@snoopydawg
party - what's left of it - is totally irrelevant. The problem is he doesn't mean it. Or, if he does, has a funny way of showing it, banning all that aren't neoLib Hillary fans.

#3

The party is utterly irrelevant," says Markos Moulitsas, the 45-year-old founder of Daily Kos, a pioneer of the "netroots" that has become a hub for digital resistance in the Trump age

This makes as much sense as when he said that "issues aren't important right now".
BFD that thousands of people are marching in women's genitalia hats. Where were they when Obama's foreign policies were much worse than Bush's?
Or when his drones killed people at weddings and then the people who came to help them?
Or the heinous war crime of bombing the hospital in Afghanistan for over an hour?
Or, or, or......
Rumors are that Soros is funding many of these protests, just like the Koch brothers funded the tea party.

@snoopydawg Or when the Dems tell us that we have to accept pro-life Democratic senators.

#3

The party is utterly irrelevant," says Markos Moulitsas, the 45-year-old founder of Daily Kos, a pioneer of the "netroots" that has become a hub for digital resistance in the Trump age

This makes as much sense as when he said that "issues aren't important right now".
BFD that thousands of people are marching in women's genitalia hats. Where were they when Obama's foreign policies were much worse than Bush's?
Or when his drones killed people at weddings and then the people who came to help them?
Or the heinous war crime of bombing the hospital in Afghanistan for over an hour?
Or, or, or......
Rumors are that Soros is funding many of these protests, just like the Koch brothers funded the tea party.

@Benny @Benny

It seems part & parcel with the pattern that's been ongoing from at least 2016 primaries. This is their identity politics strategy ratcheted up to yet more desperate levels as they seek relevancy for neo-liberalism. What the comfortable will never understand is that while you're children are starving is not the time you care about esoteric social issues. Food is what you want. Sadly, things like food and shelter are not on the list of things neoliberalism has to offer for anyone but the very lucky few.

I might add that making up some stupid name for it is also just another play out of their standard playbook. They think they are experts at using obfuscating language. I think their expertise was rooted in control of the narrative and the information age has put a permanent end to that. Their ongoing efforts at censorship will fail.

"Radical Center": Could there be a more obviously Madison avenue Frankenstein creation -- "Yup dude! I"m a radically for the status quo!" It is an obviously ludicrous concept on the face of it clearly meant to attract young and gullible activists. They are welcome to any they can get with that drivel.

#13 When I first saw Anderson's comment (and I'd seen it bantered a few times before that on TOP), I thought it was oxymoronic. It still is, just like GOS & TOP are. And to TOP's continuing slippery slope that has turned into a detrimental slide as a blog community.

Today a new FP group, the TOP Equality Staff have declared war on anyone who isn't PoC. It began with this diary about a protest at NN2017 during Stacey Evans' presentation. Evans is running for the Dem primary for gubernatorial race in GA next spring.

From what I gather, the black protestors were angry because of the placement of the speaker, not to mention that Evans was in favor of school vouchers. There's more, but I'll start with the cut & paste:

On Saturday morning, many of the black women I knew who were at the conference participated in a planned protest during the morning plenary. This was discussed on Friday so we knew it was happening and why. It was in response to Stacey Evans, a Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia who is a white woman, and her planned speech at Netroots. There were several reasons that they wanted to protest her appearance. In part, it was a response to her invitation to the conference—period. Evans is a supporter of school vouchers and has voted to take millions from Georgia public school funding. Education is a central part of black women’s political and social platform—both for our own children and for our community. To many of us, school vouchers and charter schools are not progressive. In fact, they are very often the reason why Republicans take money away from the schools in our communities, leaving us with a lack of resources and schools with crumbling infrastructure.

So Evans’ presence at a conference which is supposed to be for progressives wasn’t well-received, along with the fact that she was slated to speak right before Becky Pringle, vice president of the National Education Association. Pringle is also a black woman. Lastly, some of the women were Stacey Abrams supporters. Abrams is the other Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia. It did not escape black women’s attention that while Stacey Abrams spoke on Thursday as part of a slate that had a number of candidates of color speaking, Stacey Evans was given a position to speak on the same day as Elizabeth Warren—a darling of the progressive community. It appeared as if this was an intentional way to elevate the candidacy of one woman over another, and the black woman was getting the short end of the stick.

(emphasis mine)

snip

The protest evolved. More from that same diary:

Trust that we believe that Stacey Evans’ stances on education are not good for us or our families and they are not progressive. Trust that our 94 percent percent voting record for Hillary in the 2016 presidential election means that we know what we are doing.

Speaking as someone who identifies more closely with Democratic Socialists (not the Socialists Alternative), I am against school vouchers as they drain resources from the greater pool necessary for good K-12 public education. But these same protesters voted for Barack Obama, and he hired for his Sec of Education a person who was widely known for supporting school vouchers in Chicago, Arne Duncan. Where was their outrage then?

The diarist claims the protesters were being shouted down by the white progressives in the room.

As soon as I heard the roar of white folks chanting “Let her speak” to the protesters, I ran to the front of the room. It was my intention to go to the stage and join and support my colleagues and fellow black women, since I knew exactly why they were doing this. I stopped however, when I got close to the stage and saw a black woman standing in between tables being shouted at and terrorized by two white people. She was not in front of the stage. She had stood up and joined other people who were offering their support of the protest and who were chanting in the audience. These two white people (a man and a woman), along with many others, decided that the protest was disrespectful and that Stacey Evans had the right to speak. They were yelling at this black woman with such intensity that it was overwhelming. At one point, the man was literally in her face screaming. I was afraid for her safety.

I was not present at the conference to confirm anything the diarist reported. But I guess it was enough for this new group to form at TOP on Friday, the TOP Equality Group. According to their profile, this is their purpose:

DK Equity Group is comprised of DK staff committed to eliminating white supremacy in Daily Kos and the movement. This account has multiple staff members who will identify themselves in written posts and will use personal accounts to comment.

The group's posted earlier this afternoon its first diary, entitled "Trust black women when they protest: a lesson for us white progressives & Netroots". This was the construct:

The white response of confronting the black protesters who opposed Stacey Evans and repeatedly asked all of us to "Trust Black Women" to make education decisions for their children, was terrible. Stacey Evans is in favor of school vouchers, privatization, and charter schools, which aren’t progressive values and disproportionately harm black children.

White progressives, we should honor protest, and we often do, when we consent to it. We should not attempt to silence the voices of black people who are speaking out in protest. As white progressives, we should recognize that we are perpetuating systems of white supremacy by telling groups of marginalized and impacted communities when, where, and how they can fight their oppression.

(emphasis is by the diarist, not mine)

It's similar to BLM's protest in AZ when NN2015 was held and to the protest in Seattle at a Bernie Sanders rally later on. Bernie respected the protesters, namely Symone Sanders, to make themselves heard.

What's ironic, is that same blog supported a candidate who was a centrist and still has supporters in a rebranded group, New Democracy, which met in CO two weekends ago. Fivethirtyeight pointed out the dichotomy of values messaging the New Democracy/Dem Party in this way:

But there is a real, pressing battle in the Democratic Party over identity issues too, with some in the party worried that movements like Black Lives Matter turn off white voters while others say the Democrats should speak bluntly and unequivocally on issues that particularly affect women and nonwhite voters.

“We also have to avoid vilifying people whose social views aren’t as ‘progressive’ as we think they should be,” reads the mission statement of a new group of centrist Democrats called New Democracy. The group, whose advisory board includes Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell, argues that “both parties have indulged in a civically corrosive form of identity politics.”

My original question was "Has the Radical Center Lost Its Way?" If TOP has decided that anyone who challenges the new TOP Equality staff in any fashion (and it's discovered one isn't PoC), then it's not progressive at all. And it's certainly not listening to New Democracy. TOP thinks it's the radical center. But I don't see how they can be when the former president was lauded at all costs despite continuing wars he promised to withdraw from or appoint peopleefor leading educational policy who were for school vouchers because it benefited students of color whose attended public schools were underfunded. Yes, Duncan abandoned it and shifted to competitive grants--still neoliberal policy; Betsy DeVos picked up the mantle but for privileged white students, more aligned with dismantling public education in general. Obama did not push very hard his Dem senators enough to get a vote for a centrist SCOTUS pick in 2016. So much for that radical center!