MoveOn Members Voted to Endorse Bernie Sanders

The Top 5 Reasons MoveOn Members Voted to Endorse Bernie (with the Most Votes and Widest Margin in Our History)

By Ilya Sheyman, Executive Director, MoveOn.org Political Action

With a record-setting 78.6 percent of 340,665 votes cast by the MoveOn membership, Senator Bernie Sanders has won MoveOn.org Political Action’s endorsement for president with the largest total and widest margin in MoveOn history.

MoveOn.org only endorses candidates based on votes by our members. Our only previous presidential endorsement during a Democratic primary was for Barack Obama, in early 2008. In 2004, no Democratic candidate reached the threshold for an endorsement.

Here are 5 of the top reasons MoveOn members support Bernie and will mobilize to get out the vote on his behalf in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other crucial early states.

1. Bernie’s lifelong commitment to standing up to corporate and 1% interests to fight for an economy where everyone has a fair shot.

“His refusal to accept the status quo of the wealthiest Americans using their power to influence politicians matters to me. If we’re going to push back against the rising oligarchy in our country, we need people like Bernie Sanders representing us in government.”

– MoveOn member Matt R., Reston, VA

At the core of Bernie’s campaign is a commitment to fixing an economic system that has been rigged in favor of giant corporations and the wealthiest few and that is making economic inequality worse.

Bernie’s campaign is funded by more than a million ordinary Americans chipping in whatever they can afford — not by billionaires or corporate SuperPACs. In our endorsement vote exit poll, one of the words MoveOn members most frequently used to describe him was “integrity.” He isn’t beholden to lobbyists and corporate interests, and it shows in the positions he’s taken, from fighting to break up too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks, to tuition-free public higher education, to expanding Social Security, to fighting for bold solutions on climate change and a $15-hour minimum wage.

In short, MoveOn members support Bernie Sanders because they believe they can trust him to stand up to powerful interests and fight for what’s right.

2. He’s standing up for justice for communities facing oppression.

“In a nutshell, he exemplifies the ‘We the People’ style of democracy I believe in. He has stood by and with the people, supporting women, people of color, LGBTQ, seniors, and the poor against those who look to subjugate these historically oppressed groups for profit.”

– MoveOn member Natalie R., Claremont, CA

Bernie is fighting for racial justice by calling to demilitarize police, invest in community policing, end the drug war and tackle the epidemic of mass incarceration, and restore voting rights gutted by federal courts. On immigration, Sanders proposes allowing undocumented immigrants to purchase health care through the Affordable Care Act, dismantling inhumane deportation programs and private detention centers, and a path to citizenship for 11 million aspiring Americans. He’s fighting for equal pay for women and to expand and protect reproductive rights, and has pledged to only nominate Supreme Court justices who support Roe v. Wade.

3. He’ll say no to permanent war.

“He represents integrity. He was also right about Iraq and I prefer his stance on foreign policy. I feel that he is concerned with getting our country on track and not getting us in more wars.”

– MoveOn member Janekee C., Davenport, FL

Bernie Sanders has been a strong, consistent voice for the principle that war should always be a last resort. He had the foresight to vote against authorizing the war in Iraq in 2002, was a strong supporter of the nuclear deal to prevent war with Iran, and has been a voice of reason against escalation in Syria and other conflicts around the world.

A diplomacy-first foreign policy has long been one of MoveOn members’ top priorities, and Bernie has consistently stood with us against costly, needless, and unwise military escalation that puts our nation’s security and values at risk.

4. Electability: This election will hinge on turnout, and Bernie is inspiring and mobilizing the communities it’ll take to win.

“I have never been as excited about a candidate as I am about Bernie Sanders. His liberal values match my own values more closely than any other candidate. I respect Bernie Sander’s independence from corporate influence. His focus on social justice and addressing the economic inequality in this country make him the candidate for me.”

– MoveOn member Megan W., Poulsbo, WA

Bernie’s campaign is inspiring millions of people to enter the political process for the first time, including young people and other members of the “rising American electorate” who the eventual Democratic nominee will need to mobilize in order to win in November. He’s raised money from more contributors than any candidate in history at this stage in the primary process, and massive crowds have turned out to see him across the country. Part of why MoveOn members are supporting Bernie is that his agenda excites and inspires them, and they see it doing the same for others.

Experts agree that the general election will hinge on voter turnout. If the Obama coalition can be inspired to vote, Democrats will retain the White House. But if the electorate looks like it did in 2014, when Republicans gained ground across the country and seized control of the Senate, Democrats will be in trouble.

Not only do some new polls this week show Bernie leading the Democratic field in Iowa and New Hampshire, they also show him to be the Democratic candidate who performs best against various hypothetical Republican nominees.

MoveOn members support Bernie because they know his message has broad support and that he is well positioned to win the White House in a general election.

5. Putting members in the driver’s seat is what MoveOn does, and a whopping 79 percent voted to endorse Bernie.

“I voted for MoveOn.org to endorse Bernie Sanders for president because he represents the progressive movement like this organization. His views align perfectly with my own — wealth inequality, a living wage, job creation, Wall Street reform, racial justice, women’s and LBGT rights, college without debt, climate change, and peaceful solutions to prevent war, such as his support for the Iran deal.”

– MoveOn member Terri D., Brookfield, WI

Finally, MoveOn is endorsing Bernie for president because MoveOn is our members. MoveOn only endorses candidates for office after formal membership votes, and in this case, the outcome of our internal democratic process was overwhelming: the vast majority of voting MoveOn members want the organization to support Bernie, so that’s what we’re going to do. We’ve pledged to run a 100% positive campaign. And then regardless of who wins the nomination, MoveOn will support the eventual Democratic nominee in the general election to keep a Republican out of the White House, because the vast majority of members have made clear that it’s what they want MoveOn to do.

More than 340,000 MoveOn members participated in our endorsement process. Sanders won with 267,750 votes, or 78.6 percent. “Fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton garnered 49,811 votes (14.6 percent). Martin O’Malley earned 2,949 votes (0.9 percent). There were also 20,155 MoveOn members, or 5.9 percent, who voted against MoveOn making an endorsement now.

Bernie’s vote total and percentage are MoveOn records — the best any presidential candidate has performed in our 17-year history.

In short, MoveOn members #FeelTheBern and are going to mobilize in a big way to turn out the voters Bernie needs to win in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other early primary states. Let’s demonstrate the impact of progressive people power. Click here to join our MoveOn for Bernie campaign.

Nikki Haley's Stepford Wives Republican Response Can't Paper Over GOP Racism

By Jason Easley

Republican Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) delivered a Stepford wife like performance as she unsuccessfully sold the Republican agenda of racism and tax cuts for the wealthy in the GOP response to President Obama’s State Of The Union.

In one breath, Nikki Haley proclaimed herself the child of immigrants. In the next breath, Haley said that the country must crack down on immigration. Haley said, “We cannot continue to allow immigrants to come here illegally. And in this age of terrorism, we must not let in refugees whose intentions cannot be determined. We must fix our broken immigration system. That means stopping illegal immigration. And it means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.”

Haley brought back the same old Republican b.s. that if they win back the White House, their tax cuts for the wealthy will help working Americans, “If we held the White House, taxes would be lower for working families, and we’d put the brakes on runaway spending and debt…We would make international agreements that were celebrated in Israel and protested in Iran, not the other way around. And rather than just thanking our brave men and women in uniform, we would actually strengthen our military, so both our friends and our enemies would know that America seeks peace, but when we fight wars we win them.”

It was the same old trick that Republicans try to pull every four years. The GOP never stops trying to dress up their racist, anti-woman, pro-billionaire agenda with a new face. This time the Republican Party trotted out an American-Indian woman to try to fool voters into believing that they were not being sold the same old bill of goods.

Haley’s performance in the Republican response was professional. Her delivery was solid. She fared better than Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio, but Republicans still don’t get it. The problem is the messenger. The problem remains the message.

Voters aren’t going to buy tax cuts that benefit the wealthy and discriminatory policies from anybody.

The Stepford governor failed just like all of the other puppets failed before her.

Republicans can’t hide that it’s Donald Trump, not Nikki Haley who speaks for the real Republican Party.

Dear Ted Cruz: Even David Brooks Hates You

The New York Times conservative columnist suggests the GOP candidate is anything but kindhearted.

By Kali Holloway

Ted Cruz has been gaining on Donald Trump in recent weeks, closing the gap between the two among likely GOP voters. While the numbers show support for Cruz is building, there’s apparently one conservative whose vote he doesn’t have, and is unlikely to gain—PBS talking head and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

In his latest op-ed, Brooks took Cruz to task for what he calls the candidate’s “pagan brutalism,” which he says leaves the candidate empty of “compassion, gentleness and mercy.” Brooks cites the case of Michael Wayne Haley, a Texas man who in 1997 was sent to jail for stealing a calculator. Due to prosecutor error, what should have earned Haley two years maximum behind bars resulted in a prison sentence of an astounding 16 years. When the mistake was discovered, then-Texas solicitor general Ted Cruz actually fought to keep Haley imprisoned, going as high as the U.S. Supreme Court. Haley was ultimately released after serving six years, but in that anecdote, Brooks finds troubling indications about Cruz’s personality.

Brooks notes a marked incongruity between Cruz’s appeals to evangelical voters, with whom he’s gaining a foothold, and his so-called dedication to Christian virtues. “[Cruz’s] speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them,” Brooks writes. “When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.”

He suggests the candidate is creating an “atmosphere of apocalyptic fear,” making hyperbolic pronouncements that seem like doomsday forecasts. Brooks quotes Cruz's statement that America is in danger of toppling off the “cliff to oblivion.” He also points to a Cruz quote following a Democratic debate about how “[w]e’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day, and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously.”

Brooks believes this tone, thanks to its success with some Republican voters, is being picked up by other candidates. "Ted Cruz is making headway. There's...you begin to see little signs of liftoff,” Cruz said, according to Politico. “Trump has sort of ceiling-ed out. Carson is collapsing. And Cruz is somehow beginning to get some momentum from Iowa and elsewhere. And so people are either mimicking him, which Rubio is doing a little by adopting some of the dark and satanic tones that Cruz has."

Brooks suggests in his column that evangelical voters would do well to look more closely at Cruz’s rhetoric before deciding to support him, since it runs counter to much of what they believe. “Evangelicals and other conservatives have had their best influence on American politics when they have proceeded in a spirit of personalism,” Brooks writes, “when they have answered hostility with service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They have won elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal, fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that.”
 
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The Junior Militiaman Playset!

As Christie rises, foes turn focus on the mess he's leaving in New Jersey

By Tom Moran

With just a month to go before New Hampshire votes, Gov. Chris Christie's opponents have begun whacking him over his dismal performance as governor.

Finally, someone noticed.

I don't think I'm the only Jersey guy who feels that the voters of New Hampshire are a pretty clueless bunch if they embrace Christie before checking with his home team.

They would find that a whopping 76 percent of New Jerseyans say that Christie cares more about himself than the state; that 69 percent say he'd make a poor president, and that 59 percent are so fed up they want him to resign today.

Put it this way: If Christie wanted to leave the state for good, he'd have no trouble finding volunteers to drive him to the airport.

During two trips to New Hampshire, and one to Iowa, I found that nearly all their voters are judging Christie solely by his performance on stage, where he excels.

Heads bob up and down as Christie claims that New Jersey's economy is robust, that the Bridgegate scandal is over, that the state's finances are rock solid, and so on. It's enough to make your head explode.

But the attack ads could pry open the door to Christie's real record. And it's been a torrent lately, with attacks coming directly or indirectly from Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Marco Rubio.

Christie says the attacks are a good sign. "They're coming after me because I'm doing well," he says. "Its good to be attacked. It means I'm in the game."

Fair point. Why would they waste their money attacking a guy who has no prayer?

But that's not the end of it. Because if New Hampshire voters do take a hard look at Christie's record, he's in big trouble.

This is the time bomb that's been embedded in this campaign from the start. Once a candidate gets traction, the scrutiny gears up. And for Christie, that could cut deep.

I was impressed with Christie during his first few years, as were most people in New Jersey. He signed a slew of bipartisan reforms that helped contain public spending at a time when that was a top priority.

And he made solid progress on education, with tenure reform and the robust growth of the best charter school chains in the state's poorest cities.

Give him that. It's not for nothing that he won re-election in a landslide.

Then everything collapsed. And we learned that while he may have the talent to be a good president, he lacks the character.

The turning point came when the party establishment begged him to run for president in 2012. He turned them down, but he was left with a bad case of White House fever.

By now, he's lost his bearings, like the mythical Icarus who flew too close to the sun.

The Bridgegate scandal was an early sign. It was all about an attempt to run up his margin of victory in New Jersey as a credential for a presidential run.

But the fever has deepened since then. Christie was absent from the state 72 percent of the days during 2015, a truly shameless total. And still, he attacks Rubio for missing Senate votes. Has he lost his mind?

If you wonder why New Jersey's transit system is such a mess, blame Christie's fever. He can't raise the gas tax because it would kill his campaign, even when the state's Chamber of Commerce sees no alternative to a tax hike of some kind. So he has proposed no solution whatsoever.

The result: Our crowded trains break down much more often, tolls and fares have skyrocketed, several crumbling bridges have been closed down, and the state's economy faces the risk of a body blow if the decrepit century-old railroad tunnel under the Hudson River fails. Keep your fingers crossed.

Christie's gotten sloppy in his second term, like the cocky star quarterback who skips practice. He slurps up luxury gifts from kings and billionaires, and makes the phony claim that they are all personal friends.

He flip-flops on meaty issues like gun control, Common Core, immigration, and Planned Parenthood.
He seems paralyzed by the state's budget crisis, with the credit rating dropping a record nine times.

In New Jersey, this act has worn thin. Polls show that even Republicans here don't like him, and that he'd be crushed in a primary vote in his own state.

One hopes that New Hampshire voters will soon become curious to find out why.

Hillary Clinton Is Not Telling The Truth About Wall Street

  Scott Olson via Getty Images

And it's damaging her campaign.

By Zach Carter 

WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton's campaign spent much of this week waging a dishonest attack on Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and his campaign's Wall Street reform platform. The risky attempt to make inroads with progressives on one of her weakest issues is damaging the credibility of some of her top lieutenants.

Clinton's attack on Sanders is as simple as it is untrue: Unlike Sanders, Clinton has argued, she is willing to take on "shadow banking" -- a broad term for various financial activities that aren't regulated as strictly as conventional lending. 

Sanders has in fact proposed attacking shadow banking in two principal ways: by breaking up big financial firms that engage in shadow banking, and by severing federal financial support for shadow banking activities by reinstating Glass-Steagall.

These would be substantive changes. A lot of shadow banking takes place at firms with traditional banking charters, like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Some of it takes place at specialized hedge funds, or at major investment banks like Goldman Sachs. Breaking them up would not eliminate the risk shadow banking poses to the economy, but it would limit it. Risky shadow banking activities cannot bring down institutions that are too-big-to-fail if there are no too-big-to-fail institutions.

Yet the Clinton campaign has repeatedly said Sanders is wholly ignoring shadow banking, accusing Sanders of taking a "hands-off" approach to it that would not apply to firms like Lehman Brothers and AIG. This barrage has come from Clinton's press aides, campaign CFO Gary Gensler, and Clinton surrogate Barney Frank.

In a bizarre appearance on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show, Frank claimed that splitting up Morgan Stanley or Bank of America "is not going to do anything, literally not anything to restrain shadow banking." He even said that since Lehman Brothers was "very small" when it failed, Sanders' break-up-the-banks plan would be unworkably broad and apply to too many firms. 

It's hard to see these comments as anything but dishonest. Lehman Brothers was not "very small" when it failed. At $639 billion in assets, it was the single-biggest bankruptcy filing in American history. Only six U.S. banks are now larger than Lehman was, and the next-largest institutions are almost half Lehman's size. AIG -- then the world's largest insurer -- was even bigger.

Breaking up major institutions and forcing banks that accept insured deposits out of the shadow banking system are not the only conceivable tactics for mitigating risks posed by shadow banking. 

Clinton's plan includes some vague but sensible proposals to take a harder look at the sector, require more transparency, and impose new leverage limits on some players. Her approach eschews a focus on the threat posed by large institutions in favor of monitoring risks across the financial system (she has repeatedly rejected calls to break up the biggest banks). The Clinton team could easily make a case for her approach without saying strange and false things about Sanders' plan.

And indeed, the Clinton camp's relentless references to Lehman and AIG undercut her own regulatory approach. If bank size were truly irrelevant to the shadow banking problem, then there would be no need to consistently highlight two too-big-to-fail institutions, one of which wreaked havoc on the economy by failing, and another of which was bailed out to avoid further havoc.

Jaret Seiberg, a regulatory specialist at Guggenheim Partners - and one of the most astute finance-friendly observers of American politics - issued a note to clients this week saying that key elements of Sanders' platform have bipartisan appeal and political viability that will put pressure on other candidates to present more aggressive anti-Wall Street messaging.

"This is not just about breaking up the biggest banks," Seiberg wrote. "Sanders is calling for a system in which financial firms are smaller, the government controls the interest rates that banks charge, certain fees are capped, the Postal Service becomes a viable competitor to banks and payday lenders [and] CEO's would be criminally liable if employees defraud customers.

"Sanders appears to argue that he could implement much of this agenda on his own even without the need for legislation," Seiberg continued. "We caution against dismissing this view. There is much that the White House, Treasury, or the financial regulators could do by executive order …. Bashing Wall Street is a populist message that appeals to conservatives and liberals. Sanders has now laid out the most radical option on the table that other candidates will be judged against."

So it's easy to see why Clinton would want to steal some of Sanders' populist thunder. But focusing on Wall Street could easily backfire on Clinton. Aside from giving opponents more opportunities to highlight speaking fees she accepted from Goldman Sachs and other banks, it risks demoralizing progressive voters. Financial reform is a major issue with the Democratic Party base. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has become one of the most popular figures within the party, built on her almost single-minded focus on Wall Street accountability. Too-big-to-fail and Glass-Steagall are major causes among Warren's supporters, many of whom have flocked to Sanders, but would be perfectly happy to vote for Clinton over a Republican in November.

Unless Clinton needlessly alienates them. Turning out an enthusiastic base has increasingly become essential for both parties over the past decade. With Clinton up more than 15 percentage points in Iowa polls and ahead by even wider margins nationally, it's hard to see the upside in her campaign's current assault on Sanders. 

Making things up in order to criticize Sanders proposals that Democrats actually like only damages Clinton's credibility with Democratic voters.

Why have major TV networks pulled the plug on Bernie?

By Jim Hightower

Listen to this Commentary

Let's go to the scoreboard to see who's winning the exciting game of "Presidential Election Media Coverage."

A non-partisan media monitoring firm that has been tracking the nightly news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC reports that Trump is tromp, tromp, tromping over the airtime of everyone else. From last January thought November, these dominant flagship news shows devoted 234 minutes of prime-time coverage to the incessant chirping of the Yellow-Crested Birdbrain, with no other contender getting even a fourth of that.

Take Democrat Bernie Sanders, who's stunning the political establishment with a fiery populist campaign that's drawing record crowds. Indeed, Sanders' upstart campaign is getting higher poll ratings in the Democratic contest than Trump is getting in GOP race. And – get this – polls also show Bernie topping The Donald by 10 points if they face each other in November's presidential showdown. So surely he's getting a proportional level of media coverage by the networks on our public airwaves, right?

Ha, just kidding! The ABC, CBS, NBC devotion of 234 minutes to all-things-Trump was "balanced" by less than 10 minutes for Sanders. Most egregious, was ABC, the Disney-owned network. ABC's "World New Tonight" awarded 81 minutes of national showtime to Trump last year – and for Bernie: 20 seconds.

How self-serving of the media moguls! The one candidate who is effectively rallying large numbers of voters to oppose the rise of corporate oligarchy – including in the media – has the plug pulled on him. Of course, this only amplifies the truth of what Sanders is saying about the villainy of corporate profiteers, and it fuels a greater determination by his millions of grassroots supporters to end the reign of greed in America. For information and action, go to www.BernieSanders.com

Imagine If They Were Black: How Oregon Reveals The Real Story About Race And Whiteness In America

Oregon is about guns, right-wing media and state violence as well as race. But it shows our racial inequity clearly.

By Chauncey DeVega

I recently wrote two pieces on white privilege and the occupation of federal property in Oregon by a gun-toting terrorist insurrectionist “militia” that is led by the sons of Cliven Bundy—the Nevada rancher who, with the aid of an armed group of anti-government protesters, stood down federal authorities in 2014 because he did not want to pay his back taxes and grazing fees.

Ammon Bundy speaking at a forum hosted by the American Academy for Constitutional Education (AAFCE) at the Burke Basic School in Mesa, Arizona.
 
Photo Credit: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Ammon Bundy) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 
Those two works—one that was quite short and posted on my Facebook page; the other a longer piece featured on Salon—have been shared and commented upon hundreds of thousands of times on social media and elsewhere. When an essay on race (especially when it explores questions surrounding white privilege) goes “viral” there is a predictable range of reactions.

Some readers have responded with rage and anger because to discuss the connection between white privilege, state violence, guns and right-wing politics is verboten to them.

Other readers have been very positive and supportive. As was seen online at “Black Twitter,” many people were quick, and quite correct, to point out the hypocrisy regarding how the United States government and its agents are apparently much more likely to use violence against people of color (and especially Muslims in the post 9/11 era) than they are white Americans. With that observation, a powerful example was summoned: Tamir Rice, a black child playing with a toy gun was summarily executed by the Cleveland police; white people can brandish real guns and point them at the police and federal authorities, yet somehow they manage to (for the most part) survive unharmed.

There were other readers who are plugged into the right-wing conspiracy theory/Fox News/Alex Jones echo chamber. Epistemic closure visits ignorance and disinformation upon those who are self-exiled within the right-wing media. These readers defended the Oregon “militia” brigands with claims that the latter are “freedom fighters” who are standing up against “tyranny”–as opposed to the plain fact that they are insurrectionists protecting poachers.

Among the many thousands of comments (and several emails that I have also received), there were a few that offered a reasonable and insightful intervention. Several folks are concerned that the white Oregon “Bundy Brigands” insurrection is 1.) about “more than race,” and 2.) that somehow a discussion of the color line and white privilege is a distraction from “the bigger picture.”

To the second point, my response is that to critically interrogate matters of race and the color line is to better understand almost every aspect of American life and culture. The color line cannot be decoupled from American society. To run away from this fact is ironically to cede the centrality of race to America’s history and present. In practice, ignorant and willful “colorblindness” is a malignant and perverse type of “color consciousness” that too often enables white supremacy in the post-civil rights era.

To the first point, are the events in Oregon about “more than race?” Absolutely! Bundy’s Brigands are a nexus for many other important matters of public concern in American society.

The Oregon insurrection is an example of how the right-wing media has cultivated a culture of anger, aggrievement, anti-government conspiracy theories, and victimology among its consumers. The idea that publicly held land is a form of tyranny is absurd. However, the right-wing media and the Republican Party are part of a political religion which holds that the government is always the enemy, a baby to be drowned in the bathtub, as opposed to a force for potential good. Sarah Palin’s death panels, claims that the Affordable Care Act is akin to “slavery,” the foolishness of a “War on Christmas,” and the dunder headed political opportunism of the Benghazi witch hunts, are part of the same distorted and conspiranoid right-wing political imagination that excreted the Oregon militia standoff.

In all, there is something profoundly wrong with America’s sense of civic virtue and righteousness when some would hesitate to call Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Black Lives Matter activists freedom fighters, but those same people enthusiastically embrace using such language to describe right-wing militias and anti-government activists who want to suck off the public teat while avoiding paying any taxes or fees to do so.

The right-wing media protects and nurtures the likes of Cliven Bundy, his sons, and the broader militia movement by giving them attention and using honorifics, i.e. the word “patriots,” to describe their treasonous behavior.

Bundy’s Brigands are also white men with guns. White ammosexual identity is nurtured and protected by the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party, and the right-wing media. These gun-obsessed civic deviants are described by the right-wing, and unfortunately also the so-called liberal media, as being members of a “militia” when in reality they are rabble who are engaging in armed insurrection against a democratically elected government. The gun industry encourages the armed cowboy cosplay of groups such as Bundy’s Brigands in Oregon by marketing assault rifles and other weaponry with allusions to “freedom,” “democracy,” the myth of the American frontier and the Revolutionary War.

Bundy’s Brigands are also an example of how certain economic interests are protected in America. If this group of terrorist insurrectionists had staged their “standoff” at Wall Street for example, they would have been beaten up, arrested, and disappeared by the police, private security forces, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The rhetoric of capitalism and the iconic and empty Americana images of the yeoman farmer and cowboy are also operative in the “Oregon Standoff” as well. If Bundy’s Brigands were liberals and progressives demanding a fairer and more equal democracy, forming grange associations, or people’s economic collectives and banks, the reaction by the United States government and the corporate news media would be very, very, different. As was seen with Occupy Wall Street, the surveillance and punishing state would infiltrate and try to destroy the movement. The corporate news media would legitimate this anti-democratic behavior by slurring and defaming the activists and other social change workers who are involved with it.

Moreover, the efforts by militias, as well as those of individuals such as Cliven Bundy and his sons to privatize public land, cannot be separated from how corporations and other interests would like access to those areas. Neoliberalism considers the very notion of “the commons” and “the public” to be anathema to an organizing logic where all things are to be privatized, sold off to corporations, in exclusive service to the plutocrats, and where the working classes and poor are deemed useless eaters. Bundy’s Brigands and other right-wing militia groups speak of “freedom” from “tyranny,” but in reality they are unwittingly (or perhaps, in some cases, intentionally) working to replace an ostensibly elected and free American government with an unelected corporate dictatorship.

The Oregon insurrection is a great opportunity to participate in the too oft used “teachable moment.” History, as it always does, should inform our analysis of current events. This leads us to a necessary empirical question, one that can be answered, and likely has already been, by social scientists and historians. How does the American State respond to protest behavior by different racial groups? How are the events in Oregon similar or different from how the Philadelphia police decided to firebomb the headquarters of the African-American radical organization known as MOVE during the mid-1980's? Are the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco outliers for how the state uses violence against non-whites, exceptions that prove the rule? What of the freedom struggle by First Nations peoples in the American Indian Movement in the 1960's and 1970's?

Is the United States government (and its agents) more likely to use violent force against black and brown people as compared to whites? While both my intuition and the evidence would seem to suggest “yes,” this is not an “unknown unknown”–to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld–the answer is something that can actually be determined.

Bundy’s Brigands benefit from several types of privilege, with white privilege being central among them. But, white privilege is only one dimension of a bigger system of power relationships in the United States and West. We ought to look broadly for answers while also being mindful of the specific details and aspects of what is being studied. Bundy’s Brigands are not a Rosetta Stone for American politics. They can however, help us to better understand its dynamics.

Chauncey DeVega’s essays on race, politics and popular culture can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com/. He is a regular guest on Ring of Fire Radio and TV, and hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Follow him on Twitter.

The Awesome World Of The Future

Fraudsters Automate Russian Dating Scams

By Brian Krebs

Virtually every aspect of cybercrime has been made into a service or plug-and-play product. That includes dating scams — among the oldest and most common of online swindles. Recently, I had a chance to review a package of dating scam emails, instructions, pictures, videos and love letter templates that are sold to scammers in the underground, and was struck by how commoditized this type of fraud has become.

The dating scam package is assembled for and marketed to Russian-speaking hackers, with hundreds of email templates written in English and a variety of European languages. Many of the sample emails read a bit like Mad Libs or choose-your-own-adventure texts, featuring decision templates that include advice for ultimately tricking the mark into wiring money to the scammer.

The romance scam package is designed for fraudsters who prey on lonely men via dating Web sites and small spam campaigns. The vendor of the fraud package advertises a guaranteed response rate of at least 1.2 percent, and states that customers who average 30 scam letters per day can expect to earn roughly $2,000 a week. The proprietor also claims that his method is more than 20% effective within three replies and over 60% effective after eight.

One of hundreds of sample template files in the dating scam package.

The dating scam package advises customers to stick to a tried-and-true approach. For instance, scammers are urged to include an email from the mother of the girl in the first 10 emails between the scammer and a target. The scammer often pretends to be a young woman in an isolated or desolate region of Russia who is desperate for a new life, and the email from the girl’s supposed mother is intended to add legitimacy to the scheme.

Then there are dozens of pre-fabricated excuses for not talking on the phone, an activity reserved for the final stretch of the scam when the fraudster typically pretends to be stranded at the airport or somewhere else en route to the target’s home town.

“Working with dozens of possible outcomes, they carefully lay out every possible response, including dealing with broke guys who fell in love online,” said Alex Holden, the security expert who intercepted the romance scam package. “If the mark doesn’t have money, the package contains advice for getting him credit, telling the customer to restate his love and discuss credit options.”

A sample letter with multiple-choice options for creating unique love letter greetings.

Interestingly, although Russia is considered by many to be among the most hostile countries toward homosexuals, the makers of this dating scam package also include advice and templates for targeting gay men.

Also included in the dating scam tutorial is a list of email addresses and pseudonyms favored by anti-scammer vigilantes who try to waste the scammers’ time and otherwise prevent them from conning real victims. In addition, the package bundles several photos and videos of attractive Russian women, some of whom are holding up blank signs onto which the scammer can later Photoshop whatever message he wants.

Holden said that an enterprising fraudster with the right programming skills or the funds to hire a coder could easily automate the scam using bots that are programmed to respond to emails from the targets with content-specific replies.

CALL CENTERS TO CLOSE THE DEAL

The romance scam package urges customers to send at least a dozen emails to establish a rapport and relationship before even mentioning the subject of traveling to meet the target. It is in this critical, final part of the scam that the fraudster is encouraged to take advantage of criminal call centers that staff women who can be hired to play the part of the damsel in distress.

The login page for a criminal call center.

“When you get down to the final stage, there has to be a crisis, some compelling reason why the target should you send the money,” said Holden, founder of Hold Security [full disclosure: Yours Truly is an uncompensated adviser to Holden’s company]. “Usually this is something like the girl is stranded at the airport or needs money to get a travel visa. There has to be some kind of distress situation for this person to be duped into wiring money, which can be anywhere between $200 and $2,000 on average.”


Crooked call centers like the one pictured in the screen shot above employ male and female con artists who speak a variety of languages. When the call center employees are not being hired to close the deal on a romance scam, very often they are used to assist in bank account takeovers, redirecting packages with shipping companies, or handling fraudulent new credit applications that require phone verification.

Another reason that call centers aren’t used earlier in romance scams: Hiring one is expensive. The call center pictured above charges $10 per call, payable only in Bitcoin.

“If you imagine the cost of doing by phone every part of the scam, it’s rather high, so they do most of the scam via email,” Holden said. “What we tend to see with these dating scams is the scammer will tell the call center operator to be sure to mention special nicknames and to remind him of specific things they talked about in their email correspondence.”

An ad for a criminal call center that specializes in online dating scams. This one, run by a cybecrook who uses the nickname “Sparta,” says “Only the best calls for you.”

Check back later this week for a more in-depth story about criminal call centers.

Militiamen take over federal building in Oregon wildlife refuge after anti-government rally; son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy among them

BY Nicole Hensley

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Updated: Sunday, January 3, 2016, 3:15 AM

 

Les Zaitz/The Oregonian via AP

Ammon Bundy, son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, participates in the protest march in Burns, Oregon.

A so-called militia with ties to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy has seized a remote federal building in a frigid southeast Oregon wildlife refuge with no plans to leave.

Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, was among the self-described militiamen occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters and visitor center with eyes to take over the U.S. Bureau of Land Management fire station near Frenchglen, the Oregonian reported.

“We’re planning on staying here for years, absolutely,” Ammon Bundy told The Oregonian. “This is not a decision we’ve made at the last minute.”

Bundy, who lives in Idaho, called upon fellow militia members to "come prepared" and join protesters decrying federal overreach and rallying behind two ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven, re-sentenced in October to five years in prison for arson.

It’s unclear how many militia members are camped out at the Malheur building, but Harney County Sheriff’s Office has asked residents to stay clear of the federal land.

Bundy is already asking others to join him and a handful of others at the refuge. At least four men were seen trudging through a snow-covered road at the refuge entrance.

One of those men, shown sporting camouflage pants tucked into his boots, is holding a rifle.

Bundy addressed reporters from the refuge late Saturday as he and others stood around a bonfire, their breaths visible in the single-digit weather.

This is as close as I was allowed to get to the armed militia occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge HQ. #burnsoregon pic.twitter.com/DPztu0VsVU

— Jason Wilson (@jason_a_w) January 3, 2016

“We pose no threat to anybody,” said Bundy, when asked how he and demonstrators would respond to law enforcement officials attempting to them. “There’s no person that is physically harmed by what we’re doing.”

“If they come to bring physical harm to us, they will be doing it because of a facility or a building. I don’t believe that warrants killing people,” Bundy added.

It’s unknown how long Bundy had been plotting his standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge before driving to Oregon to protest the Hammonds looming prison sentence.

A judge ordered the Hammonds to report to a California prison Monday to begin a sentence deemed fit for the 2012 conviction. The two men set two fires in 2001 on 2006 on federal land leased by the Hammonds for cattle grazing.

The first fire destroyed all evidence of alleged deer poaching on the BLM property, claimed Dusty Hammond, whose grandfather, Dwight, and uncle, Steven, ordered him to “light the whole countryside on fire.”

“Dwight told me to keep my mouth shut, that nobody need to know about the fire, and they didn’t need to know anything about it,” Dusty said during the trial.

Dwight and Steven Hammond claimed the blazes were sparked on their neighboring property near Diamond as a precaution against future wildfires and invasive plants, but the flames spread out of control to federal lands. The two fires scorched a combined 140 acres.

Les Zaitz/The Oregonian via AP

Hundreds of protesters poured into Burns, Ore., to rally for two ranchers convicted of arson before splitting off and taking over a wildlife refuge.  

Bundy said he did not know the Hammonds personally until days before Saturday’s rally, but he identified with their ordeal in the wake of his father’s longtime saga against the federal government.

Bundy’s father, Cliven, led an anti-government standoff with federal agents over unpaid grazing fines in Nevada. The rancher of his son’s stunt at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge stunt through a phone call, but he told the Oregon Public Broadcast he had nothing to do with the take-over.

“That’s not exactly what I thought should happen, but I didn’t know what to do,” Bundy said. “He told me that they were there for the long run. I guess they figured they’re going to be there for whatever time it takes—and I don’t know what that means.”

In a statement, Bundy initially pleaded with the Hammonds to seek protective custody at the Harney County jail instead giving themselves over to federal authorities to serve a tougher prison sentence.

"This is not a time to stand down, it is time to stand up and come to Harney County," Ammon Bundy said in a separate video on Facebook.

Despite Bundy's claim he and other protesters are in it for the long haul at the wildlife refuge, he told his wife he would only "be gone for a couple days.”

Mike Blake/Reuters

Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, is reportedly among the anti-government militia holed up in a rural wildlife refuge.

Bundy’s call-to-action garnered an apparent goodbye video from one of his militia followers addressed to his wife and two daughters, ages 3 and 5. The video was recorded at some point before the holidays, tearfully explaining why he wouldn’t be home during Christmas or New Years.

“This is one of the tougher videos I’ve had to make,” said a man identified as Jon Ritzheimer. “I love you, my beautiful wife. I know I never said it enough but I’ve become so proud of the mother you’ve become.”

“We the people need to take a stand,” said Ritzheimer, adding he expects 75 year old Dwight Hammond to die in prison.

“Dwight, do you want die in prison labeled as a terrorist by these oppressors,” Ritzheimer asked. “Or do you want to die out here with us a free man. I want to die a free man.”

Ammon Bundy and two of his brothers were among hundreds of protesters in Burns rallying in support of the Hammonds outside the Harney County courthouse before a splinter group drove to the remote refuge and broke into its headquarters, about 245 miles southeast of Portland.

A FBI spokeswoman is aware of the militia take-over at the Malheur refuge, but would not comment further.

The refuge, which is closed until further notice because of the occupation, encompasses nearly 190,000 acres of wetlands and desert frequented by hunters and fishermen with a visitor center.

nhensley@nydailynews.com

Windows 95 Now Runs On The 3DS

By Wololo

Developer shutterbug2000 demoed Windows 95 running on a 3DS, yesterday. This is achieved by running a windows 95 image file from the DOS Emulator DosBox, on the 3DS.

Windows 95 on the 3DS – compatible with N3DS only?

The port takes a while to start for now and doesn’t do let you do much for now. But once things are shaping up and a proper on-screen-keyboard is added to the build, this could be used to run old windows 95 games.

 Anybody who’s old enough to have used Windows 95 though will remember that most games from this era actually ran on DOS itself rather than Windows 95. It’s also likely that the layers of emulation involved here could mean no game will ever be playable through this.

Nonetheless, this is great to see such boiling activity on the 3DS scene.

People have mentioned that the Dosbox port used here does not run on the O3DS, only on he N3DS. Some people have claimed this could be because of lack of RAM on the O3DS: these claims are complete BS. Windows 95 used to run on the PSP (
through dosbox again. update: the DOS emulator running on the PSP was actually Bochs, thanks to everyone who corrected me on this) with its 24MB of Ram, and the minimum RAM requirements for Windows 95 is 4MB. The reason this does not run on O3DS has nothing to do with available RAM, and people are already looking into fixing this.

Win 95 on 3DS – How it was achieved

Windows 95 booting on the 3DS

To achieve this magic, Shutterbug2000 ported the libretro dosbox core to the 3DS. Confused? To sum it up, the 3DS is running RetroArch (a popular meta-emulator), itself running the DosBox module (a popular DOS emulator) which then starts windows 95 (a popular GUI for DOS).

So, in other words, Shutterbug2000 made Dosbox compatible with the 3DS by tweaking the dosbox Retroarch module, and added a startup script to automatically run windows 95.

The sources for shutterbug2000’s changes can be found here. The actual code changes (the diff) from the original libretro dosbox core can be found here.

Windows 95 for 3DS – Download

You can download the files to run Win 95 on the 3DS here. Keep in mind that this is an early build, and more recent files might be found in the days to come on the original thread. you’ll also need an image of Windows 95, which is not provided in the release build for copyright reasons.

Windows 95 on the 3DS – Screenshot by @RetroRampage37

Source: Shutterbug2000 on GBATemp. Thanks @Neosabin for the heads up!

Trump Is One Of The Most Ignorant Savages Ever

Year In Review, Part Two

More Or Less Catch All Tutorial (3DS)

By Sgt. Lulz 

Since the 3DS scene is on red alert because of the keynote from a couple days ago, I decided to write a catch-all guide to installing Menuhax and Ironhax through Browserhax in anticipation of the upcoming exploits.

First and foremost:

STOP UPDATING. STAY ON 10.3, THIS IS THE LATEST EXPLOITABLE FIRMWARE. Don't update anymore.

If a system firmware update has been released, STOP READING THIS GUIDE. You need to set the blocker DNS before proceeding. You can read about this in the 'WHAT'S THIS ABOUT DNS?' section of this guide.

1. Download the Homebrew Starter Kit from https://smealum.github.io/ninjhax2/starter.zip
2. Place the contents in the root of your SD card

3. Proceed according to your System Version (Found on the top screen, bottom right corner in System Settings). You will need this system version to install Ironhax as well, so write it down if you need it.

4a. Old 3DS, System Ver. <= 10.1.0-27:
Visit http://yls8.mtheall.com/sliderhax.php on your 3DS browser and follow the instructions.
4b. Old 3DS, System Ver. = 10.3.0-28:
Visit http://yls8.mtheall.com/spider28hax.php on your 3DS browser and follow the instructions.
4c. New 3DS, System Ver. <= 10.1.0-27:
Visit http://yls8.mtheall.com/browserhax_fright.php on your 3DS browser and follow the instructions.
4d. New 3DS, System Ver. = 10.3.0-28:
Visit http://yls8.mtheall.com/browserhax_fright_tx3g.php on your 3DS browsr and follow the instructions.​

You should now see the Homebrew Menu. If you don't, restart the console and try again. Clearing the cookies and cache in your browser helps.

The next step is installing a new entrypoint, as Browserhax becomes unavailable every time a new system update comes out, potentially even leading to it being patched.

You have two entrypoints available for install from here: Menuhax and Ironhax.

You'll definitely want to get Menuhax, but Ironhax is also an option if you're a complete klutz (In your own opinion anyway, I don't mean to insult anybody) and are afraid of system updates or changing Home Menu themes.

MENUHAX:

1. Open the Menuhax_Manager app.
2. Hit 'Install'.
3. You're done.

OPTIONAL: Hit 'Setup a built-in Home Menu 'Basic' color theme' to use a different theme with Menuhax.​

To activate: Hold L while starting up your 3DS to open the Homebrew Menu.

CAUTION: Don't change your Home Menu theme after installing this, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Doing so will uninstall Menuhax and render it unusable. There are ways to use any themes if you REALLY want to do so, which I will further explain in the future.

IRONHAX (REQUIRES AN NNID):

1. Open the eShop - Old Version Downloader app.
2. Download Ironfall Invasion
3. Restart and open the Homebrew Menu (Using either Menuhax or Browserhax)
4. Open the Ironhax Installer app.
5. Follow the onscreen instructions. Your Ironfall version will most definitely be 1.0. System Version will be whatever you wrote down during the first guide, and the save slot doesn't matter.
6. You're done.
To activate: Open Ironfall Invasion and open the save slot you installed the exploit to.

CAUTION: Don't update Ironfall Invasion after installing this, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. The game will update to an unexploitable version.

WHAT NOW?:

You wait for the CFW and other-such >9.2.0-20 kernel stuff to show up.
I'll update this guide when it DOES happen.

WHAT'S THIS ABOUT DNS?:

System Versions 9.9 and above force you to update to use the Browser, as it checks with Nintendo's servers if the console is on the latest firmware to prevent exploitation. The current System Firmware as of this guide, 10.3, is exploitable as well as not needing the DNS. Things will change at 10.4 and beyond.

DON'T OPEN THE 3DS INTERNET BROWSER IF THIS IS THE CASE, YOU'LL RENDER IT COMPLETELY UNUSABLE. FOLLOW THE STEPS BELOW BEFORE YOU EVEN TRY TO DO SO.

To change your DNS settings to bypass this:

1. Open System Settings.
2. Go to Internet Settings > Connection Settings. Edit your main connection settings.
3. Set Auto-Obtain DNS to 'No' and enter 107.211.140.065 under the DNS: Both primary and secondary.
4. Do this for all your other connections, if any.

Remember: Don't update. Ever.

To the smart people:
 
If I've missed anything in this guide or there are any mistakes, let me know.
Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.

Sanders Campaign Hints 'Hacker' Who Accessed Clinton Data May Have Been a DNC Plant

By Tom Boggioni, Raw Story

In an interview with Yahoo Politics, an adviser to the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders hinted that the data breach that resulted in the campaign losing access to the DNC servers may have been the result of a employee planted in the campaign by the DNC.

Following the controversy that saw Sanders staffers blocked from accessing some of their own voter data after it was revealed that proprietary information belonging to the Clinton campaign was being viewed, the Sanders campaign apologized and fired the “hacker,” national data director, Josh Uretsky.

However, an unnamed adviser to the Vermont independent’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination is suggesting that Uretsky maybe have been a plant by both the DNC and the technology company that hosts the data.

“It’s not as if we conjured this guy Josh from thin air. This is an individual … who was recommended to us by the DNC and NGP VAN,” the adviser said.

According to the adviser, Uretsky provided references to the Sanders campaign from the DNC’s National Data Director Andrew Brown, who works closely with the shared voter file program.

“Andrew Brown spoke to us and gave him a positive review, as did this guy Bryan Whitaker,” the adviser said, identifying Whitaker as the COO of technology group NGP VAN. Whitaker is no longer with the company, having taken a similar position with another group.

Supporters of Sanders have complained that the DNC favors Clinton — the establishment favorite — noting that the Democratic debates have been scheduled on weekend evenings when viewership would be down, limiting exposure for the populist message of Sanders.

The campaign had called for a “a full investigation from top to bottom” of the data breach and how it was allowed to happen.

Ted Cruz Is Just Like His Clothes: Carefully Thought Out, Ill-Fitting And Generally Unlikable

He’s not ‘one of the guys’ on the trail, but he also doesn’t seem to belong in the Ivy League — or even among politicos.

By Cindy Casares / The Guardian

Photo Credit: Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com

The weather has finally cooled a bit, and that can only mean one thing: time for Ted Cruz to dump his ill-fitting suits and ties for his even iller-fitting collection of flannel shirts and leather jackets. The #Cruz Country Christmas Tour (in a private jet) is under way and headed to a town near you.

Why does the Texas senator lumberjack around America when the temperature drops? Is he trying to create synergy with the cover of his latest book?

That’s possible, but the real reason Ted Cruz wears flannel shirts and leather jackets in the winter is because he wants nothing more than to be perceived as one of the guys. Not just because it could win him the White House, but because he’s always been that kid in school that had no friends. The one whose parents made him insufferable by constantly telling him how much better he is than everyone else.

Cruz’s father, Rafael, has been brainwashing his son since he was about four years old to believe he’s “gifted above any man he knows” and “destined by God for greatness”, the kinds of delusions that were guaranteed to get him stuffed in a locker by junior high.

Unfortunately, training to become Daddy’s little messiah didn’t leave Cruz time to develop even the slightest sense of style, and GQ has some stern fashion advice for him.

“In general, we’re not exactly sure why presidential hopefuls think that oversized, awkward leather jackets will make them seem more, ‘relatable to voters’,” the website said on Tuesday.

First, the jacket just doesn’t fit. If you’re looking for one, make sure the shoulder seams hit at your actual shoulders and there’s not so much fabric pooling around your elbows (a slimmer cut would fix that). Second, it’s also a bizarrely vague style, neither a bomber nor a cafe-type racer. Cruz opted for a nondescript zip-front jacket that we think calling basic might be too complimentary.

Even that weird, animatronic twang Cruz speaks with, despite having grown up in urban Houston attending private schools, raised by his Canadian mom and Cuban-accented dad, is a sad attempt to make you think he’s a regular working stiff. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So he pretends to fit in with blue-collar types, but he was also pretending when in the company of his supposed milieu. Ever since Cruz came on the national, political stage in 2013, his freshman roommate at Princeton has been tweeting college memories of the junior senator, and not in a good way.

“I begged them for a different room or roommate. Begged. They didn’t understand then. They do now,” Craig Mazin tweeted about Cruz in 2013. Mazin is a professional screenwriter and avowed anti-Cruzite. “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone,” he told The Daily Beast. “I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”

Of course, not everyone at Princeton hated Cruz. The other dorks on the debate team thought he was a master debater and a “sort of stud” with girls on the debate circuit. (Hoo boy.) Cruz’s debate style meant he didn’t respond to arguments, but reframed them so he could control the conversation. Erik Leitch, who lived in the same building as Cruz, saw that style bleed over into his personal interactions. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views,” Leitch said in the same Daily Beast piece.

So, Cruz was a weird kid saddled with a messiah complex who didn’t fit in with the liberal, Ivy League intellectuals in college. Surely he finally found his peer group when he got to Washington, right?

Political strategist Matthew Dowd, who worked with Cruz on the George W Bush campaign, tweeted that “if truth serum was given to the staff of the 2000 Bush campaign”, an enormous percentage of them “would vote for Trump over Cruz”.

“I just don’t like the guy,” George W Bush himself said of Cruz at a political fundraiser for his baby brother Jeb. Well, sure, but he’s just saying that because of his brother, surely.

“The tenor of what he said about the other candidates was really pretty pleasant,” one donor at the party said of Bush. “Until he got to Cruz.”

And Bush is certainly not the only Republican willing to go on the record with his hatred for Cruz.

“The list of GOP politicians and operatives willing to take open shots at Cruz has grown long,” says the Washington Post, listing Senators John McCain, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn and John Thune, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former House speaker John Boehner and former senator Tom Coburn, for starters.

It looks like a flannel shirt and a leather jacket aren’t going to be enough to overhaul Ted Cruz’s image. He’d need some idea of who he really is instead of who he’s trying to be to win over voters.

Cindy Casares is a columnist for the Texas Observer and the founding editor of Guanabee Media, an English-language, pop culture blog network about Latinos established in 2007. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, The American Prospect and Cosmo Latina. Follower her on Twitter @La_Cindy.

Why Children Get Gifts On Christmas: A History

By Paul Ringel

An 1881 illustration by Thomas Nast, published in Harper's. Nast created the image of Santa Claus that endures today. Wikimedia Commons

During a week when so many Americans have experienced some combination of joy, rage, and frustration in seeking the perfect holiday gifts for their children, it seems appropriate to pause and ask: Where did the practice of giving Christmas gifts to children come from?

There does not appear to be an easy answer. Gifts do not primarily serve as rewards: Commentators on the political left and right have in recent years asked parents to abandon the “naughty and nice” paradigm that suggests such presents are prizes for good behavior, and indeed historical evidence suggests that proper conduct has not been a widespread prerequisite for young Americans to receive Christmas gifts.

Nor do presents seem to have a clear connection to Christian faith. Some American families have established a “three-gift” Christmas in an effort to link the practice to the generosity of the three wise men in the story of Jesus’s birth, but again no broad historical precedent exists for this link. In fact, religious leaders have long been more likely to decry the commercialization of Christmas as detracting from the true spirit of the holiday than to celebrate the delivery of purchased goods to middle-class or wealthy children. (Donating gifts to poor children is a different matter, of course, but that practice became common in the United States only after gift-giving at home became a well-established ritual.)

Critics of the commercialization of Christmas tend to attribute the growth of holiday gift-giving to corporate marketing efforts. While such efforts did contribute to the magnitude of the ritual, the practice of buying Christmas presents for children predates the spread of corporate capitalism in the United States: It began during the first half of the 1800's, particularly in New York City, and was part of a broader transformation of Christmas from a time of public revelry into a home and child centered holiday.

This reinvention was driven partly by commercial interests, but more powerfully by the converging anxieties of social elites and middle-class parents in rapidly urbanizing communities who sought to exert control over the bewildering changes occurring in their cities. By establishing a new type of midwinter celebration that integrated home, family, and shopping, these Americans strengthened an emerging bond between Protestantism and consumer capitalism.

In his book The Battle for Christmas, the historian Stephen Nissenbaum presents the 19th-century reinvention of the holiday as a triumph of New York’s elites over the city’s emerging working classes. 

New York’s population grew nearly tenfold between 1800 and 1850, and during that time elites became increasingly frightened of traditional December rituals of “social inversion,” in which poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the streets, abandoning established social constraints much like on Halloween night or New Year’s Eve. 

These rituals, which occurred any time between St. Nicholas Day (a Catholic feast day observed in Europe on December 6th) and New Year’s Day, had for centuries been a means of relieving European peasants’ (or American slaves’) discontent during the traditional downtime of the agricultural cycle. 

In a newly congested urban environment, though, aristocrats worried that such celebrations might become vehicles for protest when employers refused to give workers time off during the holidays or when a long winter of unemployment loomed for seasonal laborers.

In response to these concerns, a group of wealthy men who called themselves the Knickerbockers invented a new series of traditions for this time of year that gradually moved Christmas celebrations out of the city’s streets and into its homes. They presented these traditions as a reinvigoration of Dutch customs practiced in New Amsterdam and New York during the colonial period, although Nissenbaum and other scholars have established that these supposed antecedents largely did not exist in North America. 

Drawing from two story collections by Washington Irving, their most well-known member, these New Yorkers experimented with domestic festivities on St. Nicholas Day and New Year’s Day until another member of the group, Clement Clark Moore, solidified the tradition of celebrating on Christmas with his enormously popular poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “The Night Before Christmas”) in 1822.

The St. Nicholas that Moore presented in his famous poem was not a wholesale invention, but like the other traditions the Knickerbockers borrowed and transformed, he was not a well-established part of New York’s winter holiday rituals. Similarly, his delivery of presents to children aligned with a newly emerging practice in 1820's New York, although the giving of homemade gifts during the winter holidays appears to have begun by the late 1700's. Moore’s poem does not explain why children are receiving presents on Christmas, although they clearly have the expectation of receiving special treats (“visions of sugar plums danced in their heads”). 

Understanding why giving gifts to children (and by gradual extension, to adults) became part of this new Christmas tradition requires an expansion of Nissenbaum’s story. The Battle for Christmas focuses on the tensions between New York’s elites and its working classes, but during this same period, a middle class began to emerge in New York and other northern cities, and the reinvention of Christmas served their purposes as well. 

Like their wealthier contemporaries, middle-class families worried about what rapid population growth and expanding market capitalism would do to their children—particularly because an expansion of goods and services on offer was reducing young people’s household responsibilities at a time when alternative pathways to adulthood, such as public education, had yet to emerge.

In response to the increasing uncertainty surrounding this stage of life, urban families that aspired to prepare their children for life in the middle and upper ranks of American society widely adopted new strategies for child-rearing. As work and home became increasingly separated for these families, parents kept children within the home (or at church or in school) as long as possible in order to avoid what many of them perceived as the corrupting influences of commerce on kids’ inchoate moral character. Elites’ efforts to domesticate Christmas aligned neatly with these parents’ interests, for they encouraged young Americans to associate the joys of the holiday with the morally and physically protective space of home.

Meanwhile, even if parents were concerned about commercial influences outside the home, they were not bothered by the idea of letting children’s commodities into it, in limited doses. In the 1820's, an American toy industry began to emerge, and American publishers started producing books and magazines for children. (The first three self-sustaining children’s magazines in U.S. history debuted between 1823 and 1827.) Much of the initial demand for these items reflected parents’ recognition of the instructional power of consumer goods. As an 1824 review of the evangelical children’s magazine The Youth’s Friend noted,

Let the Youth’s Magazine be called his own paper, and how will the juvenile reader clasp it to his bosom in ecstacy [sic] as he takes it from the Post-Office. And if instruction from any source will deeply affect his heart, it will when communicated through the medium of this little pamphlet.

If early 19th-century newspaper ads promoting bibles as children’s Christmas gifts are any indication, parents during this era seem to have retained a similar focus on delivering spiritual value to their children. After the Civil War, the spread of consumer products in American cities made it increasingly difficult to control children’s access to toys, books, and magazines, so in order to keep young people at home, parents gradually acquiesced to purchasing products intended to amuse as well as instruct their offspring.

Postbellum Christmas traditions followed this broader trend by becoming more child-focused, particularly through the reconstructed image of St. Nicholas. Clement Clark Moore’s St. Nick was an elf who was jolly but also a bit scary (as indicated by the narrator’s repeated reminder that he had “nothing to dread”). 

During the 1860's, the cartoonist Thomas Nast created a new image of Santa Claus that replaced this ambiguous figure with a warm, grandfatherly character who often appeared with his arms full of dolls, games, and other secular toys. One of the earliest publications in which Nast’s Santa figure appeared was the December 1868 issue of the magazine Hearth and Home.

Christmas gift-giving, then, is the product of overlapping interests between elites who wanted to move raucous celebrations out of the streets and into homes, and families who simultaneously wanted to keep their children safe at home and expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial entertainment. Retailers certainly supported and benefited from this implicit alliance, but not until the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive role of marketing directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or annoy) their parents into spending more money on what was already a well-established practice of Christmas gift-giving.

In the nearly two centuries since New Yorkers instigated the invention of today’s Christmas rituals, American families have invested gift-giving and other widely practiced holiday traditions with their own unique meanings. Identifying the origins of these rituals as historical rather than eternal reinforces their power to do so.