Progressives (Liberals)

Both. It's not either/or.

A text message that referred to Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” that was sent through rival Bernie Sanders' volunteer messaging system led to social media feuding and confusion among supporters of both candidates.

t turns out the text message came from a rogue Sanders campaign volunteer believed to be a supporter of President Donald Trump, the campaign told The Associated Press. The individual was removed from the system.

But the image of it, posted to Twitter on Monday by a pro-Warren fundraising group, led to misinformation and increased tension among Warren and Sanders supporters.

The campaign text message, addressed to a woman named Caitlin, asked: “Are you in for Bernie?”

The person responded by saying they weren't because they were a Warren campaign volunteer.

“Pocahontas, huh?” the text from the campaign replied — invoking the racial slur Trump regularly uses to mock Warren, who had previously claimed American Indian heritage.

Twitter users immediately questioned the veracity of the text message, with some claiming Warren's campaign staged the exchange and posted it online to undermine Sanders. Others insisted the image of the text exchange had been digitally manipulated.

In response, some pro-Sanders accounts tweeted out satirical images of offensive text messages from the Warren campaign that were shared online thousands of times.

The Twitter user who posted the image of the text message did not respond to the AP’s request for comment.

The Warren campaign has no affiliation with the account that posted the text message campaign, a Warren spokesperson told the AP.
A Sanders campaign aide confirmed the text was sent from its system, which uses volunteers who can enroll online to send text messages to voters across the country.

The Sanders campaign told the AP that it believes a Trump supporter sent the text after joining the program. The campaign can view text messages sent by its volunteers, and it subsequently removed the individual from the program.

The Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to further questions about why they think the individual was a Trump supporter.

The cellphone number listed on the text message has also been disconnected.

The Sanders campaign told the AP that it believes a Trump supporter sent the text after joining the program.

Such activity has been a feature of GOP dirty tricks ("rat *******") campaigns

BERNIE CAMP EXPOSED: Field Organizer Says ‘F***ing Cities Will Burn’ if Trump Wins, Calls for Murder of Enemies

There is a certain type of Extremely Online supporter of Bernie Sanders who tends to dismiss the importance of Russian interference in our elections. (...) In other words, Sanders speaks to the threat of Russian interference not through the sort of neo-Cold War frame often derided by some of his online supporters, but through a frame that pits liberal democracies that share a common, if sometimes wobbly and ineffective, commitment to international institutions against a global movement of “oligarchic authoritarianism.”

As the philosopher Neil Levy has argued, the scientific topic of global warming was intensely politicized by organizations with vested interests in unrestricted capitalism. These hired the notorious “merchants of doubt” to propagandize against respectable science—the doubt merchants set out to debunk the whole idea of global warming and climate change. There was no deep reason such radical science denial should have become a shibboleth for right-wing orthodoxy, but it’s now the case in many circles. There is evidence that many right-wing or conservative citizens view acceptance of climate science as the mark of an ideological enemy—an ill-intentioned person who cannot be trusted and should not be given a hearing.

Free-market opportunists and fanatics have the most to answer for in this instance—they have acted cynically to damage the social fabric—but left-wing environmentalists have not always been helpful to their own cause or to the planetary future. In that respect, another philosopher (and environmentalist), Simon Keller, expressed something of a mea culpa in a book chapter published in 2015. Keller points out that the revelation of dangerous global warming, backed up by more and more research, was not a surprise to environmentalists, who already possessed values and a worldview that made them receptive to the message. The facts about global warming fitted well with environmentalists’ pre-existing understanding of the world, which included a critique of indefinite economic growth. For this group of people, news about global warming even seemed like a vindication.

For some reason, Trump's overt admiration for Putin, his campaign's collusion with Russia, to say nothing of Russia's involvement in Brexit and in undermining European elections, never raised these progressive eyebrows.

but we can still talk about it.

Makes it hard for people to know anymore what is real and what is maliciously fake.

For some reason, Trump's overt admiration for Putin, his campaign's collusion with Russia, to say nothing of Russia's involvement in Brexit and in undermining European elections, never raised these progressive eyebrows.

Seek out more balanced and sane sources of information.

Overt admiration of Putin?

The special counsel found that Russia did interfere with the election, but “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

On April 18, 2019, a redacted copy of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election” (Mueller Report) was released to the public. The Mueller report builds on the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that there were two campaigns to elect Donald Trump— one run by Trump and one run by the Russian government. The Mueller report clearly identified collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, despite repeated denials from Trump and many of his senior advisers and close associates that there were any connections between the two campaigns.

A total of 272 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia-linked operatives have been identified, including at least 38 meetings. And we know that at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials and Trump advisers were aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition, including Trump himself. None of these contacts were ever reported to the proper authorities. Instead, the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.

Beyond the many lies the Trump team told to the American people, Mueller himself repeatedly remarked on how far the Trump team was willing to go to hide their Russian contacts, stating, “the investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference.”

Russia has lost most of it's power on the International stage.