Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
On a sweltering night in Miami’s Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, a 90-year-old building slightly older than Joe Biden, 9 candidates with no shot at anything and the tenth, the first fake Native American candidate, gathered to humiliate and be humiliated on national television.
On a set designed to look like a cardboard cutout White House, 10 cardboard cutouts of candidates, hoping to sit in the real White House, frantically searched for their 15 seconds of fame, while ignoring moderator questions and going over time.
All the millionaire candidates agreed that the economy wasn’t working for ordinary Americans like the ones they see on TV.
The speeches about the misery suffered by ordinary Americans in a booming economy at the hands of giant evil corporations fell flat to a base in which a third of Democrat primary voters earn over $100,000.
“Who is this economy working for?” Elizabeth Warren asked, doing a hand hatchet chop in a tribute to her imaginary Native American heritage while claiming that it was just working for those at the top.
Like her.
Not only was Warren wealthier than most of the other candidates on stage, but she was called on three times as often.
As part of their commitment to redistribution, the socialist candidates redistributed each other’s time. But, despite their supposed commitment to redistribution, they resisted speaking time socialism.
This was supposed to be a debate and the moderators did try to ask occasionally challenging questions, while the candidates courageously evaded and avoided them and instead delivered prepared speeches attacking Trump and insisting that the economy wasn’t working for most people who weren’t as rich as them.
Instead of going after Warren, the field of starving losers went after the weakest member of the herd who still had a few percentage points to his fake name. Bill de Blasio and Julian Castro jumped on Beto O’Rourke, like starving hyenas pouncing on a midget gazelle, in an orgy of blood and talking points.
Despite O’Rourke’s Kennedyesque buck teeth, he went down like a marshmallow.
Democrats wondering how he would perform in a debate against President Trump could only imagine the hipster being slapped around a stage for three debates straight.
Castro and Bill de Blasio went after O’Rourke from the left in a radical primary where the moderates were on the run and the only acceptable non-radical position was protecting union health care plans.
Julian Castro declared that transgender people aborting babies should be paid for by taxpayers as his idea of “reproductive justice”. Then he demanded that the other candidates agree to legalize illegal migration or be forced to listen to him practice enunciating, “Guatemala.”
Elizabeth Warren delivered all her remarks in the hysterical pitch of a paranoid schizophrenic grandma demanding to know why all the songs on the radio are telling her to kill her parrot. That included a call to take away everyone’s health insurance and replace it with filmstrips of Karl Marx lifting weights.
Bill de Blasio smirked his way through a call for a 70% tax rate. “There’s plenty of money in this world,” he gloated. “It’s just in the wrong hands.”
The wrong hands were any but his own oversized mitts which clenched greedily at the touch of money.
The moment they had a chance the 2020 losers, whose campaigns never even took off, launched into one single factoid that would make them stand out to the audience of confused viewers wondering who they were and where Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden were.
Cory Booker reminded viewers and voters at every opportunity that he was not only African-American, but lived in a “low-income” black community. Booker claimed that people had been shot on his block. His neighbors have said that he hardly shows up at his official New Jersey address.
He actually lives near a miniature indoor golf course in Washington D.C.
“As an African-American man in an African-American community,” Booker began one of his speeches, convinced that the audience would forget he was black unless he reminded them of it every time.
Julian Castro claimed that his working-class background meant that he knew what it was like to rent a house. Castro, who doesn’t speak Spanish, pronounced “Jose”, “Oscar” and “Honduras” with the exaggerated care of a white Dos Equis pitchman.
Tulsi Gabbard constantly reminded viewers that she had served in the military. Tim Ryan wanted people to remember that he was from Ohio. Not everyone in Ohio was as happy to be associated with him.
John Delaney wanted people to know that they would never have to look at him after this night.
Beto O’Rourke randomly broke out into awkward Spanish while Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren looked on in horror. Booker’s horror was understandable. He had memorized his own speech in bad Spanish and Beto’s stunt had upstaged his stunt.
The high school Spanish got worse with a panicked O’Rourke being asked a question in Spanish.
Bill de Blasio announced that what set him apart from all the other candidates was raising a black son.
And then there were the bizarre and goofy proposals.
Jay Inslee promised to put union members to work in the wind turbines of the future, offering two contradictory proposals in one.
“We must understand that this is a climate crisis, emergency,” Jay Inslee rasped. “I am the candidate who said this has to be the top priority.”
Tim Ryan called for “trauma-based care in every school” and announced that he wanted to “dominate the solar industry”.
Cory Booker claimed that African-American transgender people were being lynched.
Tulsi Gabbard claimed that appeasing Iran would put the American people first.
The single most shameless moment may have come when Bill de Blasio, who refuses to use his father’s last name, Wilhelm, tried to exploit his father’s service in WW2.
The highlight of the loser debate was when a technical malfunction shut down the debate at the top of the second hour. Rachel Maddow, a Russia conspiracy theorist, somehow exercised enough restraint not to shout, “It’s the Russians. They’re finally here.”
But Maddow brought her own obsession with locking up Trump to the table, demanding to know if the President of the United States might be impeached and forced to watch MSNBC for the rest of his life.
Indeed, despite all the obsession with a Russian conspiracy, Beto O’Rourke was the first candidate to mention Russia, 95 minutes into the debate. Russia, as a topic, did not come up until the very end of the debate when more candidates cited the weather as the greatest geopolitical threat than Russia.
A technical malfunction was the perfect embodiment of a technical malfunction of a debate of losers.
9 politicians with no future met up on a stage, made promises that they don’t understand and will never be able to keep, recited simplistic talking points, and doubled down on every radical position.
And the tenth, Senator Elizabeth Warren out-radicalized them all.
The losers would almost all clamber back into the Iran nuclear sellout. Almost all of them wanted to ban guns, borders, and the economy. None of them had much in the way of a plan.
All of them had rhetoric.
And that’s all the loser debate amounted to.
9 losers with less chance of becoming president than freezing to death in a Miami summer met on a neon stage. Don’t bother remembering their names. By 2020, you won’t hear them again.
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