Look, if you haven’t been radicalized by the last three years, at least, I don’t know what it’s going to take to get you there. I mean real radicalization. Not just a renewed commitment to replying to the President’s tweets with jeers that his fake tan is orange. I mean an abandonment of electoral politics, a furious zeal for direct action, a drastic personal paradigm shift away from capitalism.

As I write this, world health authorities are beginning to lose whatever fleeting grasp they had on Covid-19. Gameshow host, rapist, crook, liar, and President of the United States, Donald Trump, who at one time asserted that Covid was a hoax perpetrated by democrats, has been downplaying the threat and assuring his dog-brained MAGA zealots that it’s no big deal and you’re good to go to work. Not that long ago, the entire continent of Australia was literally on fire, devastating west coast wildfires have become an annual ordeal that Californians just have to live with now. Migrant children are still starving to death in actual concentration camps, no record has been kept of their whereabouts and it’s likely that thousands of children will never see their parents ever again. There’s also credible evidence that they’re being trafficked and exploited while they wait for some kind of certainty about their future that will probably never come. ICE agents are literally going door to door in hispanic neighborhoods armed with rifles. Do I need to keep going? Because I can. This was just in the last couple of months.

A sane person sees this laundry list of horror and realizes that the United States government, that lumbering bureaucratic behemoth, will never do a thing to stop any of it. There is ideology and, most importantly, profitable industry wrapped up in all of it. A person of sound mind realizes that there are no heroes at the top. That, while the Republican party is a ghoulish cabal of cartoon villains; a bona fide death cult, that the democrats are also not the ray of hope that banishes the darkness that liberals think they are. We people, justifiably horrified by what we see taking place within the borders of the United States, realize that all of that and more are the direct product of a fundamentally broken system of authority and capital and that the clock has run out. If we, as a species, are going to survive, then a fundamental shift in policy is necessary right now. We stand on the event horizon of a real catastrophe.

And the best solution the DNC could conjure up is Joe Biden.

No hope and change for you, peasant! Just be grateful that I’m not Trump.

“Nothing will fundamentally change”

Hillary Clinton somehow managed to botch the simplest layup that any presidential candidate ever faced by way of the 2016 election. The Oval Office was practically handed to her on a silver platter. The party cleared the decks for her and she somehow lost it all to noted gameshow host, rapist, liar, and crook, Donald John Trump, a man whose rallies contain no policy discussion, only vague platitudes about American exceptionalism and an elderly man with a strange combover dry humping a flag. And when the smoke had cleared and she stood there wondering how this could have happened, her campaign leapt into action and immediately cast the blame on those dreaded Bernie Bros. Those sexist internet trolls who would stop at nothing until her political ambitions were ground into dust and scatted to the corners of the earth by the winds of history. They didn’t get their way! Their precious communist messiah, Bernie Sanders, who is not even a real democrat, spoiled the election for Hillary by staying home and abstaining from the vote.

At the same time, traumatized liberals beat the public’s disbelief into submission with the indisputable fact that Hillary had won the popular vote by 3 million votes, nationally. An entire percentage point of the American population, in a race where only half of the eligible population voted, makes up a significant gap between winner and loser. So, if the Bros stayed home, and the total number of votes cast was more or less consistent (a little higher, actually) with election totals from the last 20 years, and Hillary was still on top by 3 million votes, how could the Bernie Bros have ruined this for her? Could it be that #BernieOrBust was a myth cooked up by the Clinton campaign to mitigate the damages of losing to Gameshow host, rapist, crook, and liar, Donald Trump?

In 2016 we, myself included, sucked it up and checked the box for Hillary. In 2020, we’d like to thank the Clinton campaign for giving us such a good idea because in 2020 the #BernieOrBust threat is real.

Behold! The optimism of Democrats!

The public recoiled after Super Tuesday. Frightened, wimpy moderates threw their hands in the air, relieved that fear prevailed. They mushed three moderates into one conglomeration of despair and resignation and managed to finally slow the Bernie Sanders steamroller. Biden’s Super Tuesday victory was raised up as evidence that the cooler heads of the liberal establishment had finally prevailed and that this whole Bernie Sanders thing was as hollow as the media had been desperately trying to portray it. But on Super Wednesday, the memes started rolling out about Biden, accompanied by Super Tuesday analysis and the tone wasn’t optimistic. It was the usual liberal resignation. The DNC had chosen for us all and thrust Joe Biden into our lives as the safe choice. Liberals shrugged. This is how it goes. Election after election, they choose for us and we shrug. Sure, the chosen one may have their fans but the tone of the memes and the analysis speaks volumes. No one is happy about it but the DNC holds you hostage. What are you going to do? Not vote? There are Supreme Court seats at stake. Republican policies will have a direct effect on vulnerable communities. To not vote would be a case study in white privilege and you’re an ally, aren’t you?

Maybe the Democrat party needs to die, then.

We played by their rules. We donated money. We knocked on doors, phone banked, and texted for Bernie. We voted in primaries. Our campaign was funded entirely by private donations. Our volunteers and donors were energized in a way that no other campaign was. Bernie rallies were held in spaces best suited for concerts and sporting events because they had to be and still people stood outside when the venue reached capacity. We did everything by the book and we won in spite of it. We have the energy. We have the optimism. We have the voters that mainstream liberals ignore. Did Biden’s campaign have anything like this? Mayor Pete? Amy? Their primary results up Super Tuesday reflected the deficit. The DNC dictates the direction of the party, coordinates billions of dollars of campaign funding under its umbrella and along comes this scrappy movement which operates under their jurisdiction but is entirely out of their control.

And that’s why the DNC needs to be afraid.

They’ll say that we threw a tantrum. They’ll say that we didn’t get our way so we took our toys and went home and because of that Donald Trump won a second term. They’ll say this because they said it last time. But here’s the catch: This time they’ll have been right.

The stakes are just that high

What we’re advocating for is not that revolutionary and it’s absolutely necessary if this country is going to continue to operate in a way consistent with its own mythology. We want everyone to be able to get healthcare whenever they need it. Not affordable healthcare. Comprehensive, nationalized, healthcare that guarantees treatment to literally every American at no cost. We want an environmental policy that provides us with a planet which sustains human life. We want educational policy that takes the profit incentive out of schooling and provides a college education tuition free so you’re not spending your entire life working to pay off your degree. We want billionaires to pay their fair shares. These people live lives of fabulous luxury on the backs on working Americans. They can afford to pay their taxes and still control vast fortunes. These are not revolutionary concepts. They’re concepts which afford all Americans a fairer shot at living a life of quality in the wealthiest nation in the world. And yet, we hear the usual pushback from democrats that we can’t have them. We need to find ways to make progressive policy work within the framework afforded to us by our capitalist overlords. If clean drinking water runs in direct conflict to the bottom line and there’s no profit incentive in cleaning up the infrastructure, then you’re screwed and will be drinking contaminated water and if brain damage and cancer aren’t bad enough already, you’ll have some blue wave #RESIST liberal on Twitter explaining to you how this is actually a good thing as you scroll through your mentions during the chemotherapy appointment that has doomed the future of your family to poverty.

We’re taking this party hostage

As long as capitalism dominates, progress will not be allowed. Desperate times call for desperate measures and if we have to hold a gun to the DNC’s head, then we will. If your standard refrain is: Bernie can’t pass those bills! That’s congress’s problem. If Congress won’t do it, then shame on them. At least the Republican Congress got over their horror at Trump being their boss and fell in line. If the democrats won’t, we’ll make sure that some that will are elected. We’ll have done it once at the presidential level and we‘ll do it again in congressional races. And if the DNC calls our bluff and Trump wins, which polls project him to (unless he faces Bernie Sanders in the general) then they will have earned this failure and the blood will be on their hands, not ours. We tried to do it their way and for all of their modern liberal philosophy of compassion, they played every sneaky card in their hand to make sure that the poor suffer and everyone’s chances of joining them is one unlucky medical bill away. Republicans won’t be happy until the entire world is one gigantic country club and society is divided into the club membership and the staff that fetches their drinks. Democrats aim for the same goal but make it a point to let everyone know how woke they are by ensuring that half the guards at our worldwide concentration camps are women.

And it makes sense that the typical liberal response to anyone abstaining from voting would be to cry white privilege, but in a world where the most noble thing a liberal can do is vote blue no matter who every four years and then do nothing in between, that they would assume that those of us who refuse to feed the machine are also doing nothing in between but we’re not. Every state has a thousand leftist causes that desperately need money and man power. The Trump administration will target vulnerable communities, but a liberal administration will ignore them and so we have to pick up the slack. So, while liberals will be crying over their loss, unable to claim a moral high ground that a majority of electoral college votes affords them, we’ll be organizing with our POC and LGBTQ comrades just as we are now and they are not. The difference between a Trump win and a Biden win is whether or not we’re organizing to teach each other to shoot and defend ourselves.

The DNC needs to think hard about what they face in this moment. Address a minor revolution now for human rights or address a real one in the not too distant future. We will starve the capitalist class and if that means burying the democrat party, then so be it. The difference is literally whether the phrase “Eat the rich” is figurative or literal.