Editor's note: this article originally appeared October 21st, 2019 on Facebook; for more of my recent writing, please check out my image blog at Can't You Read; including this piece of why war in Syria is still bad despite Trump, institutional loyalty, class and propaganda in "Ghost Wars" by Tim Weiner, and what's changed about liberal attitudes towards Ed Snowden in the past six years.
All analysis by Nina Illingworth unless otherwise indicated.
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"Elizabeth Warren Under Fire as Campaign Surrogate’s Racist, Homophobic Tweets Come to Light"
Frankly I'm not going to spend a lot of time analyzing the above piece from October 14th because there's really not a whole lot to analyze here, but let's summarize a little bit:
One of Elizabeth Warren's high-profile campaign surrogates (activist Ashlee Marie Preston) who happens to be a black trans woman made the ludicrous claim that Bernie Sanders has never supported the LGBT community and declared that she "had the receipts" to prove it.
As it turns out however, it was Preston herself who had left a long list of receipts online - specifically all manner of homophobic, bigoted and racist tweets which I'm not going to bother to review here, you can just read the article if you want to get a good idea of how awful they were.
Predictably, Preston issued a defiant "sorry, not sorry" non-apology and began deleting tweets while the Warren campaign did everything it possibly could to deny any sort of official ties to Ashlee Marie - offering meekly that Preston was "not on the payroll" of the Warren campaign, which is pretty funny because I'm pretty sure Bernie Sanders isn't paying folks like Nina Turner or Killer Mike either but nobody would doubt they are Sanders campaign surrogates. As the photo at the top of the Law and Crime article above clearly indicates, Ashlee Marie Preston was clearly an official part of the Warren campaign and whether or not they paid her directly for her time and services out of the campaign kitty is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.
While the Warren campaign's response *is* more than just a little shameful, the simple truth is that I'm not here to bust Liz's chops for employing a bad campaign surrogate without doing the proper amount of vetting beforehand. Mind you, I do take exception to the campaign's attempts to portray itself as an innocent and friendly bystander while Liz uses folks like Preston and loyal think tanks like Demos to mercilessly slander and attack Sanders in the public discourse, but Warren isn't the first campaign to screw up by failing to properly vet a particularly aggressive and effective surrogate, nor will she be the last either. This is obviously a serious gaffe, but it's not even remotely as openly disqualifying as say Palooka Joe Biden's corruption or Trapper Keeper's habit of chucking binders at subordinates.
What I personally find more revealing about this whole sad episode is the nominally-liberal, mainstream corporate media's disturbing cone of silence surrounding a story which, if it had been a Sanders campaign surrogate, would almost certainly have been a front page story for at least a couple of days. There's a reason I'm sharing a link from Law and Crime, an objectively right wing (albeit not fascist) news blog and it's because if you do a Google search right now, you'll discover that while multiple "winger" outlets across the spectrum from blogs to Fox News picked up the story, it somehow didn't even rate a comment on sites like MSNBC, Vox, Salon, the Washington Post or any one of the numerous, even pro-Biden websites that dominate the "liberal blogosphere."
Naturally sycophants and apologists will simply argue that the incident isn't newsworthy and the right's only interests here are sensationalism and the endless culture war, but any fair-minded observer of the ongoing liberal vilification of both Bernie surrogate Susan Sarandon and Sanders himself for not disavowing Sarandon will know that's utter hogwash - this might not be disqualifying for Warren, but it sure as sh*t is "news" in any reasonable understanding of the word.
At this point it absolutely could not be *more* obvious that mainstream liberal media is openly "in the tank" for a Liz Warren nomination run; that's not a conspiracy, that's just a reasonable analysis of the available evidence and it should definitely concern you if you're still clinging to the lie that Warren is "basically the same" as Bernie if you're a working class voter. There's a reason Wall Street, billion dollar media corporations and rich Democratic Party donors are all "coming around" on Liz Warren and it certainly isn't because they now agree with Bernie's agenda - the same agenda these liberal media outlets want you to believe Warren has improved upon for her 2020 nomination run.
Indeed as those of you who study the growing phenomenon of online censorship are no doubt already aware, this problem actually goes much deeper than just the mainstream corporate media because the entire establishment is against Sanders and in on this cone of silence. For just one obvious example, do a quick Google search for "Susan Sarandon liberals insane" and then repeat that same search with "Duck Duck Go" - as you'll see, someone at Alphabet (the giant company that used to be Google) doesn't think pointing out the objectively insane liberal obsession with Susan Sarandon is worth including in the front four pages of results; that's not an accident (see below.)
Of course all of this will hardly be news to anyone who watched the Washington post publish sixteen negative headlines about Sanders in sixteen hours during the 2016 Democratic Primary but the obvious contradictions here, both in terms of the media's supposed role in the election process and the staggeringly obvious bias against Sanders require constant reminding in the face of this same "cone of silence." Elections are not supposed to be decided by an openly biased corporate media complex and the newsworthiness of a given story isn't supposed to have anything to do with whether or not the boss likes a given candidate - yet clearly, in the American "democratic" system, nothing is as it's "supposed" to be in a liberal democracy and the ruling classes are determined to stop Bernie Sanders and his labor class political revolution at all costs.
The obvious question then becomes, will the American labor class get "fooled again" or will they find a way to see past the cone of silence and an interconnected web of aristocratic lies to vote for the only candidate in the 2020 Dem Primary who actually represents their interests?
Nobody can predict the future, but I'm willing to bet that after four years of lies, smears and open gaslighting against the real left and the roughly eighty-nine percent of American society that comprises the labor class, folks are awful tired of watching Lucy snatch away the football. If 2016 taught us anything it's that while the liberal corporate media can certainly *lose* an election, they are utterly incapable of winning one - unless liberal elites are prepared to shatter the Democratic Party into a thousand pieces by blatantly rigging another nomination process, Bernie Sanders will be the 2020 nominee on the Democratic side, and yes, he'll beat Donald Trump or Mike Pence regardless of how this impeachment inquiry shakes out.
This is the end of the line for neoliberalism; the only question left is will the rich folks burn the party to the ground to stall the rise of Democratic Socialism and thereby hand the country over to a reality TV show fascist (again) for another four years? I wouldn't bet against it, but after watching 26,000 excited people cram into a Sanders rally on a cold October Saturday, it's clear that they're going to have to do a little better than the same old cone of silence to stop Bernie's momentum this time.
- nina illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.
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