Neolibs are STILL BLAMING Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders and Russia for 2016
Instead of putting the blame where it belongs for Trump being elected, specifically at the feet of DNC and Hillary Clinton, neoliberals are still trying to claim it's because of Bernie and Jill Stein
Jill Stein was the Green Party nominee in 2016, and was the only candidate in that election who even remotely was acceptable to me. She was the only candidate who believed in key progressive policies such as medicare-for-all, tuition-free college and a $15 minimum wage, which are my main 3 domestic priorities. She also supported the Green New Deal, which is the only meaningful thing that the United States can do to curb climate change.
It is important to remember what happened in the Democratic primary earlier that year. It was originally believed that Hillary Clinton would run away with it, and her idiotic, unpopular centrism. Unfortunately for the Democratic National Committee, people simply didn’t like her. They remembered that her husband did NAFTA, which destroyed the Midwest, which is the most important part of the country with the electoral college.
Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, had a bunch of popular policies that struck a nerve with people. They liked that he was against the trade deals that destroyed the Midwest. They liked that he wanted everyone to have healthcare. They liked that he wanted all workers to make a living wage. He became the most popular Senator in the country.
He polled significantly better than Hillary Clinton did against Donald Trump. At the same time as she was beating Trump by a small number nationally, Bernie was absolutely dismantling him.
This wasn’t good news for the DNC. Hillary was their little pet project, and all signs were that she was an utter failure.
So, they fixed the election.
We know this because, in 2016, Wikileaks revealed 20,000 hacked emails of staffers, up to highest level, of the Democratic National Committee, where they discussed plans to stop the rise of the Bernie campaign.
Some emails show how they funneled money that normally would’ve gone to down-ballot Democrats to instead the Clinton campaign, meaning that the Clinton campaign got millions of dollars from the DNC.
They also gave superdelegates a great deal of power of the eventual winner of the primary. These people are those who have held leadership positions in the Democratic Party, with some being elected members of the DNC, a second being Democratic Governors, a third being Democratic Congresspeople and the final category is distinguished party leaders. 67 of these people were lobbyists, primarily for the Clinton campaign.
This is important because these people almost universally supported the Clinton campaign, fixing the election for her.
Many mainstream media organizations also decided to include superdelegates in the delegate count throughout the primary process, inflating Clinton’s count by about 400. This created a perception of insurmountability for the Sanders campaign, which discouraged many young Sanders supporters from turning out.
They also smeared Sanders supporters as toxic young, white males who were regularly sexist online. This didn’t reflect reality. The Sanders campaign, especially 4 years later, was one of the most diverse in history. What they actually did is take any attack on Clinton as purely sexist, no matter how substantive that criticism was.
This all shows how the people running the election fixed it to get the candidate that they wanted. That, of course, happened to be the worst possible candidate.
Bernie Sanders then endorsed and campaigned for Hillary Clinton. What he should’ve said is “Hillary stole this election from me. I’m going to do everything in my power to stop her.” What that would’ve included is campaigning for Jill Stein, who was one very similar politically to Bernie Sanders.
After Hillary lost in November of that year to the worst candidate in the history of American elections, shitlibs decided that they couldn’t blame her. They found a lot of other people to blame.
Personally, I would have a go at her trade policy, or lack thereof, and her inability to campaign in the rustbelt, which is where a lot of the swing states that went to Trump are situated.
However, Hillary initially blamed Russia. This was one of the most blatant and stupid conspiracy theories ever. There was never any evidence of it, and a lot of the stories that came out of Russiagate were thoroughly debunked.
One of the things that they claimed was that Russia hacked the DNC emails and gave them to WikiLeaks on behalf of the Trump campaign. Any idiot could see that this claim was preposterous. WikiLeaks has done countless hackings that harmed Russia. They would have no interest in helping him. They probably want him dead.
Then, the idea that the Trump campaign worked with Assange is even stupider. They tried to extradite and charge him with perjury, and give him the death penalty. They wanted to kill him. Am I meant to believe that they then wanted Assange to help them?
This was simply a conspiracy theory that fell flat when it was investigated by Robert Mueller, even though Rachel Maddow attempted to paint it as a success story. It was thoroughly disproved, and it was complete bullshit, purely created by the Clinton campaign to clear her name for losing an election that a three year old could’ve won.
Her supporters then tried to blame Bernie for not supporting Hillary enough. This is one of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard. Over a single 5 day period, Bernie did 14 events for her. That is beyond committed to a campaign.
If I were him, I would’ve taken Jill Stein’s offer to be her VP. That would have allowed a third party to have a massive bump, which could’ve moved America away from the stupid 2 party system.
Despite Bernie choosing to be the bigger man and supporting the Clinton campaign, people who love Hillary Clinton for reasons that I’ll never understand decided that Trump winning was his fault. Apparently he didn’t endorse Hillary enough, and was too busy sulking. He did 14 events in 5 days for her, and apparently that’s no enough, and he was just being a sore loser.
My favourite, however, is when they began to have a go at Jill Stein.
As we have already gone over, Jill Stein was generally a good candidate. While I did have a few qualms with her, mainly over guns (she supports more restrictive measures than I do), she is largely a top class candidate. She was honestly excellent.
Unfortunately, Bernie didn’t see that she was a much better candidate than Hillary Clinton was, or, if he did, thought that beating Trump was more important. I don’t agree with that calculation. I think that, in a democracy, voting for the candidate with the best policies should outweigh anything else.
However, according to shitlibs, doing that is the end of the world, and anything bad that happens is the fault of people doing that.
This line was first trotted out when President Trump won in 2016. A big group of shitlibs blamed Jill Stein and her supporters for the loss. They claimed that this was because, in swing states, Stein got more votes than Hillary lost by. This is true. However, it is also true that Gary Johnson took more votes off of Trump than Stein did off Hillary. Additionally, more voters stayed home than voted for any of the candidates. However, more important than all of that is that Hillary Clinton was a fucking shit candidate who was more unpopular in most important states than a billionaire Reality TV host.
There have been many smears of Jill Stein. The first is that she was a Russian tool. This, much like the ‘Trump is a Russian tool’ and the ‘Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian tool’ lies, was complete bullshit. It seems like a bit of a coincidence that every candidate who is anti-war is smeared as a Russian agent, as is every enemy of Hillary Clinton.
The second is that all of her voters were misogynist pigs who couldn’t bear to have a woman as President. I simply cannot understand how anyone fell for this. Her voters were so sexist that they voted for a woman. Besides, if someone is an awful sexist, they probably wouldn’t be tempted to vote for a Democrat in any circumstance, as they are the party of the woke.
Maybe what caused Hillary to lose was calling half the country a ‘basket of deplorables’. Insulting your voting base may not help. Then, calling all the other candidates Russian agents also shows that your aren’t campaigning in good faith.
The reason I’m bringing up wounds that should have long since been buried is that this is all coming up in the Twitterverse after the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe vs Wade in response to a Texas bill banning abortion beyond 6 weeks. Now, as I have said, I oppose that bill. I think it is stupid. I wrote a whole article explaining that and the eviction moratorium ending, and what could have been done to prevent it.
The answer, however, is not to vote for shitty candidates because they are 3% better than the other guy. The answer is for the Democrats to put up better candidates than the corrupt ruling class of the Democratic party, which are what all of their candidates for an extremely long time have been.
Jill Filipovic, however, doesn’t seem to understand that insulting people doesn’t make them want to vote for you.
She is blaming people with standards for who they vote for. She is blaming those who care about the country. She is blaming people who don’t support and help corrupt oligarchs. She is having a go at people for not voting for the candidate whose running mate opposed abortion.
This is the person who wrote this article in 2016.
She has a track record of being wrong about everything tactics-wise. Why anyone trusts her is beyond me.
This all strikes me as shitlibs desperately trying to blame everyone else but themselves for their failures, and still continuing to harp on about something that happened five years ago.
Remember, they could’ve packed the supreme court. They didn’t. They could’ve done away with the supreme court altogether. They didn’t. They could’ve created a federal law on abortion that overrides the state law. They didn’t. This isn’t because of Jill Stein. This is because of the Democrats.
nice title