MORE: HRC Wants To Shut Up Shaun King, As Mass Insurrection vs. Crony Capitalism Grows Ever Stronger

In yet another example highlighting the similarities of the current frontrunners campaigns’ most unsavory aspects, intimidation is used by both as part of their tactics. The degrees may be divergent but the outcomes both have to do with control and power. No doubt this aspect also has a direct correlation to their runaway high unfavorable and untrustworthy numbers. Sanders forges a different path, and because of it his solitary standing as the only candidate this season to have higher honesty and favorability ratings. And in a political climate in which fear and loathing are the lay of the land this factor quite frankly will win this election for Sanders in a landslide.

Trump may get the frothing goons into the halls to accost and beat protesters he calls out from the stage, and Hillary may flaunt a sweeping of “endorsements” from insiders, but neither will get a strong plurality of the American people for it.

Former Daily Kos contributor and Morehouse graduate Shaun King is claiming on Twitter today that a friend of his was contacted by someone in the Clinton campaign to help “stop” him.

I'm just curious, what does the Clinton campaign "stopping me" and my critiques of her look like exactly? How does one go about that?

Only blind partisans will foolishly dismiss this as innocuous hearsay. Fact is the fundamental truth there is valid. It calls to attention a long history of similar, well-documented instances of intimidation and coercion. HRC, her advisors, surrogates, and supporters still don’t get that relying on playing this kind of game may prove this time around to be the final death knell of her aspirations for president.

Here’s a nutshell of how that intimidation and coercion works in this 30 second clip, explained by James Rucker from Color of Change:

"How Hillary Clinton Wields Power Over Black Leaders" -@jruckerHT @TheYoungTurks, @cenkuygur, @olichangpic.twitter.com/SuG4YwaWcs

Here’s a longer clip of Rucker speaking with Cenk from The Young Turks about his own insider experience, “How Hillary Clinton Wields Power Over Black Leaders: James Rucker Interview w/ Cenk Uygur (edited).”

There have been far too many metaphors over the years to reach into the bag now to compare government to organized crime. The Godfather made that salient point perfectly then, and we all know it now.

Extortion, folks. That’s what we’ve got going on. It’s the blatant lining up of favors on layaway, not pissing off the people in power, trading access, and influence peddling. This applies to everyone inside the Democratic machine, not just the black folks here speaking out clearly of their evidence.

Mark Twain described such human beings as having “corn-pone opinions,” which was a theory he adopted from a black philosopher slave he believed to be “the greatest orator in the United States and would some day be heard from”:

A man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions -- at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.

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Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is conformity…

A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.

Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals.

This theory describes perfectly what is happening within the structure of the Democratic Party right now. Where there’s money to be made, power to be exchanged, and access to be given, this fallibility of human nature (or is it overwhelming self-interest and greed?) rises above the moral conscience.

For too many here, we’ve been blinded by allegiance to an out-of-touch, at best/corrupt, at worst, party who have allowed our economic system to be in the capture of Wall St and Big Business, who have gambled and outsourced our livelihoods away. We’re not thinking independently; we’re thinking with our party. This election season we’re constantly reminded that Clinton has gotten lots of “endorsements,” as if that alone were not a topic worth parsing through the behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, threats, and subtle intimidation that certainly goes on.

It takes monumental fortitude and temerity to stare that down. But it is, in the end, the only way we’ve ever gotten the kind of progress that benefits the many and not the few. Pissing off people in power is exactly how change comes about. It’s the only way. MLK’s entire life of radical activism and truth telling pissed off many people in power, straight up to the President and every level down to the community board meeting.

Bernie Sanders has those qualities. His take on religion and spirituality, centered around the simple but powerful premise that “we are all in this together,” goes to the heart of this election season:

The truth is at some level when you hurt, when your children hurt, I hurt. I hurt. And when my kids hurt, you hurt. And it’s very easy to turn our backs on kids who are hungry, or veterans who are sleeping out on the street, and we can develop a psyche, a psychology which is “I don’t have to worry about them; all I’m gonna worry about is myself; I need to make another 5 billion dollars.”

But I believe that what human nature is about is that everybody in this room impacts everybody else in all kinds of ways that we can’t even understand. It’s beyond intellect. It’s a spiritual, emotional thing. So I believe that when we do the right thing, when we try to treat people with respect and dignity, when we say that that child who is hungry is my child, I think we are more human when we do that, than when we say “hey, this whole world is me, I need more and more, I don’t care about anyone else.” That’s my religion. That’s what I believe in.

Sanders has run entirely different campaigns, which is why Rachel Maddow completely shut down HRC when she lamely tried to “cast aspersions on his character” in a groping claim about his Wall St ad. Maddow reminded her that Bernie “doesn’t have an enemy in the world of democratic politics.”

This is a candidate who won every single county of his home state in the primary. He is respected that much. Anybody even know where Hillary calls home anymore?

With every passing primary and caucus we see over and over that the top issues to voters are the economy and jobs. They’re sick of the perceived lack of help and coddling of Wall St, corporate America, and lobbyists. And to that extent I think most people probably believe that government officials should not be piling up fortunes, especially while people are still deep in the throes of an ongoing economic slog.

Another not small matter to me, and I believe to the public at large concerning the Clintons, is contrasting the post-presidential careers of the last two Democrats. Clinton has reaped hundreds of millions into his Clinton Foundation, which has been exposed as a money laundering operation similar to the premise described in John Perkins’ “Confessions of An Economic Hitman.” The amount of personal wealth both Clintons accumulated from “speeches” is also quite staggering. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter continues to teach Sunday school locally, monitor elections around the world, and literally help build homes with Habitat For Humanity. You can’t get much more night and day than that.

In this fearful climate of joblessness, staggering consumer and college debt, austerity for municipalities, healthcare insurance company “deductibles” and “co-payments” and brazen Wall St and real estate pillaging, the kind of wealth the former POTUS and FLOTUS have amassed is, to use a corporate euphemism, not good “optics.”

So how will the “optics” of something like this play out, which is just one of a mountainous litany of similar charges against her?

All this brings me back to King’s point. As a member of this generation’s civil rights struggle, or more to the point as has been expressed by many #BlackLivesMatter protesters “the Oppressed People’s movement,” he’s squarely a big supporter of Bernie Sanders. That’s because Sanders seems to believe that institutional racism must be challenged and rooted out from every hole, corner, and bedrock. And to do that it will take shining a disinfecting light on the intersection of economic and racial inequality would be an excellent place to start.

The Clintons would like Shaun King to adopt corn-pone opinions too. Like too many others that fear is gone and people are angry with this outmoded style of politics that threatens, cajoles, and disparages. People are clamoring, in the face of Trump vs. Clinton, for an honest broker, with very high trustworthy numbers, who’s willing to expose the fraudulence of a system that is essentially an auction house to the highest bidder, in which the Revolving Door of power in DC is greased to perfection by chronic dysfunction in Congress to preserve the pernicious status quo.

There’s a major divide going on in this country. Only party insiders and many in the MSM continue to not want to believe it is happening. Everybody else gets this.

The Democratic Party, much like the Republican party right now, are making fatal mistakes abut it. Because our side for decades have also adopted RW Neoliberal economic policies that favor the rich, cut social programs, defend the Economic Terrorists of Wall St, deregulate business, allow insurance companies to be the middlemen for healthcare, defund our schools and the arts, people no longer believe in the party for deliverance (for just one example, see Rahm Emanuel’s poll numbers). Congress is at all-time lows in approval ratings.

It’s been clear for a while that Dem party insiders put all their eggs in one basket by marginalizing, denigrating, and blacking out Sanders. And because of that they have ceded the very real roiling anger of a economic populism to an insane fascist goon. This party had better start reading the writing on the wall before it’s too late.

It is blindingly clear that the only way to respond to the snorting, stampeding elephant in the room is the candidate who stands singularly as the most trusted and honest, by far, in the race. Nominating Clinton will be a disaster of epic proportions.

Neither Bernie Sanders nor Shaun King have corn-pone opinions, and won’t be intimidated from telling the truth.