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[Ken Burch]

25. If you're implying that that represents most Sanders supporterss, that's bullshit.

Yes, his support base skewed white and male...but it's not as though those who backed him WANTED it that way, or that Bernie did.

And at a certain point you're going to have to accept the fact that those who called for the party to place a greater emphasis on economic justice NEVER wanted the party to stop challenging racism, or even to challenge it less.

Before it was invented by supporters of one candidate in 2015, there was NEVER a divide on the issues between social justice and economic justice supporters. Before that, 95% of the time we were all in the same marches, fighting for the same things.

Can you please, finally, accept the fact that there is no longer any reason to perpetuate the notion that economic justice campaigners dismiss the need to fight institutional bigotry and social oppressnion? We don't now. Even if we could have communicated better in the primaries, we didn't then. And I think that some of the uglier things that were said in that time, things I condemned at the time, were driven in part by the fact that false accusations of indifference to social oppression were repeated and repeated and repeated even when they had long since been disproved.

None of us have ever argued that white men mattered more than anyone else. All we said was that there needs to be at least some common-ground battles based on class AS WELL as a multiracial movement against social oppression. We could always have had both and we can STILL have both. For the future, we NEED both, because we need to get votes we didn't get then, mainly from alienated nonvoters but also from at least some people who voted for the other major-party candidate and will come to the realization that they were played. Seeking those votes doesn't require us, as a party, to abandon anyone or anything.

Now that neither 2016 presidential candidate will ever run for president again, can we move past the primary rhetoric once and for all?

If this means people need to phrase things differently, fine.

If it means there needs to be more critique of what was conveyed in the heat of the moment, then let's have that.

But it has to happen.

And it can't happen if false accusations of indifference to bigotry continue to be spread.

In the name of the future, stop with that already.

What you did in that last post helps no one.