In November, the liberal activist and Twitter personality Peter Daou got into a spat with an unlikely adversary: Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress and Daou’s erstwhile ally in the fight to elect Hillary Clinton president in 2016. After she called his criticism of Obamacare from the left “enraging and the most privileged bs,” Daou tweeted an affronted riposte to his nearly 300,000 followers.



"Privileged" huh @neeratanden?



I'm Lebanese-Jewish and was a war refugee as a kid. I've worked hard for everything in my life, dealing with PTSD the entire time.



My argument is that we're losing the larger war against the right despite temporary victories.



Dispute that. https://t.co/RdzxzdbydX — Peter Daou (@peterdaou) November 6, 2019

Tanden blocked Daou (he has since been unblocked). The clash between these two Clinton loyalists, both of whom spent the 2016 election sparring with supporters of Bernie Sanders online, is illuminating. Tanden runs the most powerful Democratic Party–aligned think tank, where she draws an annual salary of nearly $400,000. Her career and motivations are easy to follow: She’s a paragon of the Democratic establishment, skeptical of the party’s left wing and in a good position to leverage her influence to land a plum spot in a future Democratic administration.



Daou’s motivations are harder to parse. He is one of the very few veterans of the bitterly contentious 2016 Democratic primary to switch sides, transitioning in the past year from one of Clinton’s most fanatical surrogates to an equally fervent booster of Sanders. His change of heart has been startling. This is the same guy who, after Clinton fainted during a visit to the World Trade Center memorial two months before the election, tweeted , “To #Hillary haters jabbering about NYC weather, I LIVE HERE. I usually play outdoor summer hoops and today it was too hot even for a stroll.” (It was 80 degrees and low humidity.) No one, it seemed, was more willing to go all out for Clinton’s lost cause than Daou. It’s no wonder that he got a shout-out in the first section of Clinton’s campaign memoir, What Happened, while Tanden’s name is absent throughout.

No one, it seemed, was more willing to go all out for Clinton’s lost cause than Daou.

But now, Daou’s boundless enthusiasm is redirected. “Only ONE candidate is spearheading a mass movement for systemic change,” Daou tweeted in a characteristic recent outburst. In another, he credited Sanders with having “inspired a new generation of progressive candidates to run for office.” These tweets have been typical of Daou’s feed since April, when he announced his conversion in an essay in The Nation titled “I Was Bernie’s Biggest Critic in 2016—I’ve Changed My Mind.” Daou then began apologizing for his past attacks on Sanders and offered a blanket amnesty to his former critics in the form of mass unblockings.

Some on the left have accused Daou of cynical motives. Sarah Jones, a left-leaning writer at New York magazine (and a former staffer at The New Republic), recently tweeted: “truly embarrassed for everyone enabling Peter Daou’s latest grifter turn.” Others, such as the Mike Gravel teens, have embraced the conversion, hailing Daou as “King!” in reply to his tweets. But the predominant reaction has been one of bemusement. “I can’t gauge how sincere he is, but I support it for entertainment value and because the stakes are so low,” says Alex Nichols, the author of a scathing 2017 profile of Daou in The Outline. “It’s truly puzzling,” says Felix Biederman, a co-host of the popular left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House and a vocal critic of Daou in 2016.