Do it for Paul!
It wasn't all that long ago that the Dems turned Senator Paul Wellstone's funeral into an obscene political circus. But time passes. And the deceased senator becomes just another dead, old white man to be purged as we march into the cattle cars to be driven to the bright, utopian future.
And his sons, they questioned whether the left shouldn't maybe talk to anyone who isn't a member of the right identity politics groups. (Also they apparently questioned the corruption. The two tend to go hand in hand. Citing your identity politics outrage helps cover a vast multitude of sins.)
The Wellstone legacy, the thing that the Dems once furiously fought for, now got taken out back for two in the head. Like Saturn, the revolution devours its own children. Literally.
he issue stands center stage in Minnesota, where Trump’s steamroller performance in rural America led to a near-disaster for the Democratic Party in 2016. Republicans took control of the state Legislature, while Trump came within 1.5 percentage points of carrying the state — a feat no Republican has managed since Richard Nixon in 1972.
Don't worry. The Dems have a three-part plan.
1. Contempt
2. Racism
3. Wait for them to die
David Wellstone and other Democrats close to his father began objecting last year to what David Wellstone described as Wellstone Action’s abandonment of disaffected Democrats in the rural Midwest — the rural poor were an early focus of the late senator — with an increasingly narrow focus on gender politics and people of color.
“I said, ‘After Trump, we’ve got to figure out how we are going to go back after those Democrats that we lost,” David Wellstone said. “We can do all the stuff we do. We do great stuff on communities of color; we’re doing great stuff on gender identity politics. But we need to do some of these other trainings. … Nobody wanted to have a discussion about that.”
In a prepared statement, Connie Lewis, chairwoman of the Wellstone Action board, said the group’s “mission has not changed.” But the group’s staff and board of directors appeared to suggest a shift in the progressive movement since Paul Wellstone’s death, asserting in a statement on its website that “a lot has changed over the last fifteen years” and that “the progressive movement also looks different today than it did when we first started.”
In an early sign of tension at Wellstone Action, then-board member Rick Kahn, Paul Wellstone’s longtime friend and campaign treasurer, raised concerns in an email to a staffer last year about a draft tax filing in which staff proposed changing the group’s stated mission from “advancing progressive social change and economic justice” to “advancing progressive social change and economic, racial, and gender justice.”
“I am not remotely questioning the work we do in the realm of racial and gender justice,” Kahn said in the email, one of several documents he provided to POLITICO. “I support it, and applaud it, all of it. That has always been true, and will always remain true. What I am calling into question, and vigorously objecting to, is the strategic thinking in expressly choosing to highlight our work for just those two groups, and no others, in a document posted online, that we share with the entire world.”
That's too close to saying, "All Lives Matter." And that's the worst possible hate crime you can commit. You might as well build your mansion from the bodies of people of color while eating live whales.
Kahn and other allies of Wellstone's sons said the board moved against them only after they began raising questions about the group’s finances. But the exchange reflected a broader undercurrent of discord. Noting Wellstone Action’s other priority constituencies included young people and working-class people, among others, Kahn wrote, “And since the language in question relates expressly to the legacy of Paul and Sheila [Wellstone], if we are willfully choosing to include some groups here, and not others, what about justice for people with mental illness, and victims of domestic violence?”
David Wellstone took the language on the group’s website — that “a lot has changed over the last fifteen years” — as an affront to his father’s legacy.
“How I read it is Paul Wellstone is no longer relevant. It is the most untrue, un-thought-through and most offensive remark,” Wellstone said. “When you’ve got people who are hurting and they’re turning to Donald Trump, we’ve got to give them something. … We should be the fighters for all folks who aren’t on top. That’s what my dad always said.”
Don't you know, we have always been at war with whiteness?
Sorry, your Dad's just another dead white man. Ten years from now they'll start tearing down his statues and renaming his buildings because he was never sufficiently tolerant of some new identity politics group that doesn't exist yet, but that will soon be the most oppressed group ever (until the next one.)
While Mark and David Wellstone wrote a letter to donors raising concerns about fiscal management and warning of “swirling dark clouds of controversy, unanswered questions, and doubts about the very survival of the organization,” at least two major donors, the Ford Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, expressed ongoing support.
Of course they have.
Do it for Paul!