Within a few hours of Joe Biden’s official presidential announcement, the Justice Democrats, the progressive group behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise to power, brought out the flamethrower. “The old guard of the Democratic Party failed to stop Trump, and they can’t be counted on to lead the fight against his divide-and-conquer politics today,” began executive director Alexandra Rojas, accusing Biden of standing “in near complete opposition to where the center of energy is in the Democratic Party today.”

Incredibly, the rebuke from Justice Democrats was among the more anodyne responses on the far left, where Biden—Amtrak Joe, defender of the middle class, Scranton native son—is being treated like Darth Vader. Or, worse, the second coming of Hillary Clinton. “If you hear from a candidate that we’re just going to go back to 2016, it’s not satisfying,” one progressive grassroots organizer told me.

The left’s animosity toward Biden derives in part from a feeling that the Democratic Party is at a crossroads, that the answer to Donald Trump isn’t a restoration of the old order but a brash, new, left-wing politics. In fact, about half of registered Democrats identify as moderate or conservative, suggesting that Biden, far from being out of step with the party’s base, is actually its best representative. But groups like Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, Data for Progress, and others, are hoping to seize the moment to change the conversation, either by supporting candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, or pushing the centrists further to the left. Hence the all-out, shock-and-awe style blitzkrieg. “Whoever you will support, if it is not Biden, Biden is an existential threat to your candidate. So you have to fuck him up, and he’s just the most vulnerable to attack for the most shitty stuff, ” said progressive activist Sean McElwee, a co-founder of Data for Progress. “It’s going to be a guerrilla war of placing the shittiest issues and getting the oppo out there.”

According to sources I spoke to across the progressive-activist world, the general strategy is to mobilize the grassroots to destroy Biden’s greatest asset—his supposed electability—by making him radioactive on the left. The first step, quite literally, is to repeat his political record over and over again. In a single breath, Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, rattled off Biden’s sins: his sexist interrogation of Anita Hill; his lead role in passing the 1994 crime bill that put mass incarceration on steroids; and his longtime cozy relationship with credit-card companies, which he cemented in 2005 with a vote against bankruptcy-protection reforms.

“I guess I challenge the premise that we’re going all out now—all I did was basically just read out his record right now to you,” said Mitchell. “He’s going to have a lot of opportunities, now that he’s in the race, to explain to us and constituents how he could be on the wrong side of history over and over again.” (Unmentioned but omnipresent: Biden’s voting record on environmental and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, his handsiness with women, and his support for the Iraq War.)

While Bernie Sanders has pledged not to go negative in the 2020 race, far-left operatives don’t feel bound by the same rules of political warfare. “If I was a candidate who’s trying to win an election, I would definitely not shit on Biden,” acknowledged McElwee. “I’m not. I’m an analyst who would very much not like to see the most reactionary Democrat in the field become the nominee.” Without hesitation, he went for the jugular. “I mean, there’s a lot of oppo on Biden. . . . The Biden family is like the fucking Lannisters.”