Bernie Sander’s Heretical Critique

There’s no way of getting inside that room with Bernie and Liz. Maybe the NSA has records of the conversation somewhere, but odds are they’re not going to spill the beans, if only because it would suggest a level of surveillance whose scandal would swamp the issue at hand. So, we’re left to our own psychological devices to peer back through the veil of the present in search of the truth of the past.

I take it as established that Elizabeth Warren misremembers her own experiences in order to cast herself as a plucky victim who nevertheless persisted. The casting directors have clearly loved her, somewhere in that nether region between political conspiracy and the genius of history, exactly because of this authentic habit of mind. It’s the part she was born to play. Given this character, of both disposition and casting, it’s easy for me to imagine her twisting whatever Bernie in fact said to her into another episode in the ongoing saga of LIZ AGAINST THE MAN.

But, the idea that Bernie Sanders always tells the truth just doesn’t jibe with my recollection of the last few years. A popular example of Bernie’s nearly Washingtonian level of compulsive truth telling is his affirmative declaration of support for giving terrorists in prison the right to vote. Granted, it is a lunatic thing to say when running for general office, but not inside his political base.

On the other hand, Bernie was the guy who lied about how great Hillary was, and turned on his own supporters for their reluctance to support her. It’s not clear to me whether he did this because he really believed Trump was a clear and present danger, or because he didn’t want to be blamed for helping Trump get elected, or whether he was a sheepdog all along, but the fact remains: he did it. He praised Hillary in a way that directly contradicted the rhetoric he had used against her in the primary. He called for a political revolution, then stopped short of actually engaging in one. One way or another, whether it was to pull Clinton down or boost her up, Bernie Sanders has demonstrated a willingness to say what he doesn’t truly believe in service to political purposes.

Clearly, the charge Warren leveled at him, as if against her will, amounted to a lethal threat to his campaign. Given that Bernie views his campaign as the best expression of a necessary revolution in human affairs, he has sufficient and compelling reason to deny having ever made the statement, regardless of what he actually said, or actually thinks on the matter.

In a nutshell: This is demonstrably one of the few instances in which Bernie Sanders would lie.

So, much as I am not a fan of LIZ AGAINST THE MAN, or really the whole genre of latter-day girl-power fiction, I think it’s entirely possible that Bernie said something closer to what Liz remembers than he would like to admit.

Bernie’s Top Secret Critique Revealed By An Act of Psychic Insight

If I were Bernie Sanders, here’s the gist of what that something would be: A woman can’t beat Trump because the women of our time are bent on using girl-power, diversity rhetoric, and Trump has already demonstrated that he’s like kryptonite to that Superwoman.

As the triumph of Chapelle and Gervais, and the failure of Smollette, have demonstrated: The Woke have lost the Culture War, dragged down by their own self-satisfied, hermetically-sealed, virtue-signalling incompetence. As all female candidates now are wed to the doctrines of wokeness, no female candidate could defeat Trump.

Warren’s response in the debate confirms this read, exposing this incident as a skirmish in an ongoing culture war within the Democratic party and the Greater American Left, between what we might call the woke warriors and the old socialist guard for the mantle of moral righteousness, for the body and soul of the Party.

At the time, I found Warren’s quick tack in answering how she felt “when Bernie told her a woman couldn’t be president” an irritating disconnect. Rather than challenging Sanders’ denial, she took the accusation as the opportunity to answer a question “that’s out there”, about whether a woman can beat Donald Trump. The whole thing seemed scripted, as if the whole conflict itself, from leak to nuts, had been constructed to provide Liz the opportunity to assert the claim that women were the superior candidates of today. Liz prefers candidates who don’t lose elections. And only female candidates don’t lose elections.

That CNN repeatedly replayed Warren’s near non-sequitur, dubbing it “the line of the night”, seals the deal in my mind that this was a power play in an ideological war for control of the party, and by extension, the cultural Left.

Go Woke, My Son

Warren described herself as having “disagreed” with Sander’s point, when he made it to her privately sometime last year, as if it was a simple sort of point, unexceptional enough to merely disagree with. Of course, for Bernie Sanders to have made such an assertion would have required a great deal of explanation and context. It’s not the sort of statement that Sanders would have simply made, or that Warren would have simply “disagreed” with.

The implication pushed by the Clinton camp and their allies since 2016 has been that Bernie is a secret sexist. Therefore, it’s not all that unbelievable that he would have just blundered out something like this in an unguarded moment.

Once we put aside this propaganda, we then have to imagine what sort of conversation it was that held such a statement. If Warren’s strange response is an indication, then it may have been a discussion about the strategic viability of going woke against Trump.

Hillary already tried it and lost, and that was at a time when the country was half-terrified Trump would literally destroy the world one day, while fucking around in the Oval Office like it was just another Trump Tower looking down on a strip of casinos and prostitutes. We might imagine Bernie saying that running the same playbook, with a hopefully less-unlikable Hillary, wouldn’t work, because since 2016, trust in wokeness has diminished in almost exact proportion to an increase of trust in Trump.

Bernie may have made the political argument that going woke woman was a recipe for continued disaster, and Warren may have disagreed exactly with this, knowing that she was going to run a woke woman campaign.
That, at least, is the argument she chose to pick a fight with, whether it was the argument Bernie had made or not.

Again, given her starring role in LIZ AGAINST THE MAN, it’s easy to imagine that Warren had only imagined Bernie was making such an argument. It hardly matters, since whether it was made then or not, it is now the real argument between the campaigns of Warren and Sanders, even if it must remain at the margins and in the realm of what is deniable and what is denied.

The War in Progressive Heaven

We have long wondered how they would differentiate themselves, and had to content ourselves with fundraising differences, and arguments over the best way to get to Medicare-For-All. All of these were tactical arguments within a unified strategic front. This seemingly pointless and avoidable feud is actually the breaking through of an ideological conflict, of a war already raging in Progressive Heaven.
Warren has gone woke in asserting that women, by the mere fact of their being women, are not just the equals of men, but their betters as Democratic candidates.

All of this gets to why Tulsi Gabbard is such a danger to the Democratic party establishment, which now uses woke feminism to keep a hold on power. Gabbard would negate the woman card, stripping the Establishment of its trump fig leaf pretension to bearing the moral weight of history. The sense of this weight makes all the difference, as it is exactly this that allows and justifies a people for bending the moral arc toward themselves.

That’s why I wished way back before he had announced that Bernie would stay out and put his energy behind Tulsi, so as to subvert this cultural divide, which the Establishment uses to divide and conquer populist energy. I forget which singer it was that sang, as long as you play their game, girl, you’re never going to win.

Think of Gillibrand, and Harris, and Clinton, and Warren, who took it upon herself to deputize Klobuchar into the ranks of superior women, the Amazons, the Squad, whose political ascendence will alone turn the tide of Trump’s America. Such is the mythos of the Democratic party, belied by the fact that Warren is a failing candidate, and the only truly strong female candidate has been banished from the lighted stage to walk the Siberian streets of New Hampshire and Iowa in search of support.

LIZ AGAINST THE MAN is just a single series in an overarching drama, the Mahabharata of our times, which we might title The Triumphant Emergence of the Female Future. It’s a drama that has been the subject of many scathing reviews, which only feeds the movement’s beating heart of righteous victimhood on an oxygen of slings and arrows.

Outside of this self-worshipping bubble, though, word on the street is that a lot of people just aren’t buying it anymore. It could be that Bernie Sanders had the courage to speak that heretical view in private.