Everyone knows about the pied piper. They probably don't know he was real. One day, all the children of a small town followed a piper off to nowhere. The parents never heard from their kids again.
The town never recovered.
Democrats have been using a strategy called "pied piper" for ten years now. They elevate far right candidates during primaries. They run ads for them. They finance their campaigns. They give these lunatics tens of millions of dollars, hoping it will benefit them during general elections.
You've probably gotten a little tired of the spiel from Democrats over the last few years. We're always fighting to save democracy now. You can either vote for a deeply flawed Democrat, or a completely fascist.
Well, Democrats engineered that choice.
They made it that way.
They set the table for us by backing far right extremists during primaries. It's turned into an extensive practice, with Democrats even working on behalf of politicians like Kari Lake during primaries. Meanwhile, they promote and endorse conservative members of their own party, often sabotaging left candidates who advocate for living wages and universal healthcare.
In the most glaring example, Nancy Pelosi endorsed Henry Cuellar against Jessica Cisneros. Cuellar doesn't support women's reproductive rights. He votes against commonsense gun control measures.
Here's a quick history lesson:
Most sources trace the origins of pied piper back to 2012, when Clair McCaskill elevated an unhinged Republican from the far right. It helped her win. People decided they would rather have someone sane running the government. Of course, that strategy failed McCaskill six years later.
That's how we wound up with Josh Hawley.
Democrats elevated him during primaries.
And he won.
The Clinton campaign tried the pied piper strategy in 2016. They kept it quiet, but a leaked memo eventually called them out. They elevated far right candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
In fact, Clinton's campaign manager pushed Trump's legitimacy from the beginning, back when everyone considered him a joke. The leaked memo says, "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack." There's quite a paper trail showing that Clinton's advisors believed she would lose against establishment Republicans. They went out of their way to make sure she faced a clear loser. Nothing says loser like Trump.
So they thought...
The campaign instructed the media to treat deplorables seriously and give them lots of press coverage. Meanwhile, they either neglected or punched down on Bernie Sanders, painting his policies as naive or overly idealistic for the real world. The media did as told.
It failed.
This should be ancient history. It's not.
Democrats did what politicians always do. Instead of abandoning a failed strategy, they doubled down and tried to make it work.
Democrats have continued using pied piper for the last three elections. They did it in 2022, and then celebrated it as a success. In reality, they probably could've picked up even more seats if they'd kept their campaign promises. That wasn't the direction they decided to go.
Various reports have found Democratic candidates and PACs funding and campaigning for the most unelectable candidates they can find. They spend tens of millions of dollars on their behalf.
For example, Josh Shapiro won the Pennsylvania governor's race by spending nearly a million dollars on TV ads in favor of an election denier and January 6th conspirator during the Republican primaries. He then campaigned against that election denier and won.
This is how Democrats win elections now, by supporting fascists and conspiracy theorists and then imploring us to save democracy.
They beseech us. They beg us.
They command us.
The Democratic party's core supporters eat it right up. They spend their time and energy shouting down and silencing the left, along with anyone who dares to suggest they won't vote for any of the candidates they're presented with. They shame and blame holdouts for tacitly endorsing fascism.
They say, "Would you rather have a dictator?"
They lecture.
The media presents the pied piper approach as a viable political strategy, as if nothing matters more than securing votes and winning elections. They don't talk about the wider impacts and implications.
Look at the state of our politics. The Republican party has gone nuts. That's the official story. The untold story is that Democrats helped it along at every stage, out of political expediency. We're much worse for it.
It's easy to blame Republicans for turning into a pack of fascists led by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. It's more disturbing to realize that Democrats have often facilitated this metamorphosis by amplifying fascism, while attacking moderate Republicans and left Democrats. I bet if you dug around in Marjorie or Matt's donor list, you'd find some of the same finance groups backing them. They're great pied pipers.
Why would Democrats do this?
It's simple.
Establishment Democrats don't want moderate Republicans running against them. It's hard to distinguish between the moderates of a two-party system that ultimately serves the elite. It forces political candidates to come up with original ideas that Americans would like and support.
They prefer a race to the bottom.
It's easy to distinguish yourself from fascists. It's easy to run against someone who's openly sexist, racist, or homophobic.
Except look what's happening...
By elevating the worst of the conservatives, Democrats have managed to mainstream their views. Far from ensuring easy wins, they've helped normalize ideologies we thought were dead.
Democrats seem to love it.
They don't mind shifting to the right. They certainly don't mind portraying themselves as heroes and the last buffer between us and a dictatorship. If anything, it pleases their billionaire donors.
We lose.
You might've noticed something over the last couple of years. We don't talk about universal basic income. We don't talk about healthcare. We're left largely on our own to fight for fair wages through unions, when we can build them, in a desperate attempt to keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, we celebrate "Democratic victories" where we manage to cling to our basic human rights for a little bit longer. In reality, we're simply voting to keep out the fascists that establishment Democrats themselves keep throwing at us.
Where does this end?
It looks like Democrats will keep funding crazier and crazier opponents during primaries and then framing our choices for us. They'll keep shifting to the right. On this path, we'll eventually elect someone as bad as Trump. The differences will exist mainly at a superficial level. We're only choosing between having a dictator now and having one in eight years.
I'm not pointing this out to tell you how to vote. I just think everyone should know exactly what they're voting for.
If nothing else, now you know.
If America descends into fascism, it won't happen because that's what people voted for or even wanted. It'll happen because establishment politicians kept rigging the system to present Americans with a false choice between fascism and something that barely resembles democracy. They kept pushing the choice further and further until there was no longer any choice at all.
That's the plain truth.
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