Rising Newsletter: Why Michael Moore Backs Bernie Over Warren
The Media Tries To Make HRC Happen
Hello #Risers! Welcome to the third edition of our newsletter. If you haven’t already, tell your friends to sign up by sharing the link to this post!
As promised every Friday we’ll tell you what our favorite segments of the week are, give you a written and expanded version of #RisingQs, and give you our weekly takeaways. If there’s anything you love, like, dislike, or hate don’t hesitate to reply to this email with your thoughts!
Favorite Segments Of The Week
#1: Michael Moore
Why: Moore explains why Bernie Sanders is different from Elizabeth Warren and why in Moore’s view ‘capitalists lose’ from Al Gore to John Kerry. We had a wide ranging conversation about the state of the race and what the structural economic factors that led to Trump mean for 2020.
#2: Matt Karp
Why: Both of us really enjoyed this interview. Saagar likened Matt’s recent Jacobin piece on class voting to the Flight 93 Election essay for Donald Trump in 2016 in terms of the way it lays out the stakes and choice of this election. Matt explained why he believes that an Elizabeth Warren victory would double down on the Democrats professional managerial alignment and why that matters.
#3: Marianne Williamson
Why: Marianne had tough words for the DNC throughout our interview with her and strongly defended Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Marianne also explained how and why the media smears certain candidates.
#4: Tim Pool
Why: Tim Pool is a great chronicler of media bias and laid out his thoughts on the possibility of Hillary Clinton jumping into the race as well as her nasty smear of Tulsi Gabbard.
Expanded #RisingQs
#1:
Answer (from both): No, next question
#2:
Answer (from both): Yes, but not only because they want to be VP but because if you go after Biden for his soft corruption, certain corners of the Democratic Party will instantly accuse you of helping Trump or even being a Russian asset or something else insane! This has happened to Krystal repeatedly since calling out Hunter Biden’s cushy board seat. Many of these candidates also need to protect their future employment prospects and access to money.
#3:
Answer (from both): First of all, great question! Our guiding principle is to cover power skeptically, whether it comes from the right or from the left or anywhere else for that matter. Power doesn’t stop at the government it extends if not more so to corporations and other moneyed interests in American society. In addition, most media leaves the working class out of their coverage or treats them with contempt, we try to put the working class at the center of our coverage. We want to focus on leaders and ideas who are grappling with the real systemic rot that we face instead of yelling about the symptoms (Did Trump call Pelosi third-rate or third-grade! This is the worst thing that anyone’s ever done since yesterday!)
Weekly Takeaways
Krystal’s Weekly Takeaway:
Elites See HRC as a Savior!? LOLOLOL
This was the week that the media and Democratic elites decided they were bored with the 20 candidates running for President on the Democratic side. After all the top 3 of Biden, Warren, and Bernie has been relatively stable. (BORING!) And voters don’t seem inclined to oblige the media by becoming raging Pete-aholics or Amy-maniacs. Worse, the centrist candidate who is performing well with the voters, Joe Biden, is showing some important signs of weakness. His debate performance sucked. He jumped in to bash the President for his offensive lynching comments only for CNN’s K-file to promptly post a clip of Biden calling Clinton’s impeachment a lynching.
And he’s been tarred as the big money candidate for spending $1 million on private jet travel from elite haven to elite haven but doesn’t actually have any big money. With less than $9 million in the bank, his campaign actually dropped their resistance to outsiders forming a Super PAC so that a few millionaires and billionaires could more effectively prop up his effort.
Here’s how Ryan Grim described his change in strategy:
And here’s how Joe Biden just last year apparently thought of Super PACs (and hilariously said he was more like Bernie/Warren than Clinton!)
So things aren’t going all that well for Team Biden AND the media doesn’t really love Biden any way. He’s a little downscale for them. A little too verbally incoherent. He doesn’t boast about his plans and he doesn’t have an Ivy League degree and he wasn’t a Rhodes Scholar. So who who could we pull out of the hat to spice up this race?
Enter Hillary Clinton! First she started an offensive and obnoxious spat with Tulsi Gabbard as part of her book tour that put her back in the mainstream narrative. Then Jonathan Martin over at the New York Times reported on a group of Democratic elites who were handwringing about the current field and wondering if they could lure in Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Obama or… you guessed it, Hillary Clinton! Then the Washington Post, in a similar report of elite freakout over Biden’s weakness and Warren/Sanders desire to raise their taxes, dropped the gem that Hillary Clinton is still thinking about running “according to two people close to her.” And finally Hillary advisor Phillipe Reines went on Fox News of all places to announce she hadn’t closed the door. The media wants to make Hillary happen and Hillary is happy to play along and pretend she’s relevant again.
Will she actually jump in? I doubt it. But if she does, you can say hello to Presidential nominee Bernie Sanders.
Saagar’ s Weekly Takeaway:
Surprise everybody, I’m up in arms about China again. This time around my ire isn’t aimed entirely at the NBA but also at Disney CEO Bob Iger. Iger gave an interview to Bloomberg this week in which he proudly told the audience that the lesson he learned from the NBA/China debacle is to never speak about sensitive issues regarding the Chinese government.
Iger’s Disney of course has billions of dollars at stake in the Chinese market. They are the largest population on earth after all and he can’t jeopardize any of his movies being banned from the country. Hollywood’s entire business model these days is to create bad, overly CGI’d movies, that will play well to a non-English speaking audience.
Ben Sasse of all people actually put it best in a statement after the incident.
As I noted in my tweet above, Iger has no problem feuding with the President of the United States but is scared to pieces about pissing off Chinese President Xi Jingping. These corporations are so beholden to Chinese cash they abandoned the values of their country a very long time ago. The real question is what can be done about it?
Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton (strange combo?) moved the ball on a related issue this week I wanted to give a special shout out too. The dynamic duo wrote the Director of National Intelligence to find out whether the popular teen social media app Tik Tok is being used by the Chinese intelligence services to spy on American citizens.
Should a Chinese social media company be allowed to operate in the US if we know they have no problem sharing that information with their government? Reply to this email and let me know what you think.