Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Sanders Supporters Need To Know Now If He Intends To Be The Republican Enabling Spoiler In 2016

I read in the Boston Globe the other day that the former cult idol of the play-left,  St. Ralph Nader, has joined up with the funder of white supremacists and general opponent of people with dark skin, Ron Unz in trying to take over the Harvard Board of Overseers.  Unz is also running for Senate in California.   Unz made his money in banking and Wall Street, he made a bundle by selling the company he founded,  Wall Street Analytics,  to Moody's, one of the major players in bringing about the financial collapse of 2008

Here's some more of what Ralph's new colleague is funding.

The Unz Foundation’s most heavily financed fellow in 2008 was Gregory M. Cochran, who received $600,000 to serve as an “Unz Independent Scholar.” Cochran, then an adjunct anthropology professor at the University of Utah, has written that homosexuality may be spread by a “germ” and tied Jewish intelligence to genetics.

Unz also gave $24,000 to VDARE writer Steven E. Sailer, who described his personal ideology in a blog post as “citizenism”— the belief that “Americans should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the six billion foreigners.” Sailer has also written about what he calls the “black-white IQ gap,” and argued that the devastation incurred by Hurricane Katrina indicated that African Americans “possess poorer native judgment” and “need stricter moral guidance from society.”*

Ralph Nader is now making common cause with the likes of Ron K. Unz, his excuse is the proposal of Unz to make Harvard tuition free - to the elite who go there as well as the charity cases, including the children of millionaires and billionaires and other wealthy Harvard alumnae.  Unz has never to my knowledge campaigned against that most elite of affirmative action programs, the legacy admissions of the Ivy based aristocracy.    Currently tuition is free to anyone whose family income is less than $65,000, or so it said in The Globe.  The tuition proposal, which I would imagine has no chance of being adopted, is Unz's Trojan horse to get through his universal goal of abolishing any kind of affirmative action to correct the effects of racism.

I can't help but think that this is, somehow, related to Nader's role in helping to install George W. Bush as president in 2000 and his willingness to play a spoiler for Republicans in 2004, well after it was obvious what a terrible idea that was for "pushing the agenda left".    Or, just what is St. Nader, the blessed virgin Ralphie, doing by being part of a coalition whose obvious goal is to further the racist campaign of Ron Unz sixteen years after he played his major role in American politics, installing George W. Bush on the excuse he was "pushing the agenda to the left"?

And what does the past two decades of Ralph Nader have to say about the judgement of those who encourage his stunt candidacies for president?   It was twenty years ago he did his trial run against Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996, I will confess, to my shame, that I voted for him as a protest vote that year, four years later I voted for Al Gore, having realized from the politics in my state that those kinds of symbolic, stunt candidacies are grotesquely irresponsible.

I bring that up as a cautionary scenario because, frankly, the way he's been talking in the past few weeks, I think Bernie Sanders is trying to position himself as this year's Ralph Nader, unable to win the Presidency but quite willing to take down the far better candidate because she doesn't meet his standard of perfection, goodness, and purity.   As they make hay over the story of the voters list in Brooklyn I think that's going to get worse.

Here's a rule of thumb for lefties, when FOX-lite, CNN takes up your lines, you know that it's going to enable the Republican right, in the end.   CNN was all over the top of the page with the "voter purge in Brooklyn" this morning.

If, in the entirely unlikely event that all of the alleged 120,000 voters allegedly qualified to vote in the Democratic primary yesterday had voted for Bernie Sanders, it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the contest, Hillary Clinton would have still beaten Sanders by a large margin as she has in the entire contest, so far.  But his campaign and, worse, his more flaky followers, the kind who were Nader voters in 2000 will take up anything he says about it and amplify it to the benefit of the Republicans.

Bernie Sanders has days, not weeks or months to avoid being the enabler of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or whatever Republican hack who gets the nomination.   I don't see any indication that he and his campaign are going to do anything but attack Hillary Clinton in ways that will be useful to the Republicans.   The media is already showing signs of going with their habits of amplifying any and every attack on her, it's been doing that for three decades.  If Sanders meant to pivot to preventing a Republican winning as it was obvious that he couldn't win the nomination, I'm not seeing anything like that happening.  I don't know if he has the political skill or sharpness to do that.  If he means to, he should start today.   If he doesn't, his sane supporters who know that Hillary Clinton is entirely better than any Republican who she will be running against need to understand, right now, that he intends to play the spoiler this year.

*  There's more, here's another Harvard alum Unz has funded:

Thomas E. Woods ’94, another “Unz Research Fellow,” received $108,000 from the Unz Foundation over three years starting in 2008. Woods, a historian and writer, is a founding member of the League of the South, a self-defined “Southern Nationalist” group of “men and women who are not content to sit by and allow their land, liberty, and culture be destroyed by an alien regime and ideology.”

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