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brazenautomaton · 1 month ago

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I think you kind of lost the thread here, when you start talking about how bigots actually exist? The reason I brought it up was to pre-empt the standard response of "if you don't like how our race activists behave towards your race or gender, you must be a bigot." The existence of some nonzero quantity of actual bigots does not change the fact that "don't notice how much we hate you or else it makes you a bigot" is a bad strategy.

Democrats mistreat their base in numerous ways and you can tell that because the people telling us to vote Democrat are trying to tell us why we should ignore that. Republicans don't have to say "Vote red state or you'll be a dead state" but "vote blue no matter who" comes up in every election. The most obvious manifestation is their embrace of batshit racial and gender politics that openly and violently despise men and white people, their refusal to ever at any point distance themselves from those positions instead of getting mad at you for noticing it, and refusal to address any concerns of anyone that look even slightly un-progressive in favor of lying about why those people have those positions. They refuse to do anything about border security, even though a lot of people have very reasonable concerns about it, because look at the other guy he's racist so borders are racist and you're racist.

But it's not just that. I hate leftist activists and think they are wrong about all their activist positions, but it is accurate to observe that the Democratic party consistently makes them promises of more radical policy, relies on them to do boots-on-the-ground action and organization and agitation, does not give them the things they promised implicitly or explicitly, and then say "but you have to vote for us anyway, vote blue no matter who." Election after election, activists covering for the Democrats say things like "we have to vote for him in this election since democracy is at risk, and after that we'll hold his feet to the fire and get what we want," and they never ever do that, and expect everyone to not remember. I think it is in fact the correct choice not to give these people what they want, but they're still lying about it and stringing them along instead of ever saying "actually we don't want to give you what you want that would be a bad idea." The center-left Democrats value the support of far-left wackos enough that they won't publicly distance themselves from those people and thus show that they're not beholden to political wackos, but not enough to ever give them what they promised. It's the maximally alienating stance. They won't stop supporting every war they lay eyes on, but they still demand all the opponents of war vote for them because of how warmongering the Republicans are.

The Democrats are the only ones with agency when we are talking about the behavior of the Democrats and their attempts to get what they want. The agency of the Republicans is not relevant to this question. When you're talking about what the police could do or not do to reduce crime in a city, there is another factor in the equation, but saying "it's the fault of the criminals, they shouldn't be committing all that crime, why aren't you talking about how they shouldn't commit crime!" is not useful.

Saying "The Republicans are doing things to stop us!" is not a counter; of course they are, they are an opposing political party who wants things other than what you do, dealing with that is your fucking job and you don't seem to be very good at it. Democrats have a long list of excuses about why they couldn't do anything but next time they will totally do something. There has not been an election in the past 50 years where democracy was not at risk from the Republican candidate and it was so absolutely severe a crisis that we couldn't spare time to negotiate people in the Democratic coalition getting what they actually want.

According to the Democrats themselves, no matter how often they lose the elections, democracy never actually falls, and no matter how often they win, they never accomplish anything of any lasting effect. They keep promising things and then when in power don't seem to care all that much about accomplishing them. "Oh no, the Republicans are stopping us!" that's their fucking job and your fucking job is to overcome that! You don't see Republicans rolling around on their backs like turtles saying "Oh no, the Democrats stopped us, we can't do anything!" They say "The Democrats are trying to stop us, here is how we're going to beat them!" They have a Project 2025 plan to do the things they want to do, and the closest the Democrats had was the Green New Deal, which was even more absolutely incoherent and wackadoo than Project 2025!

Oh, and HIllary was a bad politician because she mostly got power by favor-trading with people who knew her husband and getting appointed by them. If you have allowed the media narrative to define you as a bad person for 20 years, and that sticks to you, and you're still running, and you use that as an excuse, you are a bad politician. You are bad at doing the thing you need to be good at doing. Bill Clinton had all kinds of negative media attention from every angle and none of it stuck to him because he was really, really good at what he did. Barack Obama had the middle name Hussein in the year of our Lord 2008 and the same Republican media narrative that tarred HIllary utterly despised him and yet he was widely loved and incredibly charismatic.

Hillary Clinton's rise through the Democratic power structure was her holding out her hand for power and other figures giving her power because it was #HerTurn. The party apparatus never felt like it pushed her because she was good at what she did, it pushed her because it was her turn for power. She carpetbagged up to New York in 2000 to win an essentially unlosable election against a Republican who was actively imploding before our eyes, because that was a seat they could hand out and it was her turn. Then the other time she ran for election as not an incumbent was 2016, where her unifying vision was "I dream of an America that has me as President of it, so it is time you make me President."

Both parties will blame "the system" when they lose, that's very easily available copium. But when they aren't blaming "the system," Democrats are blaming the voters for not voting for them, and Republicans are blaming themselves for not giving voters what they wanted (which always ends up "we should have been way more conservative" but at least they have the locus of control in the proper area).

They know they're authoritarian, and they're proud.

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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 5 years ago

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a post about the Democratic primary, which I did not enjoy writing

I haven’t talked about the Democratic primary here for a couple of reasons. I think that wrapping our minds about what Trump is doing in power – and what he and his backers did to get him that power – is a lot more important than any campaign tactic his eventual Democratic opponent can use, or even who the Democratic candidate is. I don’t even know who I’ll be voting for myself.

What I do know is that above all other issues, I’ll be voting on democratic values. That includes more conventional voting rights and election integrity issues that we’re used to discussing in American politics. It’s also about pounding the brakes on democratic backsliding at home, and giving institutional and moral support to people around the world who want the same. If we make enough progress on this issue, we can make enormous strides on other progressive priorities. If we don’t turn back this authoritarian tide, we will lose on everything else.

And on my #1 issue, I’ve developed serious concerns about Senator Bernie Sanders.

This is a long post because it’s an attempt to articulate an uncomfortable pattern which requires a lot of context, but I hope you’ll take the time to read it, so let me assure you of a few things it’s not:

Concerns about Sanders seem to be collapsed into “is he as extreme and irrational a leftist as Trump is a right-winger” or “is he too kooky to win an election.” I’m not doing either of those. There is an argument out there that Sanders is too far to the left on policy. I’m … really not the person to do that argument justice. There’s an argument that, whether or not you like his policies, he would have a harder time winning a national election in a year that Democrats cannot afford any more disadvantages. I think this election really is going to be won or lost by the voters choosing to accept or reject Trumpistani autocracy, but it’s entirely responsible to consider that kind of thing. I have a substantive concern about Bernie Sanders, not because I oppose progressives but because I am a progressive, and I don’t pretend to have any insight into how it might affect his chances of winning a general election.

I don’t care a whole lot about what Senator Sanders feels in his heart or whatever. I tend to think this is more about being misguided than malicious, but that’s not make or break for the pattern I’m trying to describe.

I’m not trying to endorse someone else by process of elimination; like I said, I haven’t decided yet who I’m voting for myself.

I’m old enough to remember four years ago when only a few nerds had ever heard of superdelegates. Superdelegates, or unpledged delegates, are party activists and officials who get to vote at the convention along with the pledged delegates who are assigned in the state primary contests. They’re the backup plan put in place after the clusterfuck of 1968. We also got better at avoiding clusterfucks after 1968, so they weren’t an issue. Until 2016, when Sanders decided they were an issue for him because he was going to lose the old-fashioned way, and “superdelegates” were a convenient boogeyman he could use to turn progressives against the Democratic party. Then his campaign successfully talked itself into believing that this conspiracy theory about superdelegates going against the voters, so they started arguing that the superdelegates should take the nomination away from the winner and give it to him. This was always a pipe dream, but it did inspire Sanders supporters to dox a bunch of counterrevolutionary elected officials and progressive activists. Remember, he’s a member of the Senate Democratic caucus, so he’s talking all this shit as a superdelegate.

The sore losering only helped Donald Trump and his Russian backers, but it was delegitimizing enough that the Democratic National Committee felt pressured to revamp the presidential nomination process. Thus, a “unity” committee was formed to placate the feelings of those who were implacably infuriated that the person with the most votes had won the nomination. (The Republicans, whose party processes had allowed an unqualified, unstable, ideologically unreliable foreign asset to take over, made no such alterations.) The big concession on superdelegates is that they don’t vote on the first ballot. If someone wins a majority, then they win the nomination. If nobody gets a majority, then there’s a second vote where the pledged delegates are released and the superdelegates also get a say.

Presumably because pro-Sanders activists were so instrumental in drafting the new rules, they were all set to start gaming those rules before voting began. In early January, when it was assumed that former Vice President Biden would win more delegates than anyone else but come up short of a majority, groups supporting Sanders floated the idea that Warren’s delegates should be ready to join Sanders, or vice versa. The reasoning was that a vote for Warren or Sanders should be considered a vote for what they considered the relatively progressive wing of the Democratic party, and therefore pooling the two candidate’s votes together would represent the will of the electorate. Six weeks later, with Sanders having eked out a plurality in a few early states – more delegates than anyone else, but nowhere near a majority, and losing the popular vote – he’s out here warning that it would be very, very bad for everybody if the person who wins the plurality isn’t guaranteed to win the nomination. If 66% of voters split between two “establishment” candidates, well, that 34% who voted for the “anti-establishment” Sanders better get their way, or the party gets it!1

Sanders representatives also insisted states be allowed to keep holding undemocratic caucuses – until he was outplayed in the Iowa delegate count, at which point they realized the establishment $hills had been right about voter suppression being bad.

Look, real talk, small-d democracy is about trying to do what the voters want. If Sanders stays exactly where he is in the polls – winning a plurality of delegates with only about 1/3 of the voters – he will be getting a lot less support than he did in 2016. When he lost by a whopping 12-point margin, despite being propped up by the Kremlin, the Koch brothers, and thousands of years of patriarchy. If these trends hold (and they might not!) Democratic voters, who are the voters most likely to support his policies, do not want him. So – and I’m editorializing a little bit in this final assessment – spare me.

America is a big country and the Democratic Party is a broad coalition. There are going to be good arguments for and against a lot of different ways to pick a presidential nominee, but a key part of doing it as fairly as possible is to choose the rules beforehand and then stick to them. Campaigns making the best case for their candidate isn’t a bad thing, and a politician being able to change their mind is a good thing. But Sanders whips his supporters up with sweeping claims about the legitimacy of the process – until the opposite claim looks like it might be advantageous to him, at which point his campaign completely reverses itself on whether or not the rules of the election are fair. This is not acceptable. We cannot be playing this game when we are trying to defend the legitimacy of democracy itself against the most powerful person in the world.

On its own, I’d find that frustrating. But once a frustration starts overlapping with a genuine national security issue, it stops being a frustration and starts being a serious concern.

Senator Sanders was informed a month before the Nevada caucuses that the Russian government was supporting his campaign. Again. We still don’t know what kind of support they were giving him, though it’s probably more or less what they were doing in 2016 – pushing propaganda and making it harder for people to have productive discussions about the primary. He didn’t say anything about it, except to obliquely reference Russian trolls when he was challenged on the debate stage about some of his supporters being abusive online. (We’ll come back to that one.)

When this story broke, as it clearly would, Sanders reacted by attacking the newspaper. He claimed that the briefing his campaign received was classified, which a) it is unlikely to have been properly classified, which he would’ve known if he’d tried to work out a way to go public and b) didn’t stop him from using some of that information to his advantage during a debate. His campaign went around crowing about these great victories where he squeaked out pluralities knowing that those victories were tainted by a foreign government helping him and/or sabotaging his competitors. (Meanwhile, these competitors were not even told that they were at risk.)

He responded similarly to the Russian support he received in 2016. He failed to educate his supporters about the seriousness of the attack as it was happening. When asked later, he begrudgingly admitted to having known about it, falsely claimed to have tried to alert the Clinton campaign, and attempted to deflect criticism by literally blaming the victim. Admitting that he lost despite benefiting from the criminal sabotage of his opponent, rather than because he was the victim of some nefarious party establishment conspiracy, would have damaged the story he tells voters and been a blow to his ego.

Because he chose to deflect rather than face the issue, he has never dealt with the ways that the ways that the Russian attack probably did poison his movement. Nobody else has really wanted to deal with it either, so I’ll stipulate that this is my opinion, but I think it makes sense.

There is a qualitative difference between what Sanders tries to communicate to people and what his supporters do in response. I do not believe that Sanders wanted his supporters to vote for Trump, stay home, or discourage others from voting in 2016. I do not believe he wanted progressive organizers to be inundated with death threats. I do not think he wants people like anti-racist filmmaker Ava DuVernay or Parkland parent Fred Guttenberg to be swarmed with abuse online. I sincerely believe that if you hooked Sanders up to a lie detector, he would say that’s bad stuff and he doesn’t want any of it, and I am not inclined to be overly generous to Senator Sanders.

And yet it keeps happening, and it can’t just be blamed on Russian bots. Real people physically showed up in Philadelphia to heckle speakers at the convention in 2016. Abusive phone calls to perceived establishment enemies of Sanders really do slow down after he explicitly says he doesn’t want people to do that – which means that he dissuaded real people, who started down that ugly path because they thought it was what he wanted. There is an observable mismatch between what is being said and what is being heard. Something is jamming the signal.

Jamming the signal, incidentally, requires exactly the kind of stuff that troll farms do best. Post “edgy” guillotine memes and see who bites. Flood brutal criticism of mainstream Democrats with applause. When ostensible leftists use their independent platforms to spread disinformation or even just nastiness, toss a few coins in their Patreon – they don’t have to know they’re working for you, they just have to learn that pushing the envelope is profitable. Shout down even mild criticism by spamming it with garbage, so that skeptics withdraw or become defensive, while supporters internalize the idea that abuse is an acceptable response to dissent. Work hard enough to desensitize a campaign to that kind of behavior, and you might even get it to put a bunch of spiteful trolls in charge.

This is a theory, but I think it is the most likely theory. I certainly think it’s more persuasive than the alternatives, which are “those intelligence and disinformation professionals have spent the last few years shouting into the void and having no discernible effects on target populations, and also, all these people who say they’ve been hit with the exact type of toxicity that disinformation effort seems designed to provoke are actually all hallucinating and/or lying because the unbelievers of The Establishment(TM) are all conspiring to take Bernie down” and “this Russia thing is a fake news Democrat deep state witch hunt.”

I’m not saying I think Bernie Sanders is a Russian asset. I’m saying that the Russians seem to think he’s an asset to them.

The Sanders campaign has a complicated problem on its hands, and I don’t know what they should do about it. But it isn’t enough for Sanders to say “I don’t care who Putin is supporting.” It is his job as a United States senator who swore an oath to protect and defend the constitution to care about who Putin is supporting. It is his job as a presidential candidate to care enough to ask why Putin is supporting him. Even if he doesn’t care morally, he has to care politically, because plenty of voters care, and if he can’t give us an explanation we’re going to start trying to figure it out for ourselves.

Which makes it time to stop ducking the ugly question: why is Senator Sanders useful to people who are against everything he stands for?

Maybe, as the press and the Bloomberg campaign seem to think, whoever’s designing this strategy thinks Sanders is the most likely to lose to Trump, so of course they prefer him over the stronger competition. I hope they’re right. It would certainly be comforting to think that Trump’s Russian backers think we’re going to have a free and fair election based on how voters feel about the nominees, because it would mean they’re not relying on their ability to hack state boards of elections. And it would be comforting because the other possibilities get pretty depressing. Unfortunately, the Kremlin whisperers putting out this comforting explanation were also quite certain that the Russian government was just trying to cause chaos and didn’t have a preferred candidate in 2016 (they did), the Russian government only supported Trump because they hated Hillary Clinton (she’s not running and they’re still at it), that the propaganda campaign couldn’t have had an impact (it did), that the Russian government would never have attacked actual voting infrastructure because norms or whatever (lol) …. the mind-readers turn out to be big on the wishful thinking, is what I’m saying here.

Maybe it’s just a narrow convergence of policy. Sanders was one of only a small handful of legislators who voted against the Magnitsky sanctions that the Russian government is desperate to overturn. He failed to support further sanctions on Russia for the 2016 election interference – again, interference which helped his campaign. He’s called for neutralizing NATO against Russian aggression by letting Russia join. From the Russian government’s perspective, that’s as good as destroying it like Trump has been trying to help them do. Maybe those things are enough. I think those are bad positions and he should have to explain them. But he seems less committed to those things than Trump, who’s spent three years failing to deliver.

If four years of the Trump show have taught us anything, it’s that you can’t just write off the tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff; you have to acknowledge it and explain why it’s unlikely. So yes, it is theoretically possible that Russian intelligence believes they have some leverage over Sanders, either to manipulate him or to kneecap him at a moment they think is most advantageous to Trump. That doesn’t mean Senator Sanders has done anything wrong. It just means that there’s a bit of footage from when he visited the Soviet Union back in the day, and they might think they can use it to make a damaging deep fake. Personally, I think that’s pretty unlikely to be the motive here, because the cost-benefit analysis seems pretty thin, but we’re just trying to take a clear-eyed inventory about what’s possible.

A few hours after the Post broke the news about the Russian efforts to help him, his official Twitter account posted this:

I've got news for the Republican establishment. I've got news for the Democratic establishment. They can't stop us.

If you’ve been paying a bit of attention to Sanders you’re probably not too startled by that comment, which is exactly the problem. In a few short words, it boosts some of the most insidious narratives that pro-Trump propagandists have also been pushing over the past few years. It’s framed as a belligerent defiance of “party establishments” - AKA, those same American institutions that we know our adversaries want to destroy. It sets up a nihilistic false equivalence between the Democratic and Republican parties. In this little story, it’s Sanders up against shadowy forces and their conspiracy against him – he’s the real victim here, but also the center of the universe. (Sound like anyone else the Russian troll farms like?)

This tweet may or may not have been in direct response to the Washington Post’s breaking the story about Russian intelligence helping his campaign again, but the timing sure looks like a great American newspaper was being lumped in with the big, spooky “establishment” trying to “stop” Sanders. (A week and a half later, he’s still sore at the Post about something.) That, too, would fit a disturbing pattern of Sanders world’s relationship with critical press, or even with criticism in general. While all this was going on, there was a Daily Beast story about the kind of alarming behavior that seems to keep happening in pro-Sanders circles. A low-level staffer was running a gross Twitter feed that reflected badly on the campaign. The campaign responded to the story by taking out the trash, but supporters responded to the story by swarming the reporter and sharing pictures of his home address. This wasn’t surprising. If you dip into Democratic-leaning podcasts or cable news shows, it’s really common to hear people preface any criticism of Sanders with a semi-jokey “don’t yell at me on Twitter, guys!” or respond to someone else’s criticism with a rueful “RIP your menchies [Twitter inbox].” Journalists and political commentators know to expect disproportionate retribution when they criticize the Dear Leader. (Sound like anyone else the Russian troll farms like?)

Maybe you’re the kind of person who likes to give the benefit of the doubt. Couldn’t all that be #ActuallyAboutEthicsInJournalism? I suppose a good test would be: what’s the response to negative feedback from a group of people, not just an individual who can be intimidated? And the answer is: conspiracy! Paid Protesters! Fake news, folks! That is not progressive, it is not healthy for our politics, and it’s exactly the kind of behavior that autocratic regimes around the world are always trying to normalize. Democrats, and all other small-d democrats, cannot start rewarding it.

That’s the context for this: Sanders has a long track record of defending authoritarian governments which call themselves socialist, communist, or otherwise leftist. Of course, authoritarian governments are more like gangster kleptocracies than “socialism” as Sanders sees it, but he just keeps rejecting opportunities to walk it back.

Too many progressive commentators with platforms have shrugged this off as some kooky Cold War thing that the media is blowing out of proportion, but it’s not just uptight Wall Street Journal opinion writers pushing back. A lot of Americans are Americans because their families ran for their lives from exactly these regimes. Five years of Latin American immigrants being Donald Trump’s favorite target, now we’re going to make people who fled Castro’s Cuba or Chavez’s Venezuela eat this shit sandwich? Mayor Pete Buttigieg was the first openly gay person running for the US presidency; was he supposed to add a bit in his stump speech about whether a dubious “literacy program” would help him in a concentration camp? The world is a complicated place where American leaders have to make hard decisions and don’t always get to work with nice people. That’s no excuse to be casual about rubbing salt in raw wounds.

I haven’t spent the past three years angry that Donald Trump fluffs up dictators because I’m looking for excuses to hate Donald Trump. Really, I’m good there. I’m angry about it because democracies are good and dictatorships are bad. When the American president is clear on that point, it really can make the lift just a little bit lighter for activists and freedom fighters and oppressed people doing the hard work of citizenship all over the world; when the American president fails to speak that truth, their work gets a little bit harder. I think their work is hard enough already.

You know that cliché about “Mussolini made the trains run on time”? It’s fascist propaganda. “Sure he locked up dissidents and inspired Hitler, but Infrastructure Week was a real success!” And he fucking didn’t even, because of course he didn’t, he was busy murdering everyone who could burst his narcissistic bubble. The Italian fascist regime polished up a few tourist-friendly routes and boasted to privileged visitors about how the trains were running on time. Then those visitors would go home with an innocuous sound bite to sanitize a brutal regime. Look, Prince Mohammad is letting women drive [and imprisoning the activists who made that a winning issue for him]! Sure, Putin is a heavy-handed old KGB guy, but he’s cracking down on corruption [as an excuse to imprison critics]. I’m not defending Castro, but hey, literacy program. Look, I’ve been to the Soviet Union, the bread lines didn’t look too bad on my guided tour!

Maybe the big money donors behind this Russian intelligence super PAC think Sanders will be susceptible to manipulation by their authoritarian regime because he keeps saying that he’s susceptible to manipulation by authoritarian regimes.

When someone seeking the United States presidency says that? Believe them.

I’m not saying Sanders is an aspiring dictator like Trump. I mean, I could be wrong, but that’s not my concern. A lot of politics is made up of civic habits. If we validate these tactics, we make bad habits that soften us up for a smart, focused Trump to come along in four or eight years. We can’t afford leadership that doesn’t understand, on a gut level, why those bad habits are dangerous.2

I’m not saying he’s the only flawed candidate on this issue, but he troubles me more than any candidate with even a slim path to the nomination. Representative Tulsi Gabbard is an exponentially more dangerous character – or at least she would be, if she somehow pulled ahead of “none of the above.” I have serious issues with former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg; I’m less concerned about those issues because people can criticize Bloomberg without anyone mocking them for having been raped.

Because I think democracy is the most important issue on the ballot, I’m not going to mislead you with false equivalence. Sanders would not be as bad on Trump on these issues. He would not be stacking the courts with right-wing judges who are overtly hostile to voting rights, he doesn’t stand to rake in cash by cozying up to autocratic regimes, and an administration which pays lip service to democratic values is preferable to an administration which is overtly hostile to them. A vote to reduce harm can be cast with a clear conscience. It’s still the primary, though, so we have the chance to cast a general election vote for real improvement rather than damage control.

If I haven’t convinced you of anything, fair enough. If I have convinced you that this pattern is serious enough to consider as you’re voting in this primary … this isn’t one of those posts where I try to wrap up with a concrete suggestion about something you can do, for obvious reasons. I have a suggestion about voting tactically, though. Primary delegates are awarded proportionately to every candidate who makes it over what’s called a viability threshold. Basically, a candidate who gets 15% of the vote wins something like 15% of the state’s delegates, while a candidate who gets 14% gets zero. A vote for someone with 3% support is a vote for whoever wins the state, whether you like that person or not. Check FiveThirtyEight to see which candidates are polling above 15% (preferably above 20% to get outside the margin of error) and then choose your favorite of those candidates.

1A good argument for this particular system is that it gives candidates two chances to prove that they can build a coalition, because that is something Democratic presidents need to do. You can win an outright majority going into the convention, which requires satisfying a lot of diverse groups of people. If nobody can do that, then the convention gives you another shot to show you can win people over. If you have a plurality then you have a head start. If you can’t get from a plurality to a majority, you probably shouldn’t be nominated, because you would be a shitty president.

2The topic of this post is democracy, not politics, so I don’t want to go too far into it, but I do want to shoot down the bullshit counterargument: “oh, blah blah, knife to a gun fight, Democrats are wimpy little girly-men who always play by the rules, Republicans are big strong daddies who understand power, blah blah.” Guys? Guys. You’re not going to out-shitpost the Republicans; they have unlimited money flowing into sophisticated propaganda machines. You’re not going to out-bully the fascists as a means to an end; bullying is the end for them and they have a lot more practice at it than we do. You don’t get into a pissing match with a drunk. IDGAF about sinking to their level, it’s about refusing to fight on their turf. We’re not going to win their game on their terms.

#democracy #voting rights #bernie sanders #election 2020 #democratic party

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trylonandperisphere · 4 years ago

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How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The U.S.

Rumors of roving bands of Antifa have followed small protests all over the United States. Why are people so ready to believe them?

By Anne Helen Petersen

Posted on June 9, 2020, at 4:55 p.m. ET

The rumor that shadowy leftists planned to start trouble in Great Falls, Montana, first appeared on the Facebook group of the Montana Liberty Coalition late last Wednesday afternoon.

“Heads up,” a man named Wayne Ebersole, who owns a local cover crop business, wrote. “Rumor has it that Antifa has scheduled a protest in Great Falls Friday evening at 5 p.m. in front of the Civic Center.” He asked the group if anyone had any more information, or if anyone was available to “protect businesses.”

“It has been confirmed through the police department,” one commenter replied. “They have a permit for tomorrow night and are in town now.”

They weren’t. Police later said they had been “working to quell the rumor.” But that didn’t stop it from sweeping across various right-wing groups. Within 24 hours, a screenshot of Ebersole’s post had been posted to the Facebook Group for the Montana Militia, whose members have recently dedicated themselves to tracking the perceived threat of antifa all over the state, including coordinating armed responses to “protect” their towns. (Ebersole did not respond to a request for comment.)

And by Friday at 5 p.m., as about 500 protesters gathered to protest systemic racism and police brutality, a handful of armed men had massed at the edge of the demonstration.“We heard that a little group called Antifa wanted to show up and not in our town,” one man, who declined to be named, told the Great Falls Tribune. “All it takes is a word and a whisper.”

As protests against police brutality and in support of Black Lives Matter continue to proliferate across the small towns and rural communities, so, too, have rumors of white vans of masked antifa driving from town to town, reportedly intent on destruction. In Hood River, Oregon, antifa were, according to screenshot of a fake Instagram story, calling on followers to “root loot do anything in your power.” In Spring Hill, Tennessee, there was a “busload” staying at the Holiday Inn, prepping to loot Walgreens at noon. In Wenatchee, Washington, bands of men dressed in black were surveilling potential targets. In Payette, Idaho, a plane full of protesters was circling overhead. In Honolulu, antifa had been flown in from the mainland. In Billings, Montana, some claimed agitators had been spotted by the National Guard. In Nebraska, they were creating Craigslist ads offering to pay people $25 a day to “cause as much chaos and destruction as possible.” In Sisters, Oregon, they were planning to show up at the local Bi-Mart.

To be clear: All of these rumors were false. They were all, as the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office put it, “fourth-hand information.” To combat them, police departments in dozens of towns are holding press conferences, posting announcements on social media, and telling anyone who calls the station that there has been no indication of a planned presence from antifa or any other outside agitators, whether “from Chicago” (code, in many parts of the Midwest, for black people) or “from Seattle” (code for liberals).

Yet these rumors continue to spread. That spread is facilitated by Facebook — where they thrive in groups whose previous focus was protesting pandemic-related shutdowns and circulating conspiracy theories about COVID-19 — and fanned by President Donald Trump, who recently declared his intention to label antifa a terrorist group. This morning, the president raised the antifa menace yet again, tweeting that the protester violently shoved by police in Buffalo, New York, “could be an ANTIFA.” (He was not.)

But the persistence of these rumors suggests a deeper fear of outside incursion, and the necessity of an ever-alert, armed response. As encapsulated in a Reddit thread out of Hood River, Oregon: “I’ll say this much: The people out here are armed to the teeth. If you want to bring mayhem to this area, the end result will likely have you beggingfor police protection.”

An antifa member passes a fountain during an alt-right rally on Aug. 17, 2019, in Portland, Oregon.

Antifa has become the right’s face of violent leftist protest in the United States, sloppily aligned with, as the president put it on June 1, “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters.” In a tweet, Trump claimed the national guard had “shut down” the “ANTIFA led anarchists, among others.” (The DC field office of the FBI reported no antifa involvement in protests, according to the Nation.)

It’s difficult to talk about antifa with any sort of precision. It’s “leftist” insomuch as it’s against, well, fascism, authoritarianism, and white supremacists. There are some local groups, but there’s no national leadership structure. Many antifa dedicate themselves to finding white supremacists in their communities and outing them. Most people within those groups are for violent protest only as a last resort, but a handful are for more forceful displays and destruction. Here in Montana, I encountered a very small handful in January 2017, when they showed up in Whitefishto counter a planned march by the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.

The most important thing to understand about antifa is that there are very, very few of them: According to the Washington Post, when the group tried to gather nationally, they topped out at a few hundred.

Nevertheless, Trump has been building up the menace of antifa for years. He first began evoking antifa following the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, when he famously claimed that there were “very good people, on both sides.” “Since then Trump has returned to the term often in speeches,” Ben Zimmer writes in the Atlantic, always “with an air of alien menace.”

Lifted by Trump’s rhetoric, that “alien menace” has accumulated around antifa in the public imagination, making it all the easier to believe posts in which fake antifa accounts promise to act in the exact ways Trump has described. On Sunday, May 31, a newly made Twitter account — since linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evorpa — posted: “Tonight’s the night, Comrades,” with a brown raised-fist emoji and “Tonight we say 'F--- The City' and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what's ours …”

The antifa threat has also been co-opted by QAnon, the nation’s most powerful and influential conspiracy theory and movement. At Concordia University, Marc-André Argentinoresearches the way extremist groups use social media as a tool to recruit, spread propaganda, and incite acts of violence. Last week, he began tracking the uptick in mentions of antifa within QAnon social media forums, which began to rise when “Q” (the anonymous poster who guides the site) began mentioning it on May 30. At least for the moment, QAnon is celebrating the protests (and antifa’s presence) for their potential to spark the apocalyptic “storm” central to the QAnon theology. “Antifa is a nebulous enemy, one that serves as a rallying cry for keyboard warriors and on-the-ground militiamen,” Argentino told me.

Argentino has been noticing something else, too: a growing cross-pollination between QAnon, which is often referred to simply as a conspiracy group, and more far-right extremist groups, from the so-called Boogaloo Bois and Proud Boysto more straightforward militias.

This intermingling was on display at the Reopen Michigan protests, where American flags waved alongside Confederate ones. And you can see it now all over the West, where the groups that advocated for reopening — often attracting a motley mix of constitutionalists, “patriots,” anti-vaxxers, Second Amendment advocates, anti-government advocates, and just straight up pissed off business people — have shifted their focus to “protection.” In the Tri-Cities area of Central Washington, the shift is so explicit that the Facebook group “Reopen Tri-Cities” has shifted, wholescale, to a second group called “Protect the Tri.”

Armed men gather on Main Street in the historic downtown of Klamath Falls, Oregon, on May 31.

In Montana, most of the rumors of antifa presence in the state can be traced back to state Sen. Jennifer Fielder, who warned her followers on June 1 of “multiple reports from credible witnesses” that five white panel vans of antifa were on their way to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and would then proceed to Missoula, Montana. Fielder, who lives in Northwest Montana, is known across the state for ultra-right, “liberty-minded” views on everything from public lands (they should be sold) to contact tracing (a form of governmental overreach).

But Fielder didn’t start the antifa rumor. She just brought it to Montana. On Sunday, June 1, over in Klamath Falls, Oregon, the rumors were so compelling that hundreds of armed people showed up to line the Main Street during a planned protest. The next night, in downtown Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a man with an AR-12, an AR-15, two 9 mm handguns, and a .38 special told reporter Bill Buley that he was there, along with hundreds of others, because he’d heard “there were some people who shouldn’t be here.”

In some cases, the people with guns showing up at these rallies are “supportive” of the groups protesting — at least in so far as they’re supportive of the right to freely assemble. They don’t actually believe the protesters, in many cases local high school students, would turn to violence. Instead, they believe antifa is plotting to infiltrate the otherwise peaceful protests and turn them violent — or, as was suspected in Lewiston, Idaho, use the protest as a decoy in order to ransack the business district.

Which is why, as over a thousand people gathered to march along the Snake River in Lewiston, dozens of others, many heavily armed, lined the streets downtown. One wore a Hawaiian shirt (the “uniform” of the Boogaloo Bois) and held a sign with the name of a III% militia member who had been shot by the police. Another wore a vest covered in Nazi paraphernalia. Others were decked out in flak jackets, in camo, and Clinton Conspiracy shirts. Similar scenes have played out this week in Bozeman, Kalispell, Billings, Sandpoint, and Coeur d’Alene.

Travis McAdam, who’s tracked anti-government and hate groups for 15 years with the Montana Human Rights Network, calls it the “Antifa Fantasy.” A version of this fantasy has long existed, in some form, in militia circles: “An outside, shadowy entity is going to come in,” McAdam recounted, “and whether it’s to disarm the community or attack it, these folks are going to mobilize and fight it off. Antifa is just the bogeyman that they’ve stuck in this narrative.”

Put differently: Militia members get to plan, anticipate, and enact the idea at the foundation of their existence. And they get to do it in a way that positions them as “the good guys,” fighting a cowardly bogeyman easily vanquished by show of force alone. As a popular meme circulating in North Idaho put it, “Remember that time when Antifa said they were coming to Coeur d’Alene / And everyone grabbed their guns and they didn’t come? That was awesome!” It doesn’t matter if antifa was never coming in the first place. They didn’t come, and that’s evidence of victory.

And that victory can then be leveraged into further action — and a means to extend the fantasy. On the Montana Militia page, a man named Tom Allen, whose home is listed on Facebook as Wibaux, Montana, posted that he’d spent the night in Dickenson, North Dakota, “protecting” the veterans monument during a planned protest. A group of bikers showed up to guard the nearby mall, protecting “all of Antifa’s usual targets.” There was no incident. (Allen did not respond to request for comment.)

Afterward, Allen wrote, a man who had helped coordinate the defense followed a group of perceived antifa to an Applebee’s, where he said he overheard them talking about “the waitress and how they wanted to rape her,” “killing cops” and “other violence,” and their future plans: “They’re saying there’s going to be a ‘firestorm’ in Billings this weekend.” The post was shared more than 1,800 times.

Like Argentino, the online researcher, McAdam sees this current “protect” movement as an extension and consolidation of anti-government movements that have been percolating for years. Back in 2008, when tea party rallies began sprouting up all over the United States, many of them were attended and organized by people authentically upset about economic policies. But those protests, like the reopen protests, also drew in anti-government agitators and militia members, who then began to influence and, in some cases, take over the leadership in the tea party groups.

“That dynamic is very similar to what’s happening now,” McAdam said. “A core group of people coming from the anti-government movement are always looking for a crisis, where you have a divisive issue in the community that they can tap into and exploit. The COVID pandemic was one thing, and now we’ve got another avenue.” And people who might not ever consider themselves “militia” or even anti-government, who might have joined a reopen group in frustration, are now exposed, and perhaps more receptive, to rumors of roaming antifa in need of rebuke.

Armed men and women show up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, after rumors of an outside antifa presence at a Black Lives Matter protest.

“You can really see that in the Facebook groups,” dozens of which McAdam monitors. “I would see people posting early on a Tuesday morning, saying, ‘I don’t know if this Antifa rumor is real,’ and then later in the day, they’d be like, ‘Well, I dunno if I believe this, but I’m going to go drive around Missoula and look for these Antifa vans.’”

When someone in your Facebook feed posts a warning to be on the lookout for antifa in your small town, it might seem like low-stakes nonsense. But beneath such a seemingly silly rumor lurks a larger ideological iceberg: the idea that radical leftists are out to defile and destroy, and the only recourse against them is an armed, unrestricted militia. QAnon theory builds on this, suggesting that all of it — the protests, the police reaction, the presence of antifa — has been preordained as part of a coming mass destruction

And QAnon isn’t just a niche conspiracy theory. Tweets from its proponents are regularly retweeted by the president. At least 50 current or former candidates for Congress, plus the Republican nominee for the US Senate in Oregon, are public QAnon supporters. And that doesn’t even include candidates running on the state or local level.

As Adrienne LaFrance argued in the Atlantic, QAnon has become a religion, with clearly defined sides of good and evil, hungry for converts. The antifa fantasy functions similarly. Whether you’re in Lewiston, Idaho, or Klamath Falls, Oregon, it’s so, so easy to believe.

And as QAnon continues to cross-pollinate ideas with violent, extremist groups, “keyboard warriors” may bring their conspiracies into the real world. As Argentino put it, “If you’re in QAnon, and you see your messianic leader, Trump, at risk of losing the election, and the mass arrests that Q has promised is not coming, at some point people are going to question: If the Q team and Q can’t do this themselves, maybe they need the digital patriots to become offline patriots.”

A member of the far-right militia Boogaloo Bois walks next to protesters demonstrating outside Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Metro Division 2 just outside of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 29.

On June 2, Trump sent out a blast to his email list. The subject line: ANTIFA. “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem,” the email said. “They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting — it’s absolute madness.”

That night, in Forks, Washington, a multiracial family from across the state in Spokane pulled up to a local outdoors store. They were in a decommissioned school bus and picking up supplies on their way to go camping. In the parking lot, a group of people from seven to eight cars surrounded them and accused them of being antifa. According to a statement from the sheriff’s office, the family then drove off to their camping site, trailed by a handful of cars. In two of the cars, people were holding semi-automatic weapons. As the family was setting up camp, they heard the sound of chainsaws and gunshots in the distance. When they attempted to leave, they found that trees had been felled onto the road, trapping them on site.

“For lots of folks, it’s much easier to accept the idea that the only people who could be protesting the local police would be from outside the area,” McAdam explained. “It couldn’t possibly be that people of color in our community could have bad experiences with local law enforcement.” Or, for that matter, with locals in general.

“The ‘outsiders’ part of this narrative is just so important,” McAdam said. “It allows people to say, and to believe: ‘We don’t have problems in our community.’” ●

#militia #boogaloo #boogaloo bois #iii%#qanon #protests #rumors #antifa #u.s. elections #u.s. politics #trump

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3l1n0r · 5 years ago

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My Predictions for the 2020 Election

I predict that Joe Biden will win the nomination over Bernie Sanders, the only remaining candidate at this time. He will win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, and Trump will be re-elected. Here’s why:

I believe that if Bernie Sanders had gotten the nomination he would have won. But we’ll likely never know for sure. The Democratic establishment decided, and its voters along with it, that the best we could do against Trump was Joe Biden, arguably one of the weakest candidates in the race.

Joe Biden is a far weaker candidate than Hillary Clinton before him, in a number of ways. He constantly makes mistakes and gaffes, has a history of touching women in ways that made them feel uncomfortable, has a less impressive resume with fewer accomplishments, had less support from the Democratic establishment (until the 11th hour face-turn between South Carolina and Super Tuesday), and clearly has dementia. While we will probably never get an official diagnosis of this, that won’t stop the Republicans from weaponizing it against him until at least a third of this country believes it to be fact. The situation with Hunter Biden in Ukraine will be Joe Biden’s “email scandal”; a situation in which he technically did nothing wrong (except some run-of-the-mill nepotism) but will be used to taint him with the stench of corruption.

Joe Biden is perfectly poised to lose this election; we will get Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss all over again. All he really has going for him is his connection with Obama (which won’t win over the swing state voters who went for Trump), his resume (checkered with terrible decisions that will depress turnout overall) and his long-standing ties with the black community.

It is not clear to me why so many black voters support Biden, given his terrible record on civil rights and his lies about protesting with Nelson Mandela. I believe it boils down to three things:

He was Obama’s VP, and did a good job of it

They know him

They don’t want to take any risks with an outsider leftist candidate

All of these are valid reasons. However, when pundits discuss Biden’s black support, or Sanders’ Latino support, they always ignore the most obvious factor: youth. Young voters of all races go for Sanders, olders voters of all races go for Biden. While Biden may have the support of the older black people, it is not enough to rebuild the Obama coalition that sent him to the White House. Youth was a key factor in Obama’s success, but the media’s continued dismissive attitude towards young people means that their voices are not taken seriously. (Part of this is on them, as most can’t be bothered to vote.)

I think that despite all of Biden’s obvious shortcomings, Democrats will turn out for him in a desperate attempt to unseat Donald Trump that won’t succeed. They will show up, yes, but months of the Fox News propaganda machine smearing Biden will depress turnout among young people, Bernie Sanders supporters of all ages, and possibly conservative-leaning independents as well. If Fox News can send the message to independents that Biden is just as bad, or worse, that Trump in just a few key swing states, the race will go to Trump once again.

Trump has the advantages of a mass-media propaganda machine behind him, and the incumbency. It is very likely with the coronavirus outbreak the economy will be in a recession, but Trump will pretend that such a recession is not happening and many of his supporters will believe him. He could tell them that the sky is orange and they would believe him, because he has dozens of pundits on channels broadcasting across the country arguing for why he is right and shooting down anyone who dares say otherwise. That being said, it is commonly believed that the economy is what decides presidential elections.

If economy good=re-election. If economy bad=lose re-election.

Of course, it can’t possibly be that simple. Even if the economy is doing well in the macroeconomic view, if small business and average workers are struggling (and they have been struggling for the past decade), they might be more willing to take a risk on an outsider like Trump and Sanders. This is why the economy is such a wild card. If the economy is doing well on the surface but struggling internally, it will completely pass most pundits by, and we get shock results like 2016.

We are very likely to fall into a recession because of the coronavirus outbreak. So far, Trump has handled the crisis abysmally, and significant blame for the US’s delayed response, including a lack of test kits and any sort of top-down coordination, lies at his feet. This won’t deter his base, who will be getting pumped full of messaging about how Trump has handled the crisis so well. What will be harder to turn a blind eye to is the announcement of a recession, and that recession could deter some of the people who were on the fence about Trump to swing to Biden. That alone might be enough to hand him the popular vote, but not the electoral.

The frustrating part of doing any kind of political analysis is that at the end of the day it all comes down to location. I don’t just have to predict whether voters will turn out, I have to try to predict where in the country they live and if it’s a swing state, and how likely it will go for one candidate or another. This is just my best shot at trying to predict what will happen.

If my prediction is correct and Joe Biden does win the popular vote and lose the presidency, the Democratic and Republican parties are going to need to have a serious talk about whether or not they actually think the Electoral College is fair. I don’t think anything fruitful or productive will come of those talks, but it is a conversation worth having. If my prediction is correct, it will be the third time in the past six elections that the Democrats had the presidency stolen from them.

Picking Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee will have disastrous consequences for the party. Biden would be at bare minimum a better president than Trump, but he would not be a good one, and he will not fix the problems that drove millions to vote for Trump in the first place.

I haven’t even gotten to Bernie Sanders’s supporters yet in my analysis. It is impossible to tell at this stage how many will show up at the polls for Joe Biden. Given the fact that Bernie Sanders could barely get them to go to the polls for him, I doubt Joe Biden will get much of anything in terms of youth turnout, despite his belated attempt to pivot to them now ahead of the general election. A loud minority of Bernie Sanders voters are #NeverBiden, but there is a silent majority of them who will simply show up at the polls for Trump or Biden and don’t feel the need to put the DNC on blast on Twitter to make their point. Bernie’s two greatest weaknesses, in 2016 and 2020, was his vocal minority of crazy supporters and his inability to make friends and alliances. His outsider status drew millions to campaign for him, but it turned the establishment and their followers against him, and ultimately they outnumbered him.

Historians looking back on this race will probably point to Elizabeth Warren’s claim that Bernie said a woman couldn’t be president in 2020 back in a private conversation in 2018 as the turning point that ultimately incinerated the progressive movement. Prior to that point, Bernie was holding strong in second place, and Elizabeth Warren had dipped to a low 3rd, after her October high point in the polls. In a desperate attempt to gain back her supporters who abandoned her for the perceived “more electable” progressive in the race, she launched a baseless attack against him that he denied. Most egregious of all was CNN’s clear bias towards Warren, as they responded to Sanders’ insistence he did not say what he said by turning to Warren and saying, “So how did you feel when Senator Sanders said that to you?” The clip was widely mocked on social media, but Warren’s embarrassing attempt to play the gender card with her whole “the women on the stage have won more elections than the men on the stage” spiel apparently played well with the faux-woke mainstream media.

For the record, Bernie Sanders has never stated publicly, ever, that a woman couldn’t be president. A video recently resurfaced from Time of him telling a young girl, in the 1970s, that of course a woman could be president someday. All Elizabeth Warren has as her proof is the word of a few spokespeople for her campaign, in a private meeting in 2018. Instead of confronting Bernie Sanders about it in private at the time, she waited until she was falling in the polls to launch an attack on him. It completely backfired on Warren; all she did was cement Bernie Sanders as the frontrunner of the progressive wing of the party.

She should have learned from Kamala Harris before her; playing the race and gender card might play well with the pundits, but it does not win over ordinary voters. Once you’ve reduced yourself to saying “vote for me because of my race/gender/other factor completely out of my control” you’ve lost with everyone who’s not plugged into Twitter. You have to give people a reason to vote for you, and not rely on identity politics. People don’t vote for Biden because of his identity, they vote for him because they believe he is best poised to defeat Donald Trump. People don’t vote for Sanders for his identity, they vote for him because they like his ideas and think he has a shot of getting them done if elected. But because of her attack against Bernie, her refusal to shake his hand after, her accusation that he called her a liar on national TV (he did not), her refusal to drop out of the race until Biden had already consolidated his lead, and her refusal to endorse Sanders when she finally did drop out, all speak volumes to the kind of progressive she really is. If Sanders had dropped out, he would have endorsed her, no question. But she decided she’d rather implicitly back Joe Biden, whom she publicly clashed with at the beginning of her career over fundamental policy differences, than Bernie, at a time when he needed her support more than ever. She owes a huge debt to progressives all over the country, including myself, who thought she’d actually fight for real progressive change. But it was all about getting elected, and when that failed, it was all about making sure she got a spot in Joe Biden’s cabinet. Not altogether surprising, considering she didn’t endorse Bernie in 2016, but very disappointing.

So with Elizabeth Warren out of the race, you would expect progressives to coalesce around Bernie, but this did not happen, for the reasons listed above. Some Warren supporters went to Biden because a few of Sanders’ vocal supporters sent them snake emojis and that hurt their feelings. (Snake emojis were used by Sanders supporters to call Warren a snake after she called Sanders a sexist.) Others did not go to Bernie because they believed him/his supporters to be sexist due to the media narrative coming out of that debate. Others truly believed Sanders had no chance of winning because he was too far left. But had Elizabeth Warren endorsed Bernie, not only was she likely to have gotten a vice presidency offer, she would have given Sanders a boost at a critical time when the progressive wing needed to coalesce behind one candidate. But the progressive wing was deeply divided over gender politics in a way the moderate lane was not. In the end it was Biden who coalesced support and won big in the Super Tuesday states, not Bernie.

But this does not mean Biden is a good candidate to take on Trump. He is generally perceived favorably now, but that will change after the Republicans hone their attacks against him. Trump will run circles around him in the debates and it will become even more obvious he is in cognitive decline. The public discourse will be spent poring over every detail of Biden’s long tenure in public service, and not over ways to improve this country’s future. And on top of all that, Biden will not win. Hillary Clinton had a far better shot of winning against Trump in 2016. She had every factor working in her favor. She still lost, though narrowly. Biden does not have those same factors working in his favor now. He will lose, and the media will be shocked that they could have gotten it so wrong, and the people of the world will shrug and say, “I told you he’d get re-elected,” and we’ll be subjected to four more years of whatever it is Trump is doing that cannot possibly be considered a “presidency”.

I’m obviously disappointed, and I know a lot of other people are too. But I could (obviously) be wrong. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

#Bernie sanders #joe biden #Donald trump #Elizabeth warren #political analysis #my analysis #American politics #us politics #2020 elections #2020 presidency #trump reelection #if you disagree with me that's fine but please be respectful

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

A few months ago a friend wrote me an email with the subject line, “What is Sean McElwee.”

This is the kind of question that occurs to a person who spends a lot of time on Twitter. In 2018, McElwee’s tweets seemed to abound in liberal cyberspace. He was best known for his jeremiads about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — for much of the past year, McElwee’s handle read as “we’re going to abolish ICE.” The online racket attracted attention. MSNBC host Chris Hayes interviewed him, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand showed up to the weekly happy hour he throws, and he was named to the Politico 50 along with the likes of Mick Mulvaney, Alan Dershowitz and one Donald J. Trump. Quite a lot for a 26-year-old whose main gig is at a fledgling think tank he co-founded, Data For Progress.

But still, what is he? McElwee calls himself a “jackass of all trades” but admits that trying to explain his value to those not enmeshed in the online world of politics — potential donors to his think tank, say — is difficult.

Sean McElwee is one of many young activists articulating a far-left vision of the Democratic Party.

Hayley Bartels for FiveThirtyEight

“I’m like Radiohead for donors — you can’t really explain why I’m good but everyone knows that I’m good at it,” McElwee shouted over the din of bar talk at one of his happy hours on a recent evening in New York City. “The thing I try to say is, ‘Look, I don’t know what to tell you, I wrote a report on the Green New Deal three months before the Green New Deal was a thing. I tweeted about abolish ICE before abolish ICE was a thing. I fucking raised $850,000 for down-ballot candidates from small dollar contributions.’ I’m not sitting around telling you how the fuck I do it, I don’t have time to do that.” (McElwee, it should be noted, says “fuck” an awful lot.)

McElwee is one of a cadre of young left activists whose voices have grown louder in the years following Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. Many came of political age in the decade following the financial crash of 2008, and many are disillusioned by a Democratic Party they think has been ideologically hollowed out. They’ve organized outside the traditional party apparatus — the Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats — and worked to get representation in Congress, pushing figures like newly minted congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. Now they find themselves holding greater purchase than ever before in the formal Washington political process.

For a few years now, Democratic voters have shown they’re primed for a leftward shift, and this rising group of activists and politicians wants to push them even further. At the heart of the young left’s project is a discomfort with the free market capitalist system under which we live. It’s a system deeply ingrained in many Americans’ identities, though increasingly less so: 2016 was the first year since Gallup started tracking the question that it found Democrats had a more positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism.

This new group of activists wants to capitalize on that shift. And they’re doing it by tweeting incessantly and acting impertinently toward their fellow Democrats. Unlike bright young political things of years gone by, their purpose is to confound the party’s leadership, not earn their praise.

To this end, McElwee calls himself an “Overton Window Mover.” It’s a high-minded allusion to how activists can influence the national conversation to make fringey ideas seem less radical. He and the others have already opened the Democrats’ window, and the winds of change that blow through it might be more F5 tornado than gentle summer breeze.

McElwee’s weekly happy hour is a water cooler for young progressives in New York City.

Hayley Bartels for FiveThirtyEight

My stop at McElwee’s weekly happy hour for left- wing activists and writers came just before Christmas. Twinkly lights brightened the bar’s dinge, and I grabbed a beer that was astonishingly cheap for New York City — one attendee told me that the “accessible” price of the drinks was in keeping with the progressive ethos of the group. Because he’s worried that right wing trolls might crash the weekly gathering, McElwee asked me not to reveal the happy hour’s location, but plenty of the city’s left-leaning activists and journalists know about it. “A pretty high percentage of people got invited to the happy hour via Twitter DM,” Eric Levitz of New York Magazine told me.

McElwee’s attendees — over a dozen — were scattered in pockets around the bar, some seated at a corner table, others hanging out closer to the kegs. Apparently the New Republic and The Nation both had parties that evening, McElwee told me later, so the turnout was pretty decent, all things considered. The conversation spun from rifts in the leadership of the Women’s March to the war in Yemen to how one woman at the bar had to take the day off after Ocasio-Cortez was elected because she had been overcome with emotion. (Many refer to Ocasio-Cortez simply as “AOC,” putting the 29-year-old freshman congresswoman alongside LBJ and FDR in the ranks of the politically monogrammed.)

“These are really left people, not party hacks,” Rachel Stein, an activist who works on local New York City issues, told me. The young left is a loose confederation of like-minded activists organized in like-minded groups rather than a monolithic movement with explicit goals. Organizers work for both established and emerging left-wing groups, but all share an ethos of pushing mainstream Democratic politics in a more explicitly progressive direction. Women’s marches, environmental protests at Standing Rock, and anti-racism demonstrations might draw a similar set of figures from this young left world.

Since the 2016 election, the left’s political and cultural influence has ballooned. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America grew exponentially during the first years of the Trump administration, thanks in part to the invaluable PR that was the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. At the same time, the “dirtbag-left” comedy and politics of Chapo Traphouse, a popular podcast, helped shape a certain shared sensibility among a socialist millennial set. (An excerpt from the Chapo hosts’ new book reads, “Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under 30 who is not a sociopath.”)

Many young left activists think the time has never been more right, the culture never more ready, to move left-wing politics into the mainstream. “This moment has radicalized liberals and electoralized radicals,” Maurice Mitchell, the 38-year-old new director of the Working Families Party, a New York-based progressive-left organization with close ties to the labor movement, told me.

A few days before the happy hour, I’d hopped a bus to mid-Brooklyn to meet with Waleed Shahid, communications director of the Justice Democrats, a group of Bernie Sanders campaign alumni recruiting progressive candidates to Congress. (New York City’s five boroughs are home to a number of the young leftists.) Shahid is even-keeled, if intense, and a card-carrying member (literally) of the Democratic Socialists of America. “My joke is that unlike Barack Obama, I am a Muslim socialist,” he said. He graduated from college in 2013 and worked for the Sanders campaign in 2016, followed by stints with Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon.

Protest movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the Climate March have spent years trying to push Democrats — and the U.S. at large — further to the left.

EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images, Joshua LOTT/AFP/Getty Images, Citizens of the Planet/Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

“I come from this loose network of basically millennials who were a part of all the different social movements that erupted under Obama,” Shahid told me. It was a group that had voted for the Democratic president but found themselves disappointed by many of his policies. “The people I learned organizing from were people from Occupy Wall Street, the Dreamer movement, People’s Climate March, 350.org, Black Lives Matter — that whole world which was all 22-32 [years old], mostly.”

That so many young Democratic agitators have come to their politics through movements tied to America’s racial strife has distinctly flavored their approach to the country’s economic system. “I recognized that the best way to respond to the white nationalist populism was to develop a multiracial left populism,” Mitchell told me as we sat in his Brooklyn office. In a rich turn of irony, the progressive party is housed in JPMorgan Chase’s Brooklyn outpost, the bank’s name emblazoned above the threshold. While the lobby was festooned with Liberace-inspired reindeer decorations for Christmas, Mitchell’s office was stacked to the ceiling with file boxes, one of which was labeled “crap.”

Maurice Mitchell, is the leader of the Working Families Party, a progressive organization founded by a coalition of left-leaning voices.

REUTERS / Jonathan Bachman

Mitchell, 38, is the first person of color to head the Working Families Party. “The aging Jewish radical can take you only so far,” outgoing director Dan Cantor told The New York Times when Mitchell’s appointment was announced in April 2018. Mitchell spent years as a community organizer on Long Island and most recently worked at Blackbird, a communications firm he co-founded that is closely allied with the Movement for Black Lives. By Mitchell’s telling, he’s spent most of his career at the outskirts of Democratic politics, sometimes in opposition to its elected officials, living “somewhere in that place apart.”

Trump’s election, though, had made the Democratic mainstream more receptive to ideas once thought to be liberal pipe dreams. “We’re in a moment of political realignment and it’s disorienting,” Mitchell said. “People are looking for solutions, and people instinctively understand — even people working in centrist think tanks — that the solutions of the past will not take us out of this moment of realignment and will not take us into the future.”

What’s difficult, Mitchell said, is that while the culture is primed for a shift, the details still have to be ironed out.

“It starts off by recognizing that this economy is insufficient for all of our needs, for all of our people having dignity — and then we have to transition, we have to figure out how to transition while we still live under neoliberal capitalism,” he said. “That’s the work that we’re doing.”

Alexandra Rojas is the executive director of Justice Democrats, a group of Bernie Sanders campaign alumni working to recruit more diverse working class candidates to run for Congress.

REUTERS / Jonathan Bachman

Alexandra Rojas, Justice Democrats’ 23-year-old executive director, was 13 years old when the financial crisis of 2008 hit. She recalls nothing of Washington’s deliberations over bank bailouts, only difficult conversations with her parents about scaling back. McElwee’s memories of the historic moment are similarly fuzzy. “I thought it was weird there was an organization called ‘Bear Stearns,’” he said. That childhood naivete was shed over the next decade, and the events of those years left an indelible impression; Rojas, McElwee and so many of their activist agemates were shaped by an early exposure to the potential dangers of the free market.

Much of the Democratic Party’s present identity crisis has its roots in the worldwide crash of financial markets late in George W. Bush’s presidency and at the beginning of Barack Obama’s term of office. Complicated financial products crumpled the U.S. housing market, and widespread unemployment, foreclosures and homelessness followed. While banks and investment firms failed, none of their heads were jailed for wrongdoing.

At the time, Democrats were divided over how to deal with the crisis. Elizabeth Warren — then a Harvard professor — made her first full step into Washington politics as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Warren devotes a large portion of her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance,” to her memories of the crisis — namely, that the government was far too credulous of the banks’ requests. “Now Treasury was giving $20 billion in additional TARP bailout funds to Citibank, plus a $306 billion taxpayer guarantee.”

There was a fundamental divide in how Democrats approached solving the crisis. Dodd-Frank, the legislation that would eventually pass in response to the crash, took an incremental approach to industry reform. But there was a faction that favored broader, more systemic structural reforms of the system. The more incrementalist reform won out under Obama, thanks in no small part, some thought, to lobbying by the heads of investment banks.

“Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t be the outer bound; we should have some people who are much more radical,” Krugman said.

“The financial industry has so much clout and so much influence, not just because of the money but because they’re smart people, they’re persuasive, they have great tailors,” Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics told me over coffee on a recent afternoon in Manhattan while wearing a tidy, if not tailored, outfit featuring a scarf and zip-up sweater. “I had a little bit of experience trying to persuade Obama and associates of taking a harder line on the bailouts,” he said. But Krugman didn’t prevail. “Jamie Dimon [chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase] cuts a really impressive figure, even though in fact he’s dead wrong about many of the crucial issues.”

Krugman called the emerging clutch of young activists’ skepticism about capitalism useful, and a necessary counterbalance to the lobbying and financial strength of Wall Street. Though in some aspects, he said, the far-left movement hasn’t reached intellectual maturity. “The truth is there aren’t a lot of technically adept people from that [far-left] position, which is not because there couldn’t be, but because they haven’t been a factor — it’s all new.” He continued, name checking his fellow Nobel laureate, “If you’re having meetings in which Joe Stiglitz and I are the farthest left voices, that’s a limiting spectrum and it would be helpful if there were people beyond.”

In part, that’s because before the financial crisis, American policy makers, including Democrats, didn’t do much about income inequality or widespread financial system reform. Mike Konczal, an economic fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, characterized past Democratic attitudes toward financial reform as mostly centered on workers increasing their skills and education. Democrats in the Bill Clinton era were still near-uniformly bullish on capitalism. “The system more or less worked fine, it was just a matter of getting people access to the system,” he said. “There wasn’t a big problem with the economy itself, it was just that some people were excluded from it.”

Many of the young leftists were emboldened by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Democratic primary campaign in 2016.

Win McNamee / Getty Images

In the last decade, the far left has found the problems too great to ignore. The Occupy Wall Street movement kicked things off a few years after the financial crisis but was plagued by a perception that its demands to end income inequality were too vague and the organization too decentralized. But in recent years, progressive politics have found more precise policies and voices in figures like Warren and Sanders. Rojas, the director of Justice Democrats, dropped out of community college in 2015 to work for the Sanders campaign. “I’ve had to experience what it’s like to have four or five jobs, each at $7.50, to make rent. I saw my dad suffer during the financial crisis,” she said. “I’m someone who comes from a family that really loves work and is hard working but has also experienced a capitalist system that’s run amok.”

The rising far-left Democratic activists are necessary counterpoints, Krugman told me, pushing new ideas to the masses. “Banking is on the one hand a deeply technical issue, but on the other hand it’s too important to be left solely to the technocrats,” he said. “Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t be the outer bound; we should have some people who are much more radical.”

The Democrats’ freshmen class in the House is filled with young progressives like Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. //

JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP / Getty Images, Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call, Stephen Maturen / Getty Images, Cheriss May / NurPhoto via Getty Images

With its incessant tweets and Instagrams, the young left has in essence begun a long session of political exposure therapy with the Democratic mainstream, popularizing ideas that many people have never heard of before or ones that would have been laughed down at first mention not so long ago.

It hasn’t gone over well with some factions of the party. In an exit interview following her November 2018 loss, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said she wished Ocasio-Cortez well, but called her “a bright and shiny new object who came out of nowhere.” She advised her to “stick to issues we can actually accomplish something on,” saying, “the rhetoric is cheap. Getting results is a lot harder.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been more measured, but in the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s primary upset, she tamped down suggestions that the surprise election was indicative of a radical shift in the party. “Nobody’s district is representative of somebody else’s district,” Pelosi said. “It should not be viewed as something that stands for everything else.”

That hasn’t stopped Ocasio-Cortez from using her ever-growing national platform to push for new candidates like herself all over the country. In November she announced that she would support Justice Democrats’ effort to primary Democratic members in the 2020 election, a move that’s seen as highly unusual, if not uncollegial. Maneuvers like that haven’t universally endeared her, even to sympathetic members of the party. In the weeks following the November election, one anonymous staffer from the Progressive Caucus told the Atlantic, “She’s so focused on truly Instagramming every single thing that, aside from the obvious suspects in her friendship circle, she’s not taking the time to capitalize on building relationships with members as much as she should.” (Recently, Ocasio-Cortez helped lead a Twitter class for members of the Democratic caucus.) In a recent Politico piece, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said, “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people, we just don’t need sniping in our Democratic caucus.” Corbin Trent, Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman, told FiveThirtyEight that the freshman would stay the rhetorical course and continue to support efforts to primary Democrats. “Most of her time is spent sniping Republicans and white supremacists — very little time is spent in intraparty conflict. It’s a mountain out of a molehill.”

“Politics is a swamp of confirmation bias,” Mitchell said.

Perhaps the policy activists care most about promoting in the next year is the Green New Deal. It’s a plan that’s been pushed by a group of high-profile new Democratic legislators, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, who proposed creating a new congressional committee to develop a detailed plan. As of now, the policy specifics are vague, but the plan’s broad goals are to fund a “massive investment in the drawdown in greenhouse gases,” explore renewable energy sources, and train Americans in new, more sustainable jobs. Recently, Elizabeth Warren endorsed the idea of a Green New Deal, which Ocasio-Cortez was quick to point out on Twitter. (Cory Booker and Sanders have also voiced support.)

Krugman is also bullish on the young left’s centerpiece policy. “If the Green New Deal means that we’re going to try to rely on public investment in technologies and renewables and things that will make it easier for people to use less fossil fuel, that’s a pretty good start,” he said.

The policy that has him more worried is single-payer health care, a centerpiece of Sanders’s campaign that many likely 2020 candidates have already come out to support. “That’s a huge amount of money — you can’t just do that by running up the deficit. You’d have to be collecting a bunch of new taxes, which is a reason for concern,” he said.

Krugman has been thinking about other ways to fiddle with the market system, though.

“I’ve been trying to do a little exercise with myself. I think with the fall of communism, we’d say central planning, government control of production doesn’t really work. But actually that’s not totally true,” he said. “What I try to put together is what could plausibly actually not be capitalist, actually not be markets — maybe 20-25 percent of the economy.” Things like health care, education, and utilities are all in the mix.

“We’re all going to fucking die of climate change,” McElwee said. “We have to accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.”

McElwee and I had dinner at a midtown Chinese restaurant on the same day that Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted one of his Data For Progress visualizations showing the rise in the number of tweets mentioning the “Green New Deal” since the summer of 2017. “Never underestimate the power of public imagination,” she wrote. It had been retweeted nearly 3,000 times and garnered 17,000 likes. Was the virality of the tweet and the promotion of a once-obscure policy idea some kind of success in and of itself, I asked.

“What is success? It’s power, it’s having a vision of the world that��s different from the status quo and enacting that vision,” McElwee said in between bites of scallion pancakes. At well over 6 feet tall with a uniform of puffy jackets and baseball hats, McElwee gives the impression of an overgrown teenage boy, fervent but with flashes of seeming self-awareness for his big talk. “And if three years from now Data for Progress has not enacted its vision, has not exercised itself upon the world and its ideas on the world, then we will have failed and we should stop doing this.”

Wasn’t that self-imposed timeline a little quick for broad political change to happen, I asked.

“We’re all going to fucking die of climate change,” McElwee shot back. “We have to accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.”

A trademark of the young left movement is its urgency of mission. This, coupled with a deep disdain for establishment politics, has made the dissemination of their gospel of change — particularly online — sharp-elbowed and disdainful of naysayers. “You don’t win over these people, you crush them,” McElwee told me of Republicans the first time we met. “I don’t make friends with Republican operatives. I don’t try to reach across the aisle. I think they’re bad people and I don’t want to be associated with them and you’ll never find a picture of me shaking hands with David Frum or something,” he said, referring to George W. Bush’s former speechwriter who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Now that some of the left’s candidates have found themselves in office, agitation from inside the party is a tactic that will be put to greater use. After her election, Ocasio-Cortez attended a sit-in at Pelosi’s office over climate change. Tlaib unsuccessfully asked the Democratic leader to put her on the powerful House Appropriations Committee — an assignment that typically goes to seasoned members. (Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez have both been placed on the Financial Services Committee.) And on the first day of the 2019 House session, Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ro Khanna of California said they would vote against Democrats’ rules for the new Congress because they included a measure that necessitated any spending be offset by spending cuts or revenue increases. For progressive politicians pushing massive government-funded programs like Medicare for all and the Green New Deal, the rules are not seen as bureaucratic minutiae, but as sabotage.

When I asked Shahid if the new left movement was going to be the Democrats’ version of the House Freedom Caucus, his answer was unequivocal: “Yes, it is.”

He had another historical example in mind, too: Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans, a group of abolitionists who stridently pushed for Lincoln’s Republican Party to abolish slavery. “Politics is still the art of compromise, you still have to pass legislation,” Shahid said. “But the idea is on whose terms is the compromise?” Every transformative president, he said, had found himself pushed into radical new policies by movements. (Ocasio-Cortez said something similar in a 60 Minutes interview that aired a few weeks after Shahid and I talked.) Abraham Lincoln had the abolitionists at his throat, Franklin Roosevelt had labor unions pushing for the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson had civil rights leaders prodding him toward reforms of racist laws.

“Maybe we can make Joe Biden into a Lincoln,” he said.

So whom do young leftists want as their 2020 candidate? And what role will their movement have throughout the campaign?

“I want the left to really think seriously about the fact that the core of our strategy right now is if we endorse the right person, they will owe us,” McElwee told me. The left, he said, should take a page out of big businesses’ book and not care what candidate is ultimately chosen. “Knowing what the fuck you’re talking about, having the right contacts with the right staffers who you need to call to make sure the right amendment is passed at the right time — we’re much worse at that. We don’t actually have that capacity built up.” For an idealist, McElwee has a tendency toward Machiavellian realism.

McElwee said he could live with a Biden or a Beto O’Rourke as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, which is heresy in some progressive circles. Shahid voiced a more common progressive view of O’Rourke, comparing him to Emmanuel Macron, the young centrist president of France. “He says beautiful things, but what does he believe in?”

Mitchell, for one, was put off by the rumblings of support for O’Rourke coming from Obama World. “It’s outrageous. What O’Rourke did was pretty amazing, but he lost by more than 200,000, and Stacey [Abrams] and Andrew [Gillum] lost by a hair. So how is his loss a signal that he’s a rising star and Stacey and Andrew’s losses are definitive losses — they need to regroup and figure things out? Somebody needs to explain that to me.”

A recent poll of Democrats in Iowa, a largely white state that holds the nation’s first primaries, put Biden, Sanders and O’Rourke in the lead. Mitchell thinks that figures of the Democratic establishment are too eager to cede the party to centrist figures who appeal to a particular slice of the electorate.

“Basically what they’re saying is the Democrats need a white man that can talk to other white men and not scare this imagined centrist voter away with too much radical talk about totally restructuring our economy,” Mitchell said. “Politics is a swamp of confirmation bias.”

Regardless of who the party nominee turns out to be, it seems inarguable that the young left’s ideas will filter their way into the race. Shahid told me he thought that one strategy is for his ideological cohort to staff presidential campaigns. Justice Democrats, however, will focus on the next batch of congressional campaigns. “The biggest achievement we’ve gotten outside Ocasio was building a pipeline for candidate recruitment that actually reaches working class people,” Rojas said.

McElwee said his plans are mostly to stick to the issues. Right around the new year, his Twitter name changed to read “we’re going to pass AVR” — automatic voter registration — and a new website popped up promoting a new project to pass AVR in New York state. The Daily News had a piece on it, and McElwee’s feed was a litany of retweets of progressives cooing over the initiative. McElwee had told me that if he ever stopped seeing what the next new thing was, he’d get out of politics, lose 40 pounds, and try to sell his method as the next big fad diet. As he downed the last of his sake and finished my soup dumplings, it seemed clear he wasn’t in that headspace just yet.

“I’ll clearly support whoever the nominee is,” McElwee told me. “I think all of these people can be moved. They’re pieces on a chess board that’s so much larger than them. And I want to be helping move those chess pieces.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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maswartz · 6 years ago

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Bernie Sanders suffers from Great Man syndrome. It afflicts all white men, some worse than others and it can’t be cured. In Bernie world Hillary’s popularity was only “because she was a woman.” Bernie’s followers lap up this hogwash because they don’t know any better, because they too have been conditioned to believe what the Great Man says no matter what. But Hillary, of course, was speaking up for the Obama coalition, that was black mothers of shooting victims (she was criticized for this, of course), women and children all over the world and here in the US (and criticized for this). She offered practical solutions to difficult problems that were actually workable. She didn’t make false promises like a false prophet, like a god. Hillary had a great plan for dealing with college debt, and wanted to extend and improve the Affordable Care Act. Hillary actually knew she could do the job well but like so many of us women know, not only aren’t we trusted to do the job, no one believes we CAN do the job.

I’m sorry that Bernie said what he said about Hillary and women. It fed into the warped frenzy of misogyny that overtook his so-called revolution. He still thinks, and his followers think, that he would have beaten Trump. He couldn’t even win in the primary. There was no rigging, there was no collusion. She won four million more votes that he did. The people chose HER and not him. All Bernie did was help Trump win. He knows this, which is why he’s now on a desperate speaking tour to not become Ralph Nader in he public’s eyes. Blame Hillary, blame the democrats. Do anything BUT blame Bernie. And Bernie is exactly who deserves much of the blame for what he’s done, what he is still doing, to ensure the democrats lose and lose again in four years.

Would Bernie have beaten Trump? The answer is no one can say for sure but I would guess that absolutely no, he could not have. Here are the reasons why.

But first, you might be inclined to say, “we’re fighting a fascist, why aren’t we uniting against Trump?” he reason is that we can’t unite because we are deeply and sharply divided still. 2.5 million more votes than Trump is what Hillary Clinton will have had by the end of the election. He won but just barely. He won the electoral college by going after the Bernie voters and counting on third party voters to sabotage Hillary’s lead and it worked. Bernie Sanders must take responsibility for his part in this or there will be no moving forward. You can’t lie to people when the evidence is right in front of them.

Historically speaking, this election was always the Republican’s to lose. The pendulum swing of American election cycles is maddeningly predictable: Both parties find it hard to hold onto the White House for more than 2 terms in a row. Reagan did it. But he’s really the only one in recent history. JFK and FDR both died in office and that’s the only way we ever got a successor elected, since the 1800s. We had one shot to win for the Democrats and that was to make the case that the last eight years were working for Americans, that Obama’s policies and presidency had been a success, and that we wanted four more years to finish what he had started, to overcome the obstructionist roadblocks, and buttress the Obama legacy with a Supreme Court that would work to uphold his great strides. But Bernie Sanders ran a campaign as a newly minted Democrat against the Democrats! With that reckless miscalculation, he lost this election for himself and for Hillary before it even started. His entire campaign became a beta test commercial for Trump’s candidacy, as Trump noted which Hillary attacks had traction and adopted every single talking point (minus the free college and free healthcare) that Bernie had hammered her with. Bernie helped Trump immeasurably. Bernie knew could not have beaten Trump unless he’d been Obama’s chosen successor and be handed the baton to continue Obama’s policies. Since that wasn’t happening, Bernie’s only option was to tell voters that nothing about the past two terms was good enough for the American people. He made that case that the Democrats had fallen short. A ridiculous claim, but several thousand people in key states fell for it. Sure, after he lost the nomination Bernie tried to change horses mid-stream but it never really worked for him. By then, he had convinced a few million voters in his flock that Hillary was too corrupt to deserve their vote. 3 or 4 million of his most fervid supporters could never snap out of their brainwashing. If anything, some felt doubly betrayed, and many of them turned on Bernie, called him a “sellout” when got behind Hillary.

The Republicans had major opposition research ready to launch on Bernie Sanders that would have made his numbers drop quickly significantly in the polls. But Bernie was never attacked by Hillary’s team, nor by the GOP. Ask yourself why and the reason is obvious. The GOP wanted to run against Bernie. They knew they had far more volatile stuff to dump on him that the whimpering “emails, emails, emails” chant that had lost all its pizazz. Their strategy was to leave Bernie alone because the better Bernie looked, the worse Hillary looked. Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald laid out some of that oppo research and this is what he found:

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it — a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone reallyattacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

Unfortunately, Sanders supporters think he’s god-like and thus, they rely solely on those inflated poll numbers. Nate Silver would tell them that you can’t really trust polls until you’ve seen the candidate “punched” completely by the opposition party. Silver thinks now it was a mistake for Hillary not to attack him because now no one will ever believe he could have been attacked the way she has been for decades. To them, Hillary had it coming but the truth is Bernie has never been considered a threat enough TO ATTACK in the first place.

3. Bernie is Jewish (as am I in case you want to start blamesplaining). He’s a socialist. And he’s an atheist. Do I need to explain this one? Obama might have been black but he was Christian. A man of faith. And though he was accused of being a socialist he is not. Bernie actually is! Has always been a socialist, bragged about being one, has expressed an affinity for Fidel Castro on video, and hates the Democratic party for not being leftist enough. The Jewish part is a touchy subject, but we have to be realistic about the American “heartland.” Is flyover America ready for a Jew in the White House? Let’s ask Joe Lieberman. Or how about ask voters in 40 states who have never sent a Jewish senator to Washington D.C. Ever. 40 states. Never Elected. A Jewish Senator. In 230 years. Are Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, suddenly ready to see a Jew in the Oval Office? I do not believe they are. Not in the America that just elected Donald Trump. They aren’t even ready for a woman. The Bernie people don’t seem to know this other half of America exists. To Bernie and his supporters all those people who just voted for Trump are did so because Bernie wasn’t on the ballot. Seriously, that’s what they think.

4. Bernie Sanders promised to raise taxes on just about everyone, even a small amount on the middle class. If you think any politician can win a national election by saying they are going to raise taxes on the middle class, you have another think coming. Yes, Bernie’s ideas on trade, and certainly on the climate, are appealing to most but his platform was predicated on making the government pay for everything. When you put together his own history of never having a job for his first 30 years as an adult, never really earning a paycheck that wasn’t from the government, you can fill out the bubbles from there, right? You can visualize the Republican TV ads, yes? Please tell me you can.

5. He couldn’t win the primary. In the Land of Nod , the sad fable is that Bernie was cheated by the DNC. That’s what the Republicans wanted the Berners to believe, that’s the story they seeded, nurtured and harvested, and so it was! The most hardcore Berniacs threw one hissy fit after another, stoned Wasserman-Schultz, threatened to bust up the convention all because Hillary Clinton won more votes. He lost. Not by a little, by a lot. 55% — 43%. But for a huge number of his sullen supporters, if Bernie couldn’t have the prize, the no one could. That was their attitude. But the fact is Bernie’s supporters simply didn’t vote in large enough numbers. They didn’t even vote down ballot during the primaries. They didn’t vote for any of the progressive candidates Bernie had anointed, like Russ Finegold and Zephyr Teachout. For all their demonizing of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, they couldn’t even be bthered to vote for her Bernie-certified opponent Tim Canova. The “revolution” was failing at every level, all across the country. The giddy crowds showed up at rallies but apparently standing in line to vote wasn’t exciting enough. Maybe no one ever taught these people about government. They certainly don’t seem to know much about safeguards the three branches help ensure. Bernie Sanders lost so badly in the South he never could have won the general election with those kinds of numbers even with Hillary out of the way. His excuse? “Oh, they’re just too deeply conservative in the south.” And worse: “Oh, they’re not educated about the issues.” Great way to connect with black voters, there, Professor Sanders! Dismiss them as being too ill-informed to know what’s good for them. Charming. Perhaps if Bernie had one more year of campaigning to strengthen his weaknesses, he might have got a better toehold. But he didn’t. The theory is that good reasonable Democrats would shunned him the primaries would have come ‘round and voted for him in the general. But I’m betting many would have fled altogether and voted for Trump, for the three following reasons.

6. a) Isis. If you didn’t get that Isis was a big part of this election you were living in a bubble, a fantasy bubble where your biggest fear is fracking. But the news that most people watch like CNN or Fox News? It’s all Isis all the time. Fear of Isis is pumped into their living rooms around the clock and it’s become ingrained in our national reality. These voters aren’t staring at Facebook and reading biased boutique news sites that tell progressive liberals what they want to hear (gluten free water cures cancer!). They’re looking around at the world from their own homes and they’re scared. Whether Bernie and his minions thought Isis was a threat is irrelevant. The voters clearly did and they thought it in a big way. It’s an issue much more important to a truckdriver than free college. And there are millions of longhaul truckdrivers. Trump and Hillary Clinton both mopped the floor with Bernie Sanders on Isis and terrorism and foreign policy. Remember the Daily News interview? Bernie forgot to study for that exam. 6. b) Economy. Trump pretended to be Bernie’s best friend because it made Hillary look bad. He used Bernie like a bar rag, sopping up the stale foam of angry white dudes, hipster or otherwise, who could not believe their Feel-the-Bern icon of virtue had been beaten by a girl. 6. c) Immigration. See 6a) and 6b) Because the greatest trick Trump ever pulled was convincing a stunningly large swath of white Americans that all their terrorism fears and the economic woes would magically evaporate if we could only Build That Wall. So it was all about Isis, the economy, and immigration. It was in the beginning, it was in the end, and it is now. Trump would have crushed Sanders on those key points alone and it wouldn’t have even been hard.

7. Bernie is in it for Bernie. He probably would have chosen Cornel West as his running mate, but it’s pretty clear he would not have chosen anyone he would want to share the stage with, because he didn’t like sharing the stage with anyone, not even his poor wife. (“Don’t stand next to me!”) So his veep would have been… who knows. Certainly not dynamo Elizabeth Warren. She would have swooped in like Bernie’s charismatic caregiver. Although in the dreamland of liberal utopia it would have been Sanders and Warren. But even that duo would have lost and lost badly to Trump. Outside the major cities where most of us dwell, the majority of Americans saw Trump and Sanders as different species of outsiders. That’s both funny sad, because Bernie only seemed like an outsider, because nobody in 49 states had ever heard of him before last year, despite his decades in public office. So given that choice, to those voters, Trump would have been basically Bernie except glitzy capitalism instead of scary socialism, Trump was Bernie except with a strong hand against terrorism instead of weak one. Trump was Bernie except with the sultry MILF by his side. None of this would have sat well with a man as vain as Bernie Sanders. Bernie would have been pressured by his all-or-nothing followers to pick a progressive veep so now you’ve got the Bernie progressive vote, you’ve got some of the loyalist Democrats, but you’ve lost ALL of the moderates who are too freaked out about taxes and Isis to take a chance on a radically left ticket.

8. Change in America is incremental and slow. It does not come quickly. After two terms of a Democratic president, the American people have never and will never move farther to the outer reaches in the same direction of the party in power. America is populated by mostly moderates who care more about paying taxes (or not) than just about anything else. Whatever Bernie is offering, this is an electorate that could barely accept Obamacare because they thought it was socialism — what kind of a crackpot does one have to be to think Americans would be ready to veer all the way to 100% government-run health care? They wouldn’t. They won’t. Not yet. I’m so sick of having this conversation with people and if Bernie Sanders runs in 2020 then and only then will they understand, just like the McGovern supporters learned and the Nader voters. You learn that ugly lesson once. For those of us who have lived through people learning that lesson, to watch it learned over again is not just frustrating, it’s tragic. All the left seems able to do is put republicans in power, until they get a clue about what America is and what America isn’t.

9. Liberals were living in a bubble of illusion, including and especially the Berniecrats. They were following what the media kept saying and the media focused entirely too much on Sanders — only when he hurt Hillary. They never focused on his policies. They didn’t want to talk policy. Policy is boring. Let’s watch the scrappy senator take down the powerful woman. Let’s watch Trump take Hillary down. That’s what they were invested in. And they lulled Americans into falsely believing the democrats had it in the bag. This is true now and it would have been true if Bernie won. The only difference is that now Bernie would have to find another scapegoat to explain what would have been a landslide loss for him. But the polls, they would cry, the polls! Because the polls were all they had and the polls were wrong when it came to Trump. They were wrong. Liberals need to break out of that bubble because the joke is on us. America is laughing at us and our hysteria and in order to save the environment, fight for civil and LGBT rights we have to get smarter about it and getting smarter about it does not include living in a deluded fantasy that “Bernie would have won.” No, he wouldn’t have.

10. You can’t lead the democratic party and focus only on the white working class as Bernie did. You can’t lead the democratic party by not acknowledging the success of its two term president, Barack Obama. You can’t lead the democratic party by perpetuating the false notion that Hillary Clinton was only where she was because she was a woman. The democratic party is not the party of the white working class. It stands for a bigger, broader group than that. Bernie writes it off as “identity politics” but it’s bigger than that because America, and the world, are changing. Hillary has more of a record of action than Bernie ever had in 30 years. To discount that is to tell a lie. If you tell enough lies sooner or later they catch up with you and Bernie’s would have caught up with him. He should never have divided the democrats the way he did. He should never have influenced so many young people not to choose pragmatism.

On top of our deep sense of sadness (and yes, everlasting anger) over the way this election was manipulated by the FBI, by WikiLeaks, by Putin, by news media both slanted and fake — it’s just exhausting two weeks later to have to listen to Bernie’s simplistic lectures about the Democrats “failure to connect” with the white working class, and scolded for not seeming to know what people in America care about. It has become depressing and tiresome to watch Bernie continue to blame Hillary even now. Had he ever tried to discourage the character assassination against her early on, we would have had a chance. But Bernie could not stand it that Hillary was beating him. He still can’t stand it and he still can’t believe it. It’s time for him to stop already. Just stop.

“

#bernie sanders #donald trump #hillary clinton

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go-redgirl · 6 years ago

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Joy Villa: I'm a Republican for the first time in my life. The extreme left is out of control.Joy Villa, Opinion contributor Published 2:34 p.m. ET Oct. 14, 2018

Voting: It’s the thing my ancestors bled and died for. It’s the thing women in America were jailed for daring to suggest they could, too, impact nationwide elections.

I’m a public figure as a recording artist and TV commentator. In 2017, I hit No. 1 on the Billboard Rock and Alternative Charts with my independent album, “I Make The Static,” and have amassed over half a million followers in my #Joytribe and countless red-carpet events displaying my fashion.

Most notably, my 2017 and 2018 Grammy dresses, where I actually wore my heart on my sleeve.

Today we log on to social media to find left-leaning Hollywood think it’s their duty to attack our president and anyone he endorses. I’m tired of the same old story coming out of their mouths; I think it’s time we start healing and encouraging a healthy and respectful differing of opinions.

I'm not mad at Taylor Swift

Most recently, Taylor Swift broke her silence on her politics, telling her followers she was voting against Republican Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee.

But I’m not mad at her.

Why? Well, even though I love what powerful pro-life advocate Marsha stands for, I’d be a hypocrite if I went against another singer who decided to share her own personal politics. I say share and share liberally.

Don’t attack, don’t slander, and don’t dictate. Taylor kept it civil, and I applaud that.

I’m not a Democrat, but that doesn’t make me an enemy of the Democrats, and I don’t consider them mine.

As a Latina, I’m working with my friends in the nonpartisan Latino Coalition encouraging people to register and vote. I’m working with my Jewish friends in the Jewish Republican Alliance to mobilize the Jewish community. I’m in the inner cities with the African-American Get Out The Vote campaign.

More: Democrats' big miscalculation: Conservative women like me won't abandon Brett Kavanaugh

More: I'm a liberal, Democratic teenager in a family of pro-Trump partisans. Don't worry, I'm safe.

I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m actually a registered Republican for the first time in my life. When I voted for the first time ever, it was in 2008 for Barack Obama, and I was a registered independent.

When I voted for Donald Trump on 2016, I was still an independent. For this November, I believe in and have thrown my weight behind voting Republican.

Why? Because the extreme left is out of control. They are no longer the moderates or centrists of old, the kind-hearted liberals who truly wanted to help the underprivileged and champion women’s rights and change America for the better.

Things have changed. I believe the leftist culture is now made up of socialist university professors, confusion of genders, attacks on families, believing public opinion over facts, the news media's twisting of what was said, hatred of men and white Americans and the slander of anyone they don’t 100 percent agree with.

I can no longer be a part of this group. I had to walk away.

Conservatives haven't judged me

The right is guilty of extremist diatribes, too. But I’ve seen much less of it from them. In fact, I’ve become less judged by my skin color or gender since coming out as an open conservative two years ago.

I don’t care whether you’re gay, straight, religious or not, what color you are or your stance on Trump. I really don’t care whether you register as Democrat, Republican,independent or undecided. I don’t care what you call yourself; that doesn’t matter.

I may be just another public figure telling you my opinion, but I’m going to take my energy where I know it counts: the polls.

On Nov. 6, whether you agree with my politics or not, register, study the issues, and vote.

Don’t just get mad, go out there and do something about it. Exercise your right that was fought and bled for.

Use your power and your voice in your city, state and nationwide elections. Study the issues, know the candidates, and make the choices based on your heart and mind, not your party affiliation or even what your family or friends say.

I’ll use my voice as black, Hispanic and female, to vote.

As a free American, it’s my right.

Joy Villa is a No. 1 iTunes, Amazon and Billboard artist. You can follow her on Twitter: @Joy_Villa.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to [email protected].

------------------------------------------------------

OPINION: Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! She’s a strong intelligent Black American women that’s not afraid to speak her truth. And, also not afraid to step out of the ‘Plantation Box’ and their are more like her than the Main-Stream Media and Democrats would want you to know.

You’ll be even more surprised when it comes to the 2020 election. If Democrats think they were ‘crazy’ from the 2018 election, well you might as well prepare to ‘freak-out’ again!

#n.

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arunswild · 1 year ago

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So, it's funny that you think I'm misguided because I, um, live here. And I research Israeli history. That is, in fact, what I do with my life most of the time. Anyway.

2. So, actually, you are right, the Jewish people did survive without a country. But then the Holocaust happened so I think that kind of ruins your point. Your point about supporting extreme politics to pressure Jews to move to Israel is ridiculous. There are plenty of logical reasons why this is true but I'm tired, so I'll only state one of them. There is no space for that many people. It also doesn't make sense to make Jews miserable so that they can move to somewhere where they'd probably be just as miserable, but I digress. And, really? What ways did Jews have to defend themselves practically? I wonder where those tools disappeared for the entire 2000 period where they were humiliated, exploited and massacred in droves. The fact that people pulled through doesn't make it a good thing not to be able to organize and take action. Sorry, that's ridiculous.

3. The Likud party does not represent Israel, and I'll tell you why. Netanyahu obviously is an asshole. We all know that. However, the values of his party, while definitely right (and I'm speaking as a leftist) aren't that extreme. The people he formed his coalition with are. Most of the people who voted Netanyahu in had no idea (either because they just voted for him because their parents did or because they legit just didn't expect it) that he would ally himself with a bunch of racist maniacs like Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir. Most of the right and definitely most of the left were shocked that he basically let them do whatever they wanted. So was the fact that they voted for him a mistake? Yes. Has he caused the entire country to hate him for a variety of reasons? Definitely yes. Do the actions of his government represent popular opinion? No. They represent an extreme sect of the religious zionism. I don't think anyone in their right mind would vote Netanyahu in ever again, and I hope to hell he resigns asap.

If you think the IDF is using the humanitarian aid as a cover for continuing to kill people, I don't really have anything to say to that. It just shows you don't really understand this conflict. It shows a very narrow, dichotomic understanding of this situation. I'm not saying Israel doesn't have innocent blood on its hands, that's equally stupid. However, saying we want to commit war crimes amd are pretending to agree to do things to cover up our actions is even more so.

Do you really think the IDF sat down one day and said "Gee, let's carpet bomb Gaza and murder innocent people"? No. Duh. If Hamas hadn't invaded Israel, kidnapped fucking babies, and wasn't using citizens as human shields this literally never would have happened. If six hundred people hadn't been slaughtered on October 7th I'd probably be hanging out with my friend downtown right now. Except he's dead. Because he was fighting to hold off terrorists in Be'eri.

4. I'm gonna ignore the "not caring about legal reasons to exist" part because I want to hope you wish you hadn't said something as silly as that. And the Holocaust wasn't legal. Or rather, the deprevation of basic rights was, under the Nuremberg laws, but not the death camps. Definitely not legal.

No, see, but you're missing the point. Living peacefully in Israel was never an option for us, because starting from the 1920's there were insane terror attacks (which are fascinating from a historical point of view, if you're into that) against Jews and our ability to defend ourselves against them was really, really limited. There was absolutely and definitely a need for a country of some kind. And by the way, it wasn't like a two state solution wasn't on the table. It was. And do you know who rejected it? The Arabs. Not the Jews. And actually it was suggested again. And rejected AGAIN. And then they waged war on the Jewish population. So idk what you mean by living peacefully.

Oh, definitely, yes, what happened in '67 wasn't legitimate if that's what you mean, but how does that erase Israel's right to exist exactly?

These kinds of comments really bug me because it's so clear how confused the person who wrote them is.

So let me clear this up for you, @nagashii

Israel has not stolen Palestinian culture. Of all the ridiculous claims you could make, this one is probably the most silly because it's absolutely meaningless. I'd love to hear what cultural things you think we "stole", but I'm just letting you know that whatever you think it is, you're wrong. I'm not gonna bother elaborating

You're making a very important distinction between Jews and Israel, which is great except you screwed it up. You are assuming that the existence of Jews is not dependent on the existence of Israel, while ignoring the fact that the REASON Israel exists is to protect the Jewish people. Even if there's a very Jewish person who has no interest in Israel, Israel has helped them in more ways than you can imagine. Israel gives money and aid to Jewish community and it's also gained the right to prosecute people who commit antisemitic hate crimes in other countries. So you can say that Jews are okay but Israel needs to die, but you're basically saying Jews need to die, which is, obviously, antisemitic and disgusting.

Israel doesn't have genocidal ideals, don't be idiotic. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, believe me, there would be no humanitarian aid, no warnings, no attempts to evacuate gazans. The IDF has absolutely no interest in harming anyone who isn't part of Hamas, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The fact that Hamas uses its civilians as human shields makes this incredibly hard. I know people who are currently fighting in Gaza. Trust me, killing more people is the last thing they want. Obviously there are some morons who want to kill everyone and take Gaza back, but they're idiots and nobody really gives a shit what they think because they're being childish and narrow. Those few people do not represent Israel.

The Jewish people are absolutely and completely entitled to have a country of their own, and the fact that Israel was the land chosen has not only Historical and Traditional but also Legal reasons. I'll reblog this with links to useful explanations. As I said, Israel is essential to the continued existence of the Jewish people which means that yes, we are entitled to it. Absolutely. Whether or not all the actions of the Israeli government are okay is a completely different story. The botton line is that Israel must and will continue to exist.

Hope this helps.

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foursproutwealth-blog · 7 years ago

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Daniel Greenfield: "Guns Are How A Civil War Ends... Politics Is How It Starts"

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/daniel-greenfield-guns-are-how-a-civil-war-ends-politics-is-how-it-starts/

Daniel Greenfield: "Guns Are How A Civil War Ends... Politics Is How It Starts"

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Authored by Daniel Greenfield via Sultan Knish blog,

(The following is the speech that I delivered this Sunday at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention in Myrtle Beach. My appreciation to Joe Dugan and everyone involved in organizing it and making it a reality once again. And to Don Neuen and Donna Fiducia of Cowboy Logic Radio for the introduction. And to anyone and everyone still fighting the good fight.)

Full Transcript below:

This is a civil war.

There aren’t any soldiers marching on Charleston… or Myrtle Beach. Nobody’s getting shot in the streets. Except in Chicago… and Baltimore, Detroit and Washington D.C.

But that’s not a civil war. It’s just what happens when Democrats run a city into the ground. And then they dig a hole in the ground so they can bury it even deeper.

If you look deep enough into that great big Democrat hole, you might even see where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

But it’s not guns that make a civil war. It’s politics.

Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.

How do civil wars happen?

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.

That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

I know you’re all thinking about President Trump.

He won and the establishment, the media, the democrats, rejected the results. They came up with a whole bunch of conspiracy theories to explain why he didn’t really win. It was the Russians. And the FBI. And sexism, Obama, Bernie Sanders and white people.

It’s easier to make a list of the things that Hillary Clinton doesn’t blame for losing the election. It’s going to be a short list.

A really short list. Herself.

The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this.

The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.

Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win.

Now say a third Republican president wins an election in say, 2024.

What are the odds that they’ll say that he didn’t really win? Right now, it looks like 100 percent.

What do sure odds of the Dems rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win.

It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.

That’s a civil war.

There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.

This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement.

You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.

Your very own dictatorship.

The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to the left, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate.

The attacks on Trump show that elections don’t matter to the left.

Republicans can win an election, but they have a major flaw. They’re not leftists.

That’s what the leftist dictatorship looks like.

The left lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats.

Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t scratch his own back without his say so, that’s the civil war.

Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that’s not the system that runs this country.

The left’s system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.

If it’s in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited.

He’s a dictator.

But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can’t do anything. He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented.

A Democrat in the White House has “discretion” to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn’t even have the “discretion” to reverse him.

That’s how the game is played. That’s how our country is run.

When Democrats control the Senate, then Harry Reid and his boys and girls are the sane, wise heads that keep the crazy guys in the House in check.

But when Republicans control the Senate, then it’s an outmoded body inspired by racism.

When Democrats run the Supreme Court, then it has the power to decide everything in the country. But when Republicans control the Supreme Court, it’s a dangerous body that no one should pay attention to.

When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws.

Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.

The Constitution has something to say about that.

Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land.

This is what I call a moving dictatorship.

There isn’t one guy in a room somewhere issuing the orders. Instead there’s a network of them. And the network moves around.

If the guys and girls in the network win elections, they can do it from the White House. If they lose the White House, they’ll do it from Congress. If they don’t have either one, they’ll use the Supreme Court.

If they don’t have either the White House, Congress or the Supreme Court, they’re screwed. Right?

Nope.

They just go on issuing them through circuit courts and the bureaucracy. State governments announce that they’re independent republics. Corporations begin threatening and suing the government.

There’s no consistent legal standard. Only a political one.

Under Obama, states weren’t allowed to enforce immigration laws. That was the job of the Federal government. And the states weren’t allowed to interfere with the job that the Feds weren’t doing.

Okay.

Now Trump comes into office and starts enforcing immigration laws again. And California announces it’s a sanctuary state and passes a law punishing businesses that cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement.

So what do we have here?

It’s illegal for states to enforce immigration law because that’s the province of the Federal government. But it’s legal for states to ban the Federal government from enforcing immigration law.

The only consistent pattern here is that the left decided to make it illegal to enforce immigration law.

It may do that sometimes under the guise of Federal power or states rights. But those are just fronts. The only consistent thing is that leftist policies are mandatory and opposing them is illegal.

Everything else is just a song and dance routine.

That’s how it works. It’s the moving dictatorship. It’s the tyranny of the network.

You can’t pin it down. There’s no one office or one guy. It’s a network of them. It’s an ideological dictatorship. Some people call it the deep state. But that doesn’t even begin to capture what it is.

To understand it, you have to think about things like the Cold War and Communist infiltration.

A better term than Deep State is Shadow Government.

Parts of the Shadow Government aren’t even in the government. They are wherever the left holds power. It can be in the non-profit sector and among major corporations. Power gets moved around like a New York City shell game. Where’s the quarter? Nope, it’s not there anymore.

The shadow government is an ideological network. These days it calls itself by a hashtag #Resistance. Under any name, it runs the country. Most of the time we don’t realize that. When things are normal, when there’s a Democrat in the White House or a bunch of Democrats in Congress, it’s business as usual.

Even with most Republican presidents, you didn’t notice anything too out of the ordinary. Sure, the Democrats got their way most of the time. But that’s how the game is usually played.

It’s only when someone came on the scene who didn’t play the game by the same rules, that the network exposed itself. The shadow government emerged out of hiding and came for Trump.

And that’s the civil war.

This is a war over who runs the country. Do the people who vote run the country or does this network that can lose an election, but still get its agenda through, run the country?

We’ve been having this fight for a while. But this century things have escalated.

They escalated a whole lot after Trump’s win because the network isn’t pretending anymore. It sees the opportunity to delegitimize the whole idea of elections.

Now the network isn’t running the country from cover. It’s actually out here trying to overturn the results of an election and remove the president from office.

It’s rejected the victories of two Republican presidents this century.

And if we don’t stand up and confront it, and expose it for what it is, it’s going to go on doing it in every election. And eventually Federal judges are going to gain enough power that they really will overturn elections.

It happens in other countries. If you think it can’t happen here, you haven’t been paying attention to the left.

Right now, Federal judges are declaring that President Trump isn’t allowed to govern because his Tweets show he’s a racist. How long until they say that a president isn’t even allowed to take office because they don’t like his views?

That’s where we’re headed.

Civil wars swing around a very basic question. The most basic question of them all. Who runs the country?

Is it me? Is it you? Is it Grandma? Or is it bunch of people who made running the government into their career?

America was founded on getting away from professional government. The British monarchy was a professional government. Like all professional governments, it was hereditary. Professional classes eventually decide to pass down their privileges to their kids.

America was different. We had a volunteer government. That’s what the Founding Fathers built.

This is a civil war between volunteer governments elected by the people and professional governments elected by… well… uh… themselves.

Of the establishment, by the establishment and for the establishment.

You know, the people who always say they know better, no matter how many times they screw up, because they’re the professionals. They’ve been in Washington D.C. politics since they were in diapers.

Freedom can only exist under a volunteer government. Because everyone is in charge. Power belongs to the people.

A professional government is going to have to stamp out freedom sooner or later. Freedom under a professional government can only be a fiction. Whenever the people disagree with the professionals, they’re going to have to get put down. That’s just how it is. No matter how it’s disguised, a professional government is tyranny.

Ours is really well disguised, but if it walks like a duck and locks you up like a duck, it’s a tyranny.

Now what’s the left.

Forget all the deep answers. The left is a professional government.

It’s whole idea is that everything needs to be controlled by a big central government to make society just. That means everything from your soda sizes to whether you can mow your lawn needs to be decided in Washington D.C.

Volunteer governments are unjust. Professional governments are fair. That’s the credo of the left.

Its network, the one we were just discussing, it takes over professional governments because it shares their basic ideas. Professional governments, no matter who runs them, are convinced that everything should run through the professionals. And the professionals are usually lefties. If they aren’t, they will be.

Just ask Mueller and establishment guys like him.

What infuriates professional government more than anything else? An amateur, someone like President Trump who didn’t spend his entire adult life practicing to be president, taking over the job.

President Trump is what volunteer government is all about.

When you’re a government professional, you’re invested in keeping the system going. But when you’re a volunteer, you can do all the things that the experts tell you can’t be done. You can look at the mess we’re in with fresh eyes and do the common sense things that President Trump is doing.

And common sense is the enemy of government professionals. It’s why Trump is such a threat.

A Republican government professional would be bad enough. But a Republican government volunteer does that thing you’re not supposed to do in government… think differently.

Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can’t serve in if you’re not a member. If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren’t in the club.

And Trump isn’t in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren’t in the club with him.

Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.

That’s not a free country.

It’s not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. It’s not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It’s not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It’s not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn’t supposed to win, won.

We’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and leftist professional government.

The pros have made it clear that they’re not going to accept election results anymore. They’re just going to make us do whatever they want. They’re in charge and we better do what they say.

That’s the war we’re in. And it’s important that we understand that.

Because this isn’t a shooting war yet. And I don’t want to see it become one.

And before the shooting starts, civil wars are fought with arguments. To win, you have to understand what the big picture argument is. It’s easy to get bogged down in arguments that don’t matter or won’t really change anything.

This is the argument that changes everything.

Do we have a government of the people and by the people? Or do we have a tyranny of the professionals?

The Democrats try to dress up this argument in leftist social justice babble. Those fights are worth having. But sometimes we need to pull back the curtain on what this is really about.

They’ve tried to rig the system. They’ve done it by gerrymandering, by changing the demographics of entire states through immigration, by abusing the judiciary and by a thousand different tricks.

But civil wars come down to an easy question. Who runs the country?

They’ve given us their answer and we need to give them our answer.

Both sides talk about taking back the country. But who are they taking it back for?

The left uses identity politics. It puts supposed representatives of entire identity groups up front. We’re taking the country back for women and for black people, and so on and so forth…

But nobody elected their representatives.

Identity groups don’t vote for leaders. All the black people in the country never voted to make Shaun King al Al Sharpton their representative. And women sure as hell didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

What we have in America is a representative government. A representative government makes freedom possible because it actually represents people, instead of representing ideas.

The left’s identity politics only represents ideas. Nobody gets to vote on them.

Instead the left puts out representatives from different identity politics groups, there’s your gay guy, there’s three women, there’s a black man, as fronts for their professional government system.

When they’re taking back the country, it’s always for professional government. It’s never for the people.

When conservatives fight to take back the country, it’s for the people. It’s for volunteer government the way that the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.

This is a civil war over whether the American people are going to govern themselves. Or are they going to be governed.

Are we going to have a government of the people, by the people and for the people… or are we going to have a government.

The kind of government that most countries have where a few special people decide what’s best for everyone.

We tried that kind of government under the British monarchy. And we had a revolution because we didn’t like it.

But that revolution was met with a counterrevolution by the left. The left wants a monarchy. It wants King Obama or Queen Oprah.

It wants to end government of the people, by the people and for the people. That’s what they’re fighting for. That’s what we’re fighting against. The stakes are as big as they’re ever going to get. Do elections matter anymore?

I live in the state of Ronald Reagan. I can go visit the Ronald Reagan Library any time I want to. But today California has one party elections. There are lots of elections and propositions. There’s all the theater of democracy, but none of the substance. Its political system is as free and open as the Soviet Union.

And that can be America.

The Trump years are going to decide if America survives. When his time in office is done, we’re either going to be California or a free nation once again.

The civil war is out in the open now and we need to fight the good fight. And we must fight to win.

#Wealth

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foursprout-blog · 7 years ago