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Frank Barish will keep running for president until he wins or dies

He believes in the American way, even if America has lost her way

Frank Barish debating Trump and Clinton in 2016.
Frank Barish debating Trump and Clinton in 2016.

Maybe you’ve seen him, campaigning for President across San Diego…On his third run for the Presidency now, Frank Barish has been spotted belting out the National Anthem — in his own special way — everywhere from the hallowed halls of his alma mater, SDSU, to the sandy beaches of Coronado, which he proudly stormed via ferry in August of 2023.

At a Frank Barish for America rally, which could potentially pop up anywhere Frank Barish goes, the anthem is followed by his stump speech, which is only three minutes long, because “politicians talk too much.” He begins with, “MY NAME IS FRANK BARISH, AND I BELIEVE IN AMERICA…I BELIEVE IN THE AMERICAN DREAM, AND I BELIEVE IN THE AMERICAN WAY, BUT AMERICA HAS LOST HER WAY, AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT…” Frank spouts these truths, which should be self-evident, on sidewalks across America’s Finest City, which he proudly calls home. 

Frank was born at Fort Dix Army Hospital in 1972, after his father was drafted out of law school — and inadvertently ended up on Nixon’s “enemies list” for mounting a formal challenge to the Army’s restrictive rule on the allowable length of the mustache. Frank says he was given a magic serum at birth. “My mother was sent home from the maternity ward with it.” Frank was told the little pink pills he was given until he was 12, when he took himself off the regimen, would give him good teeth. They didn’t say it was a CIA experiment. 

Says Frank, “I was the chief investigative reporter for The Corvallis Advocate ten years ago, and my publisher let me do a story on fluoride. Ted Kennedy held Congressional hearings in the ‘70s! It all came out: MK Ultra was testing all kinds of wacky serums on people! Mine made me a genius with a crippled skeleton.” Cracking his back so loudly that passersby cringe, Frank says his father spent a year on a secret CIA base in Da Nang, Vietnam as an unwitting victim of the MK Ultra program.

A still from Frank Barish’s YouTube video of himself delivering his stump speech in Old Town.

Where’d he get the idea to run for President? “God suggested I run. I know it’s a cliched thing to say; luckily, I have it on video…” Sure enough, 37 minutes into his art-film masterpiece That Vine Movie Tho, God can clearly be heard telling Frank to run for President. “Sure, he’s using my mouth, but it’s obviously God speaking. We sound totally different. That day was interesting, because I was coming out of a DMT trip…”

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Claiming to have been given the psychedelic drug unwittingly, Frank explains why he was smoking synthetic cannabis the day DMT sealed his fate. “My daughter was trying to get custody of her son back, so she went into rehab — for cannabis — and everyone there smoked Spice, which is synthetic cannabis. To pass the drug tests, we became Spice addicts, instead of cannabis patients… which is all we ever wanted to be.” Where was God in all this? “One day my bag of Spice was dosed with DMT. I went to the ‘other place’ and had a vivid yet somehow vague experience in that realm, whilst throwing up and crawling around the ground outside my storage unit in this one. When I came to, I looked up at the sky.” At that point, Frank instinctively pulled out his iPhone and pointed it at the only cloud formation in an otherwise blue sky, which came to life on cue and suggested he run for President.

That was 2015. Frank has been running for President ever since. “I’ll run until I win, or die, I suppose…” he shrugs. “I’m only homeless until you put me in the White House!” Frank smiles, recalling one of his slogans from the brutal 2016 campaign. “And I won that debate!” Sure enough, the Mindswell Films channel on YouTube shows Frank debating both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump from the patio of a Starbucks. “Anyone who watched that debate knows I won.”

Back then, Frank worked the sidewalks in Ocean Beach or La Jolla with a big sign: “WILL CLEVERLY DISPARAGE HILLARY CLINTON and/or DONALD TRUMP FOR FOOD MONEY!” He explains, “It was a way around the panhandling laws, because San Diego has an exception for political speech.” That was a long time ago, but in some ways, it feels like little has changed. Then as now, the two-party system has led to such polarization, it has driven us mad as a nation. Frank gets to the heart of the matter in his stump speech. “WE ELECT REPUBLICANS AND THINGS GET WORSE! WE ELECT DEMOCRATS AND THINGS GET WORSE!  MY NAME IS FRANK BARISH AND I’M INDEPENDENT! THE ONLY PARTY I CARE ABOUT IS MY INAUGURATION PARTY…” His big applause line: “ON MY FIRST DAY IN OFFICE, I WILL STOP WAR!” 

Frank sings The Star-Spangled Banner a bit differently each time, but one thing never changes: he leaves off the final word. Awkward silence hangs in the air as the sacred song refuses to resolve. It makes you think. He says he “brave drops” in protest of cowardice. “I’ll sing that word when I see it.”

You won’t find Frank on the ballot, you have to WRITE IN Frank Barish. But that’s the point.  “With Black Box Voting — voting machines tabulating behind secret proprietary software — there’s literally no way to know” who really wins or loses. “Black Box Voting is not democracy, but when you write in ‘Frank Barish,’ it throws a wrench into the gears of the system! They’re counting write-in votes by hand. If millions of Americans wrote in ‘Frank Barish,’ the landslide would bury the deep state under an avalanche of truth!” Or so Frank surmises, pushing his metal cart of belongings carefully down the sidewalk.

You might’ve seen him recently, bellowing his stump speech as the sun sets over Pacific Beach, a crowd of onlookers pondering this curious candidate as he bellows truths into the breeze. Is he the best American for the job? Perhaps. Will he win? Perhaps not. But the thing you really should know about Frank Barish is… he died in 1975, when I was three. He was my mother’s mother’s father. 

I took his name as my alter ego — Twain to my Clemens — long before God told me to run for President that fateful day, in a DMT Haze which may or may not have been instigated by the CIA. Someday, if I have enough money, I’ll legally change my name to Frank Barish. Then I’d be one step closer to the White House…Until then, regardless of what it says on my birth certificate, the thing you really should know about me is: MY NAME IS FRANK BARISH, AND I BELIEVE IN AMERICA.

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Frank Barish debating Trump and Clinton in 2016.
Frank Barish debating Trump and Clinton in 2016.

Maybe you’ve seen him, campaigning for President across San Diego…On his third run for the Presidency now, Frank Barish has been spotted belting out the National Anthem — in his own special way — everywhere from the hallowed halls of his alma mater, SDSU, to the sandy beaches of Coronado, which he proudly stormed via ferry in August of 2023.

At a Frank Barish for America rally, which could potentially pop up anywhere Frank Barish goes, the anthem is followed by his stump speech, which is only three minutes long, because “politicians talk too much.” He begins with, “MY NAME IS FRANK BARISH, AND I BELIEVE IN AMERICA…I BELIEVE IN THE AMERICAN DREAM, AND I BELIEVE IN THE AMERICAN WAY, BUT AMERICA HAS LOST HER WAY, AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT…” Frank spouts these truths, which should be self-evident, on sidewalks across America’s Finest City, which he proudly calls home. 

Frank was born at Fort Dix Army Hospital in 1972, after his father was drafted out of law school — and inadvertently ended up on Nixon’s “enemies list” for mounting a formal challenge to the Army’s restrictive rule on the allowable length of the mustache. Frank says he was given a magic serum at birth. “My mother was sent home from the maternity ward with it.” Frank was told the little pink pills he was given until he was 12, when he took himself off the regimen, would give him good teeth. They didn’t say it was a CIA experiment. 

Says Frank, “I was the chief investigative reporter for The Corvallis Advocate ten years ago, and my publisher let me do a story on fluoride. Ted Kennedy held Congressional hearings in the ‘70s! It all came out: MK Ultra was testing all kinds of wacky serums on people! Mine made me a genius with a crippled skeleton.” Cracking his back so loudly that passersby cringe, Frank says his father spent a year on a secret CIA base in Da Nang, Vietnam as an unwitting victim of the MK Ultra program.

A still from Frank Barish’s YouTube video of himself delivering his stump speech in Old Town.

Where’d he get the idea to run for President? “God suggested I run. I know it’s a cliched thing to say; luckily, I have it on video…” Sure enough, 37 minutes into his art-film masterpiece That Vine Movie Tho, God can clearly be heard telling Frank to run for President. “Sure, he’s using my mouth, but it’s obviously God speaking. We sound totally different. That day was interesting, because I was coming out of a DMT trip…”

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Claiming to have been given the psychedelic drug unwittingly, Frank explains why he was smoking synthetic cannabis the day DMT sealed his fate. “My daughter was trying to get custody of her son back, so she went into rehab — for cannabis — and everyone there smoked Spice, which is synthetic cannabis. To pass the drug tests, we became Spice addicts, instead of cannabis patients… which is all we ever wanted to be.” Where was God in all this? “One day my bag of Spice was dosed with DMT. I went to the ‘other place’ and had a vivid yet somehow vague experience in that realm, whilst throwing up and crawling around the ground outside my storage unit in this one. When I came to, I looked up at the sky.” At that point, Frank instinctively pulled out his iPhone and pointed it at the only cloud formation in an otherwise blue sky, which came to life on cue and suggested he run for President.

That was 2015. Frank has been running for President ever since. “I’ll run until I win, or die, I suppose…” he shrugs. “I’m only homeless until you put me in the White House!” Frank smiles, recalling one of his slogans from the brutal 2016 campaign. “And I won that debate!” Sure enough, the Mindswell Films channel on YouTube shows Frank debating both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump from the patio of a Starbucks. “Anyone who watched that debate knows I won.”

Back then, Frank worked the sidewalks in Ocean Beach or La Jolla with a big sign: “WILL CLEVERLY DISPARAGE HILLARY CLINTON and/or DONALD TRUMP FOR FOOD MONEY!” He explains, “It was a way around the panhandling laws, because San Diego has an exception for political speech.” That was a long time ago, but in some ways, it feels like little has changed. Then as now, the two-party system has led to such polarization, it has driven us mad as a nation. Frank gets to the heart of the matter in his stump speech. “WE ELECT REPUBLICANS AND THINGS GET WORSE! WE ELECT DEMOCRATS AND THINGS GET WORSE!  MY NAME IS FRANK BARISH AND I’M INDEPENDENT! THE ONLY PARTY I CARE ABOUT IS MY INAUGURATION PARTY…” His big applause line: “ON MY FIRST DAY IN OFFICE, I WILL STOP WAR!” 

Frank sings The Star-Spangled Banner a bit differently each time, but one thing never changes: he leaves off the final word. Awkward silence hangs in the air as the sacred song refuses to resolve. It makes you think. He says he “brave drops” in protest of cowardice. “I’ll sing that word when I see it.”

You won’t find Frank on the ballot, you have to WRITE IN Frank Barish. But that’s the point.  “With Black Box Voting — voting machines tabulating behind secret proprietary software — there’s literally no way to know” who really wins or loses. “Black Box Voting is not democracy, but when you write in ‘Frank Barish,’ it throws a wrench into the gears of the system! They’re counting write-in votes by hand. If millions of Americans wrote in ‘Frank Barish,’ the landslide would bury the deep state under an avalanche of truth!” Or so Frank surmises, pushing his metal cart of belongings carefully down the sidewalk.

You might’ve seen him recently, bellowing his stump speech as the sun sets over Pacific Beach, a crowd of onlookers pondering this curious candidate as he bellows truths into the breeze. Is he the best American for the job? Perhaps. Will he win? Perhaps not. But the thing you really should know about Frank Barish is… he died in 1975, when I was three. He was my mother’s mother’s father. 

I took his name as my alter ego — Twain to my Clemens — long before God told me to run for President that fateful day, in a DMT Haze which may or may not have been instigated by the CIA. Someday, if I have enough money, I’ll legally change my name to Frank Barish. Then I’d be one step closer to the White House…Until then, regardless of what it says on my birth certificate, the thing you really should know about me is: MY NAME IS FRANK BARISH, AND I BELIEVE IN AMERICA.

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