MT: I don’t believe a lot of the identity politics that are being proffered by the current version of the Democratic Party are genuine. And my first experience with this, where I really, really thought about this, was when I was following Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016. And there was a moment in that campaign where he first started to really draw blood against Hillary right. You might remember it was like in February, uh, or late January of 2016. He was hammering her on her ties to Goldman Sachs and other Banks. The New York Post interestingly did this, published this big list of all of her speech commitments and it was kind of amazing. And she wouldn’t release the transcripts right she wouldn’t release the transcripts. I mean, even the schedule was amazing. She was doing three hundred thousand dollars in the morning and then flying to some place and doing 400 Grand or something.
Reason: Yeah circle of the Bilderbergers, or whatever.
MT: And they tried everything to hit back, and nothing worked until she said: “If we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism?” And Bernie was paralyzed by that.
Reason: Yeah, Bernie’s an old school, he’s a real old school Commie. I mean, like where it’s class and everything else is a distraction, right? That, you know, capitalists will use race in order to keep the workers from realizing, no, they’re all on the same side well
MT: I almost wish he was that, because you know Bernie also marched in, you know, in for the civil rights movement in the 60s. And he was terrified of the idea that he might be accused of racism. It mortified him, and I think it really slowed his campaign.
Reason: There was also that moment, I think it might have been in Seattle or something, where he was almost literally pushed off the stage by a couple of black activists, who were like “We need to be talking about racial concerns,” not whatever he was talking about.
MT: Right, not your class thing. [And] that was when they started to sort of demonize the white working class, right, which is a brilliant strategic move. Also, interestingly, it was the exact opposite of what the Clintons had done in the 90s. You know the Clinton’s whole strategy was let’s peel off a little bit of that white working class-
Reason: We feel their pain.
MT: We feel their pain, right. And that’s, you know, they just got over the finish line doing that. So we can add to the sins of Hillary Clinton that she also injected identity politics.
With all due respect to Taibbi, identity politics had been injected into the Democratic Party’s DNA long before the 2016 presidential race.
Reason: “And that’s where the government was telling Twitter and Facebook, like, don’t run this stuff or they’ll squelch it.”
I don’t agree with all Taibbi’s takes, and a whole lot of things were going wrong with the left long before he deigned to notice it, but over all it’s an interesting interview.
Tags: 2016 Presidential Race, Bernie Sanders, coronavirus, Donald Trump, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, interview, Loudoun County, Matt Taibbi, Media Watch, Reason, Twitter, video, Virginia
Just for completeness, please note that all that stuff you hear about “Bernie Sanders is a Bolshevik, but he’s an honest one” is complete nonsense.
In 1980, he was a homeless vagrant living (illegally but tolerated) in a crawl space under the (then) new University of Vermont library. Now he’s a multi-millionaire, with three mansions and flies among them on private jets.
It’s all grift, and his grift has been widespread and greedy beyond belief, but it gets little attention. Among his best tricks were tithing 15% of campaign contributions to a “political consulting firm” run by his wife and stepdaughter (eat your heart out Joe Biden – Bernie Sanders was getting **15%** for “the big guy”). Another is having his campaign buy several thousand copies of his “books” (since he gets a royalty check based on sales, for him this is like a bottomless ATM).
I’ll stop there. A shame that some intrepid journalist doesn’t delve into the Clinton-esque/Biden-esque Sanders crime family. (Matt? You listening?)
Nick Gillespie @ 17:08: “[Congressional investigations] really come up with nothing in terms of collusion.”
Evidently, Reason magazine failed to keep up with the disclosures surrounding the Steele dossier.