thewashingtonexaminer--2020-02-20--Democrats undercut the single best case against Trump

The 2016 election offered the country a choice between a corrupt , authoritarian New Yorker with serious baggage related to sexual assault and a corrupt , authoritarian New Yorker with serious baggage related to sexual assault .
It was an easy election to sit out , as evidenced by the low percentage of voter turnout equal to that of 2004 , not 2008 .
President Trump 's tenure has oscillated from the nadirs of his Charlottesville , Virginia , conundrum and border negotiation fiascos to sky-high apexes of achieving landmark criminal justice reform and the lowest unemployment rate in half @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on in his presidency , his faux pas have resulted from his personal foibles , not his actual policy .
Plenty of Trump 's behavior is patently unacceptable for the White House , be it his petty fights on Twitter or severe abuse of presidential power in withholding congressionally approved aid to a crucial ally for his own personal political gain .
Luckily , our legal system has proven resilient , mostly preventing Trump from going through with illegal or ill-advised actions .
Still , there 's no question that the country would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who does n't publicly degrade the presidency or privately try to expand the inflated powers of the executive branch .
Some conservatives are willing to compromise .
But the Democratic presidential debate in Nevada crystallized a crucial fact : They have no interest in offering an iota of accommodation .
Conservatives who are wary of Trump 's antics might be willing to trade their tax cuts and deregulatory agenda for Obama-era policies administered by a far more restrained president , ideally one who does n't insult women and immigrants .
What they absolutely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ victories for any of last night 's top offerings .
Oh , so you say Trump 's bogus emergency declaration for border security funding shows he has no respect for limits on executive authority ?
Democrats want to ameliorate that with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren , a wannabe court packer who has promised to bypass Congress and use executive action to cancel the majority of some $ 1 trillion of student loan debt , plus restrict the Second Amendment by requiring background checks and raising the minimum age of gun sales .
Oh @ @ @ @ @ @ @ authoritarian who freely admits he does n't care one lick about our impending debt crisis ?
Democrats want to give power back to the people by electing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders , a socialist who plans to nationalize somewhere between 30 % and 40 % of the national economy to the tune of $ 100 trillion of taxpayer cash .
Oh , Trump is a racist , sexist pig ?
Democrats want to restore the dignity of the White House by electing Michael Bloomberg , an accused serial sexual harasser who 's silenced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ca n't get in the way of gleefully goading cops into `` throw [ ing ] '' minorities `` up against the wall . ''
Oh , and if you want a centrist , we refuse to offer you Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar , the pro-choice candidate who will at least pay lip service to allow pro-lifers in her party , the liberal candidate who still believes capitalism works , and a country requires a semblance of border security .
Instead , you 'll get the 38-year-old former mayor of the 308th @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Buttigieg , who wants to legalize abortion up until the point of birth , pack the Supreme Court , and tax half the annual incomes of six-figure earners .
Oh , and if you 're still betting on lovable old Uncle Joe Biden , just remember : The Democratic establishment was ready to put him out to the pasture and instead embrace the evil billionaire until Bloomberg imploded on national television .
These are n't compromises .
These are n't 2 % tax hikes or pro-choice judges .
These are socialist and proto-fascist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 're the reason you wo n't see many Republicans willing to cede an inch of ground to correct whatever wrongs the Trump administration inflicted on historical norms .
If Democrats want to earn the anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical vote , they have to earn it .
But after last night , it 's not even clear that they want it .

The 2016 election offered the country a choice between a corrupt, authoritarian New Yorker with serious baggage related to sexual assault and a corrupt, authoritarian New Yorker with serious baggage related to sexual assault. It was an easy election to sit out, as evidenced by the low percentage of voter turnout equal to that of 2004, not 2008.
President Trump's tenure has oscillated from the nadirs of his Charlottesville, Virginia, conundrum and border negotiation fiascos to sky-high apexes of achieving landmark criminal justice reform and the lowest unemployment rate in half a century. But save for early on in his presidency, his faux pas have resulted from his personal foibles, not his actual policy.
Plenty of Trump's behavior is patently unacceptable for the White House, be it his petty fights on Twitter or severe abuse of presidential power in withholding congressionally approved aid to a crucial ally for his own personal political gain. Luckily, our legal system has proven resilient, mostly preventing Trump from going through with illegal or ill-advised actions. Still, there's no question that the country would benefit from a return to a president who doesn't publicly degrade the presidency or privately try to expand the inflated powers of the executive branch.
Some conservatives are willing to compromise. But the Democratic presidential debate in Nevada crystallized a crucial fact: They have no interest in offering an iota of accommodation.
Conservatives who are wary of Trump's antics might be willing to trade their tax cuts and deregulatory agenda for Obama-era policies administered by a far more restrained president, ideally one who doesn't insult women and immigrants. What they absolutely won't do is trade Trump's victories for any of last night's top offerings.
Oh, so you say Trump's bogus emergency declaration for border security funding shows he has no respect for limits on executive authority? Democrats want to ameliorate that with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a wannabe court packer who has promised to bypass Congress and use executive action to cancel the majority of some $1 trillion of student loan debt, plus restrict the Second Amendment by requiring background checks and raising the minimum age of gun sales.
Oh, you say Trump is a big-government authoritarian who freely admits he doesn't care one lick about our impending debt crisis? Democrats want to give power back to the people by electing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist who plans to nationalize somewhere between 30% and 40% of the national economy to the tune of $100 trillion of taxpayer cash.
Oh, Trump is a racist, sexist pig? Democrats want to restore the dignity of the White House by electing Michael Bloomberg, an accused serial sexual harasser who's silenced his alleged victims with nondisclosure agreements so they can't get in the way of gleefully goading cops into "throw[ing]" minorities "up against the wall."
Oh, and if you want a centrist, we refuse to offer you Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the pro-choice candidate who will at least pay lip service to allow pro-lifers in her party, the liberal candidate who still believes capitalism works, and a country requires a semblance of border security. Instead, you'll get the 38-year-old former mayor of the 308th largest city in the country, Pete Buttigieg, who wants to legalize abortion up until the point of birth, pack the Supreme Court, and tax half the annual incomes of six-figure earners.
Oh, and if you're still betting on lovable old Uncle Joe Biden, just remember: The Democratic establishment was ready to put him out to the pasture and instead embrace the evil billionaire until Bloomberg imploded on national television.
These aren't compromises. These aren't 2% tax hikes or pro-choice judges. These are socialist and proto-fascist nightmares. And most importantly, they're the reason you won't see many Republicans willing to cede an inch of ground to correct whatever wrongs the Trump administration inflicted on historical norms.
If Democrats want to earn the anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical vote, they have to earn it. But after last night, it's not even clear that they want it.


thewashingtonexaminer--2020-02-20--Warren flip-flops on super PAC money, because what else did you expect?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren will do whatever it takes to get ahead professionally .
She will mislead employers and voters about her heritage .
She will devise dubious anecdotes about the supposed hardships she suffered as a working pregnant woman .
She will even flip-flop on her oft-repeated pledge to reject the help of super political action committees .
Asked this week about her decision to welcome a PAC to spend on behalf of her floundering 2020 Democratic primary campaign , Warren said , “ The first I got into this race over a year ago , I said , ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in will agree , no Super PACs for any of us.
’ I renewed that call dozens of times , and I couldn ’ t get a single Democrat to go along with me.
” She added , “ Finally , we reached the point a few weeks ago where all of the men who were on the debate stage all had either Super PACs or they were multibillionaires who could rummage around in their sock drawers and find enough money to be able to fund a campaign , and the only people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the two women.
” Ah , so it is everyone else ’ s fault that she broke her promise to reject super PAC funding .
Got it .
“ At that point , ” Warren ’ s lengthy explanation continued , “ there were some women around the country who said , ‘ That ’ s just not right.
’ ” I would love to know who these anonymous women are .
“ So here ’ s where I stand : If all the candidates want to get rid of Super PACs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lead the charge , ” the senator concluded .
“ But that ’ s how it has to be .
It can ’ t be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don ’ t. ” And to think , it was just two weeks ago during a debate in New Hampshire that Warren boasted that , with the exception of Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota , “ everyone ” on the stage was “ either a billionaire or is receiving help from PACs that can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for good measure , I would like to draw your attention to the Warren campaign ’ s `` fact ” sheet touting her promise to forgo PAC cash .
“ Elizabeth rejects big money ’ s influence on our political system : she ’ s not taking a dime of PAC money in this campaign , ” it claims .
“ She ’ s not sucking up to billionaires to fund a Super PAC .
She ’ s not giving wealthy donors special access .
And she challenges every other candidate who asks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ say exactly the same thing.
” Warren , it continues , “ does not accept contributions from any PAC … Third , Elizabeth rejects the help of Super PACs and would disavow any Super PAC formed to support her in the Democratic primary.
” Someone should tell her .
It was easy for Warren to make big , sweeping promises back when she was polling well and her fundraising numbers looked good .
But now that times are tough for the senator , who is struggling to raise funds as she slips to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she is engaging in as brazen a flip-flop as ever committed by a critter of Washington .
With resolve like this , we should count it as a blessing that her 2020 campaign stands no chance of placing her behind the Resolute Desk .

Sen. Elizabeth Warren will do whatever it takes to get ahead professionally.
She will mislead employers and voters about her heritage. She will devise dubious anecdotes about the supposed hardships she suffered as a working pregnant woman. She will even flip-flop on her oft-repeated pledge to reject the help of super political action committees.
Asked this week about her decision to welcome a PAC to spend on behalf of her floundering 2020 Democratic primary campaign, Warren said, “The first I got into this race over a year ago, I said, ‘I hope every presidential candidate who comes in will agree, no Super PACs for any of us.’ I renewed that call dozens of times, and I couldn’t get a single Democrat to go along with me.”
She added, “Finally, we reached the point a few weeks ago where all of the men who were on the debate stage all had either Super PACs or they were multibillionaires who could rummage around in their sock drawers and find enough money to be able to fund a campaign, and the only people who didn’t have them were the two women.”
Ah, so it is everyone else’s fault that she broke her promise to reject super PAC funding. Got it.
“At that point,” Warren’s lengthy explanation continued, “there were some women around the country who said, ‘That’s just not right.’”
I would love to know who these anonymous women are.
“So here’s where I stand: If all the candidates want to get rid of Super PACs, count me in — I’ll lead the charge,” the senator concluded. “But that’s how it has to be. It can’t be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don’t.”
And to think, it was just two weeks ago during a debate in New Hampshire that Warren boasted that, with the exception of Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, “everyone” on the stage was “either a billionaire or is receiving help from PACs that can do unlimited spending.”
Also, just for good measure, I would like to draw your attention to the Warren campaign’s "fact” sheet touting her promise to forgo PAC cash.
“Elizabeth rejects big money’s influence on our political system: she’s not taking a dime of PAC money in this campaign,” it claims. “She’s not sucking up to billionaires to fund a Super PAC. She’s not giving wealthy donors special access. And she challenges every other candidate who asks for your vote in this primary to say exactly the same thing.”
Warren, it continues, “does not accept contributions from any PAC … Third, Elizabeth rejects the help of Super PACs and would disavow any Super PAC formed to support her in the Democratic primary.”
Someone should tell her.
It was easy for Warren to make big, sweeping promises back when she was polling well and her fundraising numbers looked good. But now that times are tough for the senator, who is struggling to raise funds as she slips to fourth place in the Democratic primary, she is engaging in as brazen a flip-flop as ever committed by a critter of Washington.
With resolve like this, we should count it as a blessing that her 2020 campaign stands no chance of placing her behind the Resolute Desk.


thewashingtonexaminer--2020-02-20--Trump: Roger Stone has 'very good chance of exoneration'

Hours after Roger Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison , President Trump said he expects the eccentric political adviser to be exonerated .
Speaking at the commencement address at the Hope for Prisoners graduation in Las Vegas on Thursday , Trump said the forewoman of the jury in Stone 's case was `` totally tainted . ''
The juror , Tomeka Hart , is a former Democratic congressional candidate who posted anti-Trump messages to social media , leading Stone 's attorneys to push for a new trial .
`` I want to address today 's sentencing of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He 's become a big part of the news over the last little while , and I 'm following this very closely , and I want to see it play out to its fullest because Roger has a very good chance of exoneration , in my opinion , '' Trump said .
Stone was found guilty in November on five separate counts of lying to the House Intelligence Committee during its investigation into Russian interference about his alleged outreach to WikiLeaks , in addition to one count that he “ corruptly influenced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ congressional investigation and another for attempting to persuade corruptly the congressional testimony of radio show host Randy Credico .
Judge Amy Berman Jackson handed down the sentence on Thursday , culminating in months of high-profile intrigue surrounding the longtime Trump associate .
“ The defendant lied about a matter of great national and international importance … and he lied to Congress , '' Jackson said .
`` There was nothing unfair , phony , or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution.
” Trump , who pardoned 11 people last week , including @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gave no indication about whether he may pardon Stone .
“ I ’ m not going to do anything in terms of the great powers bestowed upon a president of the United States , '' Trump said .
`` I want the process to play out .
I think that ’ s the best thing to do because I ’ d love to see Roger exonerated .
”

Hours after Roger Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison, President Trump said he expects the eccentric political adviser to be exonerated.
Speaking at the commencement address at the Hope for Prisoners graduation in Las Vegas on Thursday, Trump said the forewoman of the jury in Stone's case was "totally tainted." The juror, Tomeka Hart, is a former Democratic congressional candidate who posted anti-Trump messages to social media, leading Stone's attorneys to push for a new trial.
"I want to address today's sentencing of a man, Roger Stone. Roger Stone. He's become a big part of the news over the last little while, and I'm following this very closely, and I want to see it play out to its fullest because Roger has a very good chance of exoneration, in my opinion," Trump said.
Stone was found guilty in November on five separate counts of lying to the House Intelligence Committee during its investigation into Russian interference about his alleged outreach to WikiLeaks, in addition to one count that he “corruptly influenced, obstructed, and impeded” the congressional investigation and another for attempting to persuade corruptly the congressional testimony of radio show host Randy Credico.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson handed down the sentence on Thursday, culminating in months of high-profile intrigue surrounding the longtime Trump associate.
“The defendant lied about a matter of great national and international importance … and he lied to Congress," Jackson said. "There was nothing unfair, phony, or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution.”
Trump, who pardoned 11 people last week, including former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, gave no indication about whether he may pardon Stone.
“I’m not going to do anything in terms of the great powers bestowed upon a president of the United States," Trump said. "I want the process to play out. I think that’s the best thing to do because I’d love to see Roger exonerated.”


thewashingtonexaminer--2020-02-20--Anti-super PAC crusader Elizabeth Warren flips to accept support as race gets tough

Elizabeth Warren has drastically changed her position on super PACs in a matter of weeks as she struggles to bounce back from a disappointing showing in early presidential nominating contests .
`` Yeah , except everyone on this stage except Amy and me is either a billionaire or is receiving help from PACs that can do unlimited spending , '' the Massachusetts senator declared during the New Hampshire Democratic presidential debate earlier this month .
`` So if you really want to live where you say , then put your money where your mouth is , and say no to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weeks later , both Warren and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar are accepting help from super PACs .
Persist PAC filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday and then placed about $ 800,000 in pro-Warren ads in Nevada media markets ahead of Saturday 's caucuses .
A super PAC called Kitchen Table Conversations formed last week and then placed $ 1.1 million worth of pro-Klobuchar ads in Nevada and South Carolina .
Super PACs have no contribution limits and are legally prohibited from giving to a candidate 's campaign or directly coordinating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fund ads or other voter outreach efforts in support of candidates .
The 2016 presidential campaign cycle saw the rise of PACs formed purely to support a specific candidate and often run by individuals who previously worked for that candidate .
Warren 's website says that she `` rejects the help of Super PACs and would disavow any Super PAC formed to support her in the Democratic primary . ''
But she declined to do so on Thursday .
`` If all the candidates want to get rid of super PACs , count @ @ @ @ @ @ @ charge .
But that 's how it has to be .
It ca n't be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don ’ t , ” Warren said on Thursday .
`` We reached the point a few weeks ago that all the men who were still in this race and on the debate stage all had either super PACs or they were multibillionaires and could just , you know , rummage around in their sock drawers to find enough money to be able to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A super PAC called Unite the Country formed to support former Vice President Joe Biden in October .
VoteVets , a super PAC that supports veterans , endorsed former South Bend , Indiana , Mayor Pete Buttigieg in December and has run ads supporting his candidacy in early voting states .
A nursing union super PAC supports Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders , and a `` dark money '' nonprofit group , Our Revolution , is supporting Sanders 's candidacy through funding grassroots efforts .
The flip for Warren comes as she tries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the New Hampshire primary , where she came in fourth place and earned no nominating delegates to the Democratic National Convention .
[ Opinion : Warren flip-flops on super PAC money , because what else did you expect ? ]

Elizabeth Warren has drastically changed her position on super PACs in a matter of weeks as she struggles to bounce back from a disappointing showing in early presidential nominating contests.
"Yeah, except everyone on this stage except Amy and me is either a billionaire or is receiving help from PACs that can do unlimited spending," the Massachusetts senator declared during the New Hampshire Democratic presidential debate earlier this month. "So if you really want to live where you say, then put your money where your mouth is, and say no to the PACs."
Less than two weeks later, both Warren and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar are accepting help from super PACs.
Persist PAC filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday and then placed about $800,000 in pro-Warren ads in Nevada media markets ahead of Saturday's caucuses.
A super PAC called Kitchen Table Conversations formed last week and then placed $1.1 million worth of pro-Klobuchar ads in Nevada and South Carolina.
Super PACs have no contribution limits and are legally prohibited from giving to a candidate's campaign or directly coordinating with them, but they can independently fund ads or other voter outreach efforts in support of candidates. The 2016 presidential campaign cycle saw the rise of PACs formed purely to support a specific candidate and often run by individuals who previously worked for that candidate.
Warren's website says that she "rejects the help of Super PACs and would disavow any Super PAC formed to support her in the Democratic primary." But she declined to do so on Thursday.
"If all the candidates want to get rid of super PACs, count me in. I'll lead the charge. But that's how it has to be. It can't be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don’t,” Warren said on Thursday.
"We reached the point a few weeks ago that all the men who were still in this race and on the debate stage all had either super PACs or they were multibillionaires and could just, you know, rummage around in their sock drawers to find enough money to be able to fund a campaign," Warren added.
A super PAC called Unite the Country formed to support former Vice President Joe Biden in October. VoteVets, a super PAC that supports veterans, endorsed former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in December and has run ads supporting his candidacy in early voting states. A nursing union super PAC supports Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and a "dark money" nonprofit group, Our Revolution, is supporting Sanders's candidacy through funding grassroots efforts.
The flip for Warren comes as she tries to bounce back from a disappointing showing in the New Hampshire primary, where she came in fourth place and earned no nominating delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
[Opinion: Warren flip-flops on super PAC money, because what else did you expect?]


thewashingtonexaminer--2020-02-20--Bernie Sanders snags endorsement from top Muslim group

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders earned an endorsement this week from the self-proclaimed largest Muslim political action committee in the United States .
announced their support of the Vermont senator on Thursday , saying the decision was based on his “ inclusive ” presidential campaign .
“ More than any other presidential candidate , Senator Sanders has built a historically inclusive and forward-thinking movement : one that represents America as a set of ideas grounded in the belief that all humans are equal and worthy of a dignified life , ” Emgage PAC CEO Wa'el Alzayat .
“ Our endorsement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the polls to ensure that our voices are heard .
Furthermore , we hope that this endorsement marks a new era of presidential candidates including Muslim American voices in the political process and policy-making decisions , '' he added .
An effort has been made by the Sanders campaign to make inroads with the Muslim community , members of which have felt largely ignored by the 2020 field .
Since announcing his candidacy for president , Sanders has a Muslim campaign manager , named a prominent Muslim activist as a campaign surrogate , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ victims of a New Zealand terrorist attack .
“ Sanders has taken an active role in elevating Muslim communities and Muslim spokespersons in the national presidential debate , ” Robert McCaw , director of the government affairs department at the Council on American-Islamic Relations , .
“ He ’ s not shy in going into Muslim spaces publicly and endorsing our issues and making them a part of the campaign.
” The next election contest will be held Saturday in Nevada , where Sanders holds a double-digit lead , .

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders earned an endorsement this week from the self-proclaimed largest Muslim political action committee in the United States.
Emgage PAC announced their support of the Vermont senator on Thursday, saying the decision was based on his “inclusive” presidential campaign.
“More than any other presidential candidate, Senator Sanders has built a historically inclusive and forward-thinking movement: one that represents America as a set of ideas grounded in the belief that all humans are equal and worthy of a dignified life,” Emgage PAC CEO Wa'el Alzayat said in a statement .
“Our endorsement is intended to galvanize Muslim Americans at the polls to ensure that our voices are heard. Furthermore, we hope that this endorsement marks a new era of presidential candidates including Muslim American voices in the political process and policy-making decisions," he added.
An effort has been made by the Sanders campaign to make inroads with the Muslim community, members of which have felt largely ignored by the 2020 field.
Since announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders has appointed a Muslim campaign manager, named a prominent Muslim activist as a campaign surrogate, and visited a mosque to honor the victims of a New Zealand terrorist attack.
“Sanders has taken an active role in elevating Muslim communities and Muslim spokespersons in the national presidential debate,” Robert McCaw, director of the government affairs department at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in October . “He’s not shy in going into Muslim spaces publicly and endorsing our issues and making them a part of the campaign.”


thewashingtonexaminer--2020-02-20--How Bloomberg is spinning his rocky debate performance

LAS VEGAS — Michael Bloomberg 's presidential campaign is working hard to spin his rocky debate debut .
Their moves : overemphasize his supposed high points , claim that his `` career politician '' presidential rivals were better positioned to land harsh blows against the former New York City mayor 's record , and redirect attention to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and President Trump .
`` Mike is not a career politician , '' top Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson told reporters in the spin room following Wednesday 's debate in Las Vegas .
`` These other folks have been in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 've been debating a long time .
But I think Mike made it very clear tonight who is best able to take on Donald Trump . ''
A statement from Bloomberg 's campaign manager Kevin Sheekey also suggested that Bloomberg 's practiced debate rivals had an advantage , bragging that it took Bloomberg `` just 45 minutes in his first debate in 10 years to get his legs on the stage . ''
In a tweet Wednesday night , the former three-term New York mayor dismissed his rivals as a `` group of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ `` created actual change . ''
Bloomberg 's roughest moment of the night came when Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren pressured him to release women who accused him of sexual harassment from nondisclosure agreements .
`` None of them accused me of doing anything , other than maybe they did n't like a joke I told , '' Bloomberg said , prompting groans from the audience .
Wolfson argued that Bloomberg 's flippant response was well-received by viewers .
`` What Democrats want is somebody who takes responsibility , someone who is honest , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he has said in his life that he regrets .
Nobody is perfect , '' Wolfson said .
`` That 's the kind of president he 'd be . ''
At a campaign rally on Thursday , Bloomberg redirected attention to the biggest villain to Democrats in 2020 .
“ So how was your night last night ?
” Bloomberg joked .
“ Look , the real winner in the debate last night was Donald Trump.
” '' If we choose a candidate who appeals to a small base like Sen. Sanders , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he added .
Throughout the two-hour affair , Bloomberg landed few effective attacks on the rest of the stage .
In one instance , he asked if any of the other candidates on stage had started a business , earning silence from the rest of the pack .
But Bloomberg 's team edited a video of the moment and turned the two-second moment into a 22-second video with crickets in the background , drawing wide criticism .
`` Congrats to the Bloomberg campaign for figuring out the only way they could salvage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deceptively editing video , '' said Joe Biden 's spokesman , Bill Russo .

LAS VEGAS — Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign is working hard to spin his rocky debate debut.
Their moves: overemphasize his supposed high points, claim that his "career politician" presidential rivals were better positioned to land harsh blows against the former New York City mayor's record, and redirect attention to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and President Trump.
"Mike is not a career politician," top Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson told reporters in the spin room following Wednesday's debate in Las Vegas. "These other folks have been in public life a long time. They've been debating a long time. But I think Mike made it very clear tonight who is best able to take on Donald Trump."
A statement from Bloomberg's campaign manager Kevin Sheekey also suggested that Bloomberg's practiced debate rivals had an advantage, bragging that it took Bloomberg "just 45 minutes in his first debate in 10 years to get his legs on the stage."
In a tweet Wednesday night, the former three-term New York mayor dismissed his rivals as a "group of politicians" and asserted that he has "created actual change."
Tonight, I stood on a stage with a group of politicians.
They talked, because that’s what they’re good at.
They went on and on about what they could and should do.
I have built. I have created actual change. I have gotten it done.
That’s what I’ll do for America. #DemDebate — Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 20, 2020
Bloomberg's roughest moment of the night came when Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren pressured him to release women who accused him of sexual harassment from nondisclosure agreements.
"None of them accused me of doing anything, other than maybe they didn't like a joke I told," Bloomberg said, prompting groans from the audience.
Wolfson argued that Bloomberg's flippant response was well-received by viewers.
"What Democrats want is somebody who takes responsibility, someone who is honest, and says that there are things that he has said in his life that he regrets. Nobody is perfect," Wolfson said. "That's the kind of president he'd be."
At a campaign rally on Thursday, Bloomberg redirected attention to the biggest villain to Democrats in 2020.
“So how was your night last night?” Bloomberg joked. “Look, the real winner in the debate last night was Donald Trump.”
"If we choose a candidate who appeals to a small base like Sen. Sanders, it will be a fatal error,” he added.
Throughout the two-hour affair, Bloomberg landed few effective attacks on the rest of the stage. In one instance, he asked if any of the other candidates on stage had started a business, earning silence from the rest of the pack.
But Bloomberg's team edited a video of the moment and turned the two-second moment into a 22-second video with crickets in the background, drawing wide criticism.
"Congrats to the Bloomberg campaign for figuring out the only way they could salvage last night's absolute disaster was by deceptively editing video," said Joe Biden's spokesman, Bill Russo.


thewashingtonexaminer--2020-02-21--'Never Sanders' Needs to Step Up Its Game

With Super Tuesday right around the corner , improbable as it might have seemed even a year ago , socialist Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders is running strong in the Democratic primary .
After solid showings in both Iowa and New Hampshire , there ’ s a significant risk that he could ultimately triumph , either outright or at a contested convention at which he holds a plurality of delegates .
As FiveThirtyEight ’ s Nate Silver wrote last week , the model used by the data and polling analysis site is now “ quite bullish on Sanders.
” While it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that no candidate wins a majority of delegates before the convention , the model also indicates that Sanders is ultimately the “ most likely Democrat to win a majority of pledged delegates.
” A few factors have come into play here .
About 40 % of pledged delegates come from Super Tuesday states and those preceding them , where Sanders has ( so far ) done a pretty good job of running up his numbers .
Sanders tends to clear 15 % in each state vote , the minimum percent to be eligible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ always bank at least a delegate here or there .
And Sanders is not , in fact , as disliked as one might suspect .
He currently holds roughly a 5-point advantage in a head-to-head matchup against President Trump , according to the RealClearPolitics average .
But a big factor weighing in Sanders ’ s favor is that a glut of centrists remains in the contest , fighting it out among themselves .
Technically , Mayor Pete Buttigieg has the outright lead , based on pure delegate math .
But others in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reason to continue .
In addition to the Indianan there ’ s former Vice President Joe Biden , whose campaign rests on the assumption that his delegate count should improve sharply after South Carolina .
There ’ s Sen. Amy Klobuchar , who is gaining traction and in New Hampshire proved appealing to late-deciding voters .
And , of course , there ’ s the elephant — or rather former elephant — in the room , Mayor Michael Bloomberg .
As we saw with the Republican field in 2016 , there ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ candidates could split the non-Bernie vote and thereby , ironically , lock down a Bernie win .
In New Hampshire , Silver notes , “ 50 percent of voters said Sanders ’ s positions were too liberal .
Meanwhile , the combined vote shares for Buttigeig ( sic ) , Klobuchar and Biden ( 52.6 percent ) considerably exceeded that for Sanders and [ Sen. Elizabeth ] Warren ( 34.9 percent ) .
” In autumn 2015 , I was getting laughed out of the room by fellow Republicans for arguing that Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And we all know how that turned out .
Bernie-skeptical Democrats who wish to avoid a 2016 redux on their side of the aisle should take note of the road they are going down .
In several vital areas , they ’ re repeating the same mistakes of the Never Trump coalition .
The first and most obvious thing on everyone ’ s lips this week , but especially Bloomberg ’ s , is “ consolidate.
” Many are starting to wake up to the notion that Sanders has a clear and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recognizing that fact and acting on it , whether by campaigns coordinating attacks on Sanders or centrist Democratic candidates actually dropping out to make way for a single contender , are different things entirely .
It also doesn ’ t help when Bloomberg , the guy who has most adamantly made the consolidation argument , is not crushing it in the polls and turned in a fairly disastrous debate performance last Wednesday .
The truth is , a big part of how Trump became the GOP nominee was that anti-Trump forces refused to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so he just kept on moving up .
Some did try to prevent it .
Notably , figures in the camp of Sen. Ted Cruz have told at least a few political writers around Washington , D.C. , that at a crucial stage in the 2016 fight , they had arranged a meeting at which the Cruz campaign intended to try to cut a deal with Sen. Marco Rubio to shut Trump down , likely involving a Cruz-Rubio or a Rubio-Cruz ticket .
Allegedly , Rubio and/or his emissaries failed to show .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ unchanged .
Gov .
John Kasich , who never had a real shot anyway , certainly stayed in the race for a ridiculously long period .
This likely prevented Cruz from amassing delegates that could have been used to block Trump .
A key focus for the anti-Trump super-PAC I ran in 2016 was limiting Kasich ’ s delegate accruals in Arizona and Utah to ensure a stronger delegate count for Cruz , something we did successfully in those two states .
But what if anti-Trump forces in the GOP had done what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What if Cruz and Rubio had joined a ticket on terms that would make them virtual co-presidents ?
This is something that Buttigieg , Biden , and Bloomberg should all be thinking hard about right now , and they should be looking squarely at Amy Klobuchar , either as their potential boss or as their potential partner in such an arrangement .
Unlike two of the moderate men , Klobuchar has Senate experience and knowhow that will be vital for getting an agenda through Congress .
Unlike all of them , she is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advantage in electoral politics ( just look at Trump ) .
Also unlike them , she is a woman who has won statewide in the Midwest .
Given the electoral map and the Democrats ’ zealous focus on identity politics , these are both positives .
Of course , to take this big but very straightforward step toward shutting down Sanders , Democratic centrists must be able to be realistic about their own chances .
They have to ask themselves if they ’ re content with gambling their party , and maybe even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to prove that , yes , people really do like them enough .
Particularly when the math does not look obviously workable .
Can they change that math ?
It ’ s possible .
Yet to do so would require making other changes that the collective anti-Trump Republicans mostly failed to do in 2016 , and which anti-Sanders Democrats should have begun last summer .
A major problem that afflicted the other 2016 GOP candidates was Trump ’ s extensive recognizability with potential voters .
Anyone who had walked through a supermarket checkout @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the name Trump .
Anyone who watched primetime NBC shows also knew the name Trump .
They knew what he looked like , that he was wealthy , that he was a “ boss.
” According to one statistic we heard while running our 2016 effort , Trump entered the 2016 primary with 99.2 % name ID .
Only Jeb Bush came close to that number , and the last name “ Bush ” was not a strong selling point after his brother ’ s White House tenure .
This continued even as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earnest .
Emblematic was Spencer Guinard , then 18 years old , who attended a Charleston , South Carolina , Trump rally covered by Yahoo News ’ Jon Ward .
As Ward reported , “ Guinard , originally from Boise , Idaho , had never heard of most of the Republican presidential candidates .
When I mentioned Marco Rubio , the Florida senator , Guinard told me he ’ d ‘ never heard that name.
’ ” But like everyone else , he ’ d heard of Trump .
This is a problem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But it ’ s also ( probably ) a problem for Biden .
For instance , Axios ’ Mike Allen reported last April that five out of a group of 12 Ohio swing voters who were shown pictures of 2020 presidential candidates “ had no idea ” who Biden was .
This is after eight years of having served as vice president , previously having run for president twice , and having been an active figure in national politics since the 1970s .
Probably some of those five voters now recognize Biden .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ voters , not diehard Democrats .
Nonetheless , recognizability is key , especially in states with open or semi-open primaries and caucuses , or states where voters can change their registration late .
Say what you will about Bloomberg ’ s advertising strategy — and there are lots of reasons to be skeptical one can “ buy ” a nomination , with most of the money dumped into TV ads that many viewers tune out — but it ’ s unlikely that by Super Tuesday , on March 3 , anyone in America @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Biden , by contrast , still probably lacks Trump-level recognition .
How do you change this ?
Stunts .
Street theater .
Getting attention .
Basically , what Trump did , though you don ’ t have to be as offensive about it ( protip : it ’ s probably not advisable to impersonate disabled people on a rally stage , for instance ) .
A lot of Rubio backers were unhappy when he launched the “ tiny hands ” attack on Trump and thought it “ unbecoming , ” but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to spend money , and fast .
It put him on the radar of people who weren ’ t paying attention .
For those GOP voters who were shopping for someone who didn ’ t look like a wuss , it helped beef up Rubio a bit .
Put another way , it ’ s time not just for the moderates to think about consolidating , but also to pick a fight with Sanders .
Last week , we saw a Democratic debate in which the centrists did this a bit — but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As with the anti-Trump contingent in 2016 , presumably they ’ re all afraid that if they attack Sanders too hard , his supporters will never back them in a general ( of course , as we saw in 2016 , a decent number of Sanders voters won ’ t back the eventual Democratic nominee anyway ) .
Given how Sanders ’ s ire appeared to rise , coupled with his health problems , it ’ s possible some of them also didn ’ t want to get too heated with him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s notable that Klobuchar jabbed at Sanders ’ s health a few times ) .
Bloomberg is doing this most , and most effectively , but even after hitting Sanders on socialism in the debate , it still is not enough .
Politics is nasty .
Where are the people crashing Sanders rallies with Soviet flags and blaring the Soviet national anthem over their phones ?
Or putting on Marx , Lenin , and Stalin masks ?
Or in Florida , showing up dressed up as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara waving Bernie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Bernie Sanders travel guides ” detailing his favorite places to hang out in Moscow , Managua , Havana , and Caracas ?
Given that Sanders first won office by aligning with the National Rifle Association , which Democratic voters seem to loathe , it ’ s frankly embarrassing that Biden , in particular , hasn ’ t made this into a line of major attack .
Biden could easily start hammering Bernie hard on this in town halls , at ice cream socials , and other voter meet-and-greets and simultaneously deploy some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carrying phony Kalashnikovs and talking about Sanders ’ s real record .
It would work better than his throwaway line at the end of last week ’ s debate hitting Sanders on the subject .
And while Bloomberg hit Sanders for his wealth and his swank millionaire properties , with a little help from Mayor Pete , this is also readily available ammunition , just lying around for the taking .
It would be best deployed by the Indianan , who appears to be the only non-millionaire in the race .
And the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also ( usually ) the most articulate candidate running and has an extremely able press team who could shove out the message of the socialist multimillionaire with three houses acting like an aggrieved factory worker making minimum wage .
Stuff such as this is petty and , in some cases , stupid .
But it draws attention to an opponent ’ s liabilities and gets the campaign pushing it on TV , thus boosting name recognition while having to spend hardly a dime .
And often , it provokes a response in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by baiting them into losing their cool .
Of course , to do it , you have to have treated the target seriously enough to do your opposition research in the first place , to know their liabilities and be willing to exploit them .
That ’ s something else that anti-Sanders candidates don ’ t seem to be doing , just as rival campaigns to Trump ’ s didn ’ t much bother with it in 2015 and early 2016 .
Like the crotchety old socialist , Trump was treated as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he did .
Sanders has had a long and colorful public life .
Obviously , it ’ s been colorful in ways that Trump ’ s is not , and vice versa .
But just as Trump proved to be an opposition research treasure trove once someone — not the GOP candidates so much as the media , super-PACs , and anti-Trump groups such as mine — dove in , so will Sanders .
It ’ s just not clear anyone has done this .
And if they have , they ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wrong reporters .
Many people who cover Sanders are fans of his who won ’ t write a bad word about him ; many others are simply pure horserace people .
Only a few have an investigative journalist ’ s bone in their bodies ( it ’ s those last few that you want to get the dirt in front of ) .
Ultimately , the moderates ’ campaigns should be looking for nuggets that underline Sanders ’ s elitism , hypocrisy on wages , benefits , climate , sexism , etc.
, @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is out of touch with the common voter .
One of the deadliest moments for Sanders ’ s campaign was probably when he was busted for not paying staff in line with his own $ 15 minimum wage plan and was proving less than enthusiastic about their union organizing efforts .
Things such as that can kill .
But so too can the palling-around-with-communists business .
There are still a lot of older Democratic voters who hated the Soviet Union , hated the Sandinistas , and generally hate socialism and communism .
Even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the “ socialist ” moniker themselves just because they like the New Deal and their Medicare and Social Security .
Plus , unlike Sanders ’ s younger followers , who may or may not turn out to vote , these people always vote .
They also have time on their hands to volunteer , and in many cases they have more disposable income than would a recent college graduate making $ 40,000 a year and carrying $ 100,000 worth of student debt .
Trump knows this .
It ’ s why when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hannity recently , he replied “ communist ” when Hannity said Sanders ’ s name .
It wasn ’ t nice .
It was nasty .
But Sanders isn ’ t a member of the GOP , and he ’ s actually not a member of the Democratic Party , either , even if he caucuses with them .
Trying to win an election isn ’ t like playing touch football .
This is the NFL , and if centrists want to stop Sanders ( which , incidentally , probably gives them a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they need to start getting rough and executing , fast .
God knows , when it ’ s general election time , Trump will do all of these things , so either go big or go home .
That ’ s how it works .
And if you don ’ t believe me , just ask Cruz , Rubio , Kasich , or anyone else who was left in Trump ’ s dust while saying “ this guy is a joke ” or “ I don ’ t want to cut a deal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ago .
Liz Mair is the founder , owner and president of Mair Strategies LLC , and a former adviser to Wisconsin Gov .
Scott Walker , Sen. Rand Paul , Gov .
Rick Perry , and Carly Fiorina .
In 2008 , she served as the Republican National Committee ’ s first and only online communications director , and a spokeswoman .

With Super Tuesday right around the corner, improbable as it might have seemed even a year ago, socialist Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders is running strong in the Democratic primary. After solid showings in both Iowa and New Hampshire, there’s a significant risk that he could ultimately triumph, either outright or at a contested convention at which he holds a plurality of delegates.
As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote last week, the model used by the data and polling analysis site is now “quite bullish on Sanders.” While it still shows as the most likely outcome that no candidate wins a majority of delegates before the convention, the model also indicates that Sanders is ultimately the “most likely Democrat to win a majority of pledged delegates.” A few factors have come into play here. About 40% of pledged delegates come from Super Tuesday states and those preceding them, where Sanders has (so far) done a pretty good job of running up his numbers. Sanders tends to clear 15% in each state vote, the minimum percent to be eligible to win delegates, so he can always bank at least a delegate here or there. And Sanders is not, in fact, as disliked as one might suspect. He currently holds roughly a 5-point advantage in a head-to-head matchup against President Trump, according to the RealClearPolitics average.
But a big factor weighing in Sanders’s favor is that a glut of centrists remains in the contest, fighting it out among themselves. Technically, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has the outright lead, based on pure delegate math. But others in the “moderate” lane see plenty of reason to continue. In addition to the Indianan there’s former Vice President Joe Biden, whose campaign rests on the assumption that his delegate count should improve sharply after South Carolina. There’s Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is gaining traction and in New Hampshire proved appealing to late-deciding voters. And, of course, there’s the elephant — or rather former elephant — in the room, Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
As we saw with the Republican field in 2016, there’s a risk that these “moderate” candidates could split the non-Bernie vote and thereby, ironically, lock down a Bernie win. In New Hampshire, Silver notes, “50 percent of voters said Sanders’s positions were too liberal. Meanwhile, the combined vote shares for Buttigeig (sic), Klobuchar and Biden (52.6 percent) considerably exceeded that for Sanders and [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren (34.9 percent).”
In autumn 2015, I was getting laughed out of the room by fellow Republicans for arguing that Trump could wind up as president fairly easily. And we all know how that turned out. Bernie-skeptical Democrats who wish to avoid a 2016 redux on their side of the aisle should take note of the road they are going down. In several vital areas, they’re repeating the same mistakes of the Never Trump coalition.
The first and most obvious thing on everyone’s lips this week, but especially Bloomberg’s, is “consolidate.” Many are starting to wake up to the notion that Sanders has a clear and viable path to the nomination. But recognizing that fact and acting on it, whether by campaigns coordinating attacks on Sanders or centrist Democratic candidates actually dropping out to make way for a single contender, are different things entirely. It also doesn’t help when Bloomberg, the guy who has most adamantly made the consolidation argument, is not crushing it in the polls and turned in a fairly disastrous debate performance last Wednesday.
The truth is, a big part of how Trump became the GOP nominee was that anti-Trump forces refused to consolidate to block him out, and so he just kept on moving up. Some did try to prevent it. Notably, figures in the camp of Sen. Ted Cruz have told at least a few political writers around Washington, D.C., that at a crucial stage in the 2016 fight, they had arranged a meeting at which the Cruz campaign intended to try to cut a deal with Sen. Marco Rubio to shut Trump down, likely involving a Cruz-Rubio or a Rubio-Cruz ticket. Allegedly, Rubio and/or his emissaries failed to show. So the dynamics of the race continued unchanged.
Gov. John Kasich, who never had a real shot anyway, certainly stayed in the race for a ridiculously long period. This likely prevented Cruz from amassing delegates that could have been used to block Trump. A key focus for the anti-Trump super-PAC I ran in 2016 was limiting Kasich’s delegate accruals in Arizona and Utah to ensure a stronger delegate count for Cruz, something we did successfully in those two states.
But what if anti-Trump forces in the GOP had done what Democrats could do now and consolidated? What if Cruz and Rubio had joined a ticket on terms that would make them virtual co-presidents? This is something that Buttigieg, Biden, and Bloomberg should all be thinking hard about right now, and they should be looking squarely at Amy Klobuchar, either as their potential boss or as their potential partner in such an arrangement. Unlike two of the moderate men, Klobuchar has Senate experience and knowhow that will be vital for getting an agenda through Congress. Unlike all of them, she is actually funny, which is a huge advantage in electoral politics (just look at Trump). Also unlike them, she is a woman who has won statewide in the Midwest. Given the electoral map and the Democrats’ zealous focus on identity politics, these are both positives.
Of course, to take this big but very straightforward step toward shutting down Sanders, Democratic centrists must be able to be realistic about their own chances. They have to ask themselves if they’re content with gambling their party, and maybe even the country, on an egotistical desire to prove that, yes, people really do like them enough. Particularly when the math does not look obviously workable.
Can they change that math? It’s possible. Yet to do so would require making other changes that the collective anti-Trump Republicans mostly failed to do in 2016, and which anti-Sanders Democrats should have begun last summer.
A major problem that afflicted the other 2016 GOP candidates was Trump’s extensive recognizability with potential voters. Anyone who had walked through a supermarket checkout in the prior 30 years already knew the name Trump. Anyone who watched primetime NBC shows also knew the name Trump. They knew what he looked like, that he was wealthy, that he was a “boss.” According to one statistic we heard while running our 2016 effort, Trump entered the 2016 primary with 99.2% name ID. Only Jeb Bush came close to that number, and the last name “Bush” was not a strong selling point after his brother’s White House tenure.
This continued even as the Republican contest was kicking off in earnest. Emblematic was Spencer Guinard, then 18 years old, who attended a Charleston, South Carolina, Trump rally covered by Yahoo News’ Jon Ward. As Ward reported, “Guinard, originally from Boise, Idaho, had never heard of most of the Republican presidential candidates. When I mentioned Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, Guinard told me he’d ‘never heard that name.’” But like everyone else, he’d heard of Trump.
This is a problem for Klobuchar and Buttigieg, especially. But it’s also (probably) a problem for Biden. For instance, Axios’ Mike Allen reported last April that five out of a group of 12 Ohio swing voters who were shown pictures of 2020 presidential candidates “had no idea” who Biden was. This is after eight years of having served as vice president, previously having run for president twice, and having been an active figure in national politics since the 1970s.
Probably some of those five voters now recognize Biden. And yes, they’re swing voters, not diehard Democrats. Nonetheless, recognizability is key, especially in states with open or semi-open primaries and caucuses, or states where voters can change their registration late. Say what you will about Bloomberg’s advertising strategy — and there are lots of reasons to be skeptical one can “buy” a nomination, with most of the money dumped into TV ads that many viewers tune out — but it’s unlikely that by Super Tuesday, on March 3, anyone in America won’t know who Bloomberg is. Biden, by contrast, still probably lacks Trump-level recognition.
How do you change this? Stunts. Street theater. Getting attention. Basically, what Trump did, though you don’t have to be as offensive about it (protip: it’s probably not advisable to impersonate disabled people on a rally stage, for instance).
A lot of Rubio backers were unhappy when he launched the “tiny hands” attack on Trump and thought it “unbecoming,” but it got him on cable news without having to spend money, and fast. It put him on the radar of people who weren’t paying attention. For those GOP voters who were shopping for someone who didn’t look like a wuss, it helped beef up Rubio a bit.
Put another way, it’s time not just for the moderates to think about consolidating, but also to pick a fight with Sanders. Last week, we saw a Democratic debate in which the centrists did this a bit — but barely more than they attacked each other. As with the anti-Trump contingent in 2016, presumably they’re all afraid that if they attack Sanders too hard, his supporters will never back them in a general (of course, as we saw in 2016, a decent number of Sanders voters won’t back the eventual Democratic nominee anyway). Given how Sanders’s ire appeared to rise, coupled with his health problems, it’s possible some of them also didn’t want to get too heated with him on the debate stage (it’s notable that Klobuchar jabbed at Sanders’s health a few times).
Bloomberg is doing this most, and most effectively, but even after hitting Sanders on socialism in the debate, it still is not enough. Politics is nasty. Where are the people crashing Sanders rallies with Soviet flags and blaring the Soviet national anthem over their phones? Or putting on Marx, Lenin, and Stalin masks? Or in Florida, showing up dressed up as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara waving Bernie Sanders signs? Where are the fake “Bernie Sanders travel guides” detailing his favorite places to hang out in Moscow, Managua, Havana, and Caracas?
Given that Sanders first won office by aligning with the National Rifle Association, which Democratic voters seem to loathe, it’s frankly embarrassing that Biden, in particular, hasn’t made this into a line of major attack. Biden could easily start hammering Bernie hard on this in town halls, at ice cream socials, and other voter meet-and-greets and simultaneously deploy some fake "NRA members for Bernie" carrying phony Kalashnikovs and talking about Sanders’s real record. It would work better than his throwaway line at the end of last week’s debate hitting Sanders on the subject.
And while Bloomberg hit Sanders for his wealth and his swank millionaire properties, with a little help from Mayor Pete, this is also readily available ammunition, just lying around for the taking. It would be best deployed by the Indianan, who appears to be the only non-millionaire in the race. And the good news is, he’s also (usually) the most articulate candidate running and has an extremely able press team who could shove out the message of the socialist multimillionaire with three houses acting like an aggrieved factory worker making minimum wage.
Stuff such as this is petty and, in some cases, stupid. But it draws attention to an opponent’s liabilities and gets the campaign pushing it on TV, thus boosting name recognition while having to spend hardly a dime. And often, it provokes a response in the targeted candidate that sours voters on them by baiting them into losing their cool.
Of course, to do it, you have to have treated the target seriously enough to do your opposition research in the first place, to know their liabilities and be willing to exploit them. That’s something else that anti-Sanders candidates don’t seem to be doing, just as rival campaigns to Trump’s didn’t much bother with it in 2015 and early 2016. Like the crotchety old socialist, Trump was treated as a joke who could never win. Until he did.
Sanders has had a long and colorful public life. Obviously, it’s been colorful in ways that Trump’s is not, and vice versa. But just as Trump proved to be an opposition research treasure trove once someone — not the GOP candidates so much as the media, super-PACs, and anti-Trump groups such as mine — dove in, so will Sanders. It’s just not clear anyone has done this. And if they have, they’re talking about the wrong information to the wrong reporters. Many people who cover Sanders are fans of his who won’t write a bad word about him; many others are simply pure horserace people. Only a few have an investigative journalist’s bone in their bodies (it’s those last few that you want to get the dirt in front of).
Ultimately, the moderates’ campaigns should be looking for nuggets that underline Sanders’s elitism, hypocrisy on wages, benefits, climate, sexism, etc., and generally the extent to which he is out of touch with the common voter. One of the deadliest moments for Sanders’s campaign was probably when he was busted for not paying staff in line with his own $15 minimum wage plan and was proving less than enthusiastic about their union organizing efforts. Things such as that can kill.
But so too can the palling-around-with-communists business. There are still a lot of older Democratic voters who hated the Soviet Union, hated the Sandinistas, and generally hate socialism and communism. Even more, those who hate being tagged with the “socialist” moniker themselves just because they like the New Deal and their Medicare and Social Security. Plus, unlike Sanders’s younger followers, who may or may not turn out to vote, these people always vote. They also have time on their hands to volunteer, and in many cases they have more disposable income than would a recent college graduate making $40,000 a year and carrying $100,000 worth of student debt.
Trump knows this. It’s why when he played word association games with Sean Hannity recently, he replied “communist” when Hannity said Sanders’s name. It wasn’t nice. It was nasty. But Sanders isn’t a member of the GOP, and he’s actually not a member of the Democratic Party, either, even if he caucuses with them. Trying to win an election isn’t like playing touch football. This is the NFL, and if centrists want to stop Sanders (which, incidentally, probably gives them a better shot at stopping Trump), they need to start getting rough and executing, fast.
God knows, when it’s general election time, Trump will do all of these things, so either go big or go home. That’s how it works. And if you don’t believe me, just ask Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, or anyone else who was left in Trump’s dust while saying “this guy is a joke” or “I don’t want to cut a deal with X” a mere four years ago.
Liz Mair is the founder, owner and president of Mair Strategies LLC, and a former adviser to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Sen. Rand Paul, Gov. Rick Perry, and Carly Fiorina. In 2008, she served as the Republican National Committee’s first and only online communications director, and a spokeswoman.


The privilege pyramid

Privilege is an outgrowth of the social justice movement , that branch of political activism that asserts there ’ s an inherent unfairness , and prejudice , rooted in American life .
This unfairness manifests itself in the oppression , grievance , and victimization of women , nonwhites , gays , lesbians , and even transsexuals .
It ’ s an ideology that demands that the country ’ s very foundations , customs , and norms be reordered to right all of its wrongs .
The goal of the movement isn ’ t always clear because it frequently changes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deemed to have suffered adequately and which set is guilty of some form of privilege .
Because the movement operates largely by using shame , it can sometimes seem that shame is in itself the objective .
Friedrich Nietzsche directly influenced today ’ s version of social justice by asserting that there is an inseparable link between morality and power .
He wrote in his 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality that those who wished to overthrow the established hierarchy intended to invert it so that the bottom would become the top @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t his prescription for society , but rather a severe criticism of the tendency to view society ’ s subordinates as inherently moral .
“ Only those who suffer are good , ” he wrote with acrimony .
“ Only the poor , the powerless , the lowly are good ; the suffering , the deprived , the sick , the ugly , are the only pious people , the only ones saved , salvation is for them alone , whereas you rich , the noble and powerful , you are eternally wicked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ godless , you will also be eternally wretched , cursed and damned !
” Nietzsche was identifying and criticizing the notion that those at the bottom of civilized societies should be presumed virtuous and admirable simply by nature of their suffering and disadvantages .
But that concept is precisely what forms the basis of the present social justice movement .
According to the movement and its ideology , the good , virtuous , and admirable are those who claim to have been aggrieved on account of their race , gender , or sexuality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and claiming oppression earns an individual a higher moral worth than those who are deemed “ privileged.
” Who has the power in America ’ s culture now ?
The social justice movement does , and that power is reinforced by Hollywood , the news media , academia , and much of the Washington political establishment .
Social justice ideology first spread through the universities and from there , to the other hubs of American culture .
It went from university academics , who taught it to their students , and then flowed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What ’ s seen in Hollywood entertainment and in national newspapers , on the TV news , and on the internet becomes a piece of our collective culture .
With enough repetition , it ’ s then absorbed into the mainstream .
This is how social justice ended up everywhere .
The ridiculous notion that individuals hold their own truths , as reflected in the asinine “ live your truth ” mantra , is a key feature of the social justice movement ’ s ideology .
It ’ s linked to what early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ standpoint epistemology.
” Epistemology is the philosophy of understanding human knowledge .
Standpoint epistemology , or standpoint knowledge , holds that the perspective of a certain person can lend that individual access to a unique truth that others don ’ t have and can never obtain .
Lukacs developed the concept in his 1923 work History and Class Consciousness , in which he refers to a kind of “ knowledge ” held by people of the working class that “ stands on a higher scientific plane objectively.
” In essence , depending on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , gender , sexuality , or any combination thereof — he or she will have access to a truth unobtainable to anyone who doesn ’ t share that identity .
Furthermore , social justice dictates that these truths must be acknowledged as unchallengeable and that the “ victims ” who profess to hold them are to be regarded with reverence .
In America , the earliest signs of social justice in its current state began in the 1960s .
Postmodern theories and ideas about class resentments and struggles made their way from Western @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eventually gave birth to the third-wave feminist movement , according to New York University professor Michael Rectenwald .
They spun off from there , creating the things that normal people now dread : political correctness , affirmative action , calls for reparations , identity politics , civil rights for infinite special classes of citizens , and on and on .
Because the social justice ideology , the movement , and its enforcers operate outside the purview of normal people , they have their own concepts and terms , some or all of which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ According to Rectenwald , “ social justice ” as a well-intentioned remedy to economic , societal problems traces back to the 1840s , when Italian Catholic Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli d ’ Azeglio used the term to describe “ the glaring lack of an adequate Catholic response to industrialism and urbanization , with their associated social and economic symptoms.
” It was the “ supplanting of guild-based cottage industries by urban factories [ and ] the displacement of workers ” during the Industrial Revolution that moved d ’ Azeglio to state that a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the impact it had had on the laborers .
During that period , factories and advancements in machinery disrupted the working classes of Western Europe , just as automation has done to the Midwest in America today .
The technological shift created economic opportunity for some at devastating expense to others .
“ The original social justice , ” writes Rectenwald , “ amounted to the protection and mobilization of small charitable and philanthropic organizations to address ( but not eliminate ) the recalcitrant social facts of individual , economic , and political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the new industrial economy.
” In short , there were private charities that worked to ameliorate the effects of job displacement and poverty of the industrial age .
That was considered social justice .
It stands in contrast to today ’ s social justice movement , which is only tangentially concerned with uplifting the impoverished .
It instead trains its energy on bringing down the “ privileged ” and reordering the social hierarchy around identity and grievance .
It wants the moral superiority of the oppressed moved to the top and nothing less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the work in bringing social justice from academia to the rest of America .
In her 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism , influential feminist Sandra Harding writes that “ by starting from the lived realities of women ’ s lives , we can identify the grounding for a theory of knowledge that should be the successor to both Enlightenment and Marxist epistemologies.
” In other words , Harding is asserting that women , simply by nature of their gender , possess a particular knowledge that should function as the viewpoint @ @ @ @ @ @ @ standpoint knowledge functions as the brain of social justice ideology , its heart is intersectionality , an ever-shifting ranking system that determines who is more aggrieved than the next , who deserves more deference than the other .
It ’ s a hazy , nonconcrete way of measuring overlapping identities and their corresponding hardships and victimhood .
The more cross sections of oppressed identities an individual can claim , the higher his or her status on the intersectionality scale .
It gets messy even within the movement .
Who can say whether one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Is a black woman more or less oppressed than a white gay man ?
Is a Latino man more or less privileged than a Palestinian transgender woman ?
Is a Native American man more or less aggrieved than a lesbian Asian woman ?
It ’ s all worked out through a type of never-ending oppression Olympics , a competition for the title of Most Aggrieved .
The judges are the social justice enforcers , the culture fascists in academia , in Hollywood , in the news media , and in political Washington .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ known by her pen name `` bell hooks , '' helped usher in the intersectionality ranking system in her 1984 book Feminist Theory : From Margin to Center , a critique of the feminist movement of the 1960s .
In that book , she argues that the movement overlooked struggles against forms of oppression that fall outside of gender , and outside of white women in particular .
She writes , “ Within society , all forms of oppression are supported by traditional Western thinking .
... Sexist oppression is of primary importance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist.
” She continues , “ Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by similar institutional and social structures , one system can not be eradicated while the others remain intact.
” Hooks maintains that the most discussed grievance of the time , the lack of women ’ s sexual and economic independence , was only the first step in addressing other forms of oppression not yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a prescient prediction of the situation in present-day America , with its bottomless well of grievance and oppression .
The most up-to-date idea of privilege , social justice theory ’ s ultimate adversary , was pushed into the mainstream by Peggy McIntosh , who is famous for her 1988 essay , White Privilege and Male Privilege : A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women ’ s Studies .
The essay builds on 1960s feminism but ventures into race by critiquing the privilege of white people in everyday life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ McIntosh talks about the hierarchy of intersectionality .
She refers to it instead as “ interlocking oppressions.
” And without ever using the phrase , she introduces social justice ideology ’ s most potent weapon — the modern-day struggle session : the command to “ check your privilege ” in front of the masses .
“ I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day , but about which I was ‘ meant ’ to remain oblivious , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions , assurances , tools , maps , guides , codebooks , passports , visas , clothes , compass , emergency gear , and blank checks.
” She goes on to give 46 examples of white privilege she personally enjoys , an exercise that college students are now instructed to replicate at universities all over the country .
( I personally went through it during a mandatory freshman-level course . )
Among McIntosh ’ s examples of her white privilege are : “ I can be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a location will be neutral or pleasant to me ” ; “ I can go shopping alone most of the time , fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives ” ; and , “ Whether I use checks , credit cards , or cash , I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially reliable.
” McIntosh ’ s “ knapsack of special provisions ” might have simply served as an innocuous set of observations about unrecognized prejudices @ @ @ @ @ @ @ second half of her essay .
That part takes a maniacal nosedive and suggests that those who possess privilege feel a sense of shame and a sense of responsibility to atone for something they had no say in .
“ A man ’ s sex provides advantage for him whether or not he approves of the way in which dominance has been conferred on his group , ” McIntosh writes .
“ A ‘ white ’ skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” She says that “ individual acts can palliate , but can not end ” the cycle .
“ To redesign social systems , ” she puts forth , “ we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.
” To redesign social systems .
That ’ s the entire purpose of the social justice movement .
It ’ s to remake society from top to bottom .
McIntosh concludes her essay by denouncing the “ myth of meritocracy , ” which she says is kept alive by “ obliviousness about white advantage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and is “ kept strongly inculturated in the United States.
” This is social justice .
It ’ s an ideology that says the America you understand today is fundamentally broken and that full equality is unobtainable without a complete overhaul of its current order and a total abandonment of what McIntosh called the “ myth of meritocracy.
” Social justice maintains that there is no meritocracy , only identity , oppression , and privilege .
Those assumed to hold an advantage due to their race , gender , or sexuality must @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the new intersectionality hierarchy .
“ Politics , ” says Rectenwald , “ is reduced by social justice warriors to a series of … Facebook statuses , tweets , kneel-downs during the singing of the U.S. national anthem , and so forth.
” This is called “ virtue signaling ” — overt gestures that communicate adherence to the movement and its ideology .
Social justice is centered on who can claim the highest form of oppression , grievance , and victimhood at any given moment .
It ’ s an endless competition in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , most subordinated , and most abused .
Social justice and its enforcers have created an ever-evolving , never-satisfied new class of people : the victims of privilege , who in turn become the privileged by victimization .
They are our privileged victims .
Eddie Scarry is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner and the author of Privileged Victims : How America 's Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People , from which this essay is adapted .

Privilege is an outgrowth of the social justice movement, that branch of political activism that asserts there’s an inherent unfairness, and prejudice, rooted in American life. This unfairness manifests itself in the oppression, grievance, and victimization of women, nonwhites, gays, lesbians, and even transsexuals. It’s an ideology that demands that the country’s very foundations, customs, and norms be reordered to right all of its wrongs. The goal of the movement isn’t always clear because it frequently changes, depending on which set of people is deemed to have suffered adequately and which set is guilty of some form of privilege. Because the movement operates largely by using shame, it can sometimes seem that shame is in itself the objective.
Friedrich Nietzsche directly influenced today’s version of social justice by asserting that there is an inseparable link between morality and power. He wrote in his 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality that those who wished to overthrow the established hierarchy intended to invert it so that the bottom would become the top and vice versa. This wasn’t his prescription for society, but rather a severe criticism of the tendency to view society’s subordinates as inherently moral. “Only those who suffer are good,” he wrote with acrimony. “Only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!”
Nietzsche was identifying and criticizing the notion that those at the bottom of civilized societies should be presumed virtuous and admirable simply by nature of their suffering and disadvantages. But that concept is precisely what forms the basis of the present social justice movement. According to the movement and its ideology, the good, virtuous, and admirable are those who claim to have been aggrieved on account of their race, gender, or sexuality. Under social justice, asserting grievance and claiming oppression earns an individual a higher moral worth than those who are deemed “privileged.”
Who has the power in America’s culture now? The social justice movement does, and that power is reinforced by Hollywood, the news media, academia, and much of the Washington political establishment. Social justice ideology first spread through the universities and from there, to the other hubs of American culture. It went from university academics, who taught it to their students, and then flowed from them to screenwriters and journalists. What’s seen in Hollywood entertainment and in national newspapers, on the TV news, and on the internet becomes a piece of our collective culture. With enough repetition, it’s then absorbed into the mainstream. This is how social justice ended up everywhere.
The ridiculous notion that individuals hold their own truths, as reflected in the asinine “live your truth” mantra, is a key feature of the social justice movement’s ideology. It’s linked to what early 20th-century Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs called “standpoint epistemology.” Epistemology is the philosophy of understanding human knowledge. Standpoint epistemology, or standpoint knowledge, holds that the perspective of a certain person can lend that individual access to a unique truth that others don’t have and can never obtain. Lukacs developed the concept in his 1923 work History and Class Consciousness, in which he refers to a kind of “knowledge” held by people of the working class that “stands on a higher scientific plane objectively.”
In essence, depending on an individual’s identity — race, gender, sexuality, or any combination thereof — he or she will have access to a truth unobtainable to anyone who doesn’t share that identity. Furthermore, social justice dictates that these truths must be acknowledged as unchallengeable and that the “victims” who profess to hold them are to be regarded with reverence.
In America, the earliest signs of social justice in its current state began in the 1960s. Postmodern theories and ideas about class resentments and struggles made their way from Western Europe, spread among academics, and eventually gave birth to the third-wave feminist movement, according to New York University professor Michael Rectenwald. They spun off from there, creating the things that normal people now dread: political correctness, affirmative action, calls for reparations, identity politics, civil rights for infinite special classes of citizens, and on and on.
Because the social justice ideology, the movement, and its enforcers operate outside the purview of normal people, they have their own concepts and terms, some or all of which you might not have heard before.
According to Rectenwald, “social justice” as a well-intentioned remedy to economic, societal problems traces back to the 1840s, when Italian Catholic Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio used the term to describe “the glaring lack of an adequate Catholic response to industrialism and urbanization, with their associated social and economic symptoms.” It was the “supplanting of guild-based cottage industries by urban factories [and] the displacement of workers” during the Industrial Revolution that moved d’Azeglio to state that a certain social justice was required to remedy the impact it had had on the laborers.
During that period, factories and advancements in machinery disrupted the working classes of Western Europe, just as automation has done to the Midwest in America today. The technological shift created economic opportunity for some at devastating expense to others. “The original social justice,” writes Rectenwald, “amounted to the protection and mobilization of small charitable and philanthropic organizations to address (but not eliminate) the recalcitrant social facts of individual, economic, and political inequality, which had been exacerbated under the new industrial economy.”
In short, there were private charities that worked to ameliorate the effects of job displacement and poverty of the industrial age. That was considered social justice. It stands in contrast to today’s social justice movement, which is only tangentially concerned with uplifting the impoverished. It instead trains its energy on bringing down the “privileged” and reordering the social hierarchy around identity and grievance. It wants the moral superiority of the oppressed moved to the top and nothing less.
Feminists of the 1980s did most of the work in bringing social justice from academia to the rest of America. In her 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism, influential feminist Sandra Harding writes that “by starting from the lived realities of women’s lives, we can identify the grounding for a theory of knowledge that should be the successor to both Enlightenment and Marxist epistemologies.” In other words, Harding is asserting that women, simply by nature of their gender, possess a particular knowledge that should function as the viewpoint by which the world operates.
If standpoint knowledge functions as the brain of social justice ideology, its heart is intersectionality, an ever-shifting ranking system that determines who is more aggrieved than the next, who deserves more deference than the other. It’s a hazy, nonconcrete way of measuring overlapping identities and their corresponding hardships and victimhood. The more cross sections of oppressed identities an individual can claim, the higher his or her status on the intersectionality scale.
It gets messy even within the movement. Who can say whether one person is more aggrieved than another? Is a black woman more or less oppressed than a white gay man? Is a Latino man more or less privileged than a Palestinian transgender woman? Is a Native American man more or less aggrieved than a lesbian Asian woman? It’s all worked out through a type of never-ending oppression Olympics, a competition for the title of Most Aggrieved. The judges are the social justice enforcers, the culture fascists in academia, in Hollywood, in the news media, and in political Washington.
Black feminist author Gloria Watkins, better known by her pen name "bell hooks," helped usher in the intersectionality ranking system in her 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, a critique of the feminist movement of the 1960s. In that book, she argues that the movement overlooked struggles against forms of oppression that fall outside of gender, and outside of white women in particular. She writes, “Within society, all forms of oppression are supported by traditional Western thinking. ... Sexist oppression is of primary importance … [because] it is the practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist.” She continues, “Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact.”
Hooks maintains that the most discussed grievance of the time, the lack of women’s sexual and economic independence, was only the first step in addressing other forms of oppression not yet acknowledged by society. That observation was a prescient prediction of the situation in present-day America, with its bottomless well of grievance and oppression.
The most up-to-date idea of privilege, social justice theory’s ultimate adversary, was pushed into the mainstream by Peggy McIntosh, who is famous for her 1988 essay, White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies. The essay builds on 1960s feminism but ventures into race by critiquing the privilege of white people in everyday life. Without ever using the phrase, McIntosh talks about the hierarchy of intersectionality. She refers to it instead as “interlocking oppressions.” And without ever using the phrase, she introduces social justice ideology’s most potent weapon — the modern-day struggle session: the command to “check your privilege” in front of the masses.
“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” she writes. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.”
She goes on to give 46 examples of white privilege she personally enjoys, an exercise that college students are now instructed to replicate at universities all over the country. (I personally went through it during a mandatory freshman-level course.)
Among McIntosh’s examples of her white privilege are: “I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me”; “I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives”; and, “Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially reliable.”
McIntosh’s “knapsack of special provisions” might have simply served as an innocuous set of observations about unrecognized prejudices if it weren’t for the second half of her essay. That part takes a maniacal nosedive and suggests that those who possess privilege feel a sense of shame and a sense of responsibility to atone for something they had no say in.
“A man’s sex provides advantage for him whether or not he approves of the way in which dominance has been conferred on his group,” McIntosh writes. “A ‘white’ skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us.” She says that “individual acts can palliate, but cannot end” the cycle. “To redesign social systems,” she puts forth, “we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.”
To redesign social systems. That’s the entire purpose of the social justice movement. It’s to remake society from top to bottom.
McIntosh concludes her essay by denouncing the “myth of meritocracy,” which she says is kept alive by “obliviousness about white advantage [and] obliviousness about male advantage” and is “kept strongly inculturated in the United States.”
This is social justice. It’s an ideology that says the America you understand today is fundamentally broken and that full equality is unobtainable without a complete overhaul of its current order and a total abandonment of what McIntosh called the “myth of meritocracy.” Social justice maintains that there is no meritocracy, only identity, oppression, and privilege. Those assumed to hold an advantage due to their race, gender, or sexuality must submit to the aggrieved in accordance with the new intersectionality hierarchy.
“Politics,” says Rectenwald, “is reduced by social justice warriors to a series of … Facebook statuses, tweets, kneel-downs during the singing of the U.S. national anthem, and so forth.” This is called “virtue signaling” — overt gestures that communicate adherence to the movement and its ideology.
Social justice is centered on who can claim the highest form of oppression, grievance, and victimhood at any given moment. It’s an endless competition in claiming to have been the most exploited, most subordinated, and most abused.
Social justice and its enforcers have created an ever-evolving, never-satisfied new class of people: the victims of privilege, who in turn become the privileged by victimization. They are our privileged victims.
Eddie Scarry is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner and the author of Privileged Victims: How America's Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, from which this essay is adapted.