"You are a blind monkey."

    (She was talking about me here.)

     "The app's primary funding source was George Soros. Iowa DNC denied homeland security request to check the app for security, etc. U are a blind monkey if u can't figure out it's more corruption and election rigging."

     Facebook comment on yesterday's blog post.

Conspiracy!

The situation is worse than I realized.

Eric and Don Junior thought to foment trouble within Democratic ranks. 

Yesterday this blog described the trolling carried out immediately by the Trump sons, telling Democrats to blame the Iowa mess on the DNC. They hoped to create division and suspicion. This blog then described the reaction among Sanders' supporters, and observed that they were pre-prepped to interpret the mess as a long-planned conspiracy to cheat Sanders, led by the usuals suspects: George Soros, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, Tom Perez, all under the thumb and direction of the corporate overlords.

I called it conspiratorial thinking and was skeptical. My blog post got noticed on Facebook. It got panned.

Rick Wilson, former Republican campaign strategist and now savagely anti-Trump, is currently promoting his new book, Running Against the Devil. He writes that a Sanders candidacy would attempt to sell ideological socialism to unwilling and skeptical Americans, and is doomed to lose 40 states. Americans, he wrote, want to hear about kitchen table solutions to problems, not about class struggle. 

But equally bad, he writes, is what happens if he is not the nominee. Sanders's brand is to be consistent in his Democratic Socialist analysis of economic dysfunction. He leads the "Progressive Activist" tribe within American politics. Some 8% of Americans are in that tribe, Wilson writes, and some 22% of Democrats. Wilson predicts if Sanders loses the nomination he will do a pro-forma minimum for the Democratic winner, and thereby signal to his supporters that the Democrat is another tainted candidate, better than Trump, sure, but still a corporate sellout, who will been fatally stained by the crime of having defeated the spokesman for the true faith. The Progressive Activist group will stay home or vote third party, as many did in 2016, he wrote. 

It is a grim, prediction, and arguably completely inaccurate and unfair to Sanders and his supporters. That accusation gets pushback when it is encountered on social media:  Don't blame us for not voting for a really crappy, corrupt, unelectable candidate, they respond. Hillary is on you folks, the establishment. Hillary lost because she was terrible, not because of us.

The response to yesterday's blog post suggests Democratic division is deep and that the Democratic Party is simply not a credible vehicle for political change. Democrats contesting Sanders are not future allies, they are corrupt enemies. 

Rick Wilson may be right.

I consider the chatter within social media a primary source. It is direct and unfiltered. I read and scan multiple Facebook groups. I saw an avalanche of comments on the subject of the Iowa mess, both in general, and in direct response to my blog post:

*****"It was a carefully planned mess. The DNC is completely corrupt and Buttleakage is a corrupt candidate being installed by a desperate and corrupt establishment."

*****"It was rigged and Pete is a rat faced liar!"

*****"It's not even a question. The DNC was caught red handed."

*****"Why would people think the Iowa caucus was rigged??? IDK, maybe because the party was caught taking Bernie votes and moving them to Tom Steyer and Deval Patrick. Or maybe because they refuse to release the full results (which almost definitely has Bernie in the lead.) . . .  Maybe it's because Mayo Pete keeps winning delegates on coin flips."

*****"It was a carefully planned mess. The DNC is completely corrupt and Buttleakage is a corrupt candidate being installed by a desperate and corrupt establishment."

"FUCK THE DNC"

There are lots of Bernie Sanders Facebook support groups, sometimes calling themselves "safe zones" to share pro-Sanders material. There are similar ones for other candidates and this is absolutely predictable. What is interesting about the current kerfuffle is that comments in Bernie-oriented groups suggesting this might be an accident of incompetence are quickly overwhelmed with responses saying that the commenter is naive or clueless. This was a plot. The DNC is evil. Democrats are corrupt. Organizing long con-jobs like this is what the DNC does. Buttigieg is an agent of others.

Period.

Bernie Sanders will support the nominee, even if it is not him, but he has created a movement within the Progressive Activist core of the Democratic Party that is ideologically committed to the notion that the status quo is a bipartisan conspiracy of the powerful to retain power, and that people who have succeeded in the status quo are corrupt. Current officeholders--senatorial rivals--are corrupt, as they must be to have survived. Pete Buttigieg, a boy wunderkind not in the senate, has succeeded so quickly and well because he, too, sold out. He must have. How else could he have gotten to where he is in a corrupt system.

In the current system, only the corrupted can survive. Except Bernie.



[Note to commenters. Do not copy-and-paste articles from news sites and then present them as comments here. I delete them. I also delete comments that spoof the names of others.]