Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
In 2020, Joe Biden, a member of the Silent Generation, offered a defense of democracy as democracy, which was enough for people who remember fascism and actual communism. In an era when many have forgotten that history and lost faith in democracy, GenX Kamala Harris has to do something more: She has to sell democracy, which Trump has been discrediting for a decade, itself.
The superseding indictment against Trump didn’t, just, remove all mention of Trump’s government officials and tweak the language to emphasize his role as candidate. It also shored up the focus on preventing Joe Biden’s electoral certificates from being counted in a way that DOJ has started to do with some crime scene defendants.
Contrary to a common interpretation of the DNC, Kamala Harris is not eschewing the incumbency she has Vice President. She is running on a continuation and expansion of Joe Biden’s successful policies. And she is running, just as Joe Biden did and was doing, on defeating both Trump’s electoral bid but also the threat he poses to democracy itself.