Uh, this is completely absurd. Please refrain from commenting in public if you think this is remotely true. Also, "I've seen" is a pretty classic way to disown the words you're saying and to evade accountability. Do YOU think it's comparable to the Night of Long Knives? If not, don't say it.

If you have real, cogent criticisms of the Democratic primary, post them.

Here's what I saw: the primary played out fair and square, just as it's designed to do, and Bernie lost. Fair and square.

Yep, the AP called the election for Hillary the night before the primary in California. We'll never know what the vote would have been without that major election interferance. Update: I was indeed talking about 2016 - thanks for pointing that out.

Actually, we do indeed what the vote would have been, which is why AP felt comfortable calling it. You know why they called it, right? It's because Hillary had enough pledged and unpledged delegates at that point to become the nominee.

NBC called it before California, too. Because it was over. That's even assuming Hillary won ZERO delegates in California, which of course was not the case, and could not possibly have ended up being the case. It was a very conservative and well-justified call.

Please check your facts before posting misinformation.

There were months left in the primaries, and public opinion is far from static. Your logic, even at a first pass, fails completely.

That was '16. That was also a complete mess and was my introduction to how politics is really played. Democrat party is not your friend, they are bought and paid for by the people making money hand over fist on everything that people are upset about today.

There was so much, and so little has still been addressed.

The ACRONYM fiasco alone is enough to discredit the entire institution, but apparently news moves too fast for real public discourse about that.

What happened with Bernie Sanders in the primaries? I thought he saw it through to the end and just plain lost to Biden. Not that that fact alone didn't concern me.

But I think it's a far more damning image to the party that Tulsi Gabbard qualified for the debates under the rules at the time, and then was excluded because they changed the rules. You can't play the race or gender card every time your person isn't winning, and then go out of your way to very specifically exclude the only candidate left who isn't white and isn't male. You can't really make a principled argument against the way the electoral college currently works by ignoring non-mainland delegates. You can't claim every vote should count. You can't claim the two party system is the reason you can't incorporate new, non-adversarial ideas.

I tried to reply to this earlier but was put on time-out by the mods for replying to other comments. Literally has never happened to me before, until today, when I started challenging Dem establishment lines.

There's way too much to say in one comment, but just to summarize:

The "establishment" organized a quite effective takedown just prior to Super Tuesday. It was in retrospect a classic rug-pull: flood the field with candidates who provide each segment of identitarians a race-horse they can get behind; dilute the rhetoric and box out the candidates labelled "extreme" while simultaneously ripping off and diluting their core policies; pull all candidates except one, have all the other candidates endorse them, and bet (correctly) on the assumption that people don't have the time or inclination to look at all beyond the news headlines to inform their vote.

I am happy to dive much deeper into this if you are interested. There are many angles to investigate, but I would say the mainstream news media outlets were the most crucial factor, being used as effective tools of consent-manufacturing in many of the ways Chomsky describes.

You're thinking of 2016 perhaps. Nothing of the sort happened in 2020.

> How many people got a chance to vote for Bernie Sanders in 2020?

It doesn't matter. A large percentage of Democrats describe themselves as conservative. Many of those people are minorities.

Sanders' popularity was an illusion due to the bizarre ordering of Democratic primary states. The voters in the early states are much whiter, more educated, and politically active than most of the later states. That means a candidate like Sanders (who is disproportionately popular with white, educated people) looked a lot more viable than he was.

I'm not saying I think Sanders would have lost to Trump. I think Sanders was actually more viable as a general election candidate than as a Democratic primary candidate for various reasons (one of them being that a small-but-significant group of anti-establishment voters were willing to vote for Trump or Sanders, but no one else).

You think Bernie losing the primary in 2020 is comparable to Hitler literally murdering his opposition? And Obama is somehow involved?

That’s a rather tasteless metaphor.

The establishment candidates aside from Biden did drop out to clear the lane, but that only created the same head-to-head matchup that Sanders had with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Which was probably motivated by seeing what happened to establishment Republicans in the 2016 primaries.