The House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said he shared lawmakers’ “insight, heartfelt perspectives and conclusions about the path forward” in a private meeting with Joe Biden yesterday.
The meeting came after more than a dozen House Democrats publicly called on the president to end his bid for re-election after his stumbling performance against Donald Trump in their first debate.
Jeffries had promised that he would talk to Biden after speaking with all of the 213 Democrats in the House of Representatives, and, in a letter to lawmakers today, he indicated that he has done so, without elaborating on Biden’s response.
Deep-pocketed Democratic donors are putting multimillion-dollar pledges on hold and saying they won’t hand over the money until Joe Biden abandons his re-election campaign, the New York Times reports.
Others are holding off on giving any more money to Future Forward, the largest Super Pac supporting the president’s campaign.
So… I don’t disagree, and a contested convention (after Biden agreeing to release his delegates saying that he’d love to re-win the nomination but recognizes that the complaints are valid and wants what’s best for the Democrats as a whole) sounds like not a bad strategy.
There’s one pretty chilling thing though: How difficult to do think it would be for a Russian influence operation, or a GOP one working with a few friendly players in local politics / law enforcement in Chicago, to create a giant violent shit show of cops assaulting protestors and creating the exact types of events that will overshadow anything good that comes out of the convention and turn off a whole bunch of left wing people, because they can’t tell the difference between the Chicago cops doing something and the Democratic Party doing that same thing, if it happens at the convention?
I don’t think it would be difficult at all. And that’s before even adding in whatever any boogaloo people who want to show up might do.
I think the DNC could easily be where the fighting in the streets fireworks that continue into November get started for real, and in a way that depresses Democratic voter turnout a lot more than the debate did.
That is the biggest worry rn, esp after The Guardian just reported today there was massive “coordinated networks of accounts spreading disinformation (that) ‘flooded’ social media in France, Germany and Italy before the elections to the European parliament.”
Yikes. I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of violence. Maybe the fact that they’ve got a slightly better handle on these clandestine operations now than they did in 2016 will help with the Russian ops. I think the risk of right-wing agitators provoking a violent clash is higher, to be perfectly honest. They’ll certainly have to take security very seriously if this is the path they choose.
Man I fuckin hope so. Their efforts on Lemmy are just kind of comical, but that’s because those are the 2-ruble-a-day clowns sitting in a big cube farm somewhere. The real pros are perfectly capable of cultivating an online friendship with some armed right-wing loons in or out of the CPD, and nudging things along very effectively in a terrifying direction, I think.