Awesome. So that's at least TWO Dems—Harris and Warren—who are smart enough to realize that there aren't ANY Democratic primary voters on Fox. Who else will join them? https://t.co/9XQ9JZ6nLX
— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) May 15, 2019
Elsewhere in the Extremely Online multiverse…
By boycotting Fox News’s town hall invitation, Elizabeth Warren showed her disinterest in mass politics. https://t.co/nUXVHRwA0W
— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) May 15, 2019
This is a key point: Elizabeth Warren welcomes Fox News to attend her events and ask her questions. She’s not taking credentials or refusing to engage with Fox reporters.
What she isn’t going to do is give them exclusive content, let them sell ads, and lend them her credibility. https://t.co/hWMV17mmx6
— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) May 14, 2019
I really do think Warren loses a lot of leftist street cred by earnestly hating Republicans. You’re supposed to hate Democrats and consider Republicans to be the natural byproduct of Democratic failures, and their voters are merely socialists who have lost their way.
— King’s Landing Fire Safety Captain (@agraybee) May 15, 2019
because white leftists fucking LOVE trump and they love fox news white nationalist propaganda
they fucking LOVE him
he hits their lizard brains every bit as much as he does for white conservatives, but they can't admit it so they make these bullshit excuses about it
— BIE (black identity extremist) (@contrapopulist) May 15, 2019
And obviously if Bernie said what she did, they would praise him for cutting through the bullshit while the libs always seek to 'compromise with fascists'. But since Bernie went on & they genuinely believe that Trump voters are secret Leftists…..you get this.
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) May 15, 2019
Why I keep ‘giving these people attention’:
It's not that any *one* of these takes is indefensible— or even necessarily wrong—so much as that they're clearly scratching for any possible opening no matter how philosophically incoherent the overall body of work it produces. pic.twitter.com/Oeuq0h0PVc
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 16, 2019
Steve in the ATL
In case jacobin needed even less credibility, its editors don’t know the difference between “uninterest” and “disinterest”
Jacobins.
Steve au CDG
Sab
I have been a female leftist for decades, and in my experience young male leftists don’t much like women. So I don’t care what they think about Elizabeth Warren or Kamela Harris. They won’t vote for women anyway. They’ll vote for Bernie or Ralph Nader or whomever.
Mnemosyne
I was saying the same thing as @contrapopulist here earlier today: people still VASTLY underestimate the extent to which white liberals and white leftists responded to white supremacist dog whistles in 2016. People who stayed home or voted for Jill Stein were just as motivated by white supremacist propaganda as Trump’s voters were, but they can’t admit they got conned just as badly as the rubes did. Maybe worse, since the rubes at least realized they were voting for white supremacy.
Wayne Marks
Why would you willingly walk into a Lion’s Den and give them ratings and give them and the hyenas meat to chew on. Eff them. It was a smart decision. Liberals and Dems for too long have treated them as a legitimate news organization. They’re not. They are a propaganda arm of the GOP. Period. Boycott them. They can’t pretend to be “fair and balanced” if the Dems don’t bother to show up and get lumped up by the likes of Hannity and his ilk. F them. We’ll put our own message out in our own way. If you you refuse to play their game on their biased terms there’s no game to play. Starve the beast.
Bruce K
Speaking as someone who’d be categorized as a 21st-century American white male leftist, I want to see Trump hanged from the traffic light on 57th and 5th, and that’s on a good day when I’m not thinking hanging’s too good for him, and I want to see the entire 21st-century Republican party burned down to bedrock with not even the foundations left standing, and I want to see Fox News relegated to whatever entrepreneurial scrap heap will accept its poisonous remains.
Then again, maybe I’m not a true leftist. In Greece, I think I’d be classified as somewhat right-of-center.
Or maybe it’s that I’m not young any more.
But then again, I’m just one data point.
Mary G
@Sab: Yep. Misogyny isn’t just a problem with the right.
OzarkHillbilly
Blech.
Steve in the ATL
@Bruce K: et moi aussi!
Patricia Kayden
@Sab: They’ll vote for Trump.
Anne Laurie
@Sab:
There’s an old Jules Feiffer cartoon where a frantic middle-aged male leftist mansplains to the girlfriend he’s driven away “Men don’t hate women! Men NEED women! Men hate NEEDING!”
I flash back on that cartoon whenever the Red Rose Bros let their not-so-inner misogynists off the leash…
Wayne Marks
@Bruce K: One data point? Nope.I second everything you said. One white man to another. Doesn’t mean we don’t need to listen to and appreciate different perspectives – everyone in our coalition comes from their own place – but you and I may also. Coalitions are built from diversity. Let us all embrace that and all start rowing toward the land, because we are clearly, as a country right now, lost in a sea of idiocy.
Baud
This post is spot on.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
they hate Warren because her towering intellect effortlessly exposes Wilmer as an empty suit.
danielx
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
And a poorly tailored one at that.
burnspbesq
At least Jacobin, unlike the Intercept, doesn’t get its sources arrested, indicted, convicted, and tossed in the Federal pen.
See? I found something nice to say about that den of blithering idiots.
P.S. hi from Warsaw.
Richard Guhl
I always have found it ironic to the most extreme that those who yammer about the evils of neoliberalism then turn around and treat their voting as the most neoliberal thing of all — as a matter of personal consumer choice!
kd bart
@danielx: With the spotlight drawn more to him this time, Wilmer and his campaign staff mixture of toxicity and incompetence will be greatly exposed.
cleek
today’s performative leftism is just the opposite of today’s liberalism, updated daily.
?
Baud
@cleek:
Cleek’s Corollary.
zhena gogolia
@Steve in the ATL:
Hahaha! Thank you!
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
Yes, I love it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
When I look at these abortion laws, I feel so weary. We did this once. I can’t believe we have to do it again. It’s like time is rolling backwards. Birth control is clearly on the table too, at least in many reliable forms. Women now into their 60s have taken these as given all their reproductive lives.
mvr
I don’t yet have a pick in this race, but both Warren and Harris are looking pretty good to me, despite being very different from one another in some ways.
johnnybuck
Still on the Harris bandwagon, but I admire the hell out of Warren.
Neldob
Probably 2/3 of republicans support choice, but it’s such a handy tool to gin up the frothing industrial religious right wing dorks. They make bank on bad healthcare for women.
Joey Maloney
@Neldob: If you vote Republican, you don’t support choice. You might make mouth music about it but you don’t support it in any meaningful way.
JR
@Bruce K: that sounds like actual Jacobinism
cliosfanboy
@Joey Maloney: the same applies to words like freedom and liberty. The right hates what it fetishizes.
Bruce K
@JR: Back in normal times, I wouldn’t be within lightspeed-lag distance of Jacobinism, but we’re not living in normal times. I’ve distilled my political imperatives to two: competence, yes; cruelty, no. And from that, it’s not a long step at all to a hang-Trump, burn-the-GOP, dissolve-Fox-News state of mind.
sherparick
@Sab: I think they picked Meagan Day to write the article and reading it, I am reminded of the delusions and bubble that the American left has lived in all my long life (I’m 64) or they pay much attention to facts and reports from those of us out in flyover country like Driftglass or Sarah Kendizor. For one thing to “South” and the tribalism and fetishes of the White South and Appalachia are a complete mystery to them (and Bernie as his results in the Southern primaries reveal). That “white” race privilege can be a stronger bond than any class identity is a fact that from Eugene Debs to the present they have never absorbed. Finally, the audience of old white petit bourgeois and white supremacists that is the heart of the Fox audience will always vote Republican because the Republicans under Trump have openly stated that they will hurt the people they want to see hurt. As Adam Server said, “the cruelty is the point.”
chopper
@Wayne Marks:
also, who the fuck are the fox-watchers who vote in the democratic primary, exactly? what votes would you gain by going on that fucking network?
sherparick
@chopper: Jane Mayer, as always, lays out the brutal facts because, she is an actual reporter and journalist who interviews people and gather facts rather than imagine on why these how these will wake up have an epiphany one day that Karl Marx was right all along. Fox’s audience and the Republican voter is, as Driftglass says:
“As we out here in the Real World know perfectly well here, there is no hope of salvaging the tens of millions of reprogrammable Republican meatbags who sincerely believe that people like you and me are Marxist nitwit social justice mobsters, climate charlatans and race hustlers who are completely divorced from reality. That damage is done and it will be fucking up our politics for decades to come.” http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2019/05/grandpa-joe-continues-to-promise-to-do.html
JR
@Bruce K: I never said Jacobinism was a bad thing in this case
Vince
Who are all these “white leftists” that love Trump and Fox News? Does he think that random Russian twitter bots and trolls are actually real people?
Procopius
@Bruce K: I’m with you. I always thought I was a leftist, at least a Roosevelt New Dealer, but when I encounter a thread like this, telling be what leftists think, feel, say, do, like, choose, etc., I feel enormous cognitive dissonance, because I don’t think, feel, say, do, like, choose, etc. any of those things. I even voted for Hillary, although I didn’t like doing it. At the time I understood that about 95% of Sanders supporters did, too. I’m pretty sure, too, these are the same people who are calling for unity in the party, but I could be wrong about that. Like you, I’m old, and don’t get around much any more, so maybe the people who are young and call themselves leftists are very different from me and the people I’ve known who called themselves liberals and leftists.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
I think there is a lot of overlap with Paul-tards and Bernie Bros.
different-church-lady
@Procopius: leftist has been utterly redefined. It started in the blog era and has accellerated in the social media era.
Shana
@Vince: It’s like that guy (can’t remember which young GOP guy) who keeps overhearing people in a hipster coffee shops speaking admiringly about tRump in hushed tones.
Vince
@Shana: Lol, I remember that but also can’t remember who it was.
PJ
@Procopius: @different-church-lady: From reading this here almost top 10,000 blog, I get that to be “liberal” is no longer to be part of the “left”, and that “leftists” consider “liberals” to be more the enemy than Republicans or fascists (to the extent there is a difference), but how ideas or policies are divvied up between these monikers is still unclear to me. For example, Elizabeth Warren is a “liberal” while Bernie Sanders is a “leftist”, and the former has put forth many extensive policy proposals, while the latter, not so much, but when it comes down to how they act as legislators, or as potential Presidents, I am curious as to how much difference there would be between their policies.
BTW, I wish we could move beyond the nomenclature of political groupings of “left” and “right”, established 230 years ago in a very different social, economic, and political context.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Shana, @Vince:
It’s from Jacob Wohl, the self-discredited performance artist nitwit.
Major Major Major Major
@PJ: It doesn’t make any sense if you don’t spend too much time on Twitter. Perhaps this tweet, which is very popular with the Jacobin/Chapo Trap House crowd, will shed some light on their definition of ‘liberal’:
ETA: There’s a popular follow-up to that too, which basically says, “Elizabeth Warren: More Woman CEO’s of Private Prisons!”
low-tech cyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I’ll say it again: single-payer birth control.
1) To overrule any of these new laws that potentially outlaw forms of birth control
2) To make Hobby Lobby irrelevant
3) To minimize the need for abortions due to unwanted pregnancies
4) Because M4A may take awhile, but this could be done in 2021, so let’s do it
J R in WV
@Sab:
See, everyone’s experience is different. I was a young male leftist starting in about 1968. Right away I saw that young female leftists and hippys were way more interesting to me than young republican women, who were dull in most ways, and strange to boot.
First one I got to know believed in predestination! How strange was that!!??? Avoided her after learning that, always wondered if that was a learning experience for her…
Mnemosyne
@Vince:
They read and write for Jacobin. Did you not follow the link?
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Yes — many of the most obnoxious Sanders dead-enders both online and IRL started as Ron Paul supporters and switched their loyalties to Sanders so they could defeat Hillary.
These former Paulites don’t really have a firm political identity outside of wanting white men to be in charge of everything. They’re in favor of socialism as long as they benefit from it the most, and they know that’s the case with Bernie’s proposals.
Bill Arnold
@Bruce K:
I just spent a minute savoring that, with the verbs in the various different orders.
That’s what pisses me off most about the current Rs – that they deliberately, actively inspire loathing.
Neldob
@Joey Maloney: my point was trying to be that Repuglicans support forced birth in bad faith.
Butch
Am I dumb? (“Yes” is an acceptable answer.) Why is that King’s Landing tweet completely lost on me? Is that sarcasm? What is that?
Hilfy
@Bruce K: You are not alone. I’m a data point with you, especially the Rethuglicans “burnt down to the ground” bit.
PJ
@Major Major Major Major: So for them, Melissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg are prime examples of “liberals”, and exactly like Elizabeth Warren, whose policies are most definitely aligned with the interests of our tech and finance overlords that she targets.
RedDirtGirl
@Mnemosyne: I just got a book from the library that I think will be an interesting read:
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin DiAngelo.
Vince
@Mnemosyne: What link? Am I supposed to go on Twitter and read his entire history to figure out what the hell he’s talking about?
sam
Roe v Wade passed. WAS DECIDED
FIFY
laura koerber
@Procopius: I think you are right. The bashing of “leftists” is the promotion of a stereotype. Very few Bernie supporters who were Democrats voted for anyone but HRC Bernie had supporters who were not Democrats and some of them walked away. The same thing is true this time around. Bernie has Dem supporters and non-Dem supporters. His Dem supporters will vote D no matter what > His non-dem supporters won’t. There’s good polling data about this. It gets misunderstood as “Bernie supporers won’t vote for any other Dem!” and some won’t but that’s because they aren’t Democrats!