Everybody Wins The "Fell For It Again Award" These Days
Frustrated by the lack of a coherent resistance to Trump's second term, hordes of well-meaning suckers are turning back to DNC sheepdogs Bernie Sanders and AOC. Here we go again...
The day after Kamala Harris’ loss in the 2024 presidential election, Bernie Sanders was back on his bullshit. He released a statement on November 6 decrying how the Democratic Party abandoned the working class, how wealth inequality is worse than ever, and how all the well-paid, out-of-touch political consultants are unfit to meet the task at hand.
That’s all well and good, though it might have carried a little more weight had Bernie not spent the preceding four years meekly falling in line with the dictates of the party establishment, the same people who ratfucked him twice in the primaries and lied about him and his supporters every chance they got. Literally a week before putting that statement out, Bernie exhorted progressives to put aside their objections to the Biden/Kamala stance on Gaza and vote Team Blue regardless.
Five months on, Bernie and his favorite theater kid disciple, AOC, have embarked on a speaking tour that has drawn thousands of attendees at each stop and continues to gain momentum. Dubbed the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour,” referencing Biden’s slimy farewell speech from the White House in which Joe affected a pallid, weaselly imitation of Eisenhower’s sendoff warning of the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex, the tour recently included a Bernie cameo at Coachella, hardly a gathering of down-and-out working stiffs.
Well, just as Eisenhower helped build up the MIC that he later cautioned against on his way out the door, so too did Biden and the Dems gleefully embrace the oligarchs, the tech elites, the corporate overlords before some of those forces started siding with Trump. The Democrats don’t hate oligarchs; they hate that they don’t currently have the full and enthusiastic support of all the oligarchs. On a personal level, Google was instrumental in the bloodthirsty corporate propaganda that was The Shitty Media Men List, refusing to turn over who accessed the list in the 24 hours it was live to edit, making it virtually impossible to prove the exact source of false allegations and allowing those who made them to be shielded from any responsibility for the harm their smears caused.
Fair to expect that this speaking tour will actually touch on important issues vital to working people, because that’s how this grift works. It’s not a national election year, so someone like Bernie can pay lip service to some of the things destroying our quality of life that the donors would prefer not be discussed and certainly not acted upon. Then, come 2028, Bernie (if he’s still with us) and AOC will undoubtedly let everybody know, gosh, you have to forget how the party treated us soooooo unfairly once more, because there’s no more crucial mission in this, The Most Important Election of Our Lives™, than to vote for Gavin Newsom, Mayor Pete, or - God forbid - Kamala again.
AOC’s litany of betrayals and careerist stunts are too numerous to be worth listing at this point, her commitment to forced identity politics so strong the Dems enlisted her to compare Jan. 6 to her own (alleged) sexual assault trauma, because of course the Dems saw there’s been no more effective propaganda over the last decade than MeToo propaganda.
If the point is winning back the demographics liberals have aggressively chased away the last few decades, AOC might want to explain how in 2020 she was engaging in the same dreary cancel culture denialism that all shitlibs were during that period as people were having their lives destroyed for microaggressions, misunderstandings, and in some cases straight-up lies. She mocked their suffering as entitlement. Then, later that year, when leftists were criticizing her for not helping to force a vote in the House on Medicare for All, so the public would have a firmer idea of who was standing in the way of it, with negative self-awareness that little twat had the nerve to call such criticism “violence.” Entitlement in the face of bad faith actors for thee, unending victimhood social capital for AOC.
I try to not to judge too harshly the folks going to these events. After all, not only did I vote for Bernie in the 2020 primary, I did some volunteer canvassing and phonebanking for him, too. I’m little embarrassed by that in retrospect, but I had ample reason to learn my lesson, and I did. Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything that will wake up some of these people, many of whom are so close to getting it, yet seemingly never will.