The Democratic Establishment Is Panicking

The liberal elites are noticing a threat to their power. Why else would Politico, in tradition with its recent behaviors, go back to publishing smear pieces against the Bernie Sanders movement? This week, the website put out a transparently misleading article titled “Bernie’s army in disarray.” This was following a similarly biased anti-Sanders spin piece, published by The Tylt, titled “Has the Bernie Sanders revolution lost momentum?”

Every time clusters of media attacks against Sanders and his supporters have appeared, it’s coincided with the progressive movement being at an especially active point. Throughout spring 2017, when Bernie Sanders was becoming more popular than ever while activity surged in groups affiliated with his movement, Politico and other corporate media outlets put out a huge amount of fallacious material to discredit this growing political phenomena. Then there’s the empirically proven“Bernie Blackout” that happened throughout the 2016 primaries, whose intentions were revealed when the CIA-funded Washington Post famously published 16 negative articles on Sanders within 24 hours.

It’s clear that this has been coordinated. WikiLeaks has revealed that in 2007, George Soros, John Podesta, and other Democratic operatives partnered to form a self-described “robust echo chamber” of media messaging to help the Democrats in the 2008 elections. We have every reason to think this propaganda operation is still going on, since it explains the lockstep nature of recent media phenomena like the Russia sensation. And strategically assigning attacks against Bernie Sanders is just the kind of thing this media weapon could be used for.

So what can we do to fight back? We need to see through the propaganda that’s being used to discredit this movement, which is based in distortions. The winning ratio for Our Revolution candidates is currently over 40%, an incredible accomplishment since these candidates have been up against the establishment's massive amounts of corporate campaign money. The establishment wants to hide this fact from people so that they’ll be discouraged from helping the movement.

These candidates have been so successful because their ideas are supported by the majority of the American people. A Gallup poll from last year shows 56% of Americans support a government-run universal health care system. The same proportion of people support raising taxes on the corporations and the wealthy, as proven by a recent CBS poll. The fact that the Berniecrats represent these issues puts them at a massive advantage against the establishment Democrats, whose most notable recent accomplishments have been helping Republicans repeal Dodd Frank and passing an $80 billion military budget increase.

I have my reservations with Sanders and his movement. He and the politicians who affiliate with him have compromised to gain influence within the Democratic Party, particularly when it comes to opposing the dangerous Russia cold war narratives. But their goal of refusing corporate donations and defeating neoliberalism is terrifying for the political establishment, and their recent successes make the establishment visibly uneasy.

So the backlash against the movement will go on, like the elite’s larger backlash against dissent will go on. All we can do for now is keep fighting.