Why Bernie Became a Team Blue Cuck
To figure that out, we need to revisit the rigged 2016 primary and the little-discussed FBI investigation into his wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Bernie Sanders of today started listening to the Bernie Sanders of yesterday?
Like many of his progressive supporters, I've been frustrated by Bernie's attempts to change the Democratic Party from within, a strategy so outrageously flawed that its failure has always been as predictable as it was inevitable.
First, consider the legal argument posed by the DNC's own lawyer, Bruce Spiva. Below are two key quotes from the lawsuit against the DNC for rigging the 2016 Democratic primary.
Yes, you read correctly.
The DNC actually asserted that they had the right to rig their elections if they wanted, to decide the outcome in a back room regardless of voter preference.
If the Democrats had admitted their wrongful behavior after 2016 and fired everyone directly involved in the rigging process and appointed Bernie Sanders as Senate Leader and Tulsi Gabbard as House Majority Leader, then it might have been possible for the Party to redeem itself. Instead, they argued in Court that they had the legal right to rig their primary elections. They doubled-down instead of owning up.
Even more stunning is that the lawsuit was successfully dismissed, ensuring that there would never be any accountability. Without legal consequences it is both reasonable and fair to assume that the Democrats will continue to rig future elections because it was affirmed by a sitting Judge that they can.
“But it's not fair to assume!”
I've heard many liberals say this. Most will at least admit that the 2016 primary was, bare minimum, unfairly influenced by the DNC. Nobody disputes this anymore. Yet for some reason the Team Blue cultists who do admit it was rigged, largely the disillusioned Hillary/Obama cheerleaders that cannot accept that their own Party betrayed them so thoroughly, think it was just a one-time fluke. A mistake.
It wasn't. We know that the DNC rigs their elections routinely for a variety of reasons, but the most powerful and direct evidence came straight from the horse’s mouth during a secret audio recording released by The Intercept.
"Progressive candidate Levi Tillemann met with Congressman Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives, to make the case that the party should stay neutral in the Colorado primary and that he had a more plausible path to victory than the same centrism that the Republican incumbent had already beaten repeatedly. Hoyer, however, had his own message he wanted to convey: Tillemann should drop out. In a frank and wide-ranging conversation, Hoyer laid down the law for Tillemann.
The decision, Tillemann was told, had been made long ago. It wasn’t personal, Hoyer insisted, and there was nothing uniquely unfair being done to Tillemann, he explained:
This is how the party does it everywhere.
Tillemann had heard the argument before from D.C. insiders and local Democratic bigwigs, all of whom had discouraged him from challenging the establishment favorite. The only difference was that for this conversation, the candidate had his phone set to record."
Here is that audio in full:
And this is the Party that Bernie Sanders thinks he can change?
That would be like trying to get an alcoholic to quit drinking but who has zero interest in doing so and is immune to liver cancer. It won't happen without the threat of consequences. The only way to guarantee change would be to remove the corporate neoliberals from the Party and replace them with non-corporate progressives. But to do that would require winning a rigged game. While a few rare victories could occur by mere chance, even those are part of a larger, calculated strategy.
Take the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It's important to remember that when she defeated Joe Crowley, he was the Democrat most expected to challenge Nancy Pelosi for House Speaker. And Crowley bizarrely celebrated AOC’s victory, his own loss, with enthusiasm.
The end of this video shows him jamming away AFTER learning AOC won:
Even more bizarre was that Crowley, according to a campaign insider, pointed out that 2-3 weeks prior to the election Crowley was polling 35-points ahead. Of course there can be polling errors and upsets do happen… but do you honestly believe that AOC closed a 35-point gap? In less than a month?
But why then would Crowley so willingly take a knee and go along with this? Why would he lose on purpose? Because he was already lined up for a cushy lobbying gig that started less than a month after he left office, which paid a far more lucrative salary than he ever made in Congress. His client list expanded to 7 by 2021, all of which were through the Squire Patton Boggs lobbying firm.
Crowley now works with Squire Patton Boggs, a big D.C. lobbying shop where he works alongside former top GOP lawmakers. As part of the job, Crowley is promoting Trump’s new trade deal on behalf of Big Pharma, which is bankrolling an effort to sway Congress. “USMCA is a landmark trade victory for America’s workers,” he stated. “My former colleagues should take action to ratify the agreement quickly.”
Critics says the USMCA is a giveaway to Big Pharma companies, something former Representative Crowley was asked about in the past and responded that it was “for them to make their own decision.” Crowley is one of at least fifteen members of Congress who joined lobbying firms within weeks of leaving office in 2019. - Yahoo News
Do you really think Joe Crowley looks back and wishes he’d beaten AOC in 2018 instead? Of course not.
While AOC may be a powerful progressive voice in regards to social issues, that hasn’t manifested into actual legislation. And she’s consistently proven to be woefully ignorant and inept when it comes to matters of foreign policy.
The perk of rigging the election in AOC’s favor solidified that Nancy Pelosi would retain her position as House Speaker and AOC’s extreme weakness on foreign policy ensured she wouldn’t be a challenger to the imperialist ambitions of the Deep State. Even AOC’s “progressive victory” was a sham. She’s catnip to keep naive liberals excited about the Democratic Party, a mascot rather than an actual player. Same goes for the rest of the so-called Squad.
And Bernie Sanders knows it.
In fact, he probably knows more than anyone about the mechanisms behind how this game is played. He’s been in Washington for decades, after all. So why does Bernie continue to go along with this bullshit when he personally had the Presidency stolen from him as a consequence? He should be more pissed off than anyone! Why is he putting so much effort into the unachievable goal of reforming the Democratic Party from within when he previously told us himself that it could never, ever happen?
Some have written Bernie off as simply being a sellout, but this dismisses over three decades of his career. While not without flaws, particularly when it comes to foreign policy, it cannot be argued that he hasn't largely stuck to the same core issues with a refreshing degree of consistency and has soundly rejected big money interests in favor of championing the needs of the middle-class.
Bernie has had countless opportunities to cash in his chips, put his feet up, and surrender to the wishes of the Establishment. For him to suddenly do a complete 180 at this stage of his career, to become such an irredeemable cuck, seems too absurd to believe.
So again, why is he pursuing such a failed strategy to take on the Establishment he railed against, while acting as life-support for the very same Party that screwed him? And more to the point, why is he doing this now?
Chris Hedges has pointed to the fact that Bernie feared becoming a pariah like Ralph Nader and wanted to at least stay int he game. While I don’t doubt this was a factor, I suspect the FBI's bogus investigation into his wife, Jane Sanders, played a larger role. I cannot understand why nobody, not even in the independent media space, has ever taken the time to make this connection. Most people still don’t even know that it happened.
As we know, the Deep State is tied at the hip with the Democratic Party. Aside from the fact that an extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates, we also witnessed the nauseating DNC/FBI effort in promoting the hoax that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
Rather than reflecting on their own failures as a Party, the Democrats projected. Hillary Clinton's greatest liability as a candidate was her own ties to Russia, as evidenced by the internal memos from her own campaign, as revealed by Wikileaks. This included both her campaign manager John Podesta and Hillary selling 20% of U.S. uranium to Russia dealings as Secretary of State. This is even more laughable in hindsight considering the Democrats are today comparing Putin to a modern Hitler. What changed?
It is also quite telling that the allegations of Russian hacking could have been cleared up by simply running forensics on the allegedly-hacked DNC server. Of course, the DNC denied access, as admitted to by then FBI Director James Comey.
So why didn't the FBI issue a warrant? We’ll never definitively know why, but we know there must have been a reason behind the decision. And that reason had to have been of mutual-benefit to both the Deep State and the Democratic Party to ever be agreed to.
Perhaps the FBI wanted to muddy the waters, to allow Robert Mueller some level of plausible deniability to fall back on. “We didn’t know! We didn’t see the server! We believed what the DNC told us!” Or maybe the Democrats didn’t want the FBI to get their hands on concrete evidence that Seth Rich was behind the leaked emails.
Here's DNC chair Tom Perez squirming:
And here’s Adam Schiff admitting the FBI only received "blueprints" of the server via a security firm (Crowdstrike), which the DNC privately hired to do the digital forensics instead of just handing the server over to the FBI directly.
With access to every phone call, email, and text in the country, the Deep State has a limitless ability to blackmail politicians. But since Bernie doesn't have much in the way of skeletons in the closet and seemingly couldn’t be bought, the Establishment had to resort to intimidation tactics.
Jane Sanders was going on Fox News pointing fingers at the DNC’s bizarre primary rules and openly pushed the FBI to speed up their investigation into Hillary Clinton.
Then she started being more cautious with her words, walking back some of her statements, saying she wasn’t attacking Hillary, etc. But it was too late. Jane Sanders had already pissed off both the Clinton Machine and the FBI.
So it’s hardly surprising that threatening the freedom of Bernie’s wife would prove the most logical target for the purposes of reigning him in. For Hillary and the FBI, this would be a win-win. As an added bonus they could also extend the blackmail into overtime and ensure Bernie was onboard in promoting the Russiagate narrative.
And it worked.
What if the investigation into Jane Sanders was legitimate?
Are we to seriously believe the FBI waited half a decade to pursue Jane Sanders for something as petty as distorting donor levels in a 2010 loan application? And timed going public with it in the middle of the 2016 primary? They spent at least 2-3 years investigating Jane and in the end there was no negotiation, no settlement, no trial, no charges. Nothing.
The case simply… ended. Poof!
Bernie Sanders should have called the FBI's bluff, gone public with everything, truly exposed the corrupt Establishment he'd railed against his entire life, and used the momentum of his historical underdog campaign to launch a progressive third party.
If the Deep State went so far as to actually assassinate Sanders, as they did JFK, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, his death would triggered too much of a backlash. That shit isn’t as easy to get away with in today’s highly surveilled world. The jig would be up.
The Deep State maintains power by keeping their specific methodologies as covert as possible. While they would certainly wanted Bernie Sanders eliminated, and likely still do, they would be unable to act on it without risking their own exposure and the loss of public support could have derailed the fragile Russiagate narrative, which was key to ensuring President Trump didn’t have a second term.
Fingers could also be (appropriately) pointed at Hillary Clinton and the DNC, who were already behind the killing of the Wikileaks whistleblower who leaked the DNC emails (not Russia), their own staffer Seth Rich (update on that cover-up here). It’s one thing to sweep the murder of a relatively unknown intern under the rug, but to kill off a very popular sitting Senator would have been exceedingly more difficult.
Bernie should have taken them on anyway despite Chuck Schumer's ominous warning about the potential backlash facing anyone who dates challenge U.S. Intelligence agencies.
With his still record-high favorability rating, steady grassroots fundraising support, and instant name recognition, there is no one else in a better position to start a viable third party than Bernie Sanders. He'd be foolish not to wield his power when it matters most. But he didn’t in 2016 or 2020 and at this stage he’s too complicit to bother. Because Bernie Sanders, at the end of the day, is just a goddamn coward.