Last week, I gave you all a brief rant on the various emotions that run through my head when I am involved with political discourse with liberals and moderates of varying stripes, most of these emotions being on a spectrum of mild annoyance to boiling rage. Now, as of this writing, the media’s unchecked bias and lack of journalistic integrity have inflamed tensions at this week’s Nevada “Democratic” state convention and proven that I have a right to this anger. There can be no mistake that the Democrats have declared war on any and all socialist influence in their party.

I no longer have patience for liberal condescension in the mainstream media who outright dismiss legitimate voter concerns. Many of the ideas and policy proposals (such as single-payer healthcare, raising the minimum wage and reducing expenditures on U.S. adventurism) brought forth by Sanders and those to his left are not represented by some small minority seeking to upset the status quo for no good reason.

"The use of bailouts should have also been a reason to heavily regulate Wall Street, to prevent behavior that would require a bailout. But the administration didn’t do that; instead, they went the opposite direction and continued to deregulate it, culminating in the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999." This quote comes from a Wall St. trader, of all people!

The old Jewish senator from Vermont isn't responsible for the energy we saw at the Nevada convention, but rather is tapping into it via economic populism to push political discourse and policy towards the left to strengthen an increasingly weakening welfare state. He has every reason to continue his march towards the convention for the nomination in July to push the party towards a more progressive platform, and at no point has the man ever attempted to paint himself as a savior a la the cult of personality.

Whatever you may have read in the New York Times, saw on MSNBC or CNN, you all need to know that the claims that Sanders supporters became violent and issued death threats are patently false. The convention in my home state had many cameras and not one managed to capture any of this supposed violence claimed by pundits and Clinton surrogates.

Although it is admirable that Senator Sanders has not backed down from the DNC's bullying, the allegations of fraud and misconduct have still not been addressed in full, with no attempt to investigate if there is any truth to Sanders' delegates claims. However, I will give one caveat to the Sanders campaign's official statement on Nevada -- I do endorse militant action as a viable tactic in political organization, as we saw the Trump rally in Chicago. Although there was no rioting or rampant violence as we have been led to believe, the public has a right to revolt if their rights are disrespected.

This most recent narrative is one among many that the media has run with (if not outright manufactured, though without proof, we'll attribute this to incompetence / laziness rather than malice) that conveniently allows outlets to to run easy news stories at the expense of gaslighting Sanders supporters and the campaign itself. Please note this is not to say that either Bernie or his campaign hasn't been at fault for tone-deaf messaging or bumbling- this is a question of adhering to the rules of the primary. For editorial teams, it's as easy to defame the Sanders campaign as it is to snark about the more serious than previously thought threat that Donald Trump poses in a general election against the Democratic favorite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And how does the Democratic Party respond to this situation? True to neoliberal form, they risk alienating a hefty part of their electoral base (now largely composed of Millennials thanks to Sanders' mobilization) and stave off any complaints by red-baiting the far left and co-opting the intersectional language of black and brown political activists. While nowhere near in scope or degree to the COINTEL protocols that ended up destroying the Black Panthers and their coalition, we are seeing a lesser form of voter suppression that is deemed respectable by the Democratic Party simply because it alienates those to the left of them. And contrary to the party leadership's logic, they do not have the numbers and material evidence to back up their strategy of triangulating towards the political center when it comes time for the general election in November. An increasing number of the public is radicalizing towards the left in the United States, and instead of preparing a different electoral path forward, the Democrats are reacting with paranoia (due to an unfair, irrelevant comparison to Ralph Nader's independent campaign in 2000) in an attempt to reinforce their current hierarchy based on partisanship, rather than principles.

Lest you think I am over-dramatizing the 2016 Democratic primary, research the racist overtones of the 2008 campaign between Hillary Clinton and then Sen. Barack Obama to see that this is not the first time the Democratic Party was so bitterly divided, and note McCain was not nearly as successful as Trump in rallying the GOP electorate. Now, instead of a party loyalist upstart challenging the Old Guard, we are seeing an insurgent outsider attempting to wrest the "New Democrats" monopoly on the party's ideology. Of course, this is all very inconvenient for the Clinton campaign, who think criticism is tantamount to treason -- former State Senator Nina Turner of Ohio faced racist attacks upon switching her endorsement of Clinton to Sanders way back in the fall of 2015.

So where do we go now? Are we supposed to #UniteBlue and let the DNC once again scapegoat the radical left for their own political cowardice? No one likes the prospect of a Trump presidency, but that is not a viable argument in Clinton's favor, who is a weaker candidate and less moral choice than most party loyalists want to admit. They are suppressing criticism and bashing Sanders supporters, only to beg us to "unify" in November. Don't do it. Democrats have betrayed leftist causes before, just ask the Civil Rights leaders what they think of the Voting Rights Act being dismantled.