Author: themillennialdemocrats

Political analyst, historian, Democratic organizer

One Big Happy Family! Why AOC and Bernie Are Donald Trump’s Best Friends.

One Big Happy Family!
Hello, world, from Millennial Democrats! We hope it finds you well.
Earlier today, a debate was held between a few of our members, which led to a consensus decision. Some asked if I would clarify the organization’s reasons for refusing to support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as there are certainly many people on the left who, to put it mildly, do not agree with that decision.
First off, it’s important to point out how critical it is that Democrats be able to agree to disagree. We are not socialists, this is not groupthink. Dissent is welcome, even encouraged. Our position is that AOC is part of a faction, a movement, and a base of people who have been a disaster for the Democratic Party, and we fully invite opposition dialogue on the subject. Come armed with facts and not slanders, and we will debate you any time at any place.
Just make sure you know how to be a good loser.
AOC is the latest chapter in an ongoing saga, where the right has done all it can to empower and incite the socialists because they know it will make things harder for us. They want Ocasio-Cortez to be the face of our Party more than anything. She and Bernie are helping them to make of us a Goldstein, in the 1984 scenario. In order to keep the White House next year, Trump has to present an enemy to the public even worse than him, and the spectre of socialism as exhibited by the Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America gives him exactly that.
Ocasio-Cortez plays into this at every turn.
Take the Green New Deal, for example. She proudly tweeted that she and her friends threw it together over the course of a weekend, as though that were a good thing. It’s an unrealistic dreamer’s errand and a wish list, and the price tag on it has all the conservatives licking their chops.
There are those who accuse us of hostility to AOC based on her taking out of Joe Crowley, who undoubtedly was one of our best guys, and who genuinely will be missed. This is not the case, however; we are Democrats, and we support democracy. We bid our condolences and farewells to Joe and moved on. At this time, Millennial Democrats wrote Ocasio-Cortez an article of welcome and sincere congratulation, asking her to reconsider her stance on some things and drop the socialist aspect of her philosophy.
As for the environmental changes proposed as part of the Green New Deal, we fully support those aspects of the bill. Nancy Pelosi made that clear when amending the bill. Her version is the one that mainstream Democrats like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar have gone on to indicate some support for, not AOC’s.
Former Vice-President Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change science. Our side has been fighting for this since long before AOC, or any other Millennial Democrat was even born. Our opposition to the bill has less than nothing to do with that, although most of us rightly are grateful to and venerate our elders in the baby boomer generation.
We’re not for doing things sloppy. There are very serious legislative flaws in that plan. It was not well crafted, and the crafters were completely ill-prepared. They got in trouble right away because of that FAQ that went around last week, talking about the people “unwilling to work”, et cetera.
At any rate, the problems are much more foundationally serious than an unvetted fact sheet. Expert Mike Pesca weighed in, pointing out very few environmental experts consider the targets laid out in the plan to be attainable in any way. Climate change experts have called for zeroing out emissions in the power sector by 2050, while the Green New Deal proposes doing so by 2030.
On what basis does it maintain the time frame can be accelerated by two-thirds? It does not say.
What Ocasio-Cortez and her friends have actually done is to confuse the issue further, make the true adherents of climate change look bad, and make it harder for the professionals responsible to get the actual progress made, which is the problem with her entire organization, modeled after Bernie Sanders from the start. AOC sadly didn’t just used to work for JD and DSA, she is very much a part of them now, and is in fact their greatest asset.
Because of that fact, she is also the greatest Republican asset, which is one more eerie way in which the interests of the far left and alt-right coincide. Their attacks on her are likely part of their usual cunning political strategy; they know booing her is an easy way to make the left embrace her, which in chess terminology is like eating a poisoned pawn, because of what an insanely atrocious idea signing on behind the original Green New Deal would be.
Why else would Mitch McConnell allow a vote on something he knows will never pass, like the Green New Deal, except to be able to tar and feather anyone who goes for it as a socialist wingnut who gets up at three in the afternoon?

In Ocasio-Cortez, in the few very loud members of our generation that have been hoodwinked into supporting this truly evil and invasive form of government, the Republicans now have a walking personification of all they have been fighting with their money to create: a just accusation that Democrats are socialists, and that to support us is to personally become the vector of socialism.  It’s George McGovern all over again.

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan situation provides a vivid example of how big disaster socialism can be. At the end of the SOTU speech, Trump did what he’s going to be doing a lot- pointing to Bernie Sanders in silence, looking horrified, waiting for the people to become so disgusted they can’t take it and vote against their interests. Policy be damned, they will say. Look at that blue clown suit. I would rather burn than have that guy as my president.

The claim that we Democrats are going to turn America into a Venezuelan socialist hellscape looks like something new, but as every reader of this blog will be aware, they’ve been laying the groundwork for it for the last several years. Contrary to Trump’s new narrative, the Democratic Party has never embraced Bernie Sanders. We do share some policies, but he goes too far with them and makes them look ridiculous. Now he’s got AOC there with him, screaming for seventy percent income tax rates on the rich and protesting Nancy Pelosi over climate change.

Wonderful.

We had hoped to like AOC. We wrote good things about her in the beginning, even though she entered all our lives by doing something no Republican could have done in getting rid of Joe Crowley, a twenty-year veteran whose help was sorely needed. We sucked it up and congratulated her, and wished her the best in working with us to create a better future for America.
Since then, however, things have declined sorely and rapidly.
Why did she go protest Nancy Pelosi about climate change, when a bill was already on the table? Why not go protest the Republicans? Who knows, but it’s certainly convenient for them that she didn’t.
Then during the #TrumpShutdown, she also lied about her reasons for going so far as to vote with the Republicans for keeping our government closed, citing “funding for ICE” as the reason why she’d made a “tough, nuanced call” on the issue, even though ICE funding is covered by the Department of Homeland Security, and DHS funding wasn’t even discussed in the bill.
Her reasons for stabbing her own in the back remain totally obscure- and unfortunate.
The future strategy on the part of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Justice Democrats will be to use the popularity of AOC as a springboard of sorts, a mobile platform from which to position themselves to bump off even more good Democrats and spread their insurgency- and the unrealistic platform it brings along with it, so toxic in the extreme to the long term survival of the party.
In short, the whole radical left wing of the party is acting kind of like a handicap does on a racehorce right now by constantly ripping it up, dragging it down, and dampening its enthusiasm, to the ultimate benefit of Donald Trump. Millennial Democrats has been designed and built toward the purpose of countering that strategy and bringing love and life back to the center of our Party. To closely paraphrase what famed Irish poet William Butler Yeats once wrote in his riveting poem The Second Coming, things fall apart, if the center cannot hold.
In closing on the AOC topic, one of our contributors may have said it best of all earlier this evening- par for the course on that person’s batting record.
Believe me, Democrats, we’ve got the best people on the job!
“For me, it is the fact she has voted with the Republican Party against the Democratic Party, and I like Democratic legislators that vote with us and not against us.”
Why is this asking so much out of someone whom we supposedly share an agenda with?
Perhaps it makes the most sense from the standpoint of what Vladimir Lenin once said- “The best way to control the opposition, is to lead it ourselves.” Everything Ocasio-Cortez does makes perfect sense from the standpoint that she’s doing what revolutionary socialism calls for- cooperating with any group around, no matter how terrible their ideology, in order to topple a regime that both sides have found restrictive.
At any rate, this is our position, and I have given it my best. I hope I have argued for it well. Either way, it is not necessary that we all agree on everything; in a big-tent organization such as the Democratic Party, it’s pretty unlikely anyway. All we do ask is that when that is the case, we express our dissenter’s opinion with respect instead of vitriol and that we agree to disagree for the good of the country and the cause. If that’s good enough for you neo-progressives, it’s good enough for us Millennial Democrats. Have a good night, and thank you for taking the time to hear us out!
The falcon can still hear the falconer, at least for tonight.

Battle on the Border- Why The Democratic Fight Against Wall Is Worth It.

The Berlin Wall of Shame is a mistake that should remain unrepeated.

“Something there is that does not love a wall”, said the famous American poet, Robert Frost, in his famous poem Mending Wall, and that seems like a good place to start, in discussing the proposed border Wall of Donald Trump, a completely unAmerican project if ever there was one. A constitutional crisis has come to our Southern border, latest in a long line of artificial disasters created by the illegitimate and infantile man who with Russian help stole the 2016 election.

Returning again to his use of executive power to bring chaos to the country and deflect national attention from his crimes, crimes which his old campaign manager Paul Manafort got a 19-year prison sentence recommended for last week, Donald Trump has declared a national emergency where there isn’t one, announcing his intention to try and build the Wall he’s been screaming about, twelve hundred miles worth of ugly mess and dark symbol on our entire Southern border.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff gave us the story Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He’s pretty much daring the court to strike this down,” the California Democrat said. “It is going to be a real test for my GOP colleagues in Congress and their devotion to the institution.” Knowing the Republicans, they will roll right over for Trump.

It hardly bears repeating why this whole thing is moronic and despicable. Readers of this blog will most certainly already know. But what’s the other side of the story? How can the Republicans possibly justify this? What are the Fox News talking points? How could the fight be worth it in their ridiculous eyes? As they see it, here’s how the story goes, at least in the observations of this Millennial Democrats contributor.

The Wall is not immoral because it has a door. People will be allowed through according to legal channels. The current state of affairs wherein new waves of immigrants pass under bushes and across the desert to flock into our country by the hundreds will be ended. What Trump is doing is understandable, he needs it for his base, and above all, the fight is not worth it for the rest of us. It cost the country $7 billion.

Their solution? We should simply give up the fight and let him build the thing.

Let’s start out in the Aristotelian model, by conceding that there are aspects of truth to this. As always with Trump, like Charles Manson, he is very good at taking the truth and making a lie out of it. Another point to consider is that if the president of the United States wants a $5 billion appropriation for a pet project that’s important to him personally and partially fulfills a campaign promise, then he ought to be able to get it.

This is also true. The time-honored way for him to get it is to do what Trump promised above all else- come to the negotiating table, and make good deals. But back at the beginning of 2018, we were ready to cut a deal that could have given him the wall if in so doing we could have secured legal rights of citizenship for our DREAMers, the roughly two million Latino-Americans who were brought here by their parents as small children.

We, Democrats, came to the table offering a compromise involving wall money and a path to citizenship for DREAMers. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer came up with a good plan and brought it to the table for him to sign. He almost went for it, too. It was immigration hardliners in Trump’s own administration who scuttled the deal, and that is what brings us to the core truth of this whole standoff.

The Wall is a completely pointless waste of time.

Everyone knows it, including the immigration hardliners. They themselves clearly don’t think the wall is particularly useful or important in the real world. If they really wanted a wall, they would go get a wall by offering something in exchange for it, like protection for the DREAMers or letting the immigrant children their thugs have hijacked out of the warehouses they’re keeping them in, or some other thing. Nothing has been offered and nothing will be, because the only one who wants this done is Trump. As for the aforementioned hardliners, they know the whole concept is idiotic, so they won’t offer to trade for it. It’s as simple as that.

That the Wall is pointless and not worth it is true enough, and it is also Trump’s fault. He himself immediately admitted, “I didn’t have to do this” and then went on to recite his worn out old stump speech for the umpteenth millionth time. This whole boring episode makes it clear that Trump is even more isolated in his position that what’s happened on our southwestern border constitutes any kind of a national emergency than he was when he first caused the #TrumpShutdown. The immigration hardliners and the sane center agree on that much.

But where considerations of silver and gold are all that kind of person sees, it’s only where we’re getting started.

For one thing, the belief that a wall alone will keep anyone out of anything is just plain stupid. It’s a ridiculous concept all around. It’s a medieval solution to a post-industrial problem. If they really wanted to keep immigrants from crossing the Rio Grande they would lock up the guys hiring these guys. If they didn’t know they could come here and get jobs easy, they would stay back home.

Trump cites the “migrant caravans” as a reason why this is a crisis, pointing to the disgraceful failure that is Venezuelan socialism and noting that the refugees heading out of that area are in desperate straits. He sent our troops to the border in response to one of these just before the midterms.

Now that was disgraceful.

Militarily speaking, there are no modern examples of a wall being a successful defending strategy, but there sure are lots of examples of their failure. We don’t have to go all the way back to when the Mongols hopped right over the Great Wall of China, nor do we have to make mention of the founder of Rome, Romulus, having killed his brother Remus for mocking the wall he’d built around the city. He laughed at him, just like we’re all doing at Donald, which should serve as an abject lesson of how ugly people can be in a state of wounded pride.

Fixed fortifications failed the French at the Maginot Line, which was the most heavily equipped fortress of a border there ever has been. The Germans simply drove tanks through the Ardennes Forest around it, and conquered France in a little over six weeks back in 1941.

Likewise, in 1944, American troops stormed the beach at Normandy and cracked Hitler’s vaunted Atlantic Wall in one day.

France proved our point again on its way to dragging the United States into Vietnam, by getting themselves annihilated at a fortress called Dien Bien Phu.

But above all others, it was a non-military barrier as this one will be, as ideological as physical, the border of the Berlin Wall that stood for many years as the world’s largest eyesore.

The premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khruschev, put it up across Berlin in 1967. It was the result of a fit of petty rage, his own pride wounded when he understood just how unpopular his communist system was, that many people were escaping to the free lands of the West through the part of Berlin controlled by the Allied powers.

This was because, above all else, people wanted to be free than live under the hells of socialism. We still do.

Someone ought to tell Bernie Sanders that, not that he’d listen.

The Berlin Wall came down in 1991, right behind the evil empire of the Soviet Union that was propping it up, and it’s nothing but a memory now. But the scars it has left on the psyche of the human race are very large and have yet to fully heal. Something there is that does not love a wall, indeed. Willy Brandt, the Social-Democratic mayor of Berlin, and soon to be chancellor, called it the Wall of Shame. The term caught on quick and was totally accurate. If Trump does build a new one, it will be revived.

In the end, it isn’t all a question of money and impracticality. Trump’s Wall is a symbol and an evil one just as much as the one in Berlin. As Nancy Pelosi said, it really was total immorality. To placate his base would be insane, since they are all insane, and there’s no sense in appeasing dictators or their bases anyway- because it can’t be done. They will take and take until there is nothing left.

As the old saying goes, and as we have written in the past, never give Poland to Hitler. If we rolled over on this Trump would be emboldened to try for the next wicked item on his unending agenda of corruption all the harder, not that that will ever happen. Walls keep people from coming together, and that’s exactly what the human race does not need. Our history is vibrantly sad already. It’s time for us to begin learning how to heal, not to begin inflicting new wounds.

All cancer comes from one form of inflammation or another. This has gone on for too long. It’s bad for the presidency, it’s bad for America, and it’s bad for the whole human race. The border must remain open, the government must remain open, and Donald Trump must be made to stop using his powers in this egregiously ridiculous and damaging way. America has had enough.

Trump’s SOTU Cheered as Venezuelan Socialism Falls- How Right Wing Gets Mileage From Far Left.

Trump's SOTU Cheered for Anti-Socialist Theme he stole from us.

As the Venezuelan crisis worsens, and the country’s failing socialism system continues to demonstrate why the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are foolish, we are seeing the illegitimate president Trump’s new strategy at work. Now the long game becomes clear. Using no less a mouthpiece than the 2019 State of the Union Address, Trump both charted his 2020 strategy and scored big points by taking the time to score a shot on socialism, vowing that America will never be a socialist country.

It’s a little late to stand on that now, Donald, but we don’t kid ourselves that will stop you from trying.

This is what we’ve been warning against all along. The fake left is just as anti-Democrat as the right; why? How is it that their interests always manage to coincide? What were they playing at? Why has Trump been so soft on socialism until now? Why not during the election, when America really needed to hear all of our leaders saying it?

Because then it would have been too early.

In Ocasio-Cortez, in the few very loud members of our generation that have been hoodwinked into supporting this truly evil and invasive form of government, the Republicans now have a walking personification of all they have been fighting with their money to create: a just accusation that Democrats are socialists, and that to support us is to personally become the vector of socialism.  It’s George McGovern all over again.

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan situation provides a vivid example of how big disaster socialism can be. At the end of the SOTU speech, Trump did what he’s going to be doing a lot- pointing to Bernie Sanders in silence, looking horrified, waiting for the people to become so disgusted they can’t take it and vote against their interests. Policy be damned, they will say. Look at that blue clown suit. I would rather burn than have that guy as my president.

The claim that we Democrats are going to turn America into a Venezuelan socialist hellscape looks like something new, but as every reader of this blog will be aware, they’ve been laying the groundwork for it for the last several years. Contrary to Trump’s new narrative, the Democratic Party has never embraced Bernie Sanders. We do share some policies, but he goes too far with them and makes them look ridiculous. Now he’s got AOC there with him, screaming for seventy percent income tax rates on the rich and protesting Nancy Pelosi over climate change.

In the meantime, Tulsi Gabbard got involved as well, protesting Trump’s decision to condemn Maduro, which is about the one thing he has ever done right.

On both extremes of the political spectrum, everyone and everything they have is engaged in making the Democratic Party appear to be tilting left, at just the right moment for Trump.

“It seems to me that DJT has zero interest in expanding his coalition, and is going all-in on making the Democratic alternative unpalatable, hence the focus on opposing ‘socialism,’ ” the Republican strategist Michael Steel, a former senior adviser to the House G.O.P. leadership, told the New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser in an e-mail the morning after the speech.

The entire Trump era, in many ways, feels like a return to the days of Richard Nixon. Parallels abound in terms of personnel, power, and politics. Perhaps above all else, a feeling that a growing extremity is pervading our country and reaching a dangerous level is strongly troubling American consciousness. It feels like chaos is everywhere. In such circumstances, history has shown that just about anything can happen.

One wonders if that isn’t the socialistic schemers’ whole point.

Cold War-era divisions have emerged along the same old lines as always. Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro is backed by Russia, China, and Cuba, which don’t want to lose an ally in the region. He has accepted billions in Russian and Chinese aid as his country’s economy  has exploded, and is now deeply indebted to some guys that are even worse than him. The Russian government has said it is considering installing an airbase in Venezuela, and there’s no doubt at all he’d let them do it. One wonders how Trump’s tough talk on Venezuela will jive with this desire of his boss. It’s one thing to stand up to a pack of screaming wingnuts, Donald. Try standing up to Putin for a change, why don’t you.

The Venezuelan situation, complete with right-wing exiles now involved in the political scene of Miami, brings us back to the good old days of international rancor over Latin American populist revolutions. One of the standard tropes of the Nixon era was the constant trouble over the Cuban Revolution, an event which saw its sixty-year anniversary pass by last month.

In that troubled time, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro managed with the help of the famous Che Guevara to overthrow the unpopular strongman Fulgencio Batista. Having done it, he went on to construct what he promised would be a more egalitarian Cuban regime. Soon after, he made sure to announce formally what U.S. military leaders and top officials had long known anyway- that this regime would be a communist one.

In a televised address not long after, Castro declared, “I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life.” He went on to state that, “Marxism or scientific socialism has become the revolutionary movement of the working class.”

The American right was empowered by that enough to justify decades worth of grotesque savagery. Shadows of doubt will always loom over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

It’s important to note what Castro said there about socialism, “scientific” or otherwise. True communism, as envisioned conceptually by Karl Marx, is very different from the centralized socialism that grew into fruition in places like Cuba and the Soviet Union. The idea was to give over national resources to the working class, to be administered in some unknown way, at which point these completely unprepared and unsuspecting people are sent off to go to town creating a utopia (the Greek word for “nowhere”).

No one knows what that utopia might have looked like since it never happened.

What did happen was socialism, meaning that the State took ownership of absolutely everything and set about instantly setting itself up as the sole power in the land, choosing for everyone what they would have and not have, and creating a new type of elite based on party loyalty and bureaucratic efficiency. One tiny central hub, e.g. Moscow, controls every scrap of land and enjoys total autonomy within it. Every evidence shows this practice to have caused an unreal amount of human misery everywhere it has been tried; for example, China locked an entire ethnic population, the Uighurs, more than a million deep into labor camps last fall. This is not a dream.

Then as now, and in those countries as in Venezuela, the whole sloppy mess was a disaster. It starved five million people to death in the first five years of Vladimir Lenin’s reign when the Soviet Union was born. It was not well thought out, to try and apply a political theory off the pages of a book to actual human society. Socialism is something to be avoided completely and utterly, and Americans are aware of it. It is one thing we were taught in school that is all but inarguably true- not that this stops certain people from arguing it anyway.

All this history lessoning aside, we can all see what’s going on here. Trump is making a big show out of his sudden anti-socialism posture, but actually, it’s disingenuous in the extreme for him to do so. He has subscribed all along to the usual American far-right strategy, which is to consider liberals the true enemy, not communists or socialists.

This is why Trump sided with Bernie Sanders in 2016. Instead of saying at that time, Socialism is a disaster and we should all come together on this, he chose to court a bromance with the Bern and reviled us for “stealing” the election from the man Hillary Clinton beat by nearly four million votes. His base has oft-repeated this slanderous claim.

Trump waited until Nancy Pelosi gave him permission to give the 2019 SOTU before he would finally go after the fake left. We’ve been here cleaning house the whole time, and he wants to co-opt all the hard work we Democrats have done. He thinks it’s the right time to cash in. But long before the day this started, the right has done all it can to empower and incite the socialists because they know it will make things harder for us. They want Ocasio-Cortez to be the face of our Party more than anything.

Now they’ve got their Goldstein, in the 1984 scenario.

In reality, of course, Democrats are the ones on the front lines of the struggle against socialism. The reason for this is simple. American democracy is the only pillar in the world still holding up the idea of human freedom, and it’s under attack from every angle. The only people in the world who are here to protect it are us, Democrats. When the Proud Boys and Antifa come in masks, to brawl in the streets and smash windows out, we’re the ones who break it up and send them all home or to jail.

The far right uses the far left to manipulate the public all the time. That’s what agent provocateurs are for. That’s what the Nixon era taught us, and it’s why we need to be so careful now.

It’s important to realize that this could have deep implications for us. Florida is one of the most key of all the swing states, as anyone who remembers the 2000 presidential race was stolen from Al Gore can tell you. The political scale there is so evenly weighted that percentages involving tenths of a percent are often what decide its elections.

For Trump to gain support from the Venezuelan emigre community of Miami at this time would be extremely bad for our chances in 2020. He is hitting a lick off posturing as anti-socialist, but he did the opposite in 2016. Going forward, it will be incumbent upon us to raise awareness on this. Trump is a Johnny-come-lately at this game. He’s really just a poser.

In the last analysis, the thing to remember is this: Trump has not stood for democracy or its institutions at all. The World Economic Forum no longer considers America to be a full democracy, because of him. MAGA hats have become like armbands worn by Nazis, and Trump is the white power symbol successor of Hitler. It’s worth reminding the world that fascism came from socialism. It was the branch of it designed by Mussolini. The alt left and the far right is exactly the same entity.

“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves,” said Vladimir Lenin a hundred years ago.

Here at Millennial Democrats, we refuse to accept a false equivalency. We equally reject the totalitarian nightmares that arise both from fascism and socialism, and from that posture, we call not only for the resignation of the disgraced dictator Nicholas Maduro.

We call with equal lungpower for the resignation of the disgraced dictator Donald Trump.

What It Means To Stand For Something- Ralph Northam Must Resign.

With a heavy heart, we must ask this man to step down as the Governor of Virginia.

An awful discovery from the past of Virginia governor Ralph Northam was discovered recently. He was dressed up in blackface, and standing beside another man in a Klan robe. To say the least, the sight of a man we once fought for and believed in was deeply dismaying. This was not an easy article to write.

A few words about the history of “Blackface” tradition might be useful to discuss as we begin. It was created by a “comedian” named Thomas Dartmouth Rice, back in the 1830s. His mother must have been proud to see her beloved child dancing around like a buffoon on a stage, singing moronically in an exaggerated black slave vernacular. Mine might have killed me, and not unjust would her crime have been.

Rice gave his character a name, a name which later became famous for far more terrible reasons: “Jim Crow.”

David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum in Michigan, spoke to reporters from the Washington Post yesterday on the subject. He noted how Jim Crow and other performances featuring white men in blackface captivated white crowds up until the mid-20th century.

Now, thanks to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page, blackface is back in the spotlight after this photograph emerged Friday. It was dug up by the enemies of Democrats, democracy, common sense, and decency- the insane and vicious Republicans.  A former writer for the Daily Caller and Breitbart was the one who found this out. It was a hit job from the start.

Northam and us Democrats are all currently what the far right calls getting “ratf*cked”, as the fascists of Nixon’s era used to say, and helping it along really kills us. Attacking another Democrat goes against our most core beliefs.

But that’s got to take a back seat this time.

Common sense and decency, the time-honored values of the sane political center, call for us to make the decision based on more important considerations. To dress up in blackface and wear a Klan uniform is not something we can refuse to speak out on due to party loyalty. You don’t show loyalty to something by poisoning it and refusing an antidote.

Daryl Davis, a black blues musician who is known for his efforts in seeking out Klansmen to converse with to try and convert, said it best. “It doesn’t matter if the photo was from 1984, 1974 or 2004. He defined what he meant when he paired blackface with a Klan hood. Racial segregation. Racial supremacy. When you have a symbol associated with hate from the beginning, you are saying exactly what you mean.”

Millennial Democrats cannot and will not throw our base under the bus by standing with Northam on the grounds of party loyalty over this. The thought made most of us sick. So by consensus, we came together as a group and we voted on it. The decision was made to join our Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and other top Democrats nationwide in calling for Ralph Northam to step down as the Governor of Virginia.

This is hard for us.

“Why are Democrats so loyal?” was a lament made by Donald Trump the day he pathetically caved to Speaker Pelosi and ended the shutdown. He will never understand, either, but he’s spot on in drawing this conclusion. Democrats are loyal.

Usually, when this kind of thing happens, it’s a cheap hit job and a scam, like with Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. We fought as hard as we could for him, as hard as we would for any true Democrat, so long as their conduct has earned our faith and loyalty. This has limits, however, and when something like this does come up, we have got to take an unequivocal stand. Racist notions are unacceptable. Absolutely and completely unacceptable. They are anathema to everything we stand for.

Northam’s original apology– which he then went back on this morning, adding to his mistake by compounding it- featured him giving a statement saying this happened 30 years ago, and undoubtedly that is true.

In response to this apology, which was just not enough, the words of one of our contributors felt right. So with the permission of Mr. Johnny Huckaby of Hawaii, here they are.

“Imho you have a problem with your judgment if in High School you decide to wear a racist costume. For me I wouldn’t know where to find a white hooded robe… Unless he borrowed one from his Dad or his friends? It took a lot of effort to apply the blackface makeup. So all that time he’s thinking what? Was he thinking his costume would be met with acceptance or was he fearful someone might beat him up? This is really disturbing no matter if it happened 30 years ago… Are there other instances that revealed his racism that now will come to light? I can’t look the other way at such an offensive revealing of a racist such as Ralph Northam, even if the racist is a Democrat!”

Democratic party loyalty is very real, but that is because we are loyal to a principle. That is what gathered us and drove us all into the sane center together. We believe in a multicultural world and we believe that making progress entails more of it. Loyalty to the Republicans means cronyism and carries with it clannish, secret society pact kinds of connotations.

For us, it means we fully respect and regard as a family every single member of our thriving and multicultural base.

Our diversity is our greatest strength, and whoever we choose as a leader must be able to demonstrate that they thoroughly share these values. Ralph Northam has done just the opposite. That picture was taken when he was twenty-five. He was old enough to know better.

There is a large corollary point to consider here as well, which is that an offensive joke, even a particularly grotesque one such as this is, is far from the same as a career supporting structural and systemic racism as the Republicans do and have done. ‘Build the wall’ is just the tip of the iceberg.

Perhaps the case was stated best by the Reverend Dr. Jesse Barber, who tweeted on Friday the following incisive statement.

“Yes, the photo of Gov Northam is a form of racism that’s ugly & grotesque. But the worst racism is policy & structural racism. Those who’ve supported racist immigration laws & walls at the border & the racist separation of families & children should resign now. We can’t punish the cultural symbols & ignore the policy violence.”

That is gigantic, and incidents involving past discoveries of racism should be designed to illustrate the point. In the last analysis, doing the right thing is not always easy, but that is irrelevant. Northam is done, and he must step down, just as he let himself down, and let us down by extension.

Our Democratic leadership has called for his resignation, and it is with a heavy heart that we must join them. Please step down, sir, and in so doing, show the world the difference between the conscienceless Republicans and us.

A Disgrace, Not A Democrat- Why Feeling the Bern in 2020 Is A Very Bad Idea.

A Democratic Disaster- Why Feeling the Bern in 2020 Is A Very Bad Idea.

Last Friday was a great day for America. The #TrumpShutdown ended with a pathetic cave on the part of our childish, illegitimate president, and Roger Stone went to jail for tampering with Russiagate witnesses, among other things. It was amazing. But it seems at times that nothing can escape the Trump era’s corrosive gloom, not even a single day. These glory-filled twenty-four hours did not come without at least one man doing his best to spoil it.

Predictably, that man was Bernie Sanders, who has paid off for Russia before.

Two sources with direct knowledge of his plans told Yahoo News on Friday that Sanders, an independent and self-described “democratic socialist,” plans to announce his presidential bid imminently.

This is the best possible news for Donald Trump. Bernie is not only a disaster for Democrats. He’s a disaster for our chances of getting rid of Trump, which means he’s a disaster for democracy. They’re drinking champagne in Moscow again.

Sometimes it feels like we’re all in a time warp, stuck forever in the Groundhog Day that was 2016, a struggle that will define all its participants for life. The one constant in that whole tremendous mess was the total disarray caused by two personality cults- the Trump campaign, and the Sanders campaign. United by hatred for Hillary Clinton, Russian entanglements, and a belief that sexism is a good thing, these people came together and made one of the most notorious messes in all of human history.

Bernie’s name did not appear on the ballot as a presidential candidate in even a single state during the 2016 general election. But his legacy of sore losing and acrimony bear a large share of the blame for the disaster of the Trump administration. The blame lies squarely on his shoulders, on the Bernie or Bust movement, and on the foreign support that kept the Bern’s campaign alive for far too long. Taken as a whole, the evidence is clear that Sanders was the Ralph Nader of 2016, peeling off just enough votes from the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, to hand the presidency over to yet another Republican who lost the popular vote.

Wittingly or unknowingly, he allowed himself to become Vladimir Putin’s other puppet. His campaign’s chief strategist, Tad Devine, was the first witness called at the trial of Paul Manafort- Trump’s campaign manager. They were two sides of the same coin, but that did not make them equals.

Trump would have picked his teeth with Bernie then, and he would now. He spent his whole life beating up on guys like that, and the Russians would certainly have sided in the end with Trump. It would have been such a massacre that the Republicans will not even admit it, they are praying so hard for him to win. They know they’re sure to keep the White House if this grouchy socialist is the only one opposing them, especially considering his own past living on the fence of being a creepy pervert. Read his old rape fantasy essays from college sometime, if you’ve got the blood pressure for it. Just don’t do it before lunch.

Trump could point with dead accuracy to the Access Hollywood “Grab ’em by the p***y” tape and say hey, man, you know I’m not perfect, I’ve shot off my mouth more than once with locker room talk (as he absurdly calls it). But I never wrote anything that sick!”

Imagine the moniker ‘Rape Fantasy Bernie’ up there alongside Little Marco and Lyin’ Ted in the annals of the Trump era’s history.

This will not matter to the loud and extremely vocal few who have given his supporters their bad name, however. The insane and unpleasant remnant of Bernie or Bust will not be long in dusting off the banners they rioted under in 2016, out there in the streets outside at Philadelphia’s Democratic National Convention, as Paul Simon began to play ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’.

By now we have all seen the brick wall of a Bernie Bro up close and personal many times. When faced with hard facts and numbers, they will stonewall completely, sit back, and hurl slogans at you until you tire at last and have to ban them from your Facebook page. When confronted by a Bern-feeling devotee of this nature, nothing grounded in reality is going to enter the conversation.

We have seen this unfold like squares of toilet paper for three years. The vicious ugliness of Bernie Bros has become a cliche to the point where Bernie’s old campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, joined many other Sanders staffers in sending a letter of protest to his office, addressing the “Culture of Toxic Masculinity” that surrounded his campaign.” Shortly after it came out that his campaign had paid one molested staffer, forcibly kissed by one of her co-workers, $30,000 to keep her mouth shut about it. It’s enough to remind one of Stormy Daniels and Trump.

Bernie lost in 2016 in a race that was far from close. Although the Bros still blame the superdelegate system, the truth of the matter is that Hillary won by around four million votes. That’s a chunk of people the size of Chicago. She also won far more states and far more regular delegates. Superdelegates were never a factor in the race. Most people just did not feel the Bern, to paraphrase his horrible campaign slogan.

No one was buying in to a single-payer system that would have bankrupted the country to the tune of trillions of dollars, no one was buying in to the idea that a guy who has two renamed post offices to show for three decades in the Congress would one day wake up with the industriousness and creativity to be the President.

But that doesn’t stop us from being told constantly about how popular he is, even though the only demographic group of people he held Clinton to a draw among was white male voters. He also put his sexism on display using his mouth at every turn.

“It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’ That is not good enough,” Sanders told a crowd at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, according to WBUR.

How unbelievably patronizing. Hillary Clinton had a stronger resume for the job of being the President than any other person in the history of our fair nation, that’s why she deserved to win the race. It was not merely because she is a woman, although of course, that would have been historical. How ugly of Bernie, to say a thing like that. How unfair, and how ugly.

Women nationwide nearly rioted-with utter and total justification- when he accepted that awful Linda Sarsour’s invitation to be the keynote speaker at the Women’s Convention in 2017. Bernie backed out of that one as fast as his legs could carry him. However, even a rejection of enormity like that one hasn’t stopped his supporters from continuing to claim his amazing popularity with women. Actually, though, Bernie’s record on women’s rights is abysmal for a lot more than those rape essays he wrote.

Bernie says that Planned Parenthood is the establishment. He says women would prefer to stay home. He penned essays arguing that sexual repression causes cancer in women. The list is very long and very disheartening, at least to anyone who seriously plans of getting rid of Donald Trump.

He campaigned vigorously in 2017 for the campaign of Heath Mello of Nebraska, known for his strong anti-abortion stance, and justified it on the grounds of red-state pragmatism, which coming from a self-avowed socialist was absurd in the very extreme. In a nutshell, American women are about as likely to get behind Bernie as they are to go ice-skating in Hades.

We note in passing that we’ve just seen the end of 2018, which was the Year of the Democratic Woman. Good luck winning a Democratic primary without them.

Another notorious characteristic of the Sanders campaign was racism, and this too makes him unacceptable as our presidential candidate. His supporters ran wild with unrestrained ugliness in this regard.

This is what we're fighting.
This is who they are.

Medium.com’s Bianca Delarosa wrote a powerful piece the other day in response to the news regarding Bernie’s imminent announcement, titled simply, Black Democrats Have Plenty Of Reason to Be #NeverBernie. What his lunatic supporters have tried to do to Joy Reid over the years comes to mind. The whole uneasy history of Bernie Sanders and black America is laid out in a devastating array. Reading its entirety is something we highly recommend; it sheds a bright light on why Bernie is so wrong for the values of our party.

Bernie was once asked in a New Republic profile why he appears uncomfortable when talking about racial issues. His answer was revealing. “OK, see, this is an issue I’m not really — what I don’t want to do is get into me.” When told that it wasn’t about him per se, Sanders said, “It’s a complicated answer. It’s a good question, but I prefer not to get into it right now.”

This stems from something very basic, yet underestimated by his supporters- Bernie is not a Democrat. This is gigantic, and not for the same reasons cited by his supporters. They perceive our problem with this as being a misplaces loyalty issue, an undemocratic reversion to the days of Tammany Hall, but actually, that narrative is both fundamentally wrong and disingenuous. The real reason it matters is how much the Democratic Party has changed since then. Our base is multicultural. It’s not just white men who have their voices heard. That is highly troublesome to Bernie and has been for his whole career.

These days, after the Weaver protest letter and a number of other things, Bernie has switched his strategy. He has finally realized the necessity of courting the black vote, and so he headed down to South Carolina yesterday to make his case. He made speeches at churches and community centers and the like, belaboring those present to believe in him, citing his civil rights upbringing, meaning the five minutes he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington- as a college student. Last year, Bernie celebrated Martin Luther King Day by ripping to shreds Barack Obama, the first African-American president, but that’s another story.

“What he’s doing in South Carolina points to what his strategy is in terms of he has to make inroads in the core Democratic constituency,”  said J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. Bitzer has studied racial politics extensively and is widely considered an expert on the subject. When it comes to race, his view is that “you cannot divorce race from politics in the South.” This lets us know clearly what his real motives are for being down there in those churches.

According to exit polls in the state, Sanders won roughly 14 percent of black voters in South Carolina. Hillary got the other eighty-six.

Black voters are exactly like all other voters, insofar as they are not, as Delarosa pointed out, interested in being props and mascots. Who on Earth would be. They are all adults who voted smarter than any other demographic group in 2016. It really ought to go without saying they deserve to be considered as more than political coin.

Here at Millennial Democrats, we consider anything less than total integration and equality for every human person, regardless of sex or race or gender, to be completely, absolutely unacceptable. The leader we choose to put our faith behind, in the end, will have to demonstrate clearly that they thoroughly share this view.

Bernie Sanders has spent nearly thirty years proving the opposite. He will never have the support of the Party’s base, and that will make it impossible for him to beat Trump. Those committed to the Resistance must look elsewhere for a champion.

#TrumpShutdown Ends, Roger Stone Arrested- One Great Day For America.

One Great Day for America.

Hello, world, from Millennial Democrats! We’d like to bear you all our most heartfelt good tidings on this great American day. It is our extreme pleasure to announce that Trump has caved, and signed a Democratic bill to reopen the government. The shutdown is over. And Roger Stone has been arrested.

Frankly, what more can you really ask out of a single day? Speaking on my own behalf, I can say for sure. I couldn’t be any happier if I had won the lottery. I have just been sick over where this country is headed. Eight hundred thousand federal workers, going for a month without pay. It’s been one indignity after another, since the day this began and long before.

Trump’s presidency is now two years and five days old, and every day of it has been an insult to common sense and decency. Remember the first travel ban? He hadn’t been in office for two weeks, and it was worldwide pandemonium in airports. Seven continents worth of airports, clogged and logjammed with people who were suddenly- and artificially- stranded. That was the first time Trump caused a disaster for America- disaster is his favorite word- but it sure wasn’t the last. He has used this word constantly all throughout his political career. But ever since the Democrats retook the House, he has been using actual disasters as a bargaining chip and a way to deflect attention. He is said to have been convinced Pelosi would cave, and he lamented deeply.

“Why are they [sic: us Democrats] always so loyal?”

You will never understand, Donald. Never.

Who knows what Trump was thinking. It’s unreal that he could have self-deluded to this extent. If he thought he was going to come in here and bluster and bully Nancy Pelosi into giving him a wall, that’s a joke. Our Speaker could probably beat that old clown in a fistfight, let alone the political arena. Remember the G7 Summit in 2017, when he had to ride a golf cart behind all the other world leaders, who were all in shape and walking? That was great for our world image, let me tell you. Old, winded, out-of-shape America. Just look at them. So much for the Art of the Deal.

Disasters they are, but the disasters are of his own creation. This is a gigantic humiliation for Trump. He capitulated completely, but not before nearly tanking the economy, causing thousands of federal workers to file for unemployment relief, and causing significant cracks in that base of his that used to forgive him anything. His poll numbers went into nuclear meltdown. He got not one dollar for a wall. He shut the government down for absolutely nothing, and he is now the laughingstock of every single person in the world. He’s on Twitter at this very moment, whining about how he wishes people would “listen to his words” about why this is not the most gigantically cowardly and buffoonish concession in the history of all mankind. You’ve got to be kidding. This is the penultimate cave. It’s the Mammoth of caves. It’s really more like a cavern.

Thirty-five days, the government stayed shut down over this. What a total and gigantic waste. Citizens were about to lose their food stamps, and that would have really killed people, especially the sick and the very old. Trump came very close to committing his administration’s second atrocity; we’ve known for a while that his administration’s ICE has literally lost nearly fifteen hundred little kids, so we can’t call it the first. This one would have been all his fault, though. No one else to blame; Trump starved old people to death to get Russiagate out of the news. Quite a legacy; perhaps that’s why he caved. If so, it would be the one worthy thing he has done during this whole affair, which of course is why the conservatives are reviling him, specifically as a “Wimp”.

Ann Coulter congratulated the departed George Herbert Walker Bush on no longer being the biggest wimp ever to hold the office. Undoubtedly, that is so. The whole thing was the ravings of an idiot in the first place, a foolish campaign promise, something for the slobs at his rallies to scream for alongside “Lock ‘er up!” Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) blames the far-right Freedom Caucus. “I hope he ignores them for the next three weeks,” King said. “It’s the charge of the Light Brigade. It’s the Valley of Death.”

These days it’s not Hillary Clinton who is facing prison time and getting locked up. It’s all of Trump’s friends, and that brings us to the second piece of the day’s big news. This morning, federal prosecutors kicked in the door of Roger Stone, self-described political dirty trickster, and hauled him off to jail. It cost him $250,000 to bail himself out, which he probably got from some Russian still hoping to hit an easy lick. We’d like to say that’s over with for Russia. Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders had to try and spoil the day by running for president again, so there will probably be plenty of fresh acrimonies for them to exploit, especially during the primaries. We’ll get to that soon. For tonight, we would like to say God bless America and express to him our deepest gratitude. Because very soon we will be saying goodbye to Donald Trump.

Roger Stone may have sworn his loyalty, but that won’t do Donald any good, because Roger is just a poser anyway. No serious person would tattoo Richard Nixon’s face on their back. He missed the boat on Watergate and has spent the rest of his life yearning for the halcyon days when domestic fascism was strong enough to create this kind of scandal without the help of Russian rubles. Sleep well, Roger Stone. You sold out your country to the Russians, the worst enemies of America. And while the others did it for greed, or because of misplaced convictions based on sexism, you did it strictly out of malice, because that is what you do. Enjoy going down in the history books next to Benedict Arnold and Vidkun Quisling.

How sweet it is. Remember that one documentary for Netflix he did, Get Me Roger Stone? “I revel in your hate!” he defiantly shot at Democrats. Hate isn’t the word, exactly; more like loathing and disgust. We might have thrown up our hands then, but now we’re smoothing back our hair with them. Go ahead and revel, then, Rog. Have a blast, right there in your prison cell, eating Ramen noodles with Paul Manafort. His We’ll all be reveling together, in that case. It’s been a great day for America. Today, we stayed the land of the free, and the home of the brave. We have not, as Mark Twain once said, exchanged our honor for a phrase. If a phrase is needed, then perhaps this Republican president of yesterday’s will suffice.

“Mr. President, tear down that wall.” -Ronald Reagan

#ProtectMueller! New AG Barr Confirmation Raises Specter of Saturday Night Massacre.

#ProtectMueller! New AG Barr Confirmation Raises Specter of Saturday Night Massacre

Here on the eve of the confirmation of the new Attorney General pick, William Barr, questions abound about the Russiagate investigation and the eventual fate of the special counsel Robert Mueller chosen to administrate it. Barr has been critical of Mueller’s investigation but has stated that he will not interfere. We’ll see. To put it mildly, serious reasons exist to doubt the sincerity of America’s abortive failure of a forty-fifth president when he says he will not fire Mueller, the man who has compiled the case that will likely destroy him. Barr seems like a rubber stamp brought in to do just that, the hatchetman of Russian assets. We hope he proves us wrong.

If Trump does fire Mueller, it will be highly reminiscent of another corrupt president who fired a special prosecutor, president Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox began the end of his presidency, and so conventional wisdom has held that Trump will not go there. Congressional Republicans have also said that the firing of the special counsel Mueller would be a crossing of the line for them, although it’s true we have no reason to believe them either. They have caved to Trump on everything and often in the most shameful imaginable ways. Devin Nunes, former chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee, was recently found to be deliberately covering up House findings in order to protect Trump.

When considered as part of the whole incident, it seems clear this could be destined to bring us into uncharted territory completely if Trump does go the Nixon route. It wouldn’t save him, and it would damn him further in the opinion of many, but he wouldn’t resign as Nixon did. His conduct during the lengthening and unnecessary #TrumpShutdown proves him once again to be utterly without scruples. It is certain he will use the country as hostages again in the process of getting the Russiagate spotlight off of him. Thus, we have no choice but to conclude that the conventional wisdom- which also did not predict the shutdown, or the fool’s errand that was the travel ban, or the Helsinki debacle, or any number of other horrible things- is probably wrong again.

Of course Trump would fire Mueller. ‘Don’t expect Trump to go quietly’, read a Washington Post article published on January 14th. He’s got the whole country held hostage at this moment, he unrepentantly lies about anything that happens to cross his mind, and he thinks he’s “winning”, whatever that even means in the context of a ruined economy and a devastated government. I guess it means getting Employee of the Month from Vladimir Putin. Firing Mueller would fit right in as the stupidest and worst for America thing he could possibly do. It’s a glaring absence in his resume as it is.

Slava.

In related news, Trump, who was in the news over the weekend for having sworn his interpreters in his three closed-door meetings with Putin to secrecy, has taken an increasingly aggressive and door-closed stance toward Mueller’s requests for an in-person interview. Gone are the days when he boasts of having done nothing and means his crimes. The Trump of yesterday always said of Mueller that “No one wants to speak more than me“. That line is yesterday’s news, although references to the “Fake News Media” that has plagued him like the Furies remain plentiful. As usual, Trump blames himself for nothing, and provides an object- and abject- example to American children of what a spoiled brat at its worst can do.

News that the special counsel has already drafted a report- a report that draws the most damning possible conclusions- joined the confiscation of notes taken during his closed-door meetings with Putin as the two top stories in the news this weekend. Trump‘s behavior toward the Russian president was the focus of Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein on Sunday, when he appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources. While there, Bernstein- whose investigative journalism helped to take down Nixon- said the special counsel investigating Trump will find he “helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the [2016] election.” Any Facebook activist can tell you this. We’ve seen it develop from the day they prepared the Wikileaks dumps.

He is joined in this dramatically terrible conclusion by many of the counterintelligence specialists in the country, including FBI investigators assigned to the case directly. The Bureau has now let the public know that they’ve been monitoring his conduct viz. Vladimir Putin all along. God bless the good old American Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has now come through for this country through two attempted fascist takeovers.

We would also like to give a farewell salute to the former and departing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who did not have to pick someone who would look into this as hard as Mueller would, and acted with integrity throughout in spite of Republican reviles. His decency and professionalism will be missed.

In the last analysis, from the standpoint of this illegitimate infantile president, sitting back and letting this atomic report fall on him would most likely be better than trying to resist the inevitable by trying to bring this to an end. Cracks in Trump’s base are said to be forming at last, and as these people realize what they’ve been buying into, more and more of them will be looking for a new home, and a sane alternative. Our capacity to find this for them will prove to be a critical part of success for us as we move forward. Russia has been the chiefest enemy of America for nearly a hundred years now, and most Americans still know that. Reminding them is the way to go moving forward.

Does Trump Work For Putin Directly? The FBI Has Been Asking Since May of 2017.

Does Trump work for Putin directly? The FBI's been looking into it- and so have we.

One of the biggest bombshells yet in the Russiagate case was dropped on America this evening. As the #TrumpShutdown entered its third week and the first missing paycheck came up for millions of Americans, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has announced that it has been pursuing an investigation into whether Donald Trump was working for Vladimir Putin directly, either knowingly or unwittingly.

The New York Times reported late Friday that federal investigators are said to have become so alarmed by Trump’s conduct after he fired former FBI director James Comey that they at once opened a probe into whether the orange infant in the White House has been secretly working with Russia, all along, for Putin himself.

According to sources considered reliable by that venerable newspaper, counterintelligence officials were assigned to the case.

Let’s talk about that word for a minute, counterintelligence. Google Dictionary gives an excellent working definition. It refers to activities designed to prevent or thwart spying, intelligence gathering, and sabotage by an enemy or other foreign entity. Therefore, counterintelligence agents are only assigned to cases serious enough to be considered a risk to national security.

In other words, this is earth-shaking beyond all belief for Donald Trump.

Russia is and has for much of our history been the chief global rival of America. For our president to be in the actual employ of their president is clearly a worst-case scenario. We’ve been saying this for years, of course.

Now the big boys are saying it too.

For a counterintelligence committee to be examining not only whether Trump’s actions were undermining national security, but also whether he was working at the behest of the Kremlin, is clearly of the most phenomenal importance.

On Rachel Maddow‘s Friday night television show, AM Joy Reid of MSNBC was standing in, and hosted Former Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi for an interview. He said that the FBI would only even consider a decision of this magnitude without having evidence of the most utterly compelling nature, something on the level of taped conversations and the like.

Trump has been screaming for years that the whole Russian collusion story is nothing but fake news, and his sheer vehemence gave him some early successes in getting people to stop using the word.

Collusion is back on the table to stay, after this.

In related news, it came out this week that Paul Manafort broke the terms of his plea agreement in regards to his actively sharing and exchanging data from the Trump campaign with his Russian handlers. Turns out that $19 million dollars Manafort owed to Oleg Deripaska, Putin’s buddy the aluminum oligarch, came back to haunt him after all.

Just last week Time tracked down the man Deripaska used to get Manafort to pay up. “He owed us a lot of money,” Victor Boyarkin told Time. “And he was offering ways to pay it back … I came down on him hard.”

As much as Manafort is a detestable character, what does it say about America, that Russians can come over here and push our people around like this with impugnity? This has to be stopped at once. It is our opinion that the Russian Mafia, the feared ROC, should be pored over and removed from its influence from every scrap of our fair nation. Not even the garbage should be left over for them- aluminum cans are worth billions! Just ask Oleg Deripaska.

Manafort had a good friend from his glory days fixing Ukrainian elections for Putin, Konstantin Kilimnik, pictured here in this photograph, not far from Tad Devine of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Top consultant to the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign Tad Devine, hanging out with Paul Manafort and Konstatin Kilimnik.
Top consultant to the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign Tad Devine, hanging out with Paul Manafort and Konstatin Kilimnik.

Kilimnik, a shadowy and truant figure long believed to hold many pieces of this puzzle, is known by the nickname of Manafort’s Manafort. He is connected to Russian intelligence services like the GRU, which also hosted Fancy Bear and Guccifer 2.0, the hackers who got Julian Assange the hacked DNC emails that he dumped on us through Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations.

Nevertheless, the Bernie Bots and Bros rioted in the streets of Philadelphia over minor written exchanges proving that Debbie Wassermann-Schultz and Bernie did not like each other. It was the biggest single coup of the Trump campaign’s whole summer, and also the night that Russiagate became something tangible.

The Russians were said to be overjoyed. The emails themselves were played up so much by Trump and his base that by the time they were released, it did not matter what was in them, and it turned out to be nothing to an extent that was simply huge.

The information pipeline that got all this done featured Manafort, his campaign deputy Rick Gates, and Kilimnik funneling many files full of Trump campaign information to bring back to Deripaska, and received many back in return. It was reciprocal and totally coordinated. Manafort knew what he was doing to America every last step of the way.

Deripaska’s not that much of a political guy, but he does have one big interest in giving Trump a hand. He is extremely close to Putin and relies on him to keep his personal fortune. All of Russia works and eats at Putin’s order; he has more control than Stalin did over there.

Even Fox News hosts have been admitting that what Manafort did with the Russians constitutes collusion. There is no doubt about it, and this is, in its own way, even more damning for Trump than the Mueller investigation.

In the last analysis, Manafort was not chosen because of his consummate skill or charming personal characteristics. He was chosen because he was convenient, due to the money he owed for those Cayman Island hotels he burned up Deripaska’s friendship for. Many email exchanges between the two indicate Manafort’s frequent and pleading queries as to whether or not the two of them were “good”. He had that Boyarkin ogre ready to pick his bones, he was scared, and he’d been their guy so long by then that he felt there was no turning back.

So he made a devil’s bargain to sell out his country, in order to save his behind. That is the most rotten and cowardly choice that anyone can ever make. Manafort’s name will be reviled throughout all of human history, and as with the Benedict Arnolds and Vidkun Quislings of history, his name will be held up as an example of greed and cowardice to serve mankind’s final generations with a lesson that resounds with eternal importance.

Going forward, we must reexamine the entire concept of treason. We should view the Cold War as a conflict which never ended, but rather shifted forms and chosen new battlefields in the virtual realms of politics. In that scenario, Trump would be a traitor by every metric, and this is the most truthful narrative.

Trump Lies On Border as #TrumpShutdown Weakens America For Third Week.

#TrumpShutdown begins its third week, and America is hurting.

On the cusp of the twentieth day of what has now become immortalized as the #TrumpShutdown, Trump himself headed to the border to disgracefully lie to America and did so. Other than that, there is not a whole lot going on. How could there be? Everything is closed down, and as one walks around as an observer, there is a very real sense of being in the eye of the tornado.

Even West Virginian senator Lindsey Graham, a guy who has become progressively worthless as the Trump circus atmosphere corrupts him, came up with a plan to try and end the shutdown. Trump shot holes in it. He told Senate Republicans that he believes he is winning the fight”, leaving Graham shaking his head in despair, saying he has “Never been more depressed“.

On that point, at least, we are agreed.

On Friday millions of people will not get paychecks; things like food stamp benefits are only guaranteed through February. One man was on CNN the other night sobbing because he was so afraid he’s going to lose his house. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) asked the illegitimate president frankly why he doesn’t stop hurting people. His answer was right out of the spoiled child brat Trump playbook.

“Because then you won’t give me what I want.”

There’s no need really to point out how disgusted a sane human is bound to be at the sound of that, it speaks for itself loud and clear. Trump is calling it a humanitarian crisis, which it is. But the only one causing it is he himself, and he will not stop. That is something in between blackmail and terrorism.

Moving on the subject of terrorism, the Pentagon- who, earlier in the week, was actually reduced to having to go to Fox News and beg for their help in getting the moron in the Oval Office to listen to them regarding Afghanistan- has warned that it is concerned about the risk of a terrorist attack striking home in these conditions.

However, our guess is that they’re not going to feel like they need to do much at all. The worst thing they could do to hurt America right now is to simply leave us alone.

Another 9/11 would unify us. The way things are going we may collapse under our own weight, which is not completely a jab at Trump’s obesity. The most effective punch is the one you don’t have to throw, at the end of the day, but to an extent, this is wishful, hopeful thinking. We are exposed, of course. We have not been opened up like this to an attack since 9/11 happened.

It’s unreal how quickly we forget. Not even twenty years ago, terrorists smuggled boxcutters through airport security and took down the Twin Towers. Osama bin Laden believed that would be the end. Not all at once, of course, not that day. His belief was that once we had been hit that hard, we would not be able to take it. Our policies and justice would become undemocratic, and the idea of America freedom we espoused and intended to bring to the rest of the planet would be soiled irrevocably, a discarded relic like Soviet socialism.

I think a lot of people are waking up to what a bad situation we are in. And when you end up in a bad enough situation, one that makes you scared enough to forget about your pride or wants or ideas, you start to look around at how you got there.
Putin’s developing hypersonic nuclear missiles now. He could wipe us right out with them and there’s nothing we can do. We don’t have them. China and Russia both are winning that arms race viz. the US. From what we can tell, the only reason he doesn’t up and do it is for the same reason as the terrorists- because the worst thing he can do to us is to sit back and eat popcorn and watch as we self-destruct.
At the end of the day, a day in which no one went to work and time to reflect has been forced upon us, one question keeps ringing in American minds- How did it come to this?
Why is that big orange disgrace stumbling around on our border, looking dumb and talking dumber? How did he get the power?
There are three simple words that say it all.
#BernieOrBust! We pray with all our hearts they have managed to learn from their mistakes, and we think there’s a good chance of it. They might have been watching the news.

From the eye of a tornado, you can see the sky, but you can’t see what’s going on around you. There’s no way of knowing how severe the devastation is, and the reality of the situation is that there’s not much use in worrying about it. You batten down the hatches, you keep yourself in the cellar, and you hope and pray for the best with all your heart.

Along with the neverending task of raising awareness, that is what we must do now.

Bernie’s Foundation Crumbling- Campaign Alumni Address “Sexual Violence” In 2016.

Bernie Sanders is all bernt up!

Former staffers and alumni of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign wrote a lengthy letter to Bernie’s office, wanting to set up a meeting with Bernie’s office to address the climate of “sexual violence” that took place during the 2016 primary season. They labeled the situation as it developed “untenable”, and “dangerous”. They made specific reference to a pervasive culture of toxic masculinity

More than two dozen women and men who worked on that campaign participated in the letter’s crafting.

“In recent weeks there has been an ongoing conversation on social media, in texts, and in person, about the untenable and dangerous dynamic that developed during our campaign,” they wrote.

It’s about time.

This letter is not only a huge nail in undead Bernie’s coffin. It is also solid proof of something we’ve been waiting a long time for; namely, that the 9 of 10 Sanders supporters who went on to vote for Hillary Clinton in November of 2016 have inside them the moral capacity needed to assert themselves and make their voices heard on this incredibly important matter.

We’ve been hoping for years for this because it had been getting really hard to keep respecting those who kept on supporting Sanders through it all.

For three years now, we who occupy the sane center of America’s political spectrum have been forced to watch as a new type of critter, the Bernie Bro, crawled up out of the primordial filth to start spewing all over the country’s national dialectic. You couldn’t get through ten posts on your Facebook timeline without seeing some line of anti-Clinton conspiracy hatred slathered somewhere around a #BernieOrBust hashtag.

Nor has this tendency generally improved; this is clearly evidenced by the recent torrent of Bro slander unleashed against Beto O’Rourke.

It has been so disgusting that I know many people who will not now even say they’re on the left at all. They’ll say only that they are moderates. That is because their revulsion to the psychosis that led Bernie supporters to riot in the streets of Philadelphia during Hillary’s acceptance of the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination is so total.

I hope that one day they will heal enough to allow themselves to be brought back around. We need them.

This is the end for Bernie Sanders. His revolution is over, and his foundations are crumbling. Revolution Messaging, his feared social media machine, works for Beto now. Tad Devine is burned up; he was the first witness called at Paul Manafort‘s trial. Bernie’s campaign manager and Trump’s campaign manager were linked inextricably both by fate and Robert Mueller. Chief strategist Jeff Weaver was one of the ones who signed the letter.

It’s over. Time to move on.

This taking of accountability by the mentally stable members of the Sanders campaign will be a big start in restoring strength and unity to the sane center, where the middle class in all nations live.

All of us have known many Bernie supporters who were great people, progressive in the true sense of the word, people who were willing to overlook his lousy resume because they felt the issues he was championing to be so important. In all fairness and sincerity, they were! Income inequality in America really is gigantic. The middle class really is disappearing, we really do need public healthcare, and Norway really does have an excellent system of government- a capitalist one, like every other civilized country in the world.

All of that was valid, and those people who fought for it and still voted for Clinton are honorable, good Americans, just like us. But they have been shouted down by the same people who’ve been trying to shout us down, that noisy, visible, and unruly pack of creatures known as the Bernie Bros.

Those Bros are the ones who revealed the side of Bernie he didn’t want you to see.

The one who said women would prefer to stay home.

The one who said that Planned Parenthood is the establishment.

The one who voted to get lighter prison sentences for rapists.

The one who penned rape fantasy essays in the ’70s.

The list goes on ad nauseum, but one thread remains the same. This is a man who never, ever, in his whole twenty-eight years in the Congress, did a thing to champion black issues, women’s issues, LGBT issues, or really any issues except ones directly concerning white men like him. He also renamed two post offices.

Remember those last set of 2016 Democratic primary debates? Both presidential contenders were fiery, and passionate, which was only to be expected in what had, until that point, been a highly issues- focused and progressively driven primary. But once Bernie started losing, he got out and out rude. Rather than taking the opportunity to renounce the extremities of misogyny committed by his supporters, his performance gave weight to the concern Paul Krugman expressed back then: “Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro.”

During the debate, Sanders interrupted Clinton again and again, at one point even throwing out a long “excuuuuse me” while wagging his finger. When not interrupting, he sat there smirking and making faces while Clinton spoke. At one point, he was seen muttering a sarcastic “OK.”

Imagine how this would play out in a general election! Imagine how Trump would beat us over the head with this!

We have just finished seeing the end of the Year of the Democratic Woman. Nearly a hundred women across America just won midterm elections. And women have for years now been dragged savagely through the mud by the maniacal supporters of Bernie. If the choice was Trump vs Bernie, how better than to thoroughly demoralize them? What a win-win for Vladimir Putin.

During the election, one of our contributors was told that they hoped she was gang-raped, due to her refusal to support their chosen master. And on the subject of rape, look at what Bernie himself wrote on the subject! Just don’t look right after lunch. They might as well have invited Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby.

Quoth St. Bernard,

“A man goes home and masturbates, to his usual fantasy- A woman tied up, a woman on her knees, a woman abused. A woman enjoys intercourse with her man- as she fantasizes being raped by three men simultaneously.”

“Have you ever looked at the Stag, Man, Hero, Tough magazines on the shelf of your local bookstore? Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like ‘Girl of 12 raped by 14 men’ sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?”

It’s clear Bernie knows to what they are appealing, at any rate, and why not? He always has the answers, to everything!

Watch for the moniker ‘Rape Fantasy Bernie’ to join the ranks of Lyin’ Ted and Little Marco. This is all to say nothing of the other baggage he comes with; the list is so long it’s taken over a dozen articles for this organization even to begin touching it. Here’s a timeline compilation on Bernie’s bull from Medium; if you’ve got three days to spend reading, knock yourself out.

It would be the biggest disaster in the history of the Democratic Party, Nixon vs. McGovern all over again.

We have always known and believed that most of his supporters are not the kind of people to permanently turn a blind eye to all this, and it’s a big relief to see them start asserting their awareness. They should know that they have compromised themselves severely over the years by remaining silent while all this went on for basic political reasons, e.g. they didn’t want to hurt Bernie. They should be commended for finally realizing that in this issue, Bernie has hurt himself and that the topic has needed addressing.

They should be deeply commended for putting this plan into action, and actually writing that letter. Sexual violence. That’s heavy.

Last year, Millennial Democrats addressed it ourselves, when anti-Semitic organizer Linda Sarsour invited Sanders to be the keynote speaker at the Women’s March. There was an outcry over that so huge that Bernie backed out as fast as his legs would carry him so that people would stop talking about this.

The choice of Bernie Sanders was an insult to every woman everywhere.

This year, Chicago won’t have the Women’s March, because they found out what Sarsour really is. Until she is gone, there is no Women’s March. A California Women’s March has been canceled as well, this time because of racial issues that have never been addressed by these rabid supporters of Bernie Sanders.

Just as we wrote last year, we need to Occupy the Women’s March, but that’s another story.

Perhaps after he fails to change, and they come to understand he’s been this way for sixty years and isn’t changing, they’ll make the next logical step, and come back over to our side, where nothing but welcome awaits them.

The next words are for all sane supporters of Bernie Sanders- Come back to us. We will embrace you.

By all means, go ahead with your plan to convert and reform Bernie, and the climate of “sexual violence” that takes place around him. If you succeed, it’s the best thing for America and the human race. Every person who becomes a champion for the rights of women, and everyone else, has done something to promote a better world. This would also mean we get to look forward to hearing him take full public accountability for six decades worth of chauvinism.

He’d better get started.

Our predictions for your success, however, are sadly not very bright. We Democrats have been trying to reason with Bernie for many years, but the kind of guy who said JFK made him nauseous is not likely to align precisely with traditional liberal and progressive goals. If and when he fails to achieve in this, the modest task that is his charge, give us a call.

This is being written on New Year’s Day. 2019 is here, and the halfway point of the Trump presidency will be crossed in just under three weeks. The end is in sight. We need to win next year and rid the country of Donald Trump.

Let us now come together once and for all to pick a leader who can guide us through the storm. And let us realize, once and for all, that Bernie Sanders is not it.