Rick Wilson's The Enemies List
Jul 21, 2025 · 13 min · 11 segments
Elon Musk jumping into the third-party game? Buckle up. Building a party from scratch is a brutal, Kafkaesque nightmare, and the duopoly hates it. Yeah, he’s got money—big money—but money alone won’t…
Rick WilsonHost
Some states you tell the Secretary of State, "We formed a new party," and they go, "Okay." Other states you have to get signatures, and most Republican states have made that process incredibly baroque and involved and expensive and difficult.
In some states you have to go and actually start, i- it's sort of a tautological problem.
You have to win elections to be a party and you have to win more elections to keep being a party.
The duopoly of the Republican and Democratic parties for many, many, many generations had a unified immune response to third parties.
In one state in 2016, we f- followed every single legal rule, every single legal rule, and the governor's office just went, "Nope," arbitrarily.
They knew if they said no and we had to go to court and back and forth and bing and bye, that it would take forever and it, and it would've, and it would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to litigate it.
In a Democratic state, same year, Democratic state, Democratic st- Secretary of State said, "You've got, uh, to go out and get x number of signatures and you gotta do this and that." So we went out and got s- signa- signatures, paid the filing fee, did the whole thing.
Your, we, your, your application wasn't processed in time." The duopoly does not like third parties.
Some states you tell the Secretary of State, "We formed a new party," and they go, "Okay." Other states you have to get signatures, and most Republican states have made that process incredibly baroque and involved and expensive and difficult.
In some states you have to go and actually start, i- it's sort of a tautological problem.
You have to win elections to be a party and you have to win more elections to keep being a party.
The duopoly of the Republican and Democratic parties for many, many, many generations had a unified immune response to third parties.
In one state in 2016, we f- followed every single legal rule, every single legal rule, and the governor's office just went, "Nope," arbitrarily.
They knew if they said no and we had to go to court and back and forth and bing and bye, that it would take forever and it, and it would've, and it would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to litigate it.
In a Democratic state, same year, Democratic state, Democratic st- Secretary of State said, "You've got, uh, to go out and get x number of signatures and you gotta do this and that." So we went out and got s- signa- signatures, paid the filing fee, did the whole thing.
Your, we, your, your application wasn't processed in time." The duopoly does not like third parties.
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