M.L. Nestel joined Raw Story in 2023. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and The Guardian, among other titles. He also produces and writes for true-crime genre TV shows. Prior to that, he served on the Newsweek masthead as a senior writer, wrote as a correspondent at ABC News and held the titles of West Coast bureau chief and senior writer at The Daily Beast. Priors also include working as senior national correspondent at The Daily Mail and investigative reporter at all three NYC tabloids: The New York Post,The New York Daily News and Newsday. He traveled around the country as a national correspondent at The Daily. M.L. published hundreds of stories about underground music and cinema — most notably as a critic for Box Office Magazine and the New York editor at Soma Magazine. He also headed development at Fountainhead Films. M.L. splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
And it's spawned pushback by dogged Democrats — with one Biden campaign brass denouncing the so-called "bedwetting brigade" seeking to muscle the 46th president out of office for a younger replacement.
And CNN's Van Jones openly embraced the deleterious labeling.
"I'll tell you this: people are talking about bedwetters," he said. "I'm sitting here where I'm in Pampers, Huggies, and Depends, okay," he mused. "Call me a bedwetter."
Over the weekend, Biden's campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon sent a memo suggesting that the 90-minute dud that Biden earned for failing to clearly explain his policies and avoid wandering into aimless tangents wouldn't dictate the race results.
She called the response "overblown media narratives,” according to The Washington Post.
And hours later, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty launched his own memo that sought to back Biden at all costs.
“The bedwetting brigade is calling for Joe Biden to ‘drop out,’” he wrote. “That is the best possible way for Donald Trump to win and us to lose."
"First of all: Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, period. End of story. Voters voted.”
A scenario where the party goes nuclear and switches donkeys with less than four months until Election Day — would lead to outright chaos and squabbles among the party that would play into Trump's hands, The Post reports.
That didn't seem to bother Jones.
"I''m scared, he said. "I'm worried. I'm nervous. And a lot of people are and you get people who come, who come out and they, everybody has the party line – but behind closed doors, what people are worrying about is what are the polls going to show in the battleground states a week from now."
Jones suggests those polls and the confidence of donors' pocketbooks will dictate what happens with Biden's future.
"...We don't know what, what that's gonna look like," he said about the polls and donor data. "Number one: What the polls are going to show in a week? Number two, are they going to be ... can Joe Biden survive in an unscripted scenario?
Can you sit down for an interview? Can you do one? Can you do two or three? If so, then they're right? It was a bad day. But if you can't, it's not a bad day — he's in a bad way. If you're in a bad way, that's different."
