My theory: (TLDR: Alex is faking his hate to spread the Sanders name more quickly.)
Firstly, Alex Jones’ day job is to destroy the credit of anyone who takes him seriously.
Secondly, Alex Jones being genuinely anti establishment and highly intelligent, at least at one point, likely secretly supports Sanders policies. As all intelligent, informed, compassionate humans typically do.
(Yes. Alex used to be cool. Citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJXspT2VtOE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kqdLA42fUE)
Thirdly, he knows full well, being versed in the public relations field, that Bernie’s actual problem is simply one of exposure at this point, that time is of the essence, and also that there’s no such thing as bad press.
Fourthly, he knows he can’t simply endorse Sanders because that would actually hurt his campaign.
Fifthly, he knows that hate travels much faster than reason.
Given this context Alex has contrived a rather brilliant way to continue doing his job while supporting Sanders secretly in the very same act.
Thus he has produced a stream of completely mindless honeypot hate videos designed expressly to poison the memetic well for the actual opposition, so that they’ll go out in public, and rant at their friends, and hopefully strangers, about how awful Sanders is, in turn making Sanders look both electable and reasonable.
In effect he is making the genuine Anti-Sanders crowd look like right wing tin foil hats.
All while giving supporters low hanging fruit to mock, both bolstering the Sanders campaign and spreading the Infowars name through the election-engaged community.
Well played Alex, Well played.
We thank you for your service 🙂 Please do continue 🙂
…or he really has degenerated into a hateful right wing lunatic. Whichever. The effect is the same.
Update:MLK agrees with me. I obviously had no idea or that would have been the core of my argument.
Update: Just imagine what a UBI would do in this context:
http://www.thenation.com/article/new-jim-crow/
Original Essay: On the subject of reparations, I have something to say that I haven’t heard anyone else say.
Context.
1. Assume that people of color are oppressed to this day because of the damage done by slavery.
2. Assume the point of reparations is to address that early damage.
3. Assume that others profited and continue to profit unfairly from that oppression.
Ok. So, you want to address this in an economic way that’s fair and viable and ethical.
I think a progressive tax and a UBI (unconditional basic income) accomplishes that goal. And it has the added bonus of not being by definition racist in the way that affirmative actions are. This seems counter intuitive but here follow along for a second. After all if it’s not a special effort made in favor of a specific race how can it qualify as reparations? In the same way that a given policy can disproportionately impact a given race without having to expressly specify a race anywhere within it. The same way a flat tax disproportionately hurts the poor despite being by definition totally even mathematically.
A UBI provided baseline income would have diminishing improvement effect as you climb the economic ladder. Hedge fund guys are not even going to notice the tiny bump in income their UBI check would provide, thus the fairness price paid in letting rich white guys collect the same reparations check as descendants of slaves, is offset by the fact that by the very virtue of being rich, there is no effective improvement to their lives.
Also it will be offset by the fact that on balance they’ll be paying way more then they are getting expressly because they are overly wealthy.
This means a UBI by definition is a smart bomb for poverty. It self selects and self adjusts its impact by the very metric we all agree on is the metric of most relevance: degree of poverty.
A UBI check to a homeless man is literally life changing. So to of anyone else economically crushed for any reason, including damage done by systemic racism of the present or the past. The more damage done, the more a UBI will help. Automatically and instantly the people most aided are those most currently crushed. And as they rise, the help done diminishes until they reach a point of economic sufficiency where they begin paying into the system instead of extracting from it.
The more oppressed a group actually is, the more the UBI helps them over others who don’t need it. No bureaucracy required. No debate over who gets what is needed. No one decides.
The only debate is how much to give, and at what rate to tax. That’s all. Two figures.
The other end of the spectrum is the progressive tax to pay for it. In this context a progressive tax is as much a smart bomb as the UBI is. It has the opposite effect as you go up the economic ladder. The more advantage you are granted for any reason up to and including profits from systemic racism, past or present, the more the progressive tax will take from you, and the more you can afford to have taken from you without impacting your actual quality of life.
Quick note to cutthroat types. Your days are numbered.
You monied types have two choices psychologically, buy the job creator style myth of the owner class, or watch your own ethics callous over from repeated abuse.
History is on my side. The march of history and the ascension of humanity has always been away from brutality and so called social Darwinism. What is the thing that Europe, and the United States, and China have in common? Confederation. They were all essentially separate nations or states that learned that it’s better for everyone to work as a team.
We have been on a steady march, along with the rest of life, towards unity, because it works.
From amino acids to Pando, from Lucy to the United Nations the clear and obvious fact of life is that working together pays better than screwing eachother over and making excuses about it.
The Ayn Rand crowd only exists because the rest of us permit it. You may well live out your life as an exploitative agent in the meantime, as many corporate apologists and Horatio Alger types will, because clearly it’s a slow march and we have a long way to go, but don’t pretend for a second that’s the future because it is quite obviously the past.
The only thing that would give your kind a substantive future would be a catastrophic setback.
TL/DR: Bernie won’t actually have a problem with AA/minority voters on the days of vote. The media is just saying that over and over hoping to make it true.
Bernie will have the black vote when it matters and here’s why.
I know no one wants to talk about this really for fear of being misconstrued as implying that blacks as a voting block are ignorant. However, the root of Bernie’s problem with the black electorate at this stage is ironically a consequence of everything he’s trying to fight.
Blacks and most others frankly at this point haven’t on average looked into who to vote for yet because they know it’ll be a trivial decision to make and because they on average are too busy or disenfranchised to engage in what is at its point essentially the politico version of fantasy football.
At this point the election is a first world problem for the majority of those 61% of people that didn’t vote last time. For the moment, and only for the moment, most people have more pressing matters to attend to.
Not having the time to inform yourself of the reality of your choice in an upcoming vote is by definition a bigger problem the more disenfranchised your group is because then you have bigger and more real problems to deal with day to day expressly because of systemic racism or other forms of oppression.
When you are worried for example about being shot by the local police walking down the block to buy groceries, assuming you can even afford them, you’re not going to have a lot of time or inclination at first to wiki Bernie vs Clinton and their voting records. This does not make you stupid, it makes you human.
Sure it might be unwise as a group to disengage, but individually (and here is the critical part) this early, it’s essentially a waste of time. But again, be honest, this really isn’t as complicated an nuanced as the media (both mainstream and alternative) how long would it take anyone browsing to decide which is the candidate for them? We all want to sound smart, but really a choice like this takes no more than 30 minutes of searching.
There’s also the general impact of austerity measures especially in republican states on political awareness. Schools generally are in third world shape in this country and they only get worse in oppressed communities. But again, that doesn’t matter much in this specific context because of the internet and the penetration of smart phones into every level of society.
All this is in my opinion why there is this perception that Bernie isn’t doing well among minorities, blacks in particular. It’s ultimately an illusion.
This will all change the moment the primary begins because he’ll win Iowa and New Hampshire and the news will be forced to name him and the busier more distracted of the black electorate will, by virtue of it no longer being a first world problem, will inform themselves on their upcoming choice.
And when they quickly find that their choice is between a woman who accepts money from the private prison lobby and says whatever she thinks is expedient at the time, or a man who walked with King and was arrested fighting for the civil rights movement, who has not deviated from his message of equality and true progressivism in decades, they’ll make the intelligent, self serving, and compassionate choice.
See, the thing about low information voting is about the price in time of acquiring that information. The opportunity cost is the deciding factor here. As the day of the primary gets closer and closer in each state, a moment will be taken by each person who isn’t totally disconnected or prohibited from participation even indirectly, to confirm or deny what they already believe, and they’ll find Bernie’s revolution waiting for them, instead of SSDD not worth the wait inline come election day.
The issue of who to vote for in the primary will for each person stop being a waste of precious time. It then stops being a trivial day to day hobby horse race, and it starts being something real that matters today. And that only means millions of people discovering Bernie and coming to #FeelTheBern
I believe that essentially all it takes to turn the average black Hillary supporter into a Bernie Sanders’ supporter is 30 minutes on a smart phone and an open mind. Call me sappy or naive but I’m pretty sure open minds and smart phones are still ubiquitous in this country, no matter what the news tells us.
Also, primary voters are by definition more engaged than general election only voters, and engaged voters Google who they are voting for. Any progressive that shows up has a great chance of being behind Bernie than any of these polls can predict. Unless they are online, and the online polls show a landslide coming because there are no spoiler effects in play. It’s perfectly safe to vote Bernie. Indeed, given his performance (compared to Hillary) vs Trump and the other republicans, he’s the safervote.
This election is defined by populism. That will include the dismissal of the main stream media by the electorate. The same anti establishment populism that caused this race to boil down to Trump vs Sanders also is present vs the six company news machine we all know by now has been lying to us for decades.
Mark my words, Bernie is essentially going to sweep the primaries barring outright election rigging.
Update: 2016-02-23 0517 AM
I’m not afraid of being called a racist as a result of my efforts to point out the value of Bernie’s candidacy to minority voters primary because I’m not a racist by any rational definition.
I’ve realized that the scolding by the neoliberal set for whites to get out of the race issue is a slick way to perpetuate the divide.
If a particular person hates me for defending their interests, that’s their right. I’m not doing it to earn praise. I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.
It’s not about them, it’s about me 🙂
I’m not going to preemptively give up in a misguided effort to avoid offending someone. This is the Internet. Just existing offends some people heh.
Now obviously I realize that blacks can and should be able to vote for whomever they please.
You’ll notice Bernie isn’t black. I’m not saying blacks should vote Sanders because they are black, I’m saying they should vote Sanders because his policies will disproportionately help the AA community.
He’s an even better idea for the AA community than he is for the country at large (and that is really saying something) and people voting against their own interests undermine the core argument for democracy.
If people can’t be trusted to make a superior (as defined by whatever objective metric you like) decision then they shouldn’t have decision making authority. That’s why we don’t vote on matters of science. Because we know taking a poll wouldn’t be a good way of making that type of decision.
Blacks in particular (but also to a lesser extent the electorate generally) voting against their own interests in this election when the choice is between an advocate of mass incarceration, a literal fascist, and someone who marched with MLK and was a civil rights pioneer, would be rather strong evidence that democracy might generally not objectively be a good idea after all.
I mean really, what more do you want? If you don’t have a scenario in mind that falsifies democracy then you’re a fanatic.
From an email sent by DFA: http://democracyforamerica.com/
When 87.9% of DFA members endorsed Bernie Sanders, Democracy for America committed to waging a 100% positive campaign focused on the issues in support of Bernie. This commitment to campaigning on the issues includes defending Sen. Sanders against unfair and inaccurate attacks by his opponents.
Unfortunately, over the past few days, the Clinton campaign has launched extremely dishonest attacks against Bernie Sanders on an issue that defines what it means to be a Democrat — universal health care.
In those spurious attacks, the Clinton campaign has completely distorted and misled voters about Bernie’s universal health care plan.
They said Bernie is in favor of “ripping up Obamacare” and that he would “dismantle Medicare” and “send health insurance to the states, turning over your and my health insurance to governors.” The implication is that his plan would somehow mean seniors would lose access to the benefits they get from Medicare, or that right-wing governors would be able to block it from coming into their states.
That’s ridiculous. It’s time to correct the record:
Bernie’s universal health care plan would make access to health care a right for every single American — and no state government would ever be allowed to stop it.
Why are these attacks on Bernie happening now? Because several new polls in the last few days have proven that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is up for grabs in Iowa and New Hampshire.
If the Clinton campaign manages to win by scaring voters into believing that Bernie’s plan would hurt them, not only would it be bad for Bernie, it would be a crushing blow to the movement for universal health care and the ability of Democrats to advocate for it in the future.
Here’s why the attacks by the Clinton campaign are so dangerous:
Regardless of who wins the presidential primary, Democrats need to hold on to the White House in 2016. This is something that all Democrats agree on because we all know just how much is at stake in this election.
In a contested primary, it makes sense for the candidates to draw contrasts with their opponents on the issues. But there is simply no excuse for the Clinton campaign’s dishonesty about Bernie Sanders’s policies — the same kinds of lies we would expect to hear from Republicans in a general election.
Every single second the Clinton campaign continues engaging in false attacks, they make it more and more difficult to bring the party together and achieve victory for our nominee — whomever that might be — in November.
We need to put an end to this kind of dishonesty in the Democratic presidential primary — and the best way to do it is to prove that campaigns that engage in it don’t win.
Earlier today, Hillary Clinton’s campaign unleashed a series of vicious and coordinated attacks against Bernie’s universal health care plan. They falsely claimed Bernie’s plan would end the Children’s Health Insurance Program, dismantle Medicare and strip millions of people of their coverage.
Here is the truth: Bernie’s plan would guarantee health care as a right for every man, woman, and child, and it would be implemented in every state in the country regardless of who is governor.
We have made tremendous gains in Iowa, but if we lost because Hillary Clinton’s campaign scared voters into thinking Bernie’s plan would cost them their coverage, it could set our vision for universal health care back at least a generation.
I want to close with something important. This campaign isn’t about Bernie Sanders and it isn’t about Hillary Clinton. It’s about the very real issues facing working families across this country. It is a national disgrace that the United States is the only major country in the world that does not offer health care as a right.
We need a president who will fight for the 29 million Americans without health care. That’s what this campaign, and your contribution, is about.
In solidarity,
Jeff Weaver
Campaign Manager
Bernie 2016
Paid for by Bernie 2016
PO Box 905 – Burlington VT 05402 United States – (855) 4-BERNIE
