Pete Buttigieg and the DNC conspiracy

Words can’t express how much I hate Pete Buttigieg right now. Before this week I mostly just mocked him for being the guy who runs on vacuous liberal LGBT identity politics. Now I wish he would just die already. I see him as the new emblem of the conspiratorial nature of the Democratic National Convention.

I speak, of course, of the Iowa primaries that took place this week. On Monday, the first vote of the Democratic presidential primaries took place in the state of Iowa. Before the final vote was carried, it was predicted that Bernie Sanders would walk away with a handsome lead that would set him on the path to being nominated as the Democratic frontrunner. When the vote was held, the results were delayed. We had to wait two days just to get half of the results, and even as it stands now we don’t have the full results – 97% of the vote has been revealed, with 3% yet to be accounted for, and we’re still waiting on that 3%. Amidst the disarray, Pete Buttigieg declared victory before any of the results were declared, and despite the fact that not did the exit polls show a strong Bernie Sanders lead, but also the popular vote was decisively aligned with Bernie Sanders – Sanders had more of the actual vote than Buttigieg, though they appear to have the same amount of delegates going for them. One thing you might notice about the results we’re seeing presently is that, ostensibly, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are almost at a draw. They seem to have the same number of delegates and they’re both given at about 26%, with Pete slightly ahead of Bernie. This is despite the fact that Bernie is ahead of Pete by about 2,000 votes (Bernie Sanders has 44,753 votes in contrast to Pete Buttigieg’s 42,235).

So what explains this pandemonium? Well let’s start out by talking about the fact that the vote counting was conducted via a mobile phone app called IowaReporter, which was created by a company called Shadow Inc. This company is now in the spotlight and under fire due to the fact that the Iowa primary has turned into such a shitshow under their auspices. But what if I told you that Shadow Inc itself and its membership were stooges of the DNC? Shadow Inc seems to be closely connected with a liberal non-profit/tech company called ACRONYM, whose CEO Tara McGowan along with many others in their membership have a hostility towards Bernie Sanders – in fact McGowan in particular is an avowed supporter of Peter Buttigieg -, and if that’s not enough, it seems that Shadow Inc was paid by the Iowa and Nevada Democratic Party as well as, wait for it, Pete Buttigieg. So essentially the vote counting, and by proxy the voting result itself, is directly controlled by the DNC and Pete Buttigieg through a company that they hired out. Furthermore, Shadow Inc’s website boasts about how their team built technological apparatus for the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well big tech companies like Google and Apple. In other words, these are tech-savvy handmaidens for the Democratic Party elite and their high-profile supporters. Now consider also the fact that the last part of the result that has yet to be declared, from what I understand, consists of precincts that are dominated by Bernie Sanders supporters. As you take that in mind, pay close attention to how, right now, numerous media outlets talk about how they cannot declare a winner for the Iowa caucus because of “irregularities” and the tight margin between Bernie and Pete.

What I’m trying to tell you is that the DNC, once again, have been trying to prevent Bernie from winning the nomination by rigging the election, and this time it seems they’ve chosen Pete Buttigieg as their designated Democratic nominee. Why? Well, Bernie Sanders has been speculated to win the Iowa primary for quite some time now, and it’s been said if he wins Iowa he has a clear shot at nomination. Naturally this would be a cause of concern for the Democratic establishment, and so this time they opted to try and stymy him from the beginning. But why Buttigieg exactly? Well as tempting as it may be to assume that they would try to put Joe Biden in the White House, the fact of the matter is Biden’s campaign is doomed. Biden does not have a great deal of support in Iowa, in fact I find it hard to believe he has support anywhere outside of the baby boomer demographic, and even there I’d say it is limited. Biden’s campaign is so bad that Biden himself has a bad habit of telling potential voters to not vote for him, and his own campaign team has admitting that things aren’t looking too well for him. As for Elizabeth Warren? She has more of a chance than Joe Biden does at this point, but there’s no sign of her having a path to nomination, especially not with her inability to defend anything of substance. Not to mention, her attempts to sink Bernie on sexism charges appear to have backfired on her tremendously. In Pete Buttigieg you have a fresh face who also happens to be deeply connected with the Democratic establishment and Harvard elite, one who, despite by all counts cheating the Iowa primaries, is sure to gain momentum as the primaries continue, possibly replacing Elizabeth Warren as the primary obstacle to Bernie’s nomination.

What we’re left with is a conspiracy on the part of the DNC to plant a candidate of their choice to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning, and to that end they seek to rig one of the most important primaries in the race in favour of their chosen candidate. And to be quite honest I can’t emphasize the point enough, this is a conspiracy, because we have a very clear elephant in the room.

Stop and wonder, how the caucus can be ground to a halt because of one person mispronouncing Pete Buttigieg’s name? That, on its face, is absurd. And then add on to that fact we know that Shadow Inc is directly tied to the DNC, who want Pete Buttigieg to win the primaries instead of Bernie, and the fact that Buttigieg paid Shadow Inc and the company is run by people who support Pete? Not to mention, we’re bombarded with the phrase “quality control” by the media as the explanation for the counting delay, which of course begs the question of what is meant by the kind of “quality” that needs to be controlled. Can anyone believe that this is all a coincidence for even a second?

And you know, why be gullible about the matter. The last year or so has taught us that, maybe, we should embrace conspiracy as a legitimate category of political analysis. I can understand why this idea is met with resistance. The term “conspiracy theory” typically conjures up images of people who wear tin foil hats and go on about how the earth is flat, devil worshipping Illuminatists rule the world, Jews control everything, the moon landings are fake and all manner of genuinely delusional beliefs. But, consider just how many ideas that also necessitate conspiracy, whether true or not, are nonetheless accepted in mainstream politics. Take Russiagate for example, that idea that Donald Trump’s ascent to the office of the presidency was created by Vladimir Putin and a network of connected allies and influence groups as well as hackers who interfered with the US electoral system, and furthermore the idea that these same people do the same thing throughout the West, with the end goal of undermining the Western sphere of influence. What is that if not an international conspiracy? Whether you believe it to be true (and I personally don’t), it meets all the basic requirements of a conspiracy – indeed, the most basic one and the only one you really need is that a conspiracy is. And we have several readily identifiable and indisputable happenstances that fit the criteria of conspiracy in the modern era. There’s the fact that the CIA has repeatedly launched coups against foreign leaders who threaten US interests and replaced them with new regimes favourable to US interest. There’s, arguably, Cambridge Analytica manipulating data that is sold to them in order to (theoretically) infleunce voting habits to get their guys in power. There’s Watergate, the well-publicized conspiracy by the Nixon administration to intimidate the Democratic Party. I would even go so far as to count US entry into Afghanistan and Iraq a conspiracy on the grounds that the very involvement in those countries was based on a network of lies carried out by concerted elites on behalf of their own interests, as has been proven to be the case already. And let’s not get started on the conspiracies of the distant past, such as the many assassinations that took place in ancient Rome.

There are two points to take away from all of that. First is that if you remove the notion of conspiracy from political analysis, you undermine your ability to account for and explain major political events that have come to shape our present situation other than through either armchair psychoanalysis, as many liberals like to do, or through just the premise that it all just sort of happens and no one’s really in charge, as anarchists like Alan Moore believe (and being as we live in a universe where nothing really “just happens”, I think we should discard such thinking). The second thing. Second is, well, who decides what’s a “conspiracy theory” and what isn’t? I mean many of the same liberals who lambast the right for their conspiracism inevitably turn to vulgar and erroneous forms of conspiracism in order to try and get around the fact that nobody likes their politics anymore – thus, in the liberal mindset, the idea that there is a cabal of rich pedophiles who hang out at Little Saint James is pure nonsense (even though the Lolita flight logs and Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes are well-documented), but the idea that Russia is behind every populist or anti-liberal force in the West is indisputable in its veracity. Ask yourself, how does that work?

This does not of course mean that you accept every conspiracy theory under the sun, far from it: such an idea would be nonsensical, it would amount to valuing conspiracism over rationality and logical consistency. Instead it simply means that we accept conspiracy as not only a valid category of political analysis but also a ubiquitous aspect of political power, particularly under bourgeois society, and because there are many kinds of conspiracy theory we judge the veracity of conspiracy theories the same way we judge the veracity of any other theory; through the use of reason, in conjunction with the correct criteria of analysis of course (and, for those of us who consider themselves on the left, that involves class, and that’s where historical materialism comes in).

For now though, keep all of this in mind when you see the Iowa primaries, and the rest of the Democratic primaries going forward. The time where we can assume the ruling class sleepwalks and chances its machinations into place is over. The time where we can pretend that there are no cabals at work died the day Jeffrey Epstein was killed. What we are seeing is nothing more and nothing less than the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie in action – they’re conspiring while the working class aren’t – and that’s what going on in Iowa.

Pictured: Pete Buttigieg; Not pictured: a rat