Lesson for opposing camps: Two bannings today, one pro-Sanders, one pro-HRC. Same person.

[delrem]

153. The owners here are pros who threw in with HRC even before the start.

Their professional expertise is linked, long term, with the DLC and with the HRC campaign.
That's historical fact.

This is not to say that DU isn't a broad based site for Dems and even for others who share much the same political instincts as, say, Bernie Sanders but who, like me, aren't even US citizens and so are outliers, and there are "independent" US citizen outliers too, who contribute to DU. I didn't say abandon DU. I didn't say that Skinner would or should kick Bernie supporters off of DU, or anything remotely like that. I'm saying something a bit more complicated than that. I don't want to argue. Read my #72 in response to BMUS, to start - since that's a more instinctive response than my response to you today.

I can't imagine any supporter of Bernie Sanders or of the general ideals of the "Democratic Progressive caucus" not knowing that big money buys the show before it performs. I can't imagine a fly not finally seeing the sledgehammer coming down to crush it. The backers of the DLC bought the Dem party - bought all the top positions and pushed the "progressive caucus" into a corner, "a far left rump", regardless of their experience, regardless of the popular appeal of their ideas. The backers of Third-Way could do this because from the beginning they had control of the purse and because the structure was open to their doing it (this happens in Canada too - see the BC Liberal Party, for example). They bought the "think tanks", they bought the "pundits", they own 24/7/52 coverage. They own the MSM.

For all the talk about the brave new world of "the internet" and "free social media", a lot of big money went into that, too. That big money is here, in this election season, with an intensity and force never seen before.

IMO if Bernie's supporters want to discuss matters apart from that structure - where their every word, idea, observation, plan, isn't being monitored, run through software, analysed and parsed by the opposition - then they'll need to have a space defined by progressives, by themselves. Again, read my response #72 to BMUS.

That's the strongest gut belief that I have at this time.