spit_evil_olive_tips
most of this article is fairly ho-hum - a series of quotes from various people that are unsurprising given whatever their position is.
but then buried way down at the bottom, a little nugget of Actual News - as opposed to “political figure gives on-the-record statement to a journalist about what they think”.
I hadn’t seen this reported anywhere else:
A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as “no response.” The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.
“We also didn’t create a new category for Gaza responses out of fear that category would be leaked. Instead we were told to mark them as ‘no response,’” the organizer said, faulting top Harris campaign leaders for failing to address the issue. “The only ‘clowns’ out there are those who were in senior leadership and decided to abdicate on this issue, who silenced a Palestinian speaker at the DNC, and who told us to ignore it every time a voter asked us about Gaza.”
just, head in the sand. literal head in the sand.
a smart campaign would have at least tracked this data.
even if the campaign steadfastly maintains their “we are entitled to your vote either way, so shut the fuck up and stop complaining” stance, you would want to gather the data about how many people on these contact lists responded and mentioned Gaza.
but they were scared of that data leaking. because it would have generated a bunch of “the DNC’s own data shows it’s out of touch with Democratic voters about Gaza” headlines. those headlines would have made the Democrats look bad. they would also have been true, but that’s besides the point.
What’s the relevance of either of those questions for an election that happened three months ago? I don’t like relitigating unspooled events.
my brother in Cthulhu, you started this post by saying:
this is where thinking Biden wasn’t doing enough has led.
you should decide if you’re for or against re-litigating things
Projecting your political beliefs and rationales on others is not Beeing Nice.
meanwhile, one paragraph above, you’re projecting an opinion onto me that I don’t have:
You’re welcome to your opinion that Biden or Harris would have been worse
Both DOGE and Project 2025 where public knowledge when people voted.
The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
“journalism about such-and-such exists” is not the same as “such-and-such is common knowledge”. the country is awash in propaganda.
I just find it almost comical that anyone thought Trump would be an improvement if not for the drastic outcomes we’re going to see.
OK…just to make sure I understand you correctly - the people you’re mad at, are people who either voted for Trump, or didn’t vote at all, because of their opinions about Biden’s response to the genocide in Gaza.
if that’s accurate, two questions:
a) what is your estimate for the size of that group of people?
b) how many actual individual people in that group can you identify by name? how many do you know personally? (vs having read a news story quoting them)
Explicit calls for ethnic cleansing were at least not on the table with the last administration.
Trump: we should ethnically cleanse Gaza
Democrats: 👏 HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 FEMALE 👏 GENOCIDE 👏 DENYING 👏 PRESS 👏 SECRETARIES 👏
Among the many positive accomplishments by USAID over the course of its history was to help bring an end to apartheid in South Africa through peaceful means.
as usual, Trump doesn’t give a shit. it’s Musk who hates it. and it’s not hard to figure out why.
I fear I’ve become something of an accelerationist in the past few days…
yeah, go ahead and pass this, you tech-illiterate xenophobic fucks.
we need to divide and conquer the fascist coalition. make them hate each other. make them consumed by infighting. give them more “oh I didn’t realize there would be negative consequences that affected me personally” moments.
there’s a whole lot of Silicon Valley techbro types who are on board with Musk and Trump because they think it’s all lower taxes, less regulations for their startups, and less “wokeness”. go ahead, pass a law that makes it a federal crime for them to click a GitHub download link. make it so that every Hacker News thread about AI is filled with American engineers bemoaning that they’re legally prohibited from keeping up with the state-of-the-art. make their startups uncompetitive because they’re required by law to pay inflated prices to subsidize OpenAI and other “American-made” plagiarism machines.
you’re so out of touch, i don’t even know what to say.
be more specific - out of touch with whom, exactly?
out of touch with the ~400 voting members of the DNC?
can you name any of those 400, off the top of your head? I can’t, and I follow politics fairly closely.
the DNC itself doesn’t even publish the complete list - it had to be leaked
Some of the at-large members have been on the national committee for many terms. Those include stalwarts of the party establishment like Donna Brazile, Harold Ickes, Minyon Moore, and Maria Cardona, triple-hitters who have led national campaigns or party conventions, show up frequently on cable TV as political commentators, and buckrake as lobbyists and/or well-paid public speakers. Brazile is a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm” Purple Strategies, which has worked for BP, United Airlines, NASCAR, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and PhRMA. Ickes is a partner at Tiber Creek Group, whose clients include the Greater New York Hospital Association. Moore and Cardona are both partners at the Dewey Square Group, whose clients have included Lyft, McDonald’s, MGM Springfield, Sony Pictures, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and which has engaged in lobbying to undermine state labor protections.
this is the problem with Democrats in a nutshell - thinking “you’re out of touch with lobbyists and political consultants” is a dunk on someone.
Martin had been the frontrunner from the beginning of the race, leveraging his relationships with the more than 400 voting members of the DNC that he forged over more than a decade of work inside the institutional Democratic Party.
real cool that 400 Democrats, all part of the existing party establishment, are the only people who get to vote in this.
from May 2024: The Struggle for Democracy in the Democratic Party
Even in the age of social media, the Democratic Party remains a stubbornly closed-off enterprise. At the top, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is a private corporation, as opposed to a membership organization like a labor union, and its leaders have impunity over how they set and enforce party rules. For decades, DNC insiders have gone to war to prevent basic transparency and grassroots reform efforts from gaining steam.
from a recent Jacobin article:
“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money,” Ken Martin, a leading candidate for Chair of the Democratic Party, said at a forum on Sunday. “But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
and from his twitter account in October 2023, quote-tweeting Twin Cities DSA “Statement of Solidarity with Palestine”:
“From the river to the sea” is a chant used by extremists to support the destruction of Israel.
looks like we’re in for 4 more years of the same feckless bullshit from Democrats.
in the Bush years we had “fw: fw: re: fwd: DON’T BUY GAS ON TUESDAY TO STICK IT TO THE OIL COMPANIES”
in the Trump years it seems like we’re going to have “fill out this form with your name, email address, ZIP code and phone number, and we’ll have a general strike Real Soon Now”
there is a realistic possibility of a general strike in 2028, due to planning by multiple labor unions to line up their contracts to all expire at the same time.
but this? eh. I support a general strike in principle, but I’m far from convinced that this is it.
the page that lists their “leaders” has…two dozen Instagram handles. including the follower count for each one. I’m gonna need a bit more information than that. who’s actually leading leading it? if it’s gonna be successful it ain’t gonna be a committee of two dozen Instagram influencers, I know that much.
