For years, Lindy Li was an extremely active member of the Democratic Party. A former financial analyst, she ran for Congress in 2018 but lost in the Democratic primary. She went on to become a key fundraiser for the DNC, raising millions for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 and Kamala Harris’ in 2024. But, in the wake of Harris’ defeat, dismayed with what she’d seen and how money had been spent, she had a highly publicized break from the party, which she details in her new book, “Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse” (Harper, Sept. 22).  “I don’t think I could have lived with myself had I not told the truth,” she recently told Fox News. In this excerpt, she writes of how the Harris campaign lied about celebrities such as Beyonce and Taylor Swift to attract and exploit crowds.

Beyoncé will perform on the final night of the convention!

Just kidding — that was just a lie to pack the stadium for Kamala’s acceptance speech.

Deceit slithered through Chicago like Dementors from “Harry Potter,” chilling the air as fifty thousand delegates, alternates, volunteers and press descended upon Carl Sandburg’s “Hog Butcher for the World.”

As a member of the National Finance Committee, I was ushered in as a VIP, gliding from our hotel to the United Center in a private shuttle that looped through the city’s veins.

But the moment Beyoncé failed to take the convention stage, disillusionment spilled into plain view. True to form, Team B.O.C.H. — the name I’d given Biden, Obama, Clinton and Harris — botched the optics with spectacular ineptitude, courting worldwide ridicule and accusations of deceit.

Older Americans may not comprehend the power this pop demigod wields over the liberal faithful, but by willfully fanning the flames of the wildfire rumors, they effectively swore to the surging throngs — chiefly younger voters, an indispensable electoral force — that Queen Bey would serenade the masses. When she didn’t, the betrayal clanged with cataclysmic force, raw, ruthless, and ragingly ruinous. Harris face-planted before the very voters she needed most.

The singer P!nk wasn’t a big enough artist to fill Beyoncé’s towering stilettos. Alex observed that historians would pinpoint the Beyoncé debacle as the tipping point, the moment the campaign’s sugar high crashed into a brutal hangover, highlighting Harris’s ineptitude at political pageantry and her inability to follow through on her massive promises. In politics, as in life, perception is reality; the court of public opinion either dooms or deifies.

The DNC’s boneheaded showmanship hit a new low in Houston at a high-profile rally on Oct. 25. Less than two weeks ahead of the election, they once again dangled Beyoncé like forbidden fruit, only to snatch it away a second time, igniting a righteous rage that rippled through the ranks. Queen Bey, loved for her anthems, not her analyses, gave a speech that no one wanted. She had performed for Clinton in 2016, only for Trump’s win to splatter egg on her sequins. Perhaps she was done wagering her crown on another politician. When Harris took the stage after Bey’s letdown, she was greeted by furious howls, serpents of humanity streaming toward the exits. Team Harris wielded celebrities as crowd-wrangling bait, a tacit admission

In the campaign’s ebbing final hours, a VIP summons thunked in my inbox: an invitation to Vice President Harris’s valedictory rally, promising a lineup of mystery superstars, right here in Philadelphia, the aorta of the swing states. For a full week, Kamala’s rumor factory cranked at full throttle, recycling the playbook they had used to generate hype for Beyoncé’s twice-teased, twice-thwarted appearances: first at the convention, then at the Houston rally. The stage was set for history. Or, as it turned out, for the most expensive karaoke night in American political memory.

To build mystique around their pièce de résistance, Kamala’s hype arsonists torched what little credibility they had left in one sun-kissed conflagration of rumor: Taylor Swift, Pennsylvania’s prodigal daughter, was allegedly descending from the pop-star heavens in a blaze of sequins and voter registration forms to electrify a race that had flatlined for weeks.

The night before the election, Fox News journalist Jacqui Heinrich suggested to me that it would be Taylor. Citing his own Vatican-level infallibility, a high-ranking Biden White House official said with absolute certainty that it was going to be Bad Bunny. Campaign czars swore it would be a chart-incinerating rock star, not a recently dumped has-been desperate to scrape together more sales on the worst-reviewed album of the year.

A fellow megabundler pinged his jealously guarded hunch: Beyoncé, stung by the backlash to her two non-performances and desiring redemption, would make the third time the charm.

Theories swirled like fanfic plot twists: Why Taylor? Home-state halo. Bey? Redemption arc. Bad Bunny? Youthquake bait. Pop’s pantheon had to descend — it simply had to. No universe existed where Kamala would shaft young Americans yet again, belly-flopping before the nation’s glare, with the entire globe thirsting like coyotes for the next overlong heehaw or word salad.

So, you can imagine the universal disappointment when the mystery guest was unmasked once more as Katy Perry, ready to bumble through the songs she wrote with an accused sex pest to a crowd of single-issue #MeToo voters. This was a con executed with sociopathic detachment. They dangled Taylor, Beyoncé, and Bad Bunny overhead like manna, luring thirty thousand shivering masochists onto frozen concrete, and the internet flambéed itself in a frenzy of speculation.

By the time Katy bounced out waving a sparkler nobody wanted, the footage was already cut, the headlines were locked, and the dopamine had been strip-mined. But instead of a single villain, there was a syndicate of deceit, each pocketing a succulent slice of the scam. Kamala, Queen Con, reaped rivers of rapturous ink and Instagram idolatry, snagging her Rocky moment. Her optics-obsessed staffers got their crowds. Media moguls milked the ad dollars. Influencers surfed the clickbait tsunami.