“Ratfucking” means using dirty tricks to win and maintain political power. Now, ratfucking in various forms has been adopted as the Democratic Party’s main strategy. The most famous recent example is the DNC’s conspiracy with media and party insiders to ensure that Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign was completely undermined. As serious as this was, it’s just part of a bigger picture in which the Democrats have replaced a progressive policy agenda with propaganda and dirty tricks. Consider four other recent cases.

In Baltimore last year, incoming Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh ran on a platform that supported the $15 per hour minimum wage. But last month, she vetoed it. Her union supporters are shocked by her betrayal. However, this move is consistent with a history of Democratic election ratfucking. The veto should not be seen as a betrayal per se, but simply part of a well-practiced, time-honored, dirty trick of Democrats winning office by lying.

Catherine Pugh is sworn in as Baltimore Mayor, Dec 2016. Weeks later she would betray a key campaign promise.

After their devastating 2016 election losses, congressional leaders implicitly acknowledged a need for a change by endorsing progressive Representative Keith Ellison to be the Democratic National Committee’s new Chair. However, this did not sit well with other party insiders, who proceeded to apply billionaire resources to smear Ellison, a Muslim, with an ugly campaign of Islamophobic lies. With this ratfucking, Ellison was defeated, and since then the new Chair Tom Perez, an establishment figure, has toured the country to the sounds of booing from angry voters.

During the DNC chair race, the Democratic Party used billionaire Haim Saban (left) to smear progressive Keith Ellison.

On June 3rd, the Democrat-aligned political action committee (PAC) Democracy for America endorsed Georgia Assembly Minority Leader Stacey Abrams for Governor of Georgia. However, the ostensibly progressive PAC did so a year before any possible primary, anointing the establishment candidate. Abrams has a troubled record of not only supporting past Republican cuts to publicly-funded college, but also now running on a platform of maintaining those same GOP cuts. Once again, the Party works to keep ‘Democratic’ primaries safely ratfucked.

However, the Party’s ratfucking strategy is most obvious in their Russia hysteria. The ‘Russia did it’ claims originally started in mid-2016 when their extensive primary ratfucking was exposed by Wikileaks, as a way to distract from the fraud. Within 24 hours of losing the Presidential election, this distraction was upgraded to justify Clinton’s loss against Trump, the most unpopular presidential candidate in history. As described in Shattered, a book from two Clinton insiders: “The [blame Russia] strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” Just like that, the Russia hysteria was re-tasked from ratfucking distraction to political failure justification. Almost immediately, the Russia narrative was then weaponized against the newly-elected President to delegitimize him. All of these Russia claims are based on essentially no hard evidence. Within a few months, the Democrats had pivoted from ratfucking half of their primary voters to trying to ratfuck the outcome of the general election with impeachment hysteria.

The Democrats’ ‘Russiastance’ (a play on ‘Resistance’) attack is incredibly dangerous for two reasons:

Tensions between Russia and the US are the worst in history, with some expert observers stating that war is imminent. By drumming up Russia hysteria, and claiming that the President is a Russian agent, Democrats are making it impossible for Trump to negotiate peace with Putin. So while they think the outcome will be his impeachment, this attack could also drive us to war with a nuclear superpower. Even without such a catastrophe, failed Russia-US relations greatly limit joint efforts to fight ISIS and other terrorists. Democrats are acting like impeachment is their main—or only—option to fight Trump. However, there will be another election in just 18 months, with the opportunity of huge mid-term gains in Congress. They already tried the “Trump Bad” message in the last election and it failed miserably. As Bernie Sanders’ enormous popularity shows, the path to victory will require developing a new message. They might even have more success by returning to the Clinton’s original winning message: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Instead of talking about what they can do for voters, Democrats are spending all their energy to use the Russiastance to ratfuck Trump’s legitimacy. If this means no gains in 2018, Trump will have complete power to push his horrific agenda. Even worse, if the GOP wins a majority large enough for a constitutional convention, we will be looking at a US Constitution as re-imagined by Trump, the Tea Party and their white nationalist allies.

In 2017, The Democrats are beyond morally bankrupt. They have no policy visions; dirty tricks is all they have to offer. The Party’s very soul has been replaced with pure ratfuckery. And they aren’t even good at it.