Fantastic Lies: Special Ratf*cking Edition Part One
Editor’s note: when I originally sat down to write this post, I had intended it to be a quick and lively little jaunt through the corporate, establishment media’s never-ending war on Bernie Sanders and the millions of lefties, pinkos and democratic socialists who support him.
Seven thousand words (and counting) as well as multiple new stories later, I’ve now come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to break this piece up into at least three parts or nobody will be able to grind their way through it. With any luck, part two, which is already partially completed, will go up within twenty-four hours after this post does. Part three might take a bit longer. Please note that I realize the articles we’re about the break down are now a few days old; unfortunately I can only write as fast as I write, my apologies for the delay dear reader.
In a recent Patreon blog post I talked about the shockingly-early opening salvos of the 2020 Democratic Primary and the elite liberal establishment’s attempts to poison Bernie Sanders’ presumed Presidential run before it even begins. It should then come as no surprise to anyone that the attacks on Sanders (and really, the entire burgeoning American left – such as it is) have continued:
Ratfucking – “1. In politics, the use of “dirty tricks” to discredit one’s opponent(s). This often takes the form of false or semi-false accusations spread through underhanded means. The term was coined in the 1960s by Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Woodward. The art of ratfucking was brought into the public eye by Karl Rove. Among his ratfucking accomplishments are the 2000 GOP South Carolina primary and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” – more details here.
Smear One – “Bernie is practically a rapist and he hates women”
Bernie alumni seek meeting to address ‘sexual violence’ on ’16 campaign – whenever you’re trying to untangle a large, coordinated and relatively complex ratfucking operation in US politics, it’s usually a good idea to go back to the original story that started it all. No sooner had the dust settled on the obviously manufactured Bernie/Beto war than this carefully framed piece quietly slipped out into the digital discourse. I felt it was important to start off with this article because both it and the fallout it spawned are highly instructional if you want to understand how creating dominant narratives works in U.S. corporate and political media.
The fact is that if you actually read the article (a task made more difficult by Politico’s “innocent” decision to repeatedly alter it in the time since its publication) the story is a largely positive one. Sanders 2016 staffers who acknowledge the (previously reported) toxic atmosphere that most political campaigns give rise to, are requesting a meeting to preemptively attack sexual harassment during a potential 2020 run; a campaign they themselves are seemingly still interested in participating in.
The signers want the Sanders campaign to release a “productive statement on harassment in the campaign environment” and to establish a “follow-up plan to implement concrete sexual harassment policies and procedures” as well as a “commitment to hiring diverse leadership” by which I can only assume they mean “more women.” These seem like completely reasonable requests to me, and more importantly they actively demonstrate that people involved with a potential 2020 Sanders campaign structure are actively looking to address harassment and violence (sexual, or otherwise) proactively.
This is further reinforced in the response letter provided to Politico (and now curiously deleted from their story) by Bernie’s principal campaign committee which literally starts by thanking the signers for their letter and agreeing that the discussion is “incredibly important.” The letter then briefly touches on the steps taken during the 2016 campaign to combat the problem and acknowledges the need to “do better” in the future. The committee then briefly discusses some of the changes the organization made during the 2018 campaign season before once against acknowledging that “harassment of any kind is intolerable” and promising to both listen and act on reports the signers have to offer to improve these “policies and processes.”
All in all, this is a story about the Sander’s campaign coming together to materially change disturbingly pervasive, toxic political and campaign cultures and they’re starting at home, inside Bernie’s presumed 2020 run. Of course, you certainly wouldn’t know that based on how Politico framed the story – by my count there is only one mention of “sexual violence” in the letter, and five mentions of “harassment” (sexual or otherwise) but as you can see, the spin opportunities provided by quoting the later, rather than the former, were just far too delicious for the headline editor at Politico to resist. If you just read the headline, you’d probably be pretty sure that Bernie is a total piece of sh*t, and that, my friends is unquestionably no accident – for contrast, take a look at how this same magazine (Politico) framed a similar story about sexual harassment in Kamala Harris’s campaign structure and please keep in mind, nobody involved in the Sanders campaign has had to fork over a $400,000 sexual harassment settlement.
A Clear and Deliberate Bias
Let’s pause for a moment and look at how other Democratic Party leaders, luminaries and hopefuls have responded to charges of sexual harassment, either personally, institutionally or in their campaign organizations, shall we?
Longtime aide to Sen. Harris resigns after $400,000 sexual harassment settlement surfaces
Kamala Harris: 2020 hopeful ‘did not know’ aide was accused of sexual harassment
“I am ashamed”: Beto O’Rourke apologizes for his “demeaning comments about women”
Joe Biden Wrote the GOP’s Playbook for Brett Kavanaugh
Dianne Feinstein silenced Kavanaugh’s accuser to protect the status quo
Hillary Clinton Chose to Shield a Top Adviser Accused of Harassment in 2008
Lena Dunham Says She Warned Clinton Campaign About Weinstein: “Harvey’s a Rapist”
What makes Cory Booker’s groping incident different than the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh
I… see. So perhaps it might be reasonable to suggest that rather than attacking Sanders, the volunteers inside his former campaign structure should be commended for trying to tackle what appears to be a very serious problem in the Democratic Party and among its donors. Of course, that presupposes that Politico gives a damn about women and isn’t just trying to provide a ready-made attack vector in the elite liberal establishment’s longstanding war on Bernie Sanders and the possibility he might run in 2020. As bad as Politico’s presentation of the story was however, the truth is that the corporate “liberal” media was only just beginning to ratfuck Sanders on this issue:
Sexism Claims From Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Run: Paid Less, Treated Worse – fresh off declaring that Sanders shouldn’t even bother to run in 2020 because he’s stale fish, the New York Times is back to expand on and provide context for the Politico story. Unlike the crude, title-driven hackjob in Politico however, this piece, framed as a lurid expose of harassment, sexism and exploitation in the larger Sanders political organization, is a subtle masterwork of the form.
Before we get into the guts of the article, I’d like to take a moment to say that by examining these accusations, I am in no way belittling, or casting doubt on the experiences of the women involved in these incidents. The important question here is not whether these events happened, or whether the women involved are right to feel the way they do; there is no credible evidence to suggest that any of the women who’ve come forward to talk about gender-related campaign organizational problems (including unfortunately, a small number of instances of sexual harassment) are lying and it is always a woman’s right to define her own experiences. Furthermore, while the argument that Sanders and his campaign have responded inadequately to complaints is certainly a subjective one, the fact that even a few women felt that there was a culture of “bros covering up for bros” is a problem a future Sanders 2020 campaign must address, and as you can see above – is already doing so. I believe women, but I also recognize that sometimes the damage has been done and no amount of apologizing and promising to do better is going to be considered adequate by the wronged party. In turn, I believe that gap between a socially or even legally accepted “proportional response” and a personally granted “forgiveness” is the primary playground for this entire round of ratfucking against Sanders.
When you take away the lurid framing, the purposeful conflation of gender-based discrimination with violent sexual assault and the (rightfully) wounded emotions, this New York Times piece is a story about a disorganized, fledgling campaign making and mostly correcting, a serious of obtuse, frustrating but relatively minor labor management mistakes in a situation commonly and openly acknowledged to be rife with toxic masculinity. It’s a story about two unnamed campaign staffers inappropriately asking co-workers for a romantic encounter and the awkward social fallout from those situations. It’s a story about a volunteer campaign surrogate who took permission to touch a staffer’s hair as permission to get fresh with her for the rest of the day. Finally, it is a story about how the chauvinism of one important manager in Nevada, Arturo Carmona resulted in an inadequate (at the time) response to not only this incident of sexual harassment, but the unfair and demeaning treatment Carmona himself dished out to female staffers. Unlike the Politico piece, it is not a positive story for Sanders and his supporters, but in light of the ongoing standard of addressing sexual harassment in even liberal American politics, it’s more than fair to ask if subtly implying the Sanders 2016 campaign was some sort of rape factory is holding the class enemies of the New York Times to an unfair standard they certainly would not apply to more mainstream-friendly Democratic candidates.
The important question surrounding this piece, and indeed this entire discussion is whether or not these articles treat this information with balance and in the correct context, as well as whether or not the actions of Sanders and his political leadership group represent a socially accepted, adequate or proportional response. While the authors of this piece go to great lengths to keep readers focused on the fact that these things did happen, the overall thesis of the article is that the Sanders campaign has not adequately addressed these issues and that the larger blame lies with Sanders himself. So let’s look at each of the issues presented in the article and how Bernie Sanders, his advisors and his campaign organization responded or has pledged to respond going forward; we’ll start with the most important issue, sexual harassment:
- The Times story leads off with the testimony of Giulianna Di Lauro, who is identified as “a Latino outreach strategist for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential operation” and who reported to her supervisor that she’d been harassed by a campaign surrogate in Nevada. Quoting the piece, Di Lauro stated “the surrogate told her she had “beautiful curly hair” and asked if he could touch it, Ms. Di Lauro said in an interview. Thinking he would just touch a strand, she consented. But she said that he ran his hand through her hair in a “sexual way” and continued to grab, touch and “push my boundaries” for the rest of the day.” Di Lauro then notes that when she reported this to her supervisor, Bill Velazquez, he flippantly replied “I bet you would have liked it if he were younger,” and then laughed. Further down in the article, the authors return to Di Lauro’s testimony to note that “Ms. Di Lauro said she told several people who were high up in the campaign, including Rich Pelletier, who served as national field director” and that “she felt she was not taken seriously by the campaign.”
- Further down, the Times introduces Samantha Davis, “the former director of operations in Texas and New York, who also worked on the campaign’s advance team. She testifies that “I did experience sexual harassment during the campaign, and there was no one who would or could help” and that she felt that “her supervisor marginalized her after she declined an invitation to his hotel room.” Unfortunately, the supervisor is not named, no indication is given that Davis contacted anyone else in the campaign (indeed, Davis says that she couldn’t identify anyone to contact about the incident) and one is simply left to wonder what could have been done to make an important, high-profile volunteer like Davis feel less “marginalized” after an awkward and unquestionably inappropriate, but otherwise common social interaction.
- Finally the authors note that an unnamed staffer wrote “there was an entire wave of rotten sexual harassment that seemingly was never dealt with” in an unpublished December email to a Sanders political strategist. Once again however, no identifying information, supporting evidence or even direct testimony about who was responsible for, or even what this “wave of rotten sexual harassment” might have entailed, is provided. We are simply to assume that the unnamed staffer, whose email is being quoted in an obvious NY Times hit piece, is both credible and correct when she states that this “wave” existed – even though, out of thousands of volunteers in an entire national nomination campaign, the Times has only been able to find “nearly a dozen” people to talk about this important issue.
In terms of Davis and the unnamed staffer, I’m comfortable saying that no sane person on earth can reasonably expect the Sanders campaign to respond to charges of sexual harassment before they were even aware of them and I’m fairly certain that the New York Times was digging hard enough to find even the tiniest scrap of evidence that would prove otherwise. Claims like these, while concerning, fall into a murky realm of subjective judgement, unattributed allegations and yes, political ratfucking.
Despite this, it should be noted that Sanders, Weaver and the campaign committee have all acknowledge that the 2016 campaign was disorganized, and that “managers in some cases had not received appropriate training” – problems the Sanders campaign has already rectified for Bernie’s 2018 Vermont Senate campaign by hiring a 3rd party firm to address complaints, opening a toll free hotline to report harassment to someone outside the campaign structure and enforcing mandatory training for all staff and volunteers as part of the on boarding process, as we helpfully learned from the (now deleted) second letter in original Politico article.
The Giulianna Di Lauro testimony however, is another animal altogether. This is without question the most serious allegation in the entire Times article and it’s not just because a campaign surrogate decided to get fresh with a dedicated volunteer helping to shuttle him around the state of Nevada. Ms. Di Lauro’s testimony indicates that there was an obvious failure in the Sanders extended campaign structure to address her concerns, a failure that rests firmly on the shoulders of her supervisor, Bill Velazquez and on those of his superior, Rich Pelletier. The fact that she does not feel the campaign as a whole took her allegations seriously is in and of itself a significant issue, regardless of how you personally feel about the severity of the incident in question. Finally, there is no reason to doubt Giulianna Di Lauro’s testimony about what happened; the surrogate (Marco Antonio Regil) has apologized for “any interactions or behavior on my part that could’ve made anyone feel uncomfortable” through his agent. So, there’s a problem here, but the obvious question then becomes “is that problem systemic?” Let’s look at the available evidence.
First, the senator’s campaign committee is quoted in this very article as saying “no member of the leadership above Mr. Pelletier was aware of the incident until after the campaign.” Should we believe them?
- It sure seems like Giulianna Di Lauro does; in her (now deleted) December 7th Facebook post she stated “I have to speak up about this now because I hope it will be of service to the next Sanders campaign” and with her January 10th Intercept response, she seems to indicated that her decision to come forward to as a way to combat sexual harassment in all campaigns have been “weaponized” to harm Sanders uniquely, which in light of everything we’ve seen so far, doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable theory. More importantly, neither of these posts strike me as the kind of thing you’d type if you thought campaign leadership was aware that you’d been sexually harassed and was working to cover it up.
- In an often selectively quoted interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Sanders himself (rather artlessly) denied knowing about incidents of sexual harassment in his campaign until after the election.
- As recently as March 31st, 2017, fellow Latino outreach volunteer Masha Mendieta (more on her and Arturo Carmona below) believed it, writing “to my knowledge, neither Jeff Weaver nor Bernie Sanders ever knew about what was going on. If they did, I know they would have stopped it,” although it should be pointed out that Mendieta has since reversed her position for reasons that are hard to discern from her impassioned but still polemic Dec 8, 2018th Medium post.
- Finally, no one (aside from Ms. Mendieta) involved has said that either Sanders or Weaver were aware of the incident, not even this New York Times smear job we’re examining. Velazquez, who says he has no memory of being flippant towards Di Lauro, states that he took her complaint seriously and changed the staffers assigned to Regil, reported the incident to his immediate supervisor, Arturo Carmona and following up two weeks later in writing. Carmona himself confirms this and says he reported the incident to his superior, national field director Rich Pelletier, who in turn was unavailable for comment to the New York Times. At no point in time does anyone in this story say, or provide evidence to prove, that either Bernie Sanders or his campaign manager Jeff Weaver, knew about Giulianna Di Lauro’s experience before the end of the 2016 Sanders primary campaign. I find it hard to believe so many people would still be eager to work with Sanders in 2020 if they thought Bernie knew about the (relatively few) incidents of harassment and just ignored them, or as some have implied, covered them up.
Okay, but so what right? So what if Bernie Sanders didn’t know about an accusation of sexual harassment inside his Nevada organization, that’s not really the point here is it? The theory posited by this Times article is that Sanders has been mortally wounded as a progressive candidate by “his perceived failure to address this issue” (no, really, they said that) so let’s take a quick look at how Sanders, Weaver and the “Friends of Bernie” campaign committee are addressing this problem:
Please be advised that if you’re confused dear reader, you aren’t the only one. Examining the totality of evidence available to us at this moment, what I see is a fledgling political organization owning up to its own (relatively minor) mistakes, taking concrete steps to effectively address gendered harassment in a toxic US political environment and doing so in a way that makes the performative lip-service the mainstream Democratic party offers (or doesn’t offer) towards fighting misogyny, look cheap and paltry by comparison. Short of developing precognition and inventing a time machine, I’m not really certain what more Sanders’ critics (both inside and outside of his campaign structure) are really expecting here.
Unfortunately, the rest of the article goes on in much the same manner. For example, the NYT notes that “allegations of sexism surfaced during Mr. Sanders’s campaign in 2016, when many of his male fans were derogatorily dubbed “Bernie Bros” for their aggressive online attacks against female reporters and supporters of Hillary Clinton” without mentioning that the very term “Bernie Bros” is the result of a coordinated, pro-Clinton, establishment media smear repurposed from the 2008 primary campaign when Hillary’s detractors were miraculously all misogynist rage-bots and nicknamed “Obama Boys.”
The authors also mention 2016 high-level campaign volunteer and former Our Revolution organizer Sarah Slamen, noting that she “quit the organization at the end of 2016 after she said she was berated by a male member of the Our Revolution steering committee for suggesting an organizing plan. In emails reviewed by The Times, she raised issues about sexist behavior with committee members who saw the incident and Our Revolution’s national board of directors. She said she received no reassurance that anything would change.”
Frankly, the inclusion of Slamen’s story in this piece is problematic because, even setting aside the fact that Our Revolution is merely a politically-affiliated progressive activist movement and thus explicitly doesn’t work under Sanders, Weaver or the campaign committee, there’s really no evidence presented that Slamen’s assessment was shared by the Our Revolution board; a body containing numerous progressive women who are openly sensitive to the issue of sexism. Indeed, because of the fact that there were admittedly multiple committee members present, no action was taken and nobody else is quoted in the article, it seems reasonable to question if Slamen’s real issue is that other people who witnessed the situation didn’t think the problem was sexism. Or, I guess you could believe that a bunch of highly-experienced professionals, feminist activists and progressive members of Our Revolution who represent a myriad of races, genders and socioeconomic backgrounds are all in on some sort of nefarious plot to get Sarah Slamen. Once again, the watchwords are “believe women” not “assume they are infallible” and Slamen’s story is sort of a case of “she said, but literally nobody else who saw it did.”
Even while attempting to tar the Sanders campaign in one breath, authors Sydney Ember and Katie Benner are often forced to begrudgingly defend the Sanders organization in the very next paragraph:
- While pointing out reports of pay discrepancies between some women interns and their male counterparts, the article noted both that “employees often negotiated their own salaries” and that when brought to the attention of supervisors, salaries were adjusted to be “on par with their male peers.” Furthermore, the Times is also forced to, almost casually, mention that “during the campaign, the committee [Friends of Bernie] said, it conducted a review to try to standardize pay across the states and within headquarters.” Finally of course, this is all setting aside the fact that the Sanders campaign was the only one to pay its interns at all, a staggering truth blithely noted (and then forgotten) in this article with the line “during his campaign, Mr. Sanders earned kudos for paying his interns, a relatively unheard-of practice.”
- Returning to Ms. Mendieta, the Times summons the specter of unsafe, co-ed housing, writing that she “was among the Latino outreach team members who she said were expected to stay in a run-down house in Chicago in March 2016. When she arrived, she said she was told she was supposed to sleep in a room with three men she did not know.” Mendieta herself then adds “I was shaking with fear’’ and “literally, I remember thinking to myself, ‘What am I going to do,” before saying she reported the incident to Mr. [Rich] Pelletier. In the very next paragraph however, the authors state “The campaign committee said that “the challenge of finding staffer housing is one that plagues every large campaign.” It said it knew of one instance that was brought to the attention of senior leaders, including Mr. Weaver, the campaign manager, and that both Mr. Weaver and the chief operating officer “ordered that staff never be housed in coed hotel rooms again.” This is quite literally the sum total of information given; there are no other examples of unsafe co-ed housing offered, there is no indication that the incident Weaver immediately addressed is separate from the event in March 2016 that Ms. Mendieta described and there is no indication that anyone was harmed, or threatened in any way while staying in Sanders campaign staff housing – in fact, there’s no indication given in this article that anyone actually did sleep in said (admittedly thoughtless and unfair to women volunteers) co-ed campaign housing at all, including Mendieta herself. If so, it certainly doesn’t appear to have happened after Weaver ordered that staff never be housed in coed hotel rooms again.
All of which brings us to Masha Mendieta’s credible and widely supported allegations of sexism and misuse of campaign funds against former manager on the Latino outreach team and deputy national political director for the Sanders campaign, Arturo Carmona. It doesn’t take a genius to see that many of the problems inside the Sanders 2016 campaign originated in Carmona’s Nevada organization (which also featured the incompetent at best Bill Velazquez) and just as in the case of Sarah Slamen above, I have a hard time believing the numerous, openly progressive women who’ve come forward to accuse Aurturo of demeaning, unfair and blatantly sexist behavior towards female staffers are all part of some vicious plot to smear Carmona – despite his denials and suggestions of just such a scheme.
With all of that being noted however, it’s important to remember that none of the people involved (except Mendieta, and even then only belatedly and without much supporting evidence) is accusing anyone higher than Rich Pelletier of knowing about Carmona’s reprehensible management in Nevada before the end of the 2016 campaign. Furthermore, while Carmona’s apparently chauvinistic, discriminatory and sexist behavior is unquestionably unacceptable, it is still important to note that no one is accusing him of inappropriate physical behavior or making sexual advances against female staffers and to my knowledge, there has been no legal action taken against Carmona, Velazquez or Pelletier as a result of the Sanders 2016 campaign; although Mendieta makes a passing reference to unidentified lawsuits involving “men on national and state staff” (more on this in Part Two) in her fiery December 8th, 2018 post.
In the time since these accusations have surfaced, neither Sanders nor Weaver has made any effort to defend Carmona and Sanders did not endorse Arturo’s failed 2017 California Congressional Primary bid. Although Jane Sanders’ reported (by Carmona) decision to invite Mr. Carmona to a Sanders Institute symposium after the former campaign staffer requested she do so is certainly regrettable, even Mendieta admits that he wasn’t on the invitation list, Bernie himself didn’t speak with Arturo and the Senator was reportedly “surprised” to see him there. Do mainstream liberals really want to embrace the idea that candidates are responsible for the social gaffes of their spouses at this point in the discussion?
Speaking of Masha Mendieta’s early December Medium post, I find it curious that the NY Times chose to link to the March 2017 post where she states emphatically that she knows Sanders and Weaver had no idea what was going on with Carmona, and not the later post in which Mendieta angrily declares that Bernie knew everything all along – especially in light of the highly subjective, disproportionately inflated and disingenuously framed claims the authors did choose to print in this hit piece. Could this be because in the latter blog, Masha provides little if any evidence to back up potentially libelous claims of a vast conspiracy to cover up Carmona’s behavior and punish Mendieta for speaking out; a conspiracy that would have knowingly included (at a minimum) Bernie and Jane Sanders, the entire upper levels of the Sanders campaign, the California Nurses Association, RoseAnn DeMoro, high-level members of the activist organization Our Revolution, Sanders boosters Winnie Wong and Linda Sarsour as well as other, unnamed “so-called feminist allies?” While I wholeheartedly support a woman’s right to control her own feelings and narrative, much of what Mendieta alludes to in this post beyond repeating her previously established (and again, highly credible) allegations against Arturo Carmona, would represent serious criminal conduct by at least two dozen highly-respected, progressive professionals with literally no prior history of such behavior. As a woman, I am extremely sympathetic to Masha’s understandable feelings of being under siege in light of her allegations; as a reasonable observer of societal norms however, I simply cannot accept allegations that massive, at face value, without some sort of supporting evidence – indeed, if what Mendieta has said in this post can be proven to be factually true, I’d strongly advise her to hire a lawyer and sue the crap out of everyone involved.
Finally, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the use of form and structure to maximize the ratfucking effect of this article. The New York Times spends millions of dollars on hiring skilled editors who have forgotten more than you or I will ever know about proportion, flow and structure, in written media. It isn’t an accident that this article is framed as containing lurid sexual allegations even though it’s primarily about inept management, poor organization and gender-based discrimination in a single state campaign apparatus managed by a chauvinist and his deputy enabler. It isn’t an accident this piece is hyper-focused on Sanders when in reality all of the accusations are about other people and literally nobody has provided any evidence Bernie even knew about them. There’s a reason the authors keep referencing, but not providing sources for, mysterious Facebook group chats and emails suggesting far worse allegations than those explored in the article. There’s a reason the authors wouldn’t link you to Masha Mendieta’s second, extremely angry and potentially libelous Medium post, but happily referenced it in the story. There’s a reason someone fed all these talking points into a blender, spitting them out sliced into pieces and seemingly in random order; Di Lauro and Mendieta’s testimony about Marco Antonio Regil and Arturo Carmona is told in three separate parts throughout the composition for example. This technique is clearly designed to make the careless reader assume that there were vastly more actionable incidents of sexual harassment than the article ultimately claims; which is three, two of which are against unnamed male staffers, are only casually mentioned in the article without any supporting testimony and aren’t related to Carmona or the Nevada operation at all. This is ratfucking at its finest and it’s designed to poison the 2020 Sanders campaign at birth with clinging, but largely undefined or already resolved baggage and perhaps even, to convince Bernie himself not to run for president.
Continued in Part Two
– Nina Illingworth
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