My #KapelovitzChallenge! (Can You Dig It?)

Take the Kapelovitz challenge or face the wrath of … well, just my abstaining in the recall.

Introduction

Here’s the Kapelovitz Challenge#KapelovitzChallenge — that I’m sending out today (Monday morning, September 13.) If 20 people who plan to leave blank Part 2 of Tuesday’s recall (the choice of a replacement if the recall succeeds), because that’s what the Democratic Party told them to do, will instead pledge to vote for the Green Party’s endorsed candidate Dan Kapelovitz, then I will change my vote on the recall from the abstention I currently plan to cast to a NO vote. (If you’re only willing to vote for moderate Dem (and literal movie villain) Patrick Fitzpatrick, that will count for half credit.) You can email your honest pledges (no fibbing, God will know!) to mail2greg4-green [at] yahoo.com. (I will not identify you to anyone, unless you admit to having lied to me. By the way, despite that alternative email address I’m using, I am not a Green Party member; I’m a Democrat and a Berniecrat, but in this race it’s the Democrats rather than the Greens who are the spoilers!)

I’ve made this offer and some “discount offers” on specific posts here and there on Facebook, but never in a specific single post intended for sharing. I’ve got less then two days left until 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, so it’s now or never!

DAMN THE DEMS FOR CALLING FOR A BOYCOTT OF PART 2!

I have a strong desire at this point to abstain on Part 1 of the recall — which is cost-free, now that it’s clear that the recall will lose — as a symbolic protest against the Democratic Party’s heinous demand that voters simply vote NO on the recall (that part is OK) and then turn in their ballot WITHOUT voting in the Part 2 replacement race.

That terrible directive– which came straight from Gavin Newsom’s campaign, based on his apparent fear that he might not be retained unless the alternative was literally someone as bad as Donald Trump, and that it was not important to simply have a Democrat (specifically, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis) in the Governor’s chair, but that it had to be specifically him in that seat, or else the world could just go burn — is the reason why we have recently faced the hideous specter of seeing Larry Elder elected as Governor.

A big reason that it’s “heinous” and “terrible” is that the price of doing so could well be the election of Vice-President Larry Elder, whose greatly enhanced platform could easily cost us the states of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and several midwestern states, by giving him a larger platform to woo some (mostly male) Blacks and Latinos — who want to differentiate themselves from “shiftless and lazy” members of their demographic groups who “take government handouts” rather than “lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps” — to abandon the Democratic Party in favor its more punitive, disdainful, and macho alternative.

Having Democrats vote for literally anyone else in Part 2, rather than Larry Elder. would water down the big talking point he will have coming out of this election, even if/when the recall fails. As it stands, he might have close to 30% of the vote in the election. If Democrats (not the party, but just leading Democrats like our Senators, Congress members, State Senators, and House members endorse one or two candidates), Elder might not even be the leading candidate, and at worst he would have a lower proportion of the Part 2 vote. Now, it lohoks like he’ll be able to say that he got a quarter (maybe close to a third!) of the Part 2 vote — and that he got two (or three, or four!) times as many votes as his nearest contender. With a consensus moderate Democrat or Green Berniecrat gathering up votes, he might be able to say that he beat them by only 5% or 10% — or maybe he’d even lose! We’re unleashing a monster on the country of our own creation, just because of Newsom’s weakness and the party’s willingness to fall in line and mercilessly enforce his will. (And the higher the vote share Elder has, the better argument he’ll have that there must have been ballot fraud. (To those who don’t understand our state’s screwy system, a vote where Democrats defeat the recall but its candidates get less than half as many votes as all Republicans combine just naturally seems suspicious, even without the usual Trumpublican disinformation.)

And Here, Officially, is the Kapelovitz Challenge!

My solution to this clusterfail is to vote for Dan Kapelovitz — an attorney for indigent defendants and activists accused of civil disobedience — in Part 2. Getting 20 votes for him that he would not otherwise have us enough remediation of the harm that Democratic Party have done to justify my going along. If you’d like to see me change my eager abstention on the recall to an unhappy but certain NO vote, take the pledge — and mail me and let me know that you are taking the pledge!

Here’s a link to the accompanying #KapelovitzChallenge YouTube video: https://youtu.be/Jzk9iVxN3ys. The screenshot above really does not do it justice!

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)