Ryan Grim over at The Intercept interviewed a tech executive and
a Democratic strategist who has funded efforts to defeat progressive
candidates across the country.
Now, Dmitri Melhorn's number one concern is defeating Donald Trump.
He is terrified of Trump.
He thinks Trump is terrible for the country.
I agree with him on that.
But that seems to be his one and only objective.
Defeat Trump at any and all costs.
There we go, that's the word I'm looking for here.
So, while he says the far left actually ends
up being a bit of a threat when it comes to defeating Trump.
Now, I wanna go to the first video here where he talks about how,
maybe I don't need to focus on defeating progressives anymore
because they've done a good job defeating themselves.
Let's hear what he had to say there.
>> I'm curious if you think you have essentially tamed the left to the point
where you're kinda moving on from Democratic primaries, or
are you guys gearing up for another test in 2024?
That if you see progressive candidates that you think are too progressive popping
up, that the super PACs are gonna come out guns blazing on them.
>> If you listen to the way Bernie Sanders is talking about endorsing Joe Biden,
I think I am quite confident right now that the actual extremes of the left
are pretty severely marginalized.
That's in general, at the margins, for example,
when a judge gave a ruling that was really unhelpful.
This is the judge with the abortion pill, and AOC comes out and
says we should just ignore the ruling.
AOC is siding with JD Vance.
The two of them are both, yeah, rulings that we don't like, we shouldn't do.
And it makes it hard to build a coalition of donors around the rule of law.
But in terms of general voters, I don't think it's a problem anymore,
and I don't think we need to do more to fight back against it at the moment.
>> Well, they're good news and bad news for the left.
They won't get bombed by super PACs, but
that's because they've been thoroughly beaten down into the ground.
>> Yes. >> So I thought that portion of
the conversation was fascinating, and
I wanted to understand a little better what he was referring to, right?
Why does he see progressives as, in this incredibly weak position
to the point where he no longer has to target them with his funding?
Well, he did elaborate a little bit earlier on in the conversation.
So let's go to the next video and then we'll discuss Cenk.
>> A huge movement occurred in 2020 around George Floyd, right?
Actually, I'll give you three examples and you can pick them apart.
Defund the police as a movement out of the George Floyd protests was one example.
The term Latinx was a second example, and Medicare for All was a third example.
In our view, the evidence was very clear that these three things were politically
toxic in a general election and the less said the better.
And there were significant parts of the Democratic Party that were urging
those issues to be central, important, salient issues in the election.
And the entirety of the Republican Party was enthusiastic about that as well.
So you have the left-wing of the Democratic Party and
the entirety of the Republican Party elevating these issues because these
are issues that will help Republicans defeat Democrats.
And so we realized that since no one in the Democratic coalition was willing to
stand up to our own side and say, guys,
this is not working, we had to play that role.
>> So, I'm really curious what you think about what he said there, Cenk, because he
was making kind of an interesting point until he got to Medicare for All, right?
Because when he goes issue by issue,
my mind goes back to the polling on those issues, right?
So defund the police, for instance, does not poll well.
It especially does not poll well with black respondents to those polls.
Same with Latinx, multiple polls have shown that Latinos do not like Latinx.
But Medicare for all is a little different.
A little different.
>> So there's a really important sleight of hand that he's doing there.
So, is it true that there are some extreme positions on the left
that sometimes AOC and others are taking?
Yes, so we told you about this before.
Ilhan Omar nearly lost her race and had nothing to do with Medicare for All or
any of the things positions that you guys love.
Unfortunately, it did have to do with defund the police.
78% of our African American constituents did not want that idea and
there was a specific bill in Minnesota that they were opposed to.
So it wasn't some sort of conspiracy or plot in that case.
It was our actual voters going, no, we live in areas that are unsafe.
We don't want to defund the police.
So, that's just a stone cold fact.
You can catch feelings over it, but you can go look up the polling yourself.
Now, Latinx polls at 4%.
So, what have we been telling you guys?
Taking these positions that no one actually asked for,
including black people, Latinos, etc, is counterproductive.
It doesn't make sense.
They're not progressive, no one's asking for them, etc.
On the other hand,
the other positions that progressives have are intensely popular.
So Medicare for All, for example, pulls at 70%.
Latinx is at 4%.
Medicare for All is at 70%.
But what did that corporate goon do?
He just put them in the same bucket because that helps his cause so much.
He takes the most unpopular radical positions and
he attaches them to the most popular progressive positions.
And then he helps corporations kill off those incredibly popular progressive
proposals.
By the way, though, there is one thing he is right about progressive legislators.
Help him do that by attaching nonsensical positions that no one asked for
to incredibly popular positions.
So, he's lying.
They didn't do it because, we were so
concerned about Democrats winning into Latinx was preventing it.
Who ran on Latinx.
>> No one ran on Latinx.
>> People ran on defund the police and it almost cost them.
But anyone run on Latinx?
No one ran on Latinx, okay?
No, what he's saying is they gave me an opening to do an even more pro
corporate agenda.
And of course, I used it to defeat not those guys, but
other progressives that were coming up, okay?
Now, there's one other thing I'll blame progressives for, and
we'll get more into it here with more clips.
But they were supposed to go in, and once they got inside the gates,
they were supposed to open the door behind them and help other progressives win.
So when Democratic Majority for Israel attacked them and
the corporate PACs and the crypto PACs attacked them.
The just Democrats and
the progressives that were inside the gates were supposed to help them.
And they have a world of spotlight on them.
If they wanted to, they could have turned that spotlight to help those candidates,
but they chose not to.
>> Also, let's keep it real.
The progressive lawmakers really were in the middle of their
heyday when their promotion of Medicare for all and
improving economic conditions was their main message.
And I don't know, maybe my perspective is skewed.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I feel like they have increasingly moved off of
that and instead spend most of their time messaging about the cultural policies or
cultural ideas that don't tend to pull well.
>> No, that's just true.
>> When was the last time we heard AOC talk about Medicare for All?
>> Or paid family leave or higher minimum wage?
At least give Bernie credit,
because he's bringing back higher minimum wage in the Senate.
But no, they didn't.
And right now, look, I know things from talking to progressives behind the scenes,
current legislators, people who were candidates, etc.
And the reality is now everybody's afraid to mess with Democratic Majority for
Israel because they did put millions of dollars against Nina Turner and others,
and they did win.
So even tough populist progressive fighters,
pre stroke like Fetterman, he caved on Israel.
>> He did that's right.
>> And tons of them are caving on Israel because they're,
I don't want $4 million spent against me.
So they're, yeah, Israel, they can do whatever they want.
There are beloved allies.
Who cares about the goddamn Palestinians, okay?
That's the power of Pac money.
And you need to concentrate to fight against it, right?
But we have no concentrated fight against it.
Instead, we're going in random directions that's helping goons
like this that Ryan Grim is talking to.
But one more thing before we go to the next goose, because I don't want you to
forget what he said, and you could rewind the tape and watch it.
He said it's making it harder to build a coalition of donors.
Man, that is accidentally telling on yourself.
>> Mm-hm.
>> He's not talking about voters.
He's, when they're for Medicare for
All in these very popular positions that are anti corporate.
Well, it makes it very hard to build a coalition of donors, and
that's the only thing the Democratic Party cares about.
>> Such a great point.
Now, you mentioned Nina Turner, and
Nina Turner came up in the context of this discussion.
Now, I wanna set it up because, as I mentioned earlier,
he was just talking about how awful Donald Trump is.
And that is really the motivating factor behind his strategies as
a Democratic strategist.
He said, for instance, in the interview, quote, there are a lot of people
who believe, and you see it a lot, that Trump is a symptom and
that if we over focus on him, we will ignore the underlying disease.
We are strongly in disagreement with that perspective.
He is the disease.
So Dmitri Melhorn rejects the notion that there is something fundamentally
wrong with our lawmakers.
With how insanely corrupt our system of government has become,
to the point where it is dysfunctional.
And no longer serves the best interests of the constituency,
the voters in this country.
And instead thinks that no Trump is not indicative of any issues we
have in the country.
He's not a symptom of those problems.
Trump is just wild card out of nowhere.
And I wish Ryan Grim had asked him, okay, why do you think people voted for Trump?
And I'm curious what he would say to that.
Now, with that said,
knowing that his number one objective is to defeat Trump at any and
all costs, he gives specific examples of campaigns that he worked to fund.
And one of those campaigns was Chantelle Brown, let's watch.
>> The thing that I believe is that everybody from AOC to Liz Cheney needs to
be a part of the coalition to prevent Mr. Trump from taking office again.
And so if AOC is spending all of her time and energy attacking Mr.
Trump, then she's on my team.
The reason we invested in groups like the mainstream Democrats who elevated
Chantel Brown over Nina Turner.
Is we believe that Nina Turner was actually training her fire on
somebody other than Mr. Trump, specifically Mr.
Biden, who was actually the center of our team.
>> So there you have it, Cenk.
How dare Senator Turner criticize Joe Biden.
He is the god of all gods.
He is so perfect, and we must always applaud him,
even as he is honestly insufficient in serving the needs of
the people who voted him into office in the first place.
Do you remember the Voting Rights Bill?
>> Yeah, I do.
I'm very sure I do.
>> Interesting, yeah, but don't criticize Biden for failing,
refusing to fight on the Voting Rights Bill.
Don't you dare do it because you're helping Trump.
>> Yeah, no, what he's saying there is Nina Turner dared to fight against
corporate Democrats.
And corporate Democrats rule this party, and we will always be in favor
of corporations, and we will only do things for our donors.
And Nina Turner has a temerity to point that out, and it is totally unacceptable.
And that's why we spent near $10 million over two elections to
make sure she was defeated.
Because if the idea that you should fight against corporate Democrats stuck, well,
the Democratic voters might wake up and
realize this is no longer the party of FDR.
And we're not fighting for the working class at all anymore.
And we could not have Nina reminding them of that.
And by the way, wasn't one of the things that they said, Nina Turner said voting
for Biden is like eating half a bowl of excrement or something like that.
Well, but they leave out the other part where she said, voting for
Trump is eating the whole goddamn bowl, okay?
So she said, Trump is way worse than Biden, but they always leave that out, and
they pretend as if she was in favor of Trump.
He just did it again because they're goddamn liars.
Everything he's saying is, not everything as I told you,
some parts of it have truth.
But he takes the parts that are true and
mixes it up with the lies in order to trick you even further.
By the way, don't get me wrong.
When I say we shouldn't do slogans like defund the police,
it doesn't mean we shouldn't do massive reform of the police.
We absolutely, positively should.
But you're not gonna be able to do massive reform if you ran on the wrong slogan,
accidentally turned off even your own voters, and then lost elections.
Then you no longer have the leverage to do the policy that we all desperately need
and that the American people are in favor.
By the way, if you say massive reform of cops, over 60% of Americans agree.
>> Mm-hm. >> If you say defund the police,
an enormous I haven't seen the latest poll, but it's around 80, 90% say no.
So please do politics right and don't lose to these goons.
And last thing I'll say is, he says, cover Democrats like, Joe Biden,
that needs to be the center of the party.
If anyone dares to disagree, they should be driven from the party,
because it's all that Trump.
And when Trump is a disease and he's the only problem, well,
Naomi Klein had a great line about that.
She said here on the Young Turks as well.
She said the situation pre Trump was so bad that it led to Trump.
But the situation that was so
bad was how corporations took over our entire body politic.
And it was guys like this that helped them take it over.
And then after, the body is so diseased that it goes, I can't try the same thing.
I don't want the leeches anymore.
They keep leeching me from blood.
Take my blood and it's not working, I'm sick.
I'll try this meteor, this lunatic, idiot, orange headed guy, all right?
That's how desperate the country was because of
exactly Democratic consultants like this guy.
>> 1000%, in fact,
I did a little bit of digging on Melhorn because I was curious what his history is.
He was described as a tech executive and a Democratic strategist.
He's also a venture capitalist.
And I actually came across a video featuring Melhorn in a panel
discussion for the American Enterprise Institute.
>> Which is the giant right-wing think, of course, is of course he's a right-winger.
>> So this was in 2015.
You can look up the video yourselves.
It's a lengthy video, hours and hours long.
But in it, Melhorn essentially argues for
education reform of public schools, privatizing it, and
he framed it in a way that would be appealing to investors.
Meaning, he's pushing for not just a privatized model,
but a for profit education model, okay?
>> Of course.
>> Where investors would get a return on their investment in education.
And you know how that turns out.
For profit colleges have been a disaster in this country.
>> And I guarantee you, at some point a venture capital company just like his will
then go and invest into those schools and make a tidy profit.
Destroy them and hand them back to the public after they've destroyed them.
All right, but you're forcing me to say one last thing.
Guys, guys like Melhorn, their job is not to get Democrats elected.
He says it's to get Democrats elected, right?
He says, my God, Trump is the problem and we got to get Biden elected.
No, his job is to turn a Democratic Party into the Republican Party so
you have no choices at all.
So he says that's why you never vote for progressives.
You only vote for the most conservative, pro corporate Democrats so
that there's no difference at all.
And us corporate lobbyists can get everything we want.