Editor's note: this article originally appeared as a lengthy thread posted during November 21st, 2019 on my Mastodon account - there may be a few reference links I didn't feature here, that appear at the bottom of that thread if you're interested in that sort of thing.
Over the past few months, I've extensively covered the US
corporate "liberal" media's clear attempts to influence the outcome
of the 2020 Democratic Party nomination process in excruciating detail.
From NY Times smears designed to make the Sanders campaign
look like a sexual harassment factory, to endless hours of coverage defending Palooka Joe Biden's racist babbling and on through the nonexistent coverage of a bigoted Liz Warren surrogate, a clear pattern of anti-Bernie bias has
emerged. While this bias often expresses itself it many different and
subtle forms, I think at this point it's safe to say that the pattern has been
clearly demonstrated and the American corporate media is openly (and
increasingly frantically) trying to influence the 2020 Democratic Party
nomination contest against Sanders - and in favor of candidates who are perceived by
the liberal establishment as capable of beating Sanders.
Clearly the machine is
no longer sure that Joe Biden is such a candidate either.
This brings us to the “liberal” corporate media coverage
surrounding an unlikely rise in the “First in the Nation” state polls of
neoliberal candidate-like substance Pete Buttigieg; who will hereafter referred
to in this space as Dollar Store Macron, or Mayo Pete - as befits his soulless,
plastic & relentlessly focus-tested politics. To note that Mayo Pete has become the mainstream liberal
establishment's latest "Great White Hope" is both not a metaphor and
indicative of their open desperation.
If at this point you are still blissfully unaware of who
Dollar Store Macron is, or precisely why I would describe his politics as
"plastic and soulless" I'd encourage you to take a moment to stop and
read this excellent profile of Mayo Pete by Nathan J Robinson over at Current
Affairs - a piece recommended by Noam
Chomsky himself:
All About Pete
To learn more about the super villain factory Mayo Pete used
to work for, a corporation called McKinsey & Company; check out this
article by an anonymous former employee of the company, also published at
Current Affairs:
McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners
Finally, if you're still on the fence about whether or not
Dollar Store Macron is an objectively terrible candidate for both the
nomination and the office of POTUS, please read this extremely detailed and
well sourced Twitter thread by user @niktaylorde for more information:
Why You Shouldn't Vote For Pete Buttigieg - A Thread
In other words, Pete Buttigieg is not only a terrible candidate
for the labor class, but also a reasonably horrible human being - not that
you'll really hear much about any of this in the media of course; the fact that
he's young, gay and currently skullf*cking a "catchy" Panic At the
Disco track to generate false enthusiasm at his campaign events, is pretty much
as far as the corporate media's analysis is going to go when it comes to Mayo
Pete.
This is unfortunate for the American voter because the
Dollar Store Macron campaign has a serious problem that not only makes his
campaign nonviable in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest, but could
imperil his general election chances even if he somehow managed to win - Mayo
Pete is currently polling below "raisins in potato salad" with African American voters; depending on which poll you examine, we're talking
about a number between zero and one percent, literally.
Why? Well if you believe the insinuations of obtuse
Buttigieg campaign spokesperson Lis Smith, it's because African American voters
are homophobic; a narrative that even Dollar Store Macron himself has since
(wisely) rejected:
Sharpton: 'We don't have an epidemic of homophobia' in the black community
Of course, that didn't stop the Buttigieg campaign from
quietly leaking a focus group study that explicitly said Pete's sexuality is
why black voters don't like him, back in October:
Buttigieg focus groups found being gay ‘a barrier’ for some black South Carolina voters
For a more accurate (and less "objectively
racist") picture however, let's turn to The Intercept's Ryan Grim to study
an example of the staggeringly tone-deaf, low-key racist way Mayor Pete has
approached winning over African American voters in the run up to the 2020 Democratic Party primary season:
The Problem with Pete Buttigieg's "Douglass Plan" for Black America
Whoa boy, so let's get unpack this for a moment here:
Mayo Pete, a man who is already haunted by anger over a
court battle brought on by the South Bend, Indiana mayor's firing of a black police chief for recording his racist co-workers, and accusations of racist policies in his "model college town" of South Bend, is reaching out
to black voters with a policy program named after cherished African American
abolitionist Frederick Douglass - and amazingly enough, that's only strike one
here.
Efforts to promote the Douglass Plan revolved around a
published list of 400 prominent South Carolinians who were behind the plan, but
this too demonstrated a willful attempt to mislead and deceive by the Buttigieg
campaign. The list was represented as consisting of prominent African
Americans, and yet almost half of the names on it were from white voters. The list also featured a cover letter that by use of the
phrase “there is one presidential candidate who has proven to have intentional policies designed to make a difference in the Black experience, and that’s Pete Buttigieg” strongly implied the signers had endorsed Dollar Store Macron for
the Democratic Party nomination; that wasn't true either - in fact, some of the
"signers" worked for the Sanders campaign and others didn't even mean
to endorse the Douglass Plan itself, let alone Mayo Pete.
When asked about this discrepancy directly the Buttigieg
campaign offered up the wholly unserious answer that the so-called signers were
sent an email encouraging them to "opt out" of endorsing the plan;
you probably don't need me to tell you that this is absolutely *not* how
endorsements work in American politics but as a side note, I'd like to point
out that only a soulless cockroach McKinsey consultant would try to use the
Columbia House Records scam to swindle endorsements from black leaders.
The final cherry on top of it all, and indeed the only part of
this whole sad saga that received any significant amount of attention in the
mainstream media at all, was that the Buttigieg campaign included a photo of a
black woman who hadn't endorsed anything or anyone, had no connection to the
campaign and had no idea why she'd been used in Dollar Store Macron's promotional material - because she's from Kenya.
Pete Buttigieg says he was unaware that stock photo on his website depicted a Kenyan woman
And therein lies the crux of my argument and the definitive
proof that the corporate "liberal" media is openly campaigning for
anyone but Bernie in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest.
Imagine just for a moment the absolute righteous fury that
would have consumed "liberal" mainstream pundits and influencers if
it was Bernie Sanders who'd lied about African American endorsements to prop up
his credentials with black voters? Imagine if it had been Bernie who'd responded with
"Ma'am, I’m not asking for your vote" when confronted by a distraught
African American voter about a police shooting of a young black man in the city
he served as mayor? What if Bernie had started his political career by forcing out a black police chief on behalf of clearly racist cops inside the South Bend
power structure?
Keep in mind that we're talking about the same guy here,
Dollar Store Macron is responsible for all of these actions.
Frankly, you really don't even have to imagine - contrast
the utter silence on Mayo Pete's (at best) obtuse honky nonsense, with the
mainstream media dogpile Sanders was subjected to when he advised a young African American man to focus on not getting shot first, when pulled over by
the police; after a question I won't describe as "unfair" but
tragically, I cannot say there was a possible "good answer" for.
All throughout the 2016 primary process we were told by
"Very Serious People TM" in the liberal media that African Americans, in particular black women, were the most important demographic in the
electorate, and that a Democrat victory would not be possible in either 2016 or
2020 without the support of non-white voters. Specifically this narrative was used to hammer Bernie's
campaign as supposedly "too white, and out of touch" or perhaps even
outright racist - the last of which is absurd.
Now, today we find that the polling numbers show Sanders has*the* most diverse group of supporters, while pumped-up chosen "Bernie
Slayers" like Elizabeth Warren and now Dollar Store Macron are driven by
the same "too white, out of touch" voting demographic that supposedly
rendered Bernie unelectable - and the response from the mainstream
"liberal" media has been literally some combination of excuse-making
apologia to go with complete and utter silence.
Of course none of that is to say that Dollar Store Macron hasn't been in the news; corporate "liberal" media in a America are
falling all over themselves to type up a 255 respondent poll with dodgy
methodology and an admitted 6.1% margin of error that shows Mayo Pete up an
astounding +15% and leading New Hampshire - this of course pairs nicely with an
equally dodgy recent poll from Iowa that once again showed Buttigieg leading,
this time up by a mere (and implausible) +14%. Even that coverage demonstrates a considerable amount of
bias; after all the media is hardly mentioning that Pete is dropping a massive amount of money to try to win one of these two (mostly white) "First in the Nation" primaries, or that if he doesn't win at least one of them the
puffed up narrative (again aided by this same "liberal" media)
surrounding his presidential aspirations is going to look like a pathetic
punchline - instead, the corporate media would rather continue to attack
Bernie Sanders.
Like all truly good lies however, there was a tiny bit of
truth in the mainstream media's smearing of the Sanders campaign - it is in
fact awfully hard to win a national election as a Democrat with only white
voters, and doubly hard to win a Democratic Party nomination contest by that same
measure; the trick is that this isn't a problem for Bernie (who appeals to
young people and women especially across all demographics) it's a problem for
candidates like Mayo Pete and Pow Wow Chow Liz Warren.
Furthermore, if one presupposes that most of the people
reading this are in fact not racists and would prefer to live in a word where
the fight against racism is undertaken seriously, the fact that the liberal
media cynically used cries of racism to burn down the Sanders campaign, but has
hardly chirped a note about the kind of cracker nonsense Mayo Pete's campaign
is engaging in, represents a troubling continuation of longstanding enabling of
structural racism by affluent liberals and Democrats.
The truth here is that no matter how hard the so-called
"liberal" mainstream media in America tries to shove Mayo Pete into
the spotlight and generate a plausible theory by which he can become president,
Dollar Store Macron isn't going to win the 2020 Dem Party nomination contest -
and it's not because he's gay, or because black people aren't thankful enough
for his casual displays of obtuse racism; it's because he f*cking sucks as acandidate and bougie "liberal" pundits are getting desperate.
- 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.
Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.
Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!
