Democratic Loyalists Are The Trump Regime's Greatest Asset

I recently learned that I'm a sexist. The news seemed a little unexpected at first, as it was delivered by a man who actively supports an abashedly anti-woman agenda, but since he professed to know so much more than I do about advancing equality, it was only honorable for me to accept his judgement. Namely, that I and all the others who'd like to see Nancy Pelosi replaced by Sandersist insurgent Stephen Jaffe in 2018-and by extension, who want to see the Democratic Party start working for the people-seek these things out of naturally bro-ish contempt for women like Pelosi.

My respect for this columnist's striking insight into the minds of tens of millions of people he's never met was unchanged as I read further. The reason besides misogyny that we want to primary Pelosi, he keenly observed, was because she doesn't support single payer health care, which has no chance of passing anyway despite its now bipartisan majority support, and Pelosi has done some good things despite her otherwise staggering history of betraying progressives, and Jaffe isn't a progressive himself because of his non-policy related personal characteristics, and so on till the Berniecrats are hopefully so overwhelmed by this barrage of baseless attacks and efforts to change the subject that they leave the Democratic establishment alone.

And so on indeed. When we stand up to power, we can always expect to be met with unrelenting efforts from the ruling class' surrogates to gaslight us, to marginalize us, to make us feel like our concerns are absurd. This has always been the case when rulers have been challenged, but in modern times it's different. Never before most people's lifetimes have oligarchies been able to surveil the entire citizenry. To impose themselves and their ideas on all aspects of life. To endlessly perpetuate war with impunity. To wipe out massive populations and resources in an instant. To steal sizable fractions of the world's wealth with such little effort. So the modern oligarchy's propaganda has become naturally elevated as well.

The ruling class controls the vast majority of the media Americans consume, much of our political and legal institutions are engineered to control the outcome of elections. Dissidents can be persecuted with relative ease. So defending the status quo, especially when it comes to the Democratic establishment, has become a convenient task. You're remembering things wrong, the modern establishment propagandist can so easily say; millions of Sanders voters were not disenfranchised last year, Russia was not considered an ally just a few years ago, a new housing bubble did not appear during Obama's term, etc., etc. Nearly all media statements and public records can be revised to fit the oligarchy's narrative, so its deceptions are made virtually unassailable-and its presence is made seemingly unshakable.

I imagine you've guessed by now how this relates to the article's title. When a political establishment like this exists amid a rogue new administration's attempts to create a self-styled dictatorship, it's inevitable that these two forces will merge in their shared mission of dominating society. Numerous instances have come up of the Trump regime working with the Deep State to conquer the world, from new Washington Post columnist John Podesta's praising Trump's military budget increase, to Trump's responding to the neocons' Russiagate outcries by attacking Syria, to Trump's trying to prosecute Julian Assange.

As the geopolitical horror show goes on, the Deep State and the Trump administration will no doubt grow further united, such as when they'll partner in launching the next American imperial war after the next major terrorist attack gives them an opening. The factions within the ruling class are mutually moving in for an unprecedented seizure of power, and it doesn't matter that one of those factions-the Clinton Democrats-claims to oppose the other. They're still both participating in the takeover.

This is what Democratic loyalists like the one mentioned above are working towards when they attack the so-called radical left's efforts. Whether said exposer of my sexism is unaware that Pelosi is on record for supporting a litany of right-wing policies and fully capitulating to the post-9/11 Bush administration, or whether he thinks she's an acceptable Trump opposition leader in spite of this, the message is clear: so many Clinton Democrats are willing to give the Trump regime an easier path to autocracy if it means their favored Democratic leaders stay in power. And this attitude has been observed within all parts of the establishment liberal echo chamber, from the Clintonite columnists who were so eager to defend the Senate Democrats that voted for Trump's cabinet nominees to the Democratic loyalists who continue to insist, against all evidence, that moving left is a bad electoral strategy for defeating the GOP.

But there I go, talking about the standard political horse race like it will have any relevance amid the harsh, not so superficial reality to come. The financial framework is on the verge of collapsing. The Deep State's plans for war with Russia, along with Syria, Iran, and maybe even North Korea, are close to being realized. The nation is a major terrorist attack away from having its ailing democracy blown to pieces by the fanatics in the White House. There's no telling what things will look like by the next midterm or presidential election, but it's certain they'll be radically changed for the worse-perhaps so much that the elections won't take place. Regardless, most Americans will likely be focusing on crisis-induced paranoia and jingoism rather than on any elections, with a great deal of the Democratic base being no exception.

As for those who put their country above their party, be only emboldened by the establishment's attacks against you. In response to Trump's pulling out of the Paris climate deal, join Democratic Socialists of America instead of a professedly pro-climate action group that's unwilling to fight corporate power. Do all you can to help Berniecrat Tom Perriello win the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nomination on June 13 rather than his unreliably anti-Trump opponent Ralph Northam. And most importantly, don't concede the war of ideas to the defenders of the oligarchy. For all their clout, they can only manipulate the interpretation of reality, not change it. And that will be their downfall.

Be Just As Afraid Of Democratic Establishment Propaganda As Trump Administration Propaganda

This can't last. The all-consuming blur of ridiculous information that's been lobbed our way for the past four months notwithstanding, cracks continue to appear in the larger order that are too big not to be confronted at some point. Last month a report was done proving, beyond the anecdotal evidence of the many dilapidated houses I encounter on a daily basis, that America has regressed to a third world country for the majority of the population; amid levels of societal debt bigger than that of ten years ago, the new housing bubble has entered its first stages of fraying; the behavior of Arctic weather alone in the last year veers into otherworldliness as the Trump administration does everything it can to accelerate climate change.

Yet as the most viscerally scary part of these converging disasters shows signs of its imminence, with the recent behavior of North Korea being just one of the hints a major attack on the U.S. is coming soon, the leaders and institutions that are supposed to protect us from this all have for the most part been doing anything but. Instead of preemptively fighting the spasm of military aggression and power grabs that the Trump administration will attempt when this attack happens, Democratic leaders, members of the "liberal" media, and so-called moderate Republicans have so far largely supported Trump's Syria strikes and helped confirm his most authoritarian cabinet nominees.

But this report isn't about how what passes for the political center these days is so often disappointing or lacking in principle, any more than my beef with the Democratic establishment is still about it not satisfying my ideals. In both cases, it's about how the supposed center, formerly a mere enabler of fascism and right-wing extremists, has taken on a reactionary bent of its own. And how it's looking more all the time like those beholden to the so-called Democratic Party will be the ones who make the difference in ending American democracy.

In this sequel to my similarly focused but incomplete piece from February, I'll show how the neoliberal Democrats' tactics have matched up not with those of the Trump administration, but with those of the fictional Party from 1984. I know Orwell analogies have become somewhat trite, but the reason they've been used so much is that they're based on some of the most terrifyingly keen observations about human society ever made. So get ready to do a lot of reading, as starting with the first out of my three illustrations on how the Democratic Party has become the embodiment of Orwellianism-as well as on the ghastly implications this has for the very near future.

War is Peace

The vision of the future described by Orwell during his 1949 composition of 1984 is one where, just a few years after the defeat of totalitarianism in Germany and Italy, it suddenly comes back like never before. Sometime mid-century, the novel enigmatically says, a new cabal of uniquely driven and skilled totalitarians started a powerful political movement, and then gained worldwide domination after the explosion of many nuclear bombs persuaded global leaders to hand things over to the fascists. What followed was a series of massive purges against anyone deemed a threat to the new order, the dividing of society into a meticulously maintained hierarchy with a possibly metaphorical figure named Big Brother at the top, and the creation of an infrastructure that almost totally monitored humanity's communications, movements, and thoughts, all amid a paradigm of perpetual war.

This prediction, which couldn't be considered a "prophecy" but a harsh conclusion of what humanity was capable of now that it had technologically advanced so much, was naturally not half inaccurate. Even as Orwell had written it, a circle of powerful fanatics had laid the foundations for a society whose status quo was reinforced by endless war-in 1940 business leaders met with government officials to design a new geopolitical situation where America acted as the dominant "world policeman," and where war for political and corporate profits would be easier than ever. Thus the immediate switching to new conflicts after World War II ended, and the series of almost perpetual wars that's been going on for as long as most have been alive.

And thus the attempts to normalize militarism on both the self-identified right and left. Obviously the Republican imperialists have been the most notorious propagators of enthusiasm for profit-making wars. But disturbingly unbeknownst to every Democratic Party loyalist I've tried to confront on this issue, the Democrats have been virtually identical to the GOP on foreign policy since Carter.

They've done little or nothing to reduce the insane American military budget; they've unnecessarily bombed Kosovo; they've made the difference in the number of Senate votes Bush needed to invade Iraq; they've created a horrific drone warfare program; they've escalated the war in Afghanistan to disastrous effect; they've joined part in the 2011 NATO effort to invade Libya; they've handled the outbreak of war in Syria in just about the most hawkish way possible; they've essentially started another Iraq War in impractical response to ISIS; they've doomed America to thirty years and a trillion dollars of nuclear weapons spending; and they've dropped over 26,000 bombs in 2016 alone. So their latest foreign policy project isn't any surprise.

Amid the American empire-disobedient behavior of Putin and Assad in recent years, along of course with the financial and political rewards for the Deep State a war with Russia would bring, the operators of the U.S. war machine have been waiting to instigate such a war for quite some time. This became apparent last July, when the American intelligence and media establishment's first response to the DNC email leak was to blame Russia sans any evidence-just statements that it was so.

Sure, Putin has a history of interfering in elections, and yes, he clearly favored Trump over Clinton as the former wasn't promising to start a war with Russia. But the arguments for the Deep State having made up the Russian hacking claims, when you add them up, are far stronger; by making this claim, the establishment was simultaneously deflecting from the DNC's corruption, laying the grounds for threatening Trump with impeachment should he have won, justifying McCarthyite attacks against their opponents, and kicking off their campaign for war with Russia.

And I have to hand it to them how well they've played the card. Thanks to the Russian hacking line, pro-Clinton neocons and even some compliant NATO allies have been able to use language like "Russia committed an act of war" or "we were invaded;" Obama has been able to put sanctions on Russia in the last weeks of his term; and the Deep State allies in Congress have been able to threaten Trump with fake investigations on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the election, which Trump has naturally responded to by pleasing them with Syria strikes and attempts to prosecute WikiLeaks.

Yes, the neocons have had some good times with their "Russia hacked the election" talking point, and while Trump's capitulating to their agenda is forcing them to replace it with the similarly suspicious claim about Assad and Putin having been behind the gas attack last month, the times are sure to soon get even better.

In the last month or so, some clear signs have appeared that the start of the actual war effort is imminent. After forces have been set up by the American empire and Russia alike, the Democrats' favorite Russia conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch has kicked off the open calls for combat with the May 13 tweet advocating just that. Coupled with the CIA run Washington Post's column this week claiming it would be just too gosh darn hard to improve relations with Russia, it's clear we're one more easily Russia-blamed terrorist attack away from World War III.

When this attack happens, as evidenced by how most pro-establishment liberals supported Trump's April Syria strikes, support for this war will be stirred up among not just Republican but Democratic loyalists. And it will be the support from the latter that gives the regime justification to launch the whole affair-along, as I'll illustrate, with a lot of other things.

Freedom is Slavery

I know I shouldn't be surprised to see rank and file establishment liberals getting behind the neoliberal, authoritarian policies of their party. But I guess it's that Bernie Bro naivete of mine that makes me find the spectacle of people willingly giving up their economic and constitutional rights so baffling.

As I've illustrated by citing incidents where establishment liberals have said things like "we're always at war, what's one more?" and polls showing the vast majority of Democratic loyalists support Obama's drone terrorism, the drug war, neoliberal trade, and unconstitutional mass spying, the average loyal Democrat no longer opposes many of the most illiberal and repressive policies of our time. This isn't to mention the hostility Democratic elites have been able to incite towards heroic whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. And when looking at the origins of this shift towards authoritarian thinking on much of the supposed left, its implications for our fate come the next big terror attack look very ominous.

I'm of course talking about the normalization of approval for such policies that happened in the American consciousness post-9/11. Even ten years after the attacks, Americans were still being found to largely put security above civil liberties, and authoritarian attitudes have no doubt escalated since then with the emergence of ISIS and Trumpism. And looking back on how so many Democrats went along with the Bush administration's post-9/11 wars and power grabs when Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi endorsed them, the Trump administration's likely far worse actions after this next attack will largely have bipartisan support as well.

Already Democratic elites have been able to corral many of their followers toward backing some of Trump's ghastliest policies, like when Clinton campaign manager turned Washington Post columnist John Podesta praised the expansions of the military budget or when the supposedly left leaning major media outlets persuaded many of their viewers to back the Syria strikes. There's also the tactic the neocon propagandists have been able to use now that Bernie Sanders has become a major force of reminding their followers that those naive, sexist Bernie bros oppose such policies, compelling Democratic loyalists to support them out of spite.

Who's to say things would be different in the event of the administration trying to change the constitution post-terrorist attack, or create a Muslim registry, or something too awful to foresee? The answer, sadly, is that there's pretty much no limit any more to what Trump and Democratic loyalists alike will typically put up with from their leaders. The moral zeitgeist within both these groups has been twisted too much toward the warmongering, authoritarian, and overall Orwellian, and they can easily be expected to receive the coming calls for societal lockdown without question.

To address something everyone not in either of these groups will soon be wondering, there are some understandable reasons so many Americans have become willing to take the plunge into fascism.

Ignorance is Strength

Then again, maybe it's not so much been warmongering and authoritarian propaganda that's gotten much of the left to embrace the Deep State's policies, but efforts to simply hide the Democratic Party's Orwellian actions from its base. When confronted about their party's behavior in recent decades, I've seen Democratic loyalists deny that it happened far more often than I've seen them (at least directly) say they support it. Most alarming have been the cases where they've claimed specific misdeeds from Democratic leaders aren't real-according to the party loyalists I've met online, Obama ended the wars, mass spying stopped after Bush, Bill Clinton didn't sign NAFTA, Democrats didn't deregulate Wall Street, and the documented cases of massive voter suppression and electoral fraud in the 2016 Democratic primary are all "allegations."

The instances go on and on of top Democrats getting away with neoliberal, neocon policies by convincing their supporters that they didn't enact those policies in the first place (see the Party's historical revisionism tactic in 1984). This dynamic has been able to survive in an era where anyone could find out the true history of the Democratic Party with a half minute of searching on Google due to the tactic the neoliberal propagandists have lately taken up, of saying any online source that isn't part of the mainstream media is "fake news" and/or Russian propaganda.

Thus the declarations from every establishment liberal I've shown links proving the truth about the Democratic Party that the article I've provided is an opinion piece, is Russian lies, etc. And thus the insular attitude that's emerged within the establishment liberal groupthink towards any information challenging the status quo, as paralleled in what Orwell described as the "orthodoxy" of the Party from 1984.

And while this aggressive campaign against facts has been central in the Democratic establishment's public relations mechanisms from the start, it's gotten more fine tuned and extensive in recent years. Following the  consolidation of this country's major media outlets into a vast series of propaganda outlets for a handful of large corporations (as made possible by Clinton's 1996 Telecommunications Act), the Democratic wing of the plutocracy took a big step toward expanding its influence over public discourse in 2007: establishing, as revealed by WikiLeaks, an explicitly described echo chamber used to organize corporate Democratic politicians and media outlets around molding the sentiments of liberals as effectively as possible. Thus the seemingly lockstep nature of this movement towards war with Russia.

Then, of course, came the 2013 law quite literally legalizing psychological warfare, having allowed the CIA to send secret agents into American and foreign media and try to influence public opinion. Thus the bizarre new breeds of deception that have come our way of late, such as CNN's subliminally saying last year that it's illegal to read WikiLeaks, or the Bana Al-Abed Twitter account. The most recent effort to put control over discourse into the hands of the state has been Obama's so-called Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, to be quite possibly followed by the FCC's dismantling net neutrality and the passage of the internet freedom-imperiling TiSA deal. Even the establishment liberal-owned private companies have been participating in the war on open debate, with Facebook now suppressing sites it deems "fake news."

However far this psychological coup goes, though, it's already entered some very unsettling terrain. In direct parallel with the introduction of the Newspeak language in 1984, which was designed to make questioning the status quo linguistically impossible by limiting one's vocabulary to a few nonthreatening basic words, Democratic propagandists have lately been discouraging use of revolution-encouraging terms like Deep State and neoliberalism. Our language itself has become under attack by the forces of regression and greed, and Orwell has shown what comes next.

Then again, on the one hand things will keep getting worse. The regime's following, having grown virtually impervious to ideological threats from the outside, will continue to rally around demagogues of both the Trumpist and Clintonist kinds from within their insulated social microcosms. The state of the world outside those microcosms will continue to deteriorate as a result, with economic, environmental, and geopolitical collapses happening on a wildly unprecedented level. And those responsible for the looming calamity will continue to cling more determinedly to the status quo, employing scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and ideological reinforcement with ever more insistence and elaboration.

On the other hand, sanity will prevail. The populist left and right will decide to unite in their shared goal of taking down America's unelected power structures. This anti-establishment front will use the unprecedented potential for sharing information it now has, online censorship or not, to win the war of ideas against the already weakened and self-constrained traditional media. And despite the best efforts of the regime (which, it turns out, is supported by a solid minority of the population), a better world will emerge. Whichever happens, I'll be glad when this is gotten over with.

When It's The Pragmatists That Want War With Russia

Reality doesn't have much cultural favor in modern American society. When forty years of escalated economic exploitation has made the country regress to third world status for the majority of the population, we tell ourselves it's because the majority of Americans aren't trying hard enough. When seven decades of perpetual war has destabilized the middle east and driven up the national debt to record levels, the countries we've invaded and welfare recipients are respectively to blame. When two centuries of carbon emissions have created a new, perilous period called the Anthropocene, the entire problem is fabricated in an elaborate conspiracy to undermine the fossil fuel business. Pay no attention to the dilapidation of your house, the fact that you can't remember a time when we weren't in some way at war, the reports of permanent flooding in places like Miami. Trust what the non-CIA appointed Washington Post writers and legitimately elected politicians say, because they're the ones who led us into this of course genuinely depicted period of 4.4% unemployment, and they're the ones who will make the good times continue so long as you let them stay the course.

On a more current note, don't be troubled by that tweet this week from the Democrats' favorite Russiagate expert Louise Mensch stating "war is what they [Russia] will get" for supposedly meddling in the election-she's just understandably venting over the fact that Russia invaded us last year. Don't give any skeptical thought to how the known CIA front the Washington Post has recently published a piece naysaying the notion that the U.S. should create stronger ties with Russia, which at this point is to say the two countries shouldn't soon let things come to military conflict-that article is just pointing out what it calls the "realpolitic" of letting such a conflict happen. And should said conflict hypothetically materialize as soon as the next big geopolitical upset happens-which, like the last one, will have some sketchily reported but undeniable link to Russia-don't worry. Those beautiful Tomahawk missiles will keep you safe.

No, don't give any credence to the Russian propaganda blogs that draw attention to the finely tuned campaign that's been going on for the past ten months to get you behind such a war. Don't feel uneasy about the major media's universally religious acceptance on contact last July of the still unproven claim that Russian hackers gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails; to Rachel Maddow's effort at one point last year to make her audience believe, going against their memories, that Russia was something we considered an enemy in 2015; to the bizarre project the war propagandists started last month of creating a fake Twitter account, which featured supposed calls from a seven-year-old refugee girl to have her homeland further torn apart (you can't make this up). Because these things, like the dramatic events you'll soon see playing out, are the work of the only pragmatists here.

Yes, it's people like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, the moderates, the centrists, the smartest people in the room, who seek to take us down this fractious route. They're the ones that recognize we need to be realistic about things, that we mustn't be too ideologically extreme, the ones who know how politics works and the compromises that need to be made, etc etc. And luckily they've been lately taking control of things back from the naively anti-interventionist model that the Trump administration initially embraced, having pressured Trump to adopt their sensible approach to Syria last month through their theatrical series of "Russiagate!" outcries. So as these sensible leaders ramp their focus on Russiagate back up to speed in recent weeks, making Trump's caving in to their implicit lobbying towards military action an again imminent possibility, rest easy. This next bout with geopolitical flustercluck will be the outcome of careful, serious considerations on the part of qualified leaders, etc etc, about what realism calls for.

It's just like when these clear-eyed rationalists said we needed to embrace an economic ideology that's designed to create more inequality. Or when they concluded we had to go with what the Bush administration's intelligence said and invade Iraq. Or when they calculated, based on nonexistent polls showing the vast majority of the country shares their neoliberal views, that nominating a candidate who most agree with on virtually all issues had an unsafe shot at beating Trump. They've always been the ones that know best, that acknowledge we can't make promises to ourselves we can't keep, etc etc. So if they say going to war with Russia is the only pragmatic thing to do, why not question simple logic?

Of course, not everyone is so sensible. When the war effort gets started, there will be a large portion of the populace that insists ideology is more important than hard realism, and that will use the formidable power of the internet in 2017 to spread their irrational attitudes like never before. Luckily the pragmatists are already moving to prevent such interference, with the FCC being poised to end net neutrality tomorrow and the internet freedom-killing TiSA deal quietly slouching towards deployment. But there's no reasoning with the unreasonable, so we're just going to have to put up with their no doubt explosive efforts towards dissent-massive antiwar demonstrations, frantic efforts to kill belief in the Deep State's psy ops, and surging involvement with groups like World Beyond War and Tulsi Gabbard's campaign for peace will unfortunately happen in response to the coming messy but logic-driven military adventure.

In seriousness, my fellow opponents of this push for national suicide, don't let the real fanatics here tell you that you're the one who's crazy. It is not sensible for working people to give up our economic rights because someone says that's what's "fiscally responsible." It is not sensible for voters to accept candidates that want to financially starve us, take away our constitutional liberties, and literally sell out our planet because that's what someone says is politically viable. And it is not sensible, no matter how many times you'll hear it in the news in the coming months, for America to get involved in a conflict that could well end in a scene out of Dr Strangelove.

The upside is that everyone but the members of the Deep State themselves intuitively know a war with Russia is a beyond bad idea, and iterating the fact that all this buzz about Russian hacking and special prosecutors is part of a carefully orchestrated effort to get regular people behind such a war bursts the establishment's psy op efforts. It immediately shakes the potential buyers of this plan out of their fragile path toward militaristic fanaticism, and does so much to ensure the Deep State won't pull off another Iraq this time. So FCC decision and TiSA or not, do all you can to bring attention to this issue. We may not be pragmatic, but as it's turned out so much lately, our ideas are the only ones it's pragmatic to listen to.

Your Inner Propaganda Radar Is Right: The Late Night Comedians Are Establishment Mouthpieces

You're watching John Oliver, Bill Maher, Samantha Bee, or another given member of the late night comedy crew that's become so successful in the Trump era. As usual, their jokes about whatever ludicrous developments have that come of late are top-quality amusing, as are the videos and images they've made to accompany it all. But then (hopefully) you see something that gives you a certain, uneasy feeling.

You know what I'm talking about. It's that off-guard sense every free thinking person has gotten at some point while extolling the segments of these late night self-described liberal comedians, one which vaguely but undeniably tells you you're watching a slyly presented piece of establishment propaganda. This feeling used to only appear from time to time, being triggered mainly by the occasional production of drone war propaganda slipped into the comedy crew's programming. But since Bernie Sanders kicked off the battle to take back the liberal class, modern late night liberal comedy's true colors have shown frequently and with all their characteristic ugliness.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but their attacks on Bernie and what he stands for seem to have begun in April 2016, when Sanders was finally getting successful enough in the primaries for most of the beltway to take his candidacy seriously. That was when Samantha Bee-who, as we'll see, is the most blatant establishment mouthpiece of them all-did a segment wherein she interviewed a group of Sanders supporters. Despite Bee's professed motive to get an understanding of the optimism these Berners were feeling, the scene had a "well I'm glad you guys are keeping your heads up despite not being able to win" message that reeked of veiled condescension. And that was just the start of it.

By mid-May Bee's treatment of Bernie Sanders supporters had turned from condescending to negatively generalizing to outright lying about us and our concerns. In response to Sanders supporters' crying foul about the Nevada Democratic Party's inexcusable and blatant pro-Clinton rule changes, she blamed them for being excluded from the event by the dozens and used it as an opportunity to call out Berners' similarly sore loser attitudes towards the numerous other primary contests that Clinton had stole fair and square. Jon Oliver followed suit, ending his segment on the Nevada convention with an extremely deceptive monologue debunking an array of potential ways Sanders supporters could claim the primary had been rigged while addressing exactly zero of the concerns we actually had.

After Bill Maher gave his own non-address post-stolen California primary to Sanders supporters who dared  dispute the results of the primaries, it was on to the attacks against those who dared not to accept the Democratic candidate that "won" under these circumstances. Samantha Bee devoted her episode on the Democratic National Convention to mocking the grievances being aired by the Bernie Sanders protestors there, throwing in all the disingenuous epithets about "white privilege" and accusing them of disregarding the concerns of disenfranchised groups while declaring the millions of Sanders supporters who'd had their voices taken away during the primaries to be sore losers. Then in October, Jon Oliver paid a similarly honest tribute to those disenfranchised Sanders supporters who'd defected to Jill Stein by shamelessly smearing Stein and third parties in general.

And late night comedy's war on genuine progressives hasn't let up a bit since the election. In February, Samantha Bee finally let her true feelings on Bernie Sanders show by calling him a "mansplaining prick." In March Bee went out of her way to inform us that the Deep State-i.e. a system that allows elites to primarily call the shots-doesn't exist. In April Trevor Noah, usually a less blatant member of the dissent-crushing late night comedy team, essentially excused Obama's serving Wall Street as president by saying "fuck you!" (I quote) to those complaining about his taking Wall Street speaking fees. And recently Bill Maher spoke similarly to the Bernie or Bust movement, which, while I wasn't part of, I should defend from Maher's disingenuous attacks (he didn't acknowledge the major concerns Bernie or Busters had with Hillary Clinton, such as her wanting to start war with Russia).

In case you're wondering after seeing me state that last fact, the reason I wanted Clinton to win was so that those beholden to her and her party could see for themselves the horrors that would come from supporting neoliberal, warmongering leaders. We'd likely be in combat with Russia by now had Clinton won, but at least this would get the other half of the left to wake up. Since this hasn't happened, though, the Democratic establishment's media gofers have been able to more easily point to Trump and the GOP as the source of every problem, as the audiences of those late night comedy gofers cheer uproariously at their wry observations and critics hail them as righteous gatekeepers of democracy.

To state the by now painfully clear, your built in establishment propaganda radars aren't overly sensitive. These comedians, talented as they are, have been admitted into the upper ranks of corporate media punditry for more reasons than talent: they're up there because they aren't willing to challenge the status quo. Even the late night comedians who seem to personally resent the Democratic establishment, like Seth Meyers with his pointed criticisms of the Senate Democrats who voted to confirm Trump's cabinet nominees, are not really speaking truth to power. In those instances they've criticized Democrats without focusing on parts of the big picture, like the Democrats' push for war with Russia or their unacceptable embrace of corporate cash.

And don't assume these figures are simply trying to toe the line between the Clintonist and Sandersist facets of their audience. They could do this without making the dishonest statements mentioned, and while fully addressing the problems with the Democratic establishment.

In short, whether or not these skilled spokespeople for the plutocrats like it, they know they can't challenge the status quo in their positions. When you make political jokes on the corporate media outlets while presenting yourself as a progressive, you can only go so far as the standard partisan cracks about how awful those Republicans are before the boss starts to get uneasy. And until the proportions of media company ownership, along with the prevailing political culture within the Washington beltway, are brought back to their post-New Deal states, there's no use in replacing the current late night comedy cast. As long as there's an oligarchy, there's going to be laugh out loud jokes continually presented to us which promote the oligarchy.

My fellow progressives, we need to stop pretending the celebrity clowns are on our side. As I just illustrated, they're decidedly not, and we need to reject their power serving material as we reject the joke-free power serving material from the CNN pundits. Because when we do that, we can start focusing not on pushing against what we don't like but pushing for what we want. Call members of Congress about supporting the H.R. 676 single payer health care bill. Voice your support for Bernie Sanders' likely 2020 successor and all around bane to the establishment Tulsi Gabbard, and donate to her campaign for peace. And do so while leaving behind the naysayings of the status quo's defenders so you can focus on the fact that we can and will win this.

The Struggle For American Democracy Has Only Begun

According to PBS, Bernie Sanders is "gaining against Clinton in early polls." Salon's Bill Curry believes "Hillary Clinton is going to lose," primarily because millions of voters longing for a truly progressive candidate will nominate Sanders. POLITICO explained recently that Early-state polls hint at a Bernie Sanders surge, a headline that was unthinkable only several months earlier. Yahoo's Meredith Shiner calls Sanders a "progressive social media star and pragmatic legislator" and states that "Sanders also has a much more substantial legislative history" than any GOP challenger. In Iowa,1,100 people packed a gym to hear Bernie Sanders speak in May.

That was the first paragraph in an article from the columnist HA Goodman called It's Official-Bernie Sanders Has Overtaken Hillary Clinton In The Hearts And Minds Of Democrats. Published on July 25, 2015, it was the first Goodman published after he first started to believe that Sanders would win the nomination.

And up until a certain point, he had good reason to keep believing so; despite a rigged debate schedule and limited media attention, Bernie Sanders' poll numbers continued to go up. By January 31, the day before the voting started, Sanders' Real Clear Politics average had gone from 5.7% at the beginning of his campaign to 37.2%.

But after gaining momentum from his poll-defying near tie in Iowa and his blowout win in New Hampshire, something strange happened: with the help of Hillary Clinton supporter Harry Reid and his collusion with those who ran the polling places in Nevada, the state's contest was quietly stolen from Sanders. And as the primaries went on, things only got stranger. On Super Tuesday, the results in Massachusets were manipulated as well, along with those in Arizona, and, it turned out, Iowa. Though those were the only states so far that had experienced serious election fraud, there were many other factors, such as closed primaries and media manipulation, which, if subtracted, would have likely resulted in him being ahead at that point.

And before long, it looked like he was on his way to pulling ahead regardless. After a nine-state winning streak, which included a victory in Wisconsin that was both unthinkable a few weeks earlier and by an even larger margin than the polls indicated, his national poll numbers had risen to only one point behind Hillary Clinton. After the Wyoming primary on April 9, he only needed to win 56.5% of the remaining delegates to take the lead (and even if he didn't, he would still have a chance to win). And with the turning point approaching in the New York primary, despite the polls there, his chances were looking better and better as early voting showed him far surpassing expectations.

But the exclusion of independents from voting in New York, combined with the massive amounts of voting irregularities that occurred on the day of the election, all worked to steal the primary from Sanders on April 19, along with much of his chances for winning the nomination.

Despite the drop in Sanders' polls that followed, he dutifully continued into the predictably unfair April 26 contests, the blatantly rigged Nevada state convention, the suspiciously run primaries in Oregon and Kentucky, the practically predetermined Puerto Rico contest, and the clearly manipulated California primary.

Not all of the primary contests were rigged, but enough of them were that the results should be seriously called into question, and even if the highly unlikely outcome of this election were true, there's no question that Hillary Clinton won without a level playing field. Even Harry Reid thinks Sanders never had a "fair deal."

But Bernie Sanders' campaign is continuing in a different form, this one outside of the cruel game that the DNC has created for populist insurgent candidates, and this time it actually has a chance to win.

With three months until the election, Jill Stein and other Greens running for office won't get too much farther this year, but they will make crucial progress. Following the voting on November 8, which the Greens will most certainly take an unusually large share of, factors larger than any DNC propaganda campaign will begin to come into play. As I've written about previously, support for a third party alternative has been building up for decades, independents will soon outnumber both major parties combined, the state of the country points towards the coming rise of a populist third party, and there's even a historical precedent for what I'm predicting.

Everything indicates that a major Green Party sweep is inevitable in the coming years. But there's still one looming, uncomfortable question: can we expect the system to allow it after what happened to Bernie Sanders?

As I make a prediction similar to the one HA Goodman made last year, I keep in mind that the one thing he did not take into account was outright electoral fraud in favor of the candidate that the oligarchy backs. Who's to say it won't happen again in a different context?

I'm going to attempt to look into the future, imagining all of the methods of voter suppression that may (or will) be used against the Greens, and how we can defy them. All of these methods can be put into three categories, which I call false-appealing, smearing, and electioneering.

False-appealing

Twenty-four years ago, Bill Clinton said in his Democratic convention speech that "I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: Your time has come and gone." And eight years later, even after he had continued Reaganomics by signing NAFTA, killing welfare, and creating what later turned out to be the most dangerous deregulations in recent history, most on the left were still willing to believe his successor Al Gore when he said at the 2000 convention that "They're for the powerful-and we're for the people."

But by 2008, Democrats were finally losing patience with the corporatization of their party. After nominating Barack Obama in a wave of populism, they heard him say at the DNC that we're "a better country" than the one that allows Wall Street to crash the economy-and then saw him pursue a Wall Street bailout that set the stage for another financial crisis years later.

That was the beginning of the end for the Democratic Party's esteem among progressives. By 2009, the percentage of voters who affiliated as Democrats went from 35% the year before to 34%, and political independents edged them out after only being at 31% in 2008. Since then, we've seen a steady increase in independents going along with a steady decline of Democrats that stands apart from all the other times in recorded party affiliation history where a certain group has been in the majority. This shift in the electoral landscape can no longer be considered a trend, but a consistent pattern that's sure to continue, and it can only mean one thing: people are waking up to the fact that the Democratic Party does not represent the 99%.

But will enough of them wake up to end the Democratic Party?

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are locked into a battle of who's campaign can fail the least. While Clinton is at risk of being indicted before the election, a credible source has reason to believe Trump is actually sabotaging his campaign, so whatever the polls say, the race is too close to call. But whoever becomes the next president, I believe the ultimate fate of American politics will be the same.

Though it's unfortunate, what we need to indict the Democratic Party in the court of public opinion as a tool of the oligarchy is a major economic crisis. And we'll get just that, as this Truthout op-ed explains:

Although there is a role for banks to play in the economy -- they facilitate commerce, after all, when just doing "normal banking" -- 30-plus years of Reaganomics have made banks increasingly vulnerable and prone to crisis. Giving banks this kind of powerful role to play in the economy is just asking for trouble. Wall Street is literally a ticking time bomb, and when it explodes it will take the rest of the economy down with it.
This is not hyperbole -- it's fact, and we're seeing more and more evidence every day that the moment when the Wall Street time bomb will explode is rapidly approaching. As Greg Ip points out in the Wall Street Journal, housing prices and stock prices are now hovering around decades-long highs.
The last time they were this high? You guessed it: 2007, right before [the last] crash.

That was written on August 1. This crisis will most likely hit before Obama leaves office, and in that scenario, when he and the rest of the Democratic elite pursue Wall Street bailouts as they did eight years ago, they will create a political nightmare for themselves. According to a poll from three years ago, 96% of Democrats, 95% of independents, and 89% of Republicans at least see financial regulation as somewhat important. And though when asked the less general question of whether they wanted more regulation on companies, that number goes down to 71%, when middle and working class voters suffering the consequences of the lack of business oversight see their leaders pushing for bailouts, a lot of politicians, Democrats especially, will see their careers crippled.

And though Democrats were able to remain popular in 2008 despite having largely supported the bailouts, this time it will be very different. Like I said, whether Hillary Clinton will win remains to be seen, but after this election is over, she and her party will be in trouble. As the 2018 midterms approach, not just the Republicans but the Democrats will be seen by all but their most loyal members as the party of the rich. Before long, given all the factors I mentioned earlier, large numbers of voters will start moving to a populist third party, most likely the Greens.

Gone are the days when someone like Hillary Clinton can easily (or fairly) defeat a genuine progressive like Sanders, and soon so too will the era where corporate Democrats can skate on their party's "Liberal" brand and expect to succeed with the left. And Democrats are generally either in denial about this fact or assume it won't matter. “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania," says New York Senator Charles Schumer, "We will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia." To Democratic strategists, this plan of appealing to the center may seem like a safe and sensible approach, but when you look at the larger picture, Democrats are basically racing into an electoral ditch.

And so when the Greens start to enter seriously competitive territory, they won't have to worry about losing many supporters to the old Democratic trick of bait-and-switch liberalism. The Democrats will have lost all of their credibility in the minds of voters by then.

And as for those who will still cling to the notion that the Democratic Party represents them-yes, they will be there-you can show them the solid arguments I make against that in these previous articles:

The Case Against The Democratic Party

Yes, It Is Time To Leave The Democratic Party

Make No Mistake, The Democratic Party Is Dangerous

But it won't end there.

Smearing

Though the political and corporate establishment generally doesn't know about the coming electoral upheaval, lately they've been acting as if they're preparing for a long fight against populist insurgents. This is apparent in how the major media has been treating Jill Stein.

From biased polls that make it look like Stein has less support than she really does, to hit pieces on her, to outright mocking, such as the over-promotion of a poll that says Stein is tied with Harambe (which was conducted in the specific instance of Texas, a highly conservative state), the media is going after the Green Party candidate as much as they did with Sanders. The strange thing about it is that they know Stein has no chance of actually becoming president.

This signals that something deeper is going on.

I believe that Ralph Nader's success in 2000 can largely be explained by a failure on the part of the two major parties to offer candidates that excite and inspire voters, increasing the desire for another option (Ross Perot's 1992 campaign may be another example of this phenomenon). And since moderate and triangulating figures like Al Gore are exactly the kind of candidates the Democratic elite prefers, when Nader started to experience a surge in the summer of 2000, the establishment was taken completely by surprise-but it wasn't unaware of the threat to the two-party system that this signaled.

And so after the fictitious election results were certified, the liberal bourgeois found a convenient way to stigmatize Nader and his successors-the propagation of the idea that Greens are the ones who caused Bush to win. And regardless of whether this claim was based on reality, it's most certainly contributed to the virtual dominance Democrats and Republicans have enjoyed since then.

But even if they're able to repeat that spin this year with Jill Stein playing Nader's role-which they've already done to a point-it won't do much to help their case. As Chris Hedges said this year in an interview, our society is experiencing a radical shift of public sentiment in response to the unprecedented income inequality that's resulted from their past support of neoliberal politics. There's one ingredient lacking in this movement, though, which holds back its enormous potential: an avenue for it to unite around. "It’s with us already," Hedges says about the revolution, "but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place."

A populist third party is the perfect means to bring this massive amount of political will under one roof, and no matter what the Democrats do at this point, the Green surge is coming.

But that can only get us so far-the power of media manipulation must never be underestimated, and as long as the mainstream press is controlled by the same forces that back the two-party system, insurgents will be vulnerable.

Still, even this weapon of the establishment, I believe, has grown weak with time.

Howard Dean was the Bernie Sanders of 2004. Or, more accurately, of 2003. In the months before the primaries started, the major media worked very hard to topple the anti-war, anti-big business onetime Democratic frontrunner, and they succeeded spectacularly. But when they tried again this year with Sanders, though things were made a lot harder for him, he still would have won without election rigging. This proves that in the modern political environment, where revolutionary sentiments are so strong and social media is popular, such propaganda is a lot easier for insurgents to overcome.

However, there are still several widely accepted myths about the Green Party that its opponents will take every opportunity to promote, and while whatever attacks on Green candidates that the media orchestrates are for the people of the near future to defend from, we can anticipate a few of them. Here are some of the strongest arguments for the Green Party that we'll need to use to beat the Democrats, ones which I'll elaborate on in future articles:

• The Greens absolutely can win. Post-2016, the combined membership of the two "major" parties will, in all likelihood, drop well below 50%. Though the Democrats will do everything to downplay the significance of this, it will greatly strengthen the case for third parties. We aren't going to start with anywhere near as much support as Democrats, of course, but if we put enough emphasis on that glaring fact, before long they'll be the ones who are "fringe."
• The Greens represent the views of mainstream Americans. No matter how much Democrats attempt to marginalize Greens, in terms of actual ideological appeal, we by far have the advantage. 61% of Americans favor higher taxes on the wealthy, 76% think that most free trade deals have been bad for the country, 58% want a federally funded healthcare system, 78% want Citizens United overturned, 57% think that GMO foods are generally unsafe, and in a poll that proves the Greens won't be hurt in the minds of voters by their environmental brand, 67% would pay higher taxes to reduce carbon emissions. I suggest you show any progressives who choose to align themselves with the Democratic Party the Green platform, or have them take the isidewith.com quiz that shows people which political party most aligns with their beliefs. 
• The Greens aren't dividing the left, the Democrats are. This is the logical conclusion of my first argument; when the Democratic Party diminishes enough, it will be easy to accurately convince liberal voters that since most of them don't even support the Democrats, voting for them only creates more division among the opponents of the Republicans. Which brings me to the last one.
• The Greens are in a much better position than the Democrats to stop the Republicans. Like the fact that Bernie Sanders would have been a better candidate against Trump than Hillary Clinton because of his trustworthiness and consistently progressive views, after the Democrats push for wildly unpopular Wall Street bailouts, they will be severely weakened, making Greens the politically superior option.

And if the defenders of the current party model start calling you a hippie, a communist, or a purist after you lay out your arguments, you'll know they've run out of real responses.

But even after that, the oligarchy will have one more card to play...

Electioneering

"Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth," said the labor organizer Lucy Parsons. I can't find the date between Parson's birth in 1853 and her death in 1942 when she expressed that sentiment, but if she did so before the year 1900, she later found herself standing corrected.

The late 19th century was a dark period in American history. Even though the enterprise of slavery had been broken up, it had left the class that used to benefit from it with so much wealth that it seemed like no other force was powerful enough to challenge them. In 1886, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were a "legal person," giving them the authority to make money by any means necessary whether that conflicted with state laws or not. In 1890, New Jersey became the first state to allow corporations to hold stock in other corporations, creating the economically unsustainable system of financial exchange that we now know as the stock market. That same year, John D. Rockefeller's standard oil controlled 88% of the refined oil market in the United States, just one example of the massive monopolization of business that had occurred. You can get a sense of just how bad things had become by thinking of the horrifying stories from that era of child labor, slave wages, extremely long work hours, and abominable living conditions.

And yet at the turn of the century, the people somehow managed to fight back and win. After the newly elected president William McKinley was assassinated on September 6, 1901, it turned out that his choice for a running mate had saved the country. The extent that Washington had been corrupted by corporate interests seemed too great to overcome, but because nearly all of the public was on the side of Theodore Roosevelt's populist agenda, the members of Congress went along with the president out of political self-preservation. In the next seven years, Roosevelt broke up most of the major monopolies, and though he still endorsed lower taxes, he paved the way for his cousin FDR to become elected later and turn America into a social democracy.

But how does this apply to populist insurgents now, when corporations have become so powerful that they can actually prevent modern versions of the Roosevelts from being elected within the two major parties? Again, we need to ask ourselves why the Greens won't go the way of Bernie Sanders.

According to Ralph Nader, apart from the media propaganda that I mentioned before, there are indeed many built-in obstacles to running a successful third party campaign. In 1988, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization headed exclusively by Democrats and Republicans, took over all aspects of how the debates are organized. After the 1992 election, they changed the polling requirement for getting into the debates to 15%, a number that, as they knew, was nearly impossible for any third party candidate to reach. And though the environment will soon become a lot more friendly to third parties, making it entirely possible for the Greens to overcome that mark, I ask you to sign this petition to make the debate rules fair again.

But that's not even the worst of it. In 2004, Nader's independent campaign was severely hurt by the efforts of Democrats to drain money from it by falsely accusing him of widespread voter fraud. The playing field is also tilted against third parties in that many states require them to petition for ballot access, a process that Nader describes as "easy for the major parties to disrupt" by using the dirty tricks that I mentioned.

But once again, I believe that we can surmount all of these obstacles with our newfound political advantages. Because of a dramatic increase in donations, Green campaigns will easily survive when opponents try to force them to use up their resources, and with the wide popularity that they'll gain, they will no longer have much trouble getting petition signatures. Thus, they're guaranteed to gain major ground, and before long they'll surpass Democrats in the national polls.

And finally, that brings us to the one area where insurgents can really be shut out: election rigging. One can only imagine the methods Democrats will try to use to prevent Greens from winning, though the sabotage of Bernie Sanders certainly gave us a clue. There's one big difference, though, between the primaries and the general elections: in the general, it's extremely difficult to rig the process in favor of the losing candidate. George W. Bush's coup in 2000 only worked because the race was so close, and had Gore been leading in the polls as widely as I expect the Greens will be, the election fraud would have had to be much more widespread and obvious, and the American people would simply not have allowed it. Furthermore, the primaries are ideal for rigging, because they take place over a period of months in many different states, while a national election that takes place in a matter of hours is very hard for someone to try to steal and then get away with it.

All of this is not to say that our path to victory will be easy. We'll have to fight for it every step of the way. But if we succeed, which I think is likely, the country and the world will be forever changed.

And if you still doubt that that's possible based on a sense that the Greens are simply too far to the left to win, not only are you discounting the opinion polls I mentioned earlier, but you need to hear the story of how HA Goodman came to believe Bernie Sanders would become president.

In June of 2015, as Goodman recounts in an article, he was having lunch with a childhood friend when they started talking about politics. The friend, who was wearing a "Bernie" tee shirt, asked Goodman why he wasn't planning on voting for a candidate who represented everything he believed in, and Goodman's answer was that Sanders could not win because he was a socialist.

But some weeks later, after doing all of the research, Goodman realized that Bernie Sanders was not a Marx-style, ideologically extreme "socialist," but merely had an agenda similar to the Roosevelts. That was the start of his noble mission to help Sanders win, which lasted all the way up until the DNC role call vote on July 26, 2016.

The one thing Goodman was really wrong about, though, was assuming at the time that we would never get another Bernie Sanders in our lifetimes; he realized the flaw in that reasoning when he decided to start supporting Jill Stein, who, whether you also feel is worth voting for or not, is an amazing person and as much (or even more) of an advocate for change as Sanders. And Stein and her successors, whatever the outcome of this election, will be the ones who finish what Bernie started.