It's never been about the "icons"...it's about what they are being asked to do.

[Ken Burch]

It's about the activists of the past essentially being recruited to discredit the activists of today and to try to make the activists today give up and "go with the program".

There is never any excuse for using the icons of past, heroic activism to stop current activism.

Without perpetual activism, nothing ever happens.

Politics gets left to "the grown-ups"...the insiders.

The insiders, left to their own devices, always end up ceasing to try to change things.

[blm]

1. I think it's about people in crowded rooms not hearing everything clearly

which means its easy to hear things incorrectly all around.

I don't think a lot of this has been as deliberate as some think. These rooms get crazy and it's hard to hear, and the participants tend to be very passionate to the point of distraction. My event yesterday with precinct chairs and Executive committee was chaos, too, and we were only voting on replacements for two seats. ; )

The struggle was to hear clearly what was being said. Of course, most of us are also over 50 and half of us are going deaf. ; )

[Joe the Revelator]

11. Fine she heard wrong....then don't blast that type of shit out on twitter.

Words have consequences.

[blm]

13. Isn't what they believe they heard what they will post? Look at folks here….

heck, some are now posting that Hillary DID kill Vince Foster or that Sanders IS a communist, based on some video they heard and believed.

Not even juries can stop every mistaken belief, can they?

[Vattel]

2. Criticizing Lewis and Huerta when they mess up shows them respect.

They are not delicate flowers. They are not gods. They are human beings who have done wonderful things and who can rightly be criticized when they mess up. Anyone who knows the history of the UFW and Chavez and Huerta knows that deifying the leaders of that movement is a mistake. They are among my heroes but I do not worship my heroes.

Huerta's statement about Bernie's record on immigration rights clearly misrepresented his record. It was obviously unfair. I will show her the respect of pointing that out. I will also encourage her to delete the tweet about what happened in Vegas if she was mistaken. To do that is to treat her with respect. I will not call accuse her of taking a bribe or being bought off. That would be a smear. She supported Clinton long before the donation to her charity from the Clinton foundation. There is no evidence that the donation has affected her behavior in this primary.

Viva Huerta! Viva Bernie!

[Matariki]

3. Great post Vattel

[Vattel]

5. Thanks. It's always nice to get some positive feedback here at DU.

[geek tragedy]

14. Your outlook is very fair and unobjectionable.

However, it was not the prevailing sentiment amongst Bernie supporters here, the vast majority of whom either embraced or condoned the smears against Huerta.

[newthinking]

4. Thanks. Same thing happening with social orgs and NGOs

greed does funny things and the oligarchy has figured that out. Why is Europe essentially allowing their countries to be destablized?
All over the world the elite are offerring great riches to leaders to corrupt, including "Democracies".

Why are we massively printing dollars anyway and where is that money going to? The wealthy have so much money they can buy most everything the rest of us try to build up.

[NanceGreggs]

6. What it's really about ...

... is that any "icons" who support/endorse HRC over BS are declared to have been "recruited", "asked to do" something they would not have otherwise have done, and/or are dismissed as being weak-minded sell-outs who have lost their will to fight for change.

In like manner, every prominent Democrat who supports HRC over BS has been labelled as a sell-out who has been somehow coerced into doing so and/or has abandoned their principles. Every. Single. One.

When you start believing that every activist, every person willing to fight for change, every individual who believes in progressive ideas and ideals are ALL in Bernie's camp, you are buying into hype that has no connection to reality.

[Ken Burch]

9. Oversimplification, and not my view at all.

I'm fine with activists not being in "Bernie's camp". The best activists aren't in ANYBODY'S "camp". Neutrality in presidential politics is the best choice for activist groups.

It's just weird that activists would ally themselves with a candidate who gives the general impression, and did so even DURING the Sixties, that she thinks nobody should even BE an activist anymore...that that was fine in the Sixties, but that we've got no need for any of that childish foolishness anymore.

These heroes in the struggle are being deployed, willingly or not, to send the message that protest should stop, that organizing should stop, that we should all just hang it up and leave the whole thing to "our betters".

Leaving it to "our betters" always ends up meaning leaving them without accountability, looking the other way when they cut deals in backrooms that water change down to nothing, and letting the movements for change die on the vine.

If the freedom movement had done that, Jim Crow would never have ended at all.

If the UFW had done that, nothing would ever have changed for farmworkers.

If the antiwar movement had done that, we might still be in Vietnam.

I revere these heroes...but I don't trust the message they are sending here.

And it's hard to understand why, with all their experience, they'd be sending it.

We'd be better off if either John Lewis or Dolores Huerta was running for president. I'd support a Lewis/Huerta or Huerta/Lewis ticket in a heartbeat. THAT, I would trust.

[NanceGreggs]

10. "These heroes in the struggle are being deployed ...

... willingly or not, to send the message that protest should stop, that organizing should stop, that we should all just hang it up and leave the whole thing to "our betters".

They are sending no such "message" - despite your insistence that they are. They are expressing their own opinion as to who would be the better POTUS, and you apparently have a problem with anyone expressing any views that don't coincide with your own.

THAT is the "over-simplification and demonization" here; i.e. anyone who supports HRC is "being deployed, willingly or not, to send the message that protest should stop, that organizing should stop, that we should all just hang it up and leave the whole thing to our betters..

Bullshit. What you're really saying is that anyone who supports HRC is wrong, and everyone who supports BS is right.

That's not just over-simplification - that's simple-mindedness.

[Ken Burch]

12. HRC has been dismissive of protest and activism the whole time.

Read that NYT article about her college years:

ww.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/us/politics/05clinton.html?_r=3

even then, her view was that protest was basically an embarrassing waste of time. She thought Saul Alinsky's approach was basically a failure(what was he supposed to do... just meekly present petitions?) She actually believes that significant change can be made just through policies being drafted in a room.

We need policies, obviously but that isn't ever enough. And politeness and respectability never work.

Activism and protest are always needed, and sometimes it still needs to be outside the bounds of "respectability".

We can't just leave it all to the insiders and what they think is "possible".

[blm]

16. I work with a lot of older Dems, and they get passionate and clumsy with their wording sometimes,

and not all of us can hear as well as people think (hey, I'm being honest about being old, here). The knee-jerk reactions all around don't HAVE to be exaggerated into party-dividing episodes.

When we have these political events and most others the room is filled with passion, voices, and opinions, not everything is going to be said or heard correctly.

I've seen this same type of thing occur based on what people THINK they heard in these rooms month after month, year after year after year…….ESPECIALLY during the heat of primary races.

[DirkGently]

7. And the substitution of authority for substance.

The argument being made is that everyone should shut up, stop thinking, and accept the opinions of a network of powerful people endorsing each other.

It's the classic Republican vs. Democratic argument -- that a chosen few representatives should decide, and the general population's job is simply to elect them and meekly follow -- except for the fact it's being deployed by Dems against other Dems.

Notice none of these endorsements come with any articulation of substantive judgments in favor of Hillary Clinton. These are political allies doing what political allies do -- backing each other. They say nothing, or when they do, immediately go splat and have to be walked back, whether it's women going to hell or false memories of Bill and Hillary magically fighting for civil rights. It's a tactic from the 90's, before everything was recorded and a facile lie could be caught in a matter of minutes.

I keep wondering if the person handing out all these doomed, toxic talking points to progressive icons still has a job. It was an outdated, losing strategy in 2008, and it hasn't gotten any fresher or more effective since then.

[mhatrw]

8. They are fucking the entire future of the Democratic party and of progressivism in order

to preserve our current broken economic system of accelerating wealth inequality and our current broken electoral system of corporate oligarchy.

[Orsino]

15. There's a special sort of irony in Citizen's United pushing Clinton as the nominee.

It's horrid.

[tk2kewl]

17. it's intersting that many of the activists of the past that did not become politicians

are with Bernie