Fear, Loathing and Mayonnaise in the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination Contest

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!

 

Article Analysis: Fake Polls & the Anti Bernie Narrative in the Media

Editor's note: over the past few years I've done literally everything in my power not to duplicate content across multiple websites but I've finally reached the point where social media censorship is forcing my hand. The following informal article analysis essay originally appeared on Facebook, but since that company is currently (and obviously) throttling how many views my account gets until I give them money - I'm forced to re-post it here:

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The vast majority of the time I post a focused article analysis piece on Facebook it's because I'm looking to highlight glaringly obvious mistakes in the mainstream media's coverage. Today I thought I'd switch gears and take a look at this delightful piece of low budget independent journalism by Ashok Koyi on his website which appears to be called "the Kalinga" - Koyi drills deeper into a recent Iowa 2020 Democratic Party primary poll that got a lot of mainstream media play and discovers that not all is what it seems.

You can find the article here: 

https://thekalinga.in/2019/09/20/manufatucturing-consent/ 

With the important note that Ashok's article appears to be the result of multiple Twitter sleuths (two of which he credits at the bottom of the piece) I'd like to start by noting that I agree with almost everything the author states in this piece. Furthermore the investigative methodology is sound and the conclusion Koyi draws from his investigation of the people behind this poll is completely inarguable - namely that this isn't so much a "poll" as a mainstream liberal Frankenstein memo designed to manufacture the narrative that Iowa is going for Biden or Warren and Sanders is doomed.

In particular I encourage readers to please note the following paragraph taken from Koyi's report:

"The most important aspect being

"Binder specializes in qualitative rather than quantitative research. His focus is on assessing subjective factors such as language, emotion, and attitudes."

To me, all this word salad means only one thing. It means he mind-reads potential voters when conducting his polling. In simple terms the polls capture his feelings of voter’s feelings about politicians

I have never heard a worse way to describe a pollster than this. Given that only the memo is published without the underlying dataset, I am assuming that this poll is based on the feelings of David Binder staff about which democratic candidate gets what percentage of votes in Iowa in the upcoming democratic primary election"

This analysis is dead-bang on and although the author is generous enough to allow for the possibility that this isn't a mockery of traditional polling, I am not so kind - the poll in question is clearly paid for propaganda designed to discourage Sanders supporters and hopefully keep them from voting for Bernie in the primary.

This of course brings up the larger issue of the rise in paid polling outfits that operate like public relations and marketing firms over roughly the past decade. As anyone familiar with the Koch-backed climate change denial industry can attest, it is now possible for literally anyone at all to hire a polling company to produce a poll that manufactures whatever specific narrative you like. Typically this will be accomplished with some combination of leading or ambiguous questions or carefully targeting polling by a region's average annual income - who can forget the CNN poll upon which Biden's case as an "unassailable front-runner" was built up in the media, including in particular and to the surprise of no one, CNN! What was only mentioned on Right Wing News sites however is the fact that the polling company somehow managed not to sample a "statistically significant" number of 18-49 year olds who probably wouldn't have been all that jazzed about Biden.

The simple truth is that "he who pays the piper, calls the tune" and while political campaigns demand accuracy from their internal polling contractors, they are not above hiring what amounts to PR firms like Focus on Rural America and the company of its founder, Link Strategies, to manufacture a specific narrative in the media. These results are then fed to influential figures in the public discourse and you've essentially created the idea that Bernie is finished and Warren is ascendant out of nothing. Now traditionally, the mainstream media has been considered a safeguard against spurious polling because they not only sponsor a number of polls that are in theory designed to be accurate, but they also publish the methodology behind those polls when they release him. What happens however when the mainstream corporate media itself is now controlled by politically active billionaire titans of industry like say, Jeff Bezos? What happens when massive American corporate media companies are the ones paying the piper, and the tune they want to hear is that Bernie loses? Well, in this case what clearly happened is a B.S. poll designed to suppress pro-Sanders turnout in Iowa got treated seriously in the mainstream media for a few days; whether or not it actually stops Iowans from voting Sanders in five months is less clear - but that is certainly the intent of the exercise.

Look, this is big business and these folks will go to any length to rig even meaningless internet polls - good examples include Trump fixer Michael Cohen hiring an IT firm to try and rig a GOP nomination contest Drudge Poll or the weirdo Pelosi fanboys over at Daily Kos rigging weekly forum polls against Sanders by banning almost every Bernie supporter during the 2016 election. Obviously there is a certain amount of value in using rigged polls to suggest a political narrative and clearly it's fairly effective.

Who watches the watchmen when the watchmen have all been bought?

Go back and read Koyi's report at the top of this article again and ask yourself how many people are going to bother to take the roughly ten steps it takes Ashok to figure out this "poll" is utter nonsense, before they decide to believe it or not?

Right, the answer is "almost nobody."

As I've written numerous times since the real Democratic Party 2020 nomination fight kicked off just before Christmas in 2018, the mainstream corporate media, the Democratic Party and rich liberal elites are prepared to do anything, say anything and push any narrative to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the Dem nomination - precisely *because* they know that he will beat Trump.

Since that time, the Manhattan Island media and Beltway Think Tank glitterati have rotated through a seemingly never ending cast of "Bernie Slayer" ascendant candidates who had supposedly already rendered Sanders and his revolution irrelevant. One by one Lock Em Up Kamala, Trapper Keeper, Skateboard Jesus and Dollar Store Macron have fallen by the wayside only moments after the establishment media told you they were in the driver's seat. Now Palooka Joe Biden is in the act of falling on his sword and a newly conciliatory Liz Warren is hanging out with Wall Street executives and Hillary Clinton - you'd have to be a complete idiot not to see what's going on here at this point.

The narrative that the Bernie Sanders political revolution is already dead will never die, so long as the Bernie Sanders political revolution continues to live - the fact that they're still paying media minions and fake pollster gurus to tell you Sanders doesn't stand a chance is all the evidence you need to demonstrate he's still in the race and the fight is not over.

As always in life, it's important to "consider the source" and the source of all this anti-Bernie mainstream media coverage are companies owned by rich people who'd rather lose to a fascist like Trump, than share with the labor class under a Democratic Socialist like Sanders.

- Nina Illingworth

Joy-Ann Reid & the Return of McCarthyism

Editor’s note: typically when I write a Take Down piece for this website, it will revolve around a largely unknown, but laughably mendacious neoliberal Twitter user in the middle of some deplorably disingenuous meltdown or tirade of some kind; the highest profile “honoree” to show up in these take downs was author and noted Twitter meltdown artist Sady Doyle – and even then, only because she spent a half hour trying to harass me before publicly denying she’d been using bigoted attacks.

Today however, we’re going to make an exception on behalf of recently-enshrined but long-reviled Wall of Shamer, Joy-Ann Reid; who spent the better part of Friday, September 9th unsuccessfully trying to pass off the plot of a rejected Tom Clancy novel as factual news on her Twitter feed. As a result of Reid’s high profile role in the American news media and the disturbing propagation of what can only be called cold war era scaremongering in the modern, neoliberal media – this piece is really as much an examination of false media narratives as it is a savage indictment of Reid’s blatant dishonesty and arrogance.

First, we’ll talk a little bit about Reid’s meltdown, then we’ll take a look at how it fits into the larger, anti-Russian media narrative being sold to the American people on the regular these days. 

As always please be reminded that although you should have no trouble understanding what I’m saying without clicking on the links I’ve provided throughout the article; your comprehension and enjoyment of the piece will almost certainly be improved by at least skimming the source material I’ve limked to. Please don’t yell at me about “sources” on social media if you can’t be bothered to click the links. 

Hot to Trot-sky: Reid’s McCarthy Redux Moment

Now, before we get started I would like to take a moment to point out that Joy-Ann Reid is a rising star in the world of political television media who also happens to be a vocal, successful and highly-educated (more on this later) African American woman. This, undeniably makes her a lightning-rod of ignorant, bigoted criticism from the disturbingly large segment of “white America” that believes ending slavery was a bad thing; as well as men (and Anne Coulter) who feel awarding women the right to vote has directly lead to the decline of the American family.

Please allow me to assure you that I’m not here to discuss anything “those people” would find interesting. I’m not going to tell you that Joy-Ann is too loud, too female, too black or too aggressive to be on network television and if the truth be told; I really want to like Reid in my heart because the person she pretends to be when she’s not shoveling corporatist, pro-Democratic Party bullshit would be an important voice in our media.

Unfortunately, this is impossible because Joy-Ann Reid is a lying, embarrassingly partisan, centrist propagandist who is also either mindbogglingly fucking stupid or, more likely, believes that you are. Please take a moment to examine the Twitter screenshots I’ve compiled bellow and as you do so; keep in mind that all of these tweets come from a single, twenty-four hour period on Reid’s Twitter feed. As always I have not edited these tweets in any way, although they may appear slightly out of order for the purposes of proper presentation – I left the time stamps on most of them so you can easily reconstruct the chronological order of Joy-Ann’s tweets on your own if that matters to you for some reason:

Read the rest of this article now on ninaillingworth.com...