"The Democratic establishment was co-opted" | Hour 3

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. All right. So have you heard of a woman named Evan Barker? And if you haven't, she's been making the rounds. She has a new book out called Nothing Left. And she used to be a fundraiser and operative in the Democrat Party. And she has now written this book, which is dubbed a tell-all. And she's been making the rounds on the podcast and interview circuit And she recently joined Michael Schellenberger, Michael Schellenberger, also former lefty. He wrote several books, one of which was San Francisco, where he did a deep, deep dive into the homeless, uh, problem in San Francisco and how all of the nonprofits and NGOs were basically profiting by not solving the problems. Um, And so he has a podcast and website called Public, and he interviewed. Evan Barker. Like I said, she's been on several different shows, and she's been talking about this stuff. She is in high demand among conservative or right-leaning. Programs. For some reason, the Democrats and the left doesn't, want to hear what she has to say, which is weird because she's trying to like sound the alarm on the problems inside the democratic party and their, uh, their deal that they cut with the far left Marxist moon bats. Okay. So Michael Schellenberger says the 2024 election since that election, there have been three different explanations for why Democrats lost the white house and both houses of Congress and why the Democrats remain unpopular with voters. So he breaks these down. There's the moderates, they're the progressives, and then there are the fundamentalists. Okay. So first off the moderates are, They say the party went woke on migration, race, and LGBTQ plus two IASL infinity sign issues. Okay. So that's what the moderates say, that the party went woke. A Democrat pollster called the party's orthodoxy, quote, noticeably out of step with what was electorally optimal or viable. Now, what does that mean? It means that they're pushing stuff that most people don't want, right? It is not electorally optimal or viable. I mean, not even viable, right? You're pushing things that make you toxic as a candidate, right? The pollster found undecided voters broke for Trump 52 to 38%. with five of their top eight stated reasons involving immigration. This issue was a killer for Democrats, which is why a lot of them are now backtracking on the whole Abolish ICE. Unlike the DSA candidates, they're still full bore. Abolish ICE. Progressives, the next camp, they say, that the party failed to deliver a populist economic message. A Bernie Sanders-aligned autopsy found that Kamala Harris' campaign courted suburban Republicans but ignored working-class voters, and that strong populist economic messages outperformed democracy threat messages among Pennsylvania blue-collar voters 57 to 45 percent. I, for one, am shocked. This is just completely shocking that all of your, you know, the threat to democracy, like that message didn't work? Really? I thought it was so attractive to blue-collar voters, but apparently not. Apparently it was not attractive. So that's what the progressives say, that you guys did not deliver a populist economic message. Third group fundamentalists. They blame institutional factors, above all, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris themselves. So the fundamentalists pin it all on Joe and Kamala. One analyst noted that Biden's approval in the high 30s and then two years of recession-level consumer sentiment put the nominee on track to lose the popular vote by four points. Harris lost it by one and a half. Biden ran too long, the party held no real primary, and Harris inherited an inflation-poisoned incumbency. She was the victim. Now, Schellenberger says that all three of these explanations are correct, and they all work together. So each one, and I don't know, I'm not going to I'm not going to go deep into trying to dissect whether or not these are the three groups and whether or not you can define people as a member of the moderates versus the progressives versus the fundamentalists or whatever. It's not a valuable exercise for me. The point is that he did this. He breaks the Democrats down to these three groups, and he says that all of their explanations for why They've become so toxic. All of their views, they all work together and they are to some degree correct. And thus brings us to Evan Barker. She spent a decade raising money for the party's left flank from the Bernie Sanders orbit through Justice Democrats and their aligned campaigns to people like Jasmine Crockett, and even the guy up in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, who is just having a terrible week. In case you were not aware, he's commenting on Fox News host's genitalia. It's just very weird. Anyway, she now has this book, Nothing Left. She joined Schellenberger to discuss how the, quote, democratic establishment was co-opted, how it was co-opted by this far left. There was a deal that was made. All right, for over a year now, you've heard me talking about Create-A-Video, great local company in Mint Hill that has helped more than 2 million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels, and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now, Create-A-Video is helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. Introducing Group Travel Videos. 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That's GroupTravelVideos.com. Or call 704-846-7870, extension 206. And when you do that, ask for Katie. But Pete, can I just email? Well, yes, you can. You can email Katie. Katie at GroupTravelVideos.com. group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. Okay, so Evan Barker appearing on Michael Schellenberg's public podcast, the name of it is called Public, and she lays out the deal that Democrats made with the like the far-left Marxist Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA moonbat base. And here's the deal. I think a lot of people right now are confused about why DSA candidates are winning or why Abdul El-Sayed just won the nomination in Michigan. There was a big effort from the Democratic Party, from the main DNC apparatus, to suppress and push out players in the progressive wing of the party. They did so by blacklisting. I talk about that in the book. So I was actually blacklisted at one point in time. My firm was blacklisted. But all of this backfired. And it actually made the progressive wing stronger. It made us recruit our own donors. It made us find our own billionaires. It made us build our own consultant network. It made us find allied organizations. It caused new organizations like the Justice Democrats to pop up. They've learned all of the establishment's tricks. So that's what they did with AOC when she won in 2018. Right after she won, she teamed up with Sunrise Movement and the Justice Democrats to go protest outside of Nancy Pelosi's office. All right, I'm going to stop there for a second. You remember this time frame, right? Democrats were trying to fight back against this rising tide of Marxism inside their ranks. And so what did they do? Classic Democrat Party tactics, right? They blacklisted people. They shunned them. They canceled them. Like, you don't get any access to any of this stuff, whatever. And what Barker is saying is that it backfired. It made this wing stronger. Because they were forced to compete. Which I know. You would think. That the Marxists would have learned. Some sort of a lesson here. But they did not. They did not learn anything about competition. Making them stronger. So they got stronger. And then when you start. Having electoral victories. Like AOC had. Right now. Now you have to be taken seriously. To get. all these Democrats to sign on to Green New Deal and to get all of these Democrats to support Medicare for All. And then in the 2020 election and the presidential election, you had people like Kamala Harris running on Medicare for All and Pete Buttigieg because they were able to really set the tone. It's like agenda setting. It's tone setting. All right. Let me stop there. So when AOC, remember, she goes and she protests at Pelosi's office, whatever. The base of the Democrat Party is this far left. They want these things. They want Medicare for all. They want the Green New Deal, right? They want this stuff. And what has the Democrat Party delivered for them on those things? Not a lot. They gave it a lot of lip service. They taught this generation about these bumper stickers and about these talking points and, oh, we're totally for all of this stuff and we just couldn't get it done, right? So they promoted all of this stuff to the younger generation. The younger generation believed them. And then they got mad at Democrats for not delivering. So now you got people that are coming in and saying, we're going to deliver these things and we're basically holding you to your promise. You said you wanted this stuff, but you didn't deliver it. So now we have a Green New Deal. We want to regulate the cow flatulence. So you better sign on to this. And the Democrats, knowing that this is what a lot of their voters want because they've been promising it for years, they don't have a choice. They got to go along with this. And they know that's how they do it to get their policies and their priorities pushed and presidential elections, which really defines the face of the party. This is very helpful because I think that we're getting a more complete view of what has occurred, which is. The decline of the old machine, the rise of a new progressive machine. And then I think the interesting thing you're also saying there on Kamala and Biden is that their embrace of progressive policies was not well thought out. It was clumsy. They ended up embracing a bunch of stuff that ultimately led to Kamala's defeat and Biden's loss of power. For example, they opened the borders. It's hard to imagine them doing that without the progressives starting in 2018. I remember in 19, the summer of 2019, when I went to Washington, D.C., I call it the Rooftop Revolution Planning Committee because it was a party on a rooftop in D.C. headed by a guy that ran a major, prominent, national progressive organization. And he was telling me the inside story of what was going on. There was very public feuding happening with Nancy Pelosi and Shoikot, her secretary. Chief of staff. And he told me that Nancy Pelosi had just requested a meeting with AOC that week. And then five days after that meeting, they were both, Corbyn was demoted and Shoykot was left, completely left her office and went and did his own thing and later ended up running for Nancy Pelosi's seat, right? But at that moment, a lot of people in the progressive movement, I think they still have this idea actually, believed that AOC was co-opted. And she was co-opted. She later appeared with Nancy Pelosi on Rolling Stone and got these great committee assignments and just rolled over and became her lapdog. At the same time, and. This is what I write about in my book that I don't think has really been pointed out before, the Democratic establishment was also co-opted. They were co-opted because they basically embraced each other's worst impulses. AOC and the progressive left would no longer fight for economic populism or run a class-based, colorblind, populist movement the way that Bernie did in 2016, and instead would focus on the culture wars and things like abolishing ICE and defunding the police. And believing that all white people are implicitly irredeemably racist and putting identity and race at the forefront of everything. And so the Democratic establishment embraced those ideas in exchange for not having to do the actual economic populism stuff that the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 really made their focus on. And I think you even saw Bernie go in this direction in 2020 with his campaign. There you go. That's how it happened, I believe. I think it's pretty evident. I think she's correct. She would know also, right? She was in these circles. She was fundraising for these candidates. She explained the party's elites, this is according to Schellenberger's write-up, the DNC and the DCCC reached an accommodation agreement with the progressive DSA wing. The establishment embraced woke culture issues and both sides abandoned progressive economics. And they thought that this worked because Joe Biden won. And they were like, aha, this is the way to do it. We're going to go woke and we're going to talk about abolishing ice and the police are all racist. Everything's systemically racist, right? This was peak woke. Think about it, right? Go back to 2019, 2020, and then the fiery, but mostly peaceful summer of riots, right? This is, this is what they cultivated. This is why they did it. This is why they all took the knee in the Capitol, right? This is why they did this. And people were like, what are you doing? Like, These people are crazy. This is crazy stuff that you're embracing. And they're like, no, no, no, this is it. This is why they embraced it. And then the tone gets set. As she said, it's all about tone setting. The tone is set. It sort of trickles down. If you will, you have all the local candidates that are taking their cues, if not marching orders from national. And you have all the local candidates saying the same stuff. Now they're, of course, they're, you know, scrubbing their social media profiles from everything from like 2018 to 2022. Yeah. Now they realize, oh, that stuff actually cost us some elections. From the text line, Jeff with a G says, I pray that there are enough intelligent voters. Me too. Sorry. I pray there are enough intelligent voters on both sides of the spectrum that can recognize what the actual threat to democracy is. The guys that want to ban the Senate, ban the presidency, abolish ICE, erase the border, pack the Supreme. Court, etc., etc., etc. Yeah. Kevin says, no, no, Pete. It's the messaging. If we could just get the socialist utopia messaging right, the stupid voters will fall in line. According to Democrats, yeah, this is always what they say after all of their electoral... They always say it's not that our policies suck. It's that we just didn't explain them well enough. Our message just didn't break through. Basically, you're stupid. We couldn't figure out a way to make our awesome policies understandable to. You stupid people. We couldn't dumb it down enough, I guess. Michael Schellenberger said, And Evan Barker in this interview, again, pointing out that the Democratic establishment was co-opted. It embraced the ideas of the radical left in exchange for not having to do the actual economic populism stuff that the Bernie Sanders campaign focused on in 2016. They didn't want to do that. Bernie came along and he was, you know, talking about class warfare, the oligarchs and the billionaires and the millionaires, although he dropped the millionaires after he became a millionaire. So now it's just the billionaires and. The trillionaires and all of that. So they didn't actually want to deal with that stuff. And there's probably part of it is because they are, quote, the establishment, right? They've got their system, their machine set up. They're all making bank. They're doing insider trading. They're going to the cocktail parties, right? They're living high on the hog. They're not looking to disrupt that status quo. It's been working all this time for them. And so they don't feel the need to actually deliver on any of this stuff. So. when you have the rise of the DSA and they're like full woke and they're espousing the economic populism stuff, the Democrats then say, okay, we'll do the woke stuff, but shut up on the economic populism front. The ideas, the establishment embraced were open borders, defunding the police and and then putting identity and race at the forefront of everything. And this is what the donors preferred. And Barker said the donors prefer that they focus, the Democrats and the. Candidates, focus on cultural issues. Why? Well, the donors are rich. They don't want to talk about economics, right? Because then they may get eaten. This has always been the hypocrisy. We've been pointing it out when AOC shows up at the Met Gala wearing a $ 30, 000 dress that says, eat the rich, right? They don't want to talk about this stuff. So they're like, focus on the cultural issues, the cultural warfare. And that's a distraction away from the wealth of the donors. Remember, this woman is coming from the more progressive wing of the party. Now, I think she said she did vote for Donald Trump, but she's not a conservative, okay? To understand why the DSA keeps winning, it's important to understand that after 2018, The DSA wing of the party reached an accommodation with the establishment wing. The establishment, so this is the AOC-Nancy Pelosi unholy alliance, okay? The establishment wing would embrace the woke agenda, the culture war issues of the far left. the BLM-DEI radicalism, the open borders, the transgender stuff, and that's why they did it. They embraced all that stuff. And the DSA would shut up about the populist economic stuff. Even Bernie Sanders went along with this when he ran in 2020. And because Biden won, they thought this works. They thought they had cracked the code. but then Trump wins again. And you got wipeouts down ballot. You've got people who are like defund the police and every white person's a racist inherently. And all the institutions are systemically racist and corrupt and misogynistic and everything else. And people start fleeing the party. Trump wins in 24. And so now. The Democrats wake up and realize, oh, that wasn't actually a winning strategy. We have to walk, we've got to backtrack on this stuff. Delete the social media posts. Delete the Twitter posts, right? Get rid of that stuff. So that's why they're now talking economic populism. They're now talking Medicare for all, right? But what does the DSA do? They are blaming the losses of the Democrats on the establishment wing. Not them. It's not their policies. It's not the DSA culture war stuff that they were advocating that the establishment wing adopted. No, no, no. It's the establishment wing. They're the problem. We look at us with our economic populism talk. We're the future. It's their fault, even though it was the radical issues that the establishment adopted and lost on. All of that stuff came from the DSA, radical left-wing part of the base. The DSA then pivots towards affordability, economic issues. And then they just dumped the unpopular culture war stuff and they put it all on the Democrat establishment. Schellenberger says, I think this book by Evan Barker is important because it contributes to a better understanding of what exactly happened within the party over the last decade. Evan Barker also credits the rise of the progressive radical left of the Democrat party to its growing savvy at things like fundraising, which makes sense because Marxists do excel at mooching off of rich people. That does make sense. One last bit here from Evan Barker. She says, when I was working in progressive politics, I watched the left and the establishment go off the cultural deep end. They became obsessed with culture issues to the detriment of everything else. Now they're trying to move on from this. Their strategy is to go to the left on economics. And when confronted about things like trans people in women's sports, they'll tell you, No one is thinking about this or it affects a small number of people. So let's talk about economics. Let's talk about economics. Let's talk about affordability. You've noticed this, right? Every single question is always turned into something like, well, that's not really what I'm hearing people most concerned about this. You know, the things that people are concerned about are the everyday issues, the affordability, utility rates, grocery prices, right? They desperately want to move away from the culture issues. But by doing this, she says, like Abdul El-Sayed did when he was on Fox News with Jesse Waters the other night, he comes off looking like he has no common sense. It hurts his ability to have authority on other issues, like healthcare or the economy. When Jesse Waters asked him about transing kids... and he equates it to circumcision, you look like a moron, an absolute moron. His arguments on other issues then get eroded by his own design without even really knowing it. She says, I'm talking about Abdul as the example right now, but all progressives do this. The difference is they're usually running in blue cities, blue districts, blue states, but he is not. She says the days of ignoring the culture wars are long gone. Democrats have swum deep in those waters for far too long. By the way, I. Think it's the Susan B. Anthony group, the pro-life group. They're out with a strategy memo. And like they're saying, guys, like the polling on what Democrats are now doing with full term abortions. Like abortion up to the point of birth that who just signed that into law? Was that. New York? I believe it was. Hochul? Governor Hochul? I think she did that. Like that is so far beyond radical to the point where, okay, so you can like half deliver the baby and still kill it? So it's just geography. So life is based purely on geography as to where the baby is located inside or outside the uterus. That's what we're talking about now? That's what you guys are advocating? That is so unpopular of a position. It is so outside the bounds of norm. And the polling is catastrophic on it. So focus on that. That's what the pro-life group is saying. Barker goes on and says, some might want to forget these issues ever became so central to the values of so Americans, but the public will not let Democrats forget it. Most importantly, Republicans will not let them forget it. They will keep bringing these issues up. Unless, of course, you're my good friend, Ray Cooper, cut him loose, Cooper. who doesn't ever have to answer any of these questions ever because he's got the, you know, all sharks, I'm just a country lawyer kind of shtick going. And they want him to win. So they're not going to ask him these questions, but if they do ask him a question about any one of these culture issues that he was in on, remember he was governor at the time this stuff was happening and he was part of this co-opting. He went along with the establishment wing. Like I don't have any doubt that he is like, if I had to put him in one camp DSA or establishment, he's establishment. However, That means he too was co-opted by the DSA culture war stuff. And we all lived it. We saw him do it from HB2. He was actually one of the pioneers in this front, right? He weaponized the transgender issue against Republicans and against his own citizens. He was the attorney general for the state of North Carolina. And he worked to get companies to boycott us to not come here. to pull up stakes and move to different states, right? To get the NBA all-star game moved out of state, right? This is what he was organizing. The Wall Street Journal did the story about his working with the head of Salesforce, Benioff, whatever the guy's name is. He worked with companies to get them to target us, to harm our economy, our citizens, our taxpayers. Why? Because it personally benefited him in his campaign. He threatened fellow Democrats in the legislature. You will not work with the Republicans on any kind of amendments to HB2, which banned men from going into women's bathrooms and locker rooms, also imposed steep fines on Charlotte businesses, right? This was the Charlotte ordinance that prompted HB2. Like they were going to fine businesses if they didn't allow this kind of access. And so the state came in and said, no, you can't do that. They passed HB2. Cooper used it to beat up Pat McCrory. Right. And then he threatened his fellow Democrats. If you try to fix HB2, you try to amend it in any way, which he was on. He's out in the public ranting and raving and screaming about how awful it is. It's discriminatory. Right. It's not giving people their human dignity and all of this. And behind the scenes, there are Democrats that are talking to Republicans and saying, hey, you know, we can try to fix some of this stuff and maybe not get boycotted. And Cooper tells those Democrats, don't you dare do that. Don't you dare fix this thing that I'm campaigning against. If you fix it, you will have no role in my administration. And no fix came. And he won. And Barker goes on to say Democrats are going to need a better strategy than just ignoring or laughing off all of these questions. They need to give real answers. And she says they need to be courageous enough to stand up to their own base. So that's not going to happen. Because again, the Democratic Party has no natural immunity to this kind of dumbassery. They just don't. Because it's a relativistic mindset. I'm not going to tell you what's right or wrong. There are no absolute truths and stuff. It's just, you know, whatever you want. Who am I to judge? No natural immunity. So I fully anticipate this party being full Marxist within a decade. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.