Palmer Report editorial note: the gauntlet and the damage done
A week ago, I threw down the gauntlet about something I considered crucial to taking down Donald Trump. I saw that after Bernie Sanders won two out of the first three states, numerous major media outlets began painting him as the presumptive Democratic nominee, even though he was only on a path to win about a third of the delegates nationwide. If the other two-thirds of Democrats who don’t want Sanders got discouraged and stopped organizing for their preferred candidates, the media’s false reporting could end up being a self fulfilling prophecy by giving Sanders a majority. For reasons I spelled out in detail, if Sanders is the nominee, he’ll likely find a way to lose to Trump. I tried to educate everyone on the reality that we’re likely headed to a brokered convention, from which Sanders will likely not emerge as the nominee – and all we have to do is remain vigilant in supporting our preferred candidates in the meantime.
What a difference a week can make. In the time since I sounded the alarm, Bernie Sanders has offered partial praise for Fidel Castro, while using Twitter to divisively attack the Democratic Party, and we learned that he’s been using nondisclosure agreements to try to bury his own scandals. In other words, we’re now quickly seeing how Bernie’s absurd statements and unvetted scandals would be used by Trump and the GOP to destroy him in the general election, just like I predicted.
Meanwhile Joe Biden has won South Carolina in a thirty point blowout, a reminder that the first three states in this race are all pretty terrible indicators of what the rest of the nation wants. Biden has pulled into the popular vote lead, for now. Pete Buttigieg has dropped out, in order to get out of Biden’s way. Biden began talking openly about winning a brokered convention. In other words, as I tried to spell out last week, Sanders doesn’t have a lock on the nomination. He’s not on a trajectory that’s even close to obtaining the majority of delegates. As long as the two-thirds of Democrats who don’t want Sanders keep their heads in the game, someone other than Sanders will likely be the nominee. But when you see where things are headed and you try to warn everyone before the full picture is clear to them, you’re going to take some barbs for it.
I was expecting flack, of course. Bernie’s most rabid fans insisted that I was throwing my relevance away. They were sure that no one would ever read Palmer Report again, because in their minds, everyone loves Bernie, except for the handful of shady people conspiring against him. I’m happy to report that Im still standing. I quickly lost about one percent of my followers on Facebook, and about one percent of my followers on Twitter. Considering that Bernie supporters obviously make up far greater than one percent of my audience, it appears that most of them either know my criticisms and concerns about Bernie are correct, or they think I’m wrong but they’re willing to continue hearing me out. In other words, it’s only the fanatics who ran off.
Notably, over the past week I’ve gained more new Twitter followers than I lost to begin with. It’s funny how the peanut gallery’s view toward you tends to shift once they start to conclude you may have been right all along. Of course I can’t post anything on social media now without Bernie’s fanatics immediately showing up and posting the sickest replies they can think of. Some of them appear to be automated bots, but sadly, many of them are very much real people who seem to think that obsessively trolling a relative nobody like me is the beset way to help their candidate. In any case, before much longer they’ll all have been blocked, and things are getting back to normal.
From time to time I like to share these things with you, just so you have a sense of how it all looks from my end while it’s playing out. Mainly I just want to thank all of you for continuing to stick with me, even when I sometimes stick my neck out on things that you may not be ready to hear. If I played it safe instead of sounding the alarm about what seems important, I wouldn’t really be serving any purpose, would I?
