Well, Hakeem Jeffries really disliked my direct questions about why he won’t support ABOLISH ICE or why he continues to take money from AIPAC. Instead, he gave me a bunch of nonsense word salad filled with plastic fruit and vegetables.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has thrown her weight behind Governor Newsom, even as he actively goes against the Democratic base when it comes to his positions on Israel’s genocide, ICE, and taxing the billionaires.
Democrats believe they can waltz their way to power by ignoring their own base, repeating their donors’ talking points, and simply reminding people they are better than Trump.
We don’t think it’ll work this time.
Here’s Danielle Moodie with her write-up of today’s DEMOCRACY-ISH episode
There is a specific kind of condescension that only the Democratic establishment can master. It’s a flavor of arrogance that suggests if you have a pulse, a conscience, and a set of demands for your tax dollars, you are simply too “radical” to be understood.
We saw it play out in real-time recently during an interview with Representative Hakeem Jeffries. When presented with a mountain of facts—that ICE is spending $38 billion to convert warehouses into what are effectively concentration camps, that 60% of Americans now disapprove of the agency, and that its history of terrorizing Black and brown communities is documented and visceral—the response wasn’t a defense of policy. It wasn’t even an argument.
It was: “I don’t understand anything that you just said.”
It wasn’t spoken in a different language. It was spoken in the language of the majority. But to the “Big Club” of establishment politics, the majority is a fringe group to be managed, not a constituency to be led.
The “Word Salad” Shield
Establishment leadership has become a master of the “four-quadrant” strategy. In Hollywood, that means making a movie so vanilla it doesn’t offend 18-year-olds, 49-year-olds, men, or women. In politics, it results in a lackluster “word salad” designed to obfuscate and distract.
When Jeffries says, “I’m going to use the language that I want to use,” what he really means is: I will not stand for anything.
The bar has been set so low that we are expected to celebrate “restoration” instead of “transformation.” The Democratic elite is currently spiking the ball because they think they’re winning elections by simply not being Donald Trump. They believe that as long as the “D” is behind their name, they don’t have to do an audit of their failures. They don’t have to stop supporting the brutalization of Palestinians. They don’t have to tax billionaires.
They think you’ll vote for them anyway because the other side is the devil. But choosing between the devil and the devil’s helper isn’t a choice—it’s a hostage situation.
The Party That Hates Its Base
It is a bizarre phenomenon: the Democratic establishment seems to hate its own base more than Republicans hate theirs.
Republicans, for all their faults, meet their base where they are. They amplify the anger, they pivot their messaging, and they embrace the terms “right-wing” and “conservative” with pride. Meanwhile, Democrats use “leftist” or “progressive” as slurs. They are embarrassed by the very people who put them in power.
The Popularity Gap
If you want to know who is actually winning, look at the numbers. The politicians who stand “ten toes down”—those who don’t use kid gloves with leadership and aren’t afraid to say “Abolish ICE” or “Free Palestine”—are the ones with the highest approval ratings.
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The bottom of the list is populated by the “safe” fundraisers. The top is populated by the fighters.
Selective Outrage and the Normalization of Hate
Nowhere is the establishment’s cowardice more visible than in their selective silence. Take Representative Randy Fine, who recently tweeted: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
Where is the censure? Where is the press conference? Where is the leadership standing against this dehumanization?
When Rashida Tlaib criticizes a foreign government, the establishment moves with lightning speed to censure her. When a representative compares an entire religious group to animals, the “Big Club” chooses to do nothing. This is how hate speech becomes normalized political language—through the calculated silence of those in power.
By the time this rhetoric turns into physical violence and death, they’ll act surprised. But it starts with words, and it’s sustained by their “feckless, impotent” refusal to act.
Radicalized in Real Time
While leadership stammers, the people are waking up. We are seeing a new phenomenon: the radicalization of the “average” American.
Take the Navy veteran from Indiana who spent eight years in the military and now looks at ICE yanking people out of cars and says, “This is not what I signed up for.” Or the white man in New Jersey, holding an American flag and near tears, who watched masked ICE agents waiting at a school bus stop for fourth and fifth graders.
“I watched fourth and fifth graders run from our government today... in our country, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. I love my country, but I just can’t. They’re going after children.”
These aren’t “left-wing activists.” These are people seeing the “Gestapo” tactics of a 2003-era agency being turned against their neighbors. And yet, Democrats continue to fund the beast, terrified of being called “soft on crime,” repeating the same mistakes Joe Biden made with the 1990s crime bill.
Sand in the Gears: The Minnesota Lesson
The establishment wants us to sit silently, to not protest, and to wait for the next midterm as if we aren’t being sprayed with bear spray today. They want us to follow the “law” even as the law is used to smash car windows and batter bodies with rubber bullets.
But the people in Minnesota have shown us a different way. They didn’t wait for a governor or a mayor to tell them what to do. They linked arms. They created meal trains and laundry trains so their neighbors could stay safe inside. They became “sand in the gears” of an injustice.
The Tide is Turning
Even with the flood of “dark money” from groups like AIPAC, which spent millions to unseat progressives like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, the strategy is failing. In New Jersey, AIPAC tried to knock out a Democrat for being “off-script” on Israel, only to see a pro-Palestinian, “Abolish ICE” organizer, Ana Lilia Mejia, take the victory.
We have been fed crumbs for ten years. We have been told to be moderate in the face of extremism. But moderation in the face of a burning house is just a slower way to let it turn to ash.
The “Big Club” is real, and they are more comfortable with center-right Republicans than they are with you. It’s time we stopped asking for an invitation to their table and started building our own.
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