Elizabeth Warren Should Endorse Bernie Sanders — Not for Him, but for Herself and Her Mission

Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to media in the spin room following the ninth Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas, Nev., on Feb. 19, 2020.

Photo: Bridget Benett/AFP via Getty Images

Ahead of the 2016 election, Elizabeth Warren made a calculation. She had spent the last several years in the U.S. Senate building a base of power and wielding that influence to shape White House personnel and policy decisions, particularly in the Treasury Department. She planned to do the same when it came to Hillary Clinton who, all of Washington presumed, was going to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Warren first met with Clinton in December 2014 and urged Clinton not to surround herself with Wall Street bankers. The Clinton campaign followed up with her chief aide, Dan Geldon, who was also chief of staff on Warren’s 2020 campaign. At the time, Warren was in the midst of a high-profile campaign against an Obama-nominated banker, Antonio Weiss, to the Treasury Department — a fight that she would later win. Geldon brought it up.

Is it better to endorse Sanders or preserve capital to influence Biden?

“He was intently focused on personnel issues, laid out a detailed case against the Bob Rubin school of Democratic policy makers, was very critical of the Obama administration’s choices, and explained at length the opposition to Antonio Weiss,” wrote a Clinton official in an email describing the conversation, later published by WikiLeaks. “We then carefully went through a list of people they do like, which EW sent over to HRC earlier … Over all, it was a polite and engaged but not exactly warm conversation. They seem wary – and pretty convinced that the Rubin folks have the inside track with us whether we realize it yet or not – but open to engagement and to be proven wrong.”

In 2016, Warren met with Clinton again and reiterated the demand to shut down the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, making the pressure public at a speech at the Center for American Progress.

“Personnel is policy,” she said. “When we talk about personnel, we don’t mean advisers who just pay lip service to Hillary’s bold agenda, coupled with a sigh, a knowing glance, and a twiddling of thumbs until it’s time for the next swing through the revolving door, serving government then going back to the very same industries they regulate. We don’t mean Citigroup or Morgan Stanley or BlackRock getting to choose who runs the economy in this country so they can capture our government. No.”

BlackRock was a reference to CEO Larry Fink, a rumored choice for Clinton’s Treasury secretary. In order to win influence over Clinton’s personnel decisions, Warren believed at the time, she needed both carrots and sticks. By spiking Obama nominees, she had proven that she had a stick. The carrot was her decision not to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders during the primary, despite an ideological affinity among the two. Sanders wasn’t going to win, Warren calculated, so she ought to husband her political capital and put it to the best use influencing Clinton. Shortly after the Associated Press called the primary for Clinton, and after their second meeting, Warren endorsed.

Warren, of course, would never get to test out her theory, as Clinton never got the chance to put together a cabinet, though the names floated toward the end of the campaign were arguably less bad — though still bad — than they would have been without Warren’s pressure. (Fink was swapped for Sheryl Sandberg or Lael Brainard.)

And the decision came at a cost to Warren, as Sanders did better in the primary than most expected, and Warren took fire for a lack of loyalty, creating bad blood that spilled into the 2020 cycle.

As Warren weighs again whether to endorse Sanders or stay neutral — allies are certain she would not endorse Joe Biden while the contest is still alive — that same calculation is at play again. Is it better to endorse Sanders or preserve capital to influence Biden?

Hillary Clinton held a campaign rally with Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Manchester, N.H., on Oct. 24, 2016.

Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux

The problem with this kind of calculation is that it relies on an utterly flawed premise: that influence is best won in return for political favors. To the extent that Clinton would have moderated her hiring of Wall Street executives as president, she would not have done so out of gratitude toward Warren, but out of a fear of what Warren was capable of. In 2013, as a member of the Banking Committee with a coalition of allies, both inside and outside, she had managed to block the appointment of Larry Summers to be chair of the Federal Reserve. That’s where her power came from: sticks, not carrots.

And she was able to block Summers and other nominees because of her rock-solid alliance with activist elements of organized labor, outside progressive groups, and the broad social movement they represent. Her 2012 Senate campaign had smashed records for small donors. The stronger her bond to that outside movement, the more power she had on the inside.

Had Warren endorsed Sanders first, she’d likely have been able to bring more Sanders people with her when she switched to Clinton.

The more power she had on the inside, the more good she could do for people on the outside. Indeed, the amount of harm she may have prevented by the single act of blocking the mercurial Summers from the Fed is incalculable.

From Warren’s perspective, then, the question of whether to endorse Sanders doesn’t need to be about what’s best for Sanders. It should be about her — and how she can position herself to do the most good. And the stronger association Warren has with the progressive movement broadly, the stronger she is.

There are some who argue that Warren should refrain from endorsing Sanders and make a play to be Biden’s running mate — which would be a powerful position, given Biden’s declining faculties and well-known lazy streak. But that argument also presumes that the best way for Warren to curry influence with Biden is by doing him a political favor (it also presumes that Biden would ever choose her, a dubious assumption.)

But Warren’s real power with Biden rests in what she’s capable of doing to him politically, and for him politically — not in the goodwill a nonendorsement of Sanders might generate with the Biden camp.

Warren’s longterm threat to Biden and the party establishment is only as strong as her ties to the progressive movement, and the same is true of an eventual endorsement of Biden. Her value in a general election to Biden is her ability to bring Biden the progressive vote and help him unite the disparate wings of the party. Clearly, then, Warren is more valuable to Biden as an eventual endorser if she can actually bring progressives with her, and the most effective way she can do that is if she has endorsed and campaigned for Sanders. The same calculation was true in 2016. Warren’s endorsement of Clinton would have been more valuable to Clinton had Warren originally endorsed Sanders, and would have had more of a unifying effect than it ultimately did. Had Warren endorsed Sanders first, she’d likely have been able to bring more Sanders people with her when she switched to Clinton.

The other possibility — that with Warren’s endorsement, Sanders might surge back and claim the nomination — would also be a boon to Warren, who could name her position(s) in the new administration. And, indeed, with an unstable president and an unpredictable pandemic, any outcome is possible. But given the possible head-to-heads in the general election, and Biden’s demonstrated inability to campaign effectively, there’s more likely to be an administration for Warren to serve with Sanders as the nominee.

But, again, if Sanders falls short, and Warren and Sanders both endorse Biden, she will, paradoxically, have done Biden a significant favor by previously endorsing against him.

After a bruising primary, endorsing Sanders might not be what she wants to do. But Warren should do it not for him, but for herself — and, as Sanders might say, for us.

The post Elizabeth Warren Should Endorse Bernie Sanders — Not for Him, but for Herself and Her Mission appeared first on The Intercept.

Photos of the Week: Model Vostok, Super Tuesday, Fur Rondy

New growth in bushfire-affected Australia, coronavirus precautions around the world, a birthday party in isolation in China, migrants on the Turkey-Greece border, heavy rains in Brazil, a wet world-record attempt in Russia, mule deer in flight above Utah, Tennessee tornado damage, and much more.

Can Biden Still Be Stopped?

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It’s being described as one of the biggest turnarounds in presidential primary history. After disappointing results in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Joe Biden appeared to be fading in Bernie Sanders’ rearview mirror. Then came his crushing win in South Carolina, after which Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg all dropped out of the race. Klobuchar and Buttigieg, along with former candidate Beto O’Rourke, then endorsed Biden, cementing the growing consensus among establishment Democrats that the former Vice President is the best positioned candidate to stop Bernie. Where does all this leave the Democratic race? Mehdi talks to Intercept DC bureau chief Ryan Grim and to Larry Cohen of Our Revolution about Biden’s big night and about Bernie’s path forward.

Transcript coming soon.

The post Can Biden Still Be Stopped? appeared first on The Intercept.

Boris Johnson vs. Britain’s Deep State

In 1989, the billionaire investor Warren Buffett wrote a letter reflecting on what was then his 25-year stewardship of Berkshire Hathaway. His “most surprising discovery” was “the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call ‘the institutional imperative.’” Buffet told investors that he initially thought “decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions.” In fact, he discovered, this was untrue. The crucial thing was the system.

It was almost a law of business, Buffett wrote, that institutions will resist change, waste time, produce evidence to support the whims of whoever is in charge, and mindlessly imitate the behavior of rival companies. The lesson he took from his insight was to organize his company in ways that minimized the dangers of systemic failure and to invest in other companies that also seemed to understand this risk.

Buffett’s law has entered the annals of business theory, and been held up by an array of leaders—among them Dominic Cummings, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s most influential adviser.

Cummings’s belief in this worldview goes a long way toward explaining the ongoing tension between the U.K. government and the institution it is asking to enact its agenda: the British Civil Service. The tension exploded into public view this weekend with the abrupt resignation of the most senior official in the Home Office following repeated disputes with his political master, Home Secretary Priti Patel, who has been tasked with introducing an entirely new immigration regime in just 10 months. It was also on display in the revelation that the British government opted to leave the European Union’s pandemic early-warning system, despite calls from health experts to remain. But while the clashes, particularly at the Home Office, appear to have been personal and specific, involving accusations of bullying and leaking, or of placing ideology over pragmatism, they are also systemic and general, revealing a clash of ideas that is only likely to intensify, and not just a clash of personalities.

[Read: Why Britain Brexited ]

At the heart of the row is the idea set out by Buffett in 1989, that it matters not the “venality or stupidity” of the government minister or civil servant in question (depending on your view of who is in the right), but the hardwiring of the government machine itself. In Cummings’s view, the Civil Service, like every other government bureaucracy, is unable to shake Buffett’s institutional imperative toward inaction, time wasting, false certainty, and mindless imitation. The machine, Cummings believes, is unable to bring about the kind of change voters want—therefore, the only way to change the outcomes that voters dislike is to change the system. Regardless of who behaved badly in the dispute between Patel and her senior civil servant, this clash of ideas is the key underlying tension.

Cummings’s perspective is best understood not through a traditional left-wing or right-wing political prism, but philosophically. It is revolutionary in nature, seeking systemic change, not just policy reform, and means that individual bust-ups are best understood not on their specific merits alone, but as part of a wider battle over the nature of government itself.

To better understand this clash, it is instructive to return to Cummings’s writings on previous British governments that have found themselves frustrated by the small-c conservative nature of the Civil Service. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron, for instance, sought ways to more efficiently control the machine, to shake it into life to produce the outcomes that the government wanted. Blair chose to centralize and impose targets; Cameron criticized this approach from opposition, only to imitate it in power.

After a crisis following the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease early in his first government, Blair discovered “the wonders of Cobra,” Cummings writes, referring to the U.K.’s disaster-response system, named after the chamber in which it is held—Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. The military response to the crisis showed Blair what could be achieved through command and control, and when further crises emerged, Blair turned to Cobra. Today, Cobra is the go-to response taken by prime ministers when a crisis occurs. Johnson himself was seen to take control of the growing concern over the new coronavirus only when he convened his first Cobra meeting on the matter on Monday.

For Cummings, though, the reliance on Cobra shows not a system working but “a symptom of Whitehall’s profound dysfunction.” The problem, in his view, is the very thing the Civil Service is most proud of: its apolitical permanence. The Civil Service’s defenders say this is what makes it the best in the world, producing “Rolls Royce” diplomats and officials who are experts in their field; free from short-term political pressures; able to give honest, impartial advice; rounded by experience across government. Cummings counters that this is exactly what is wrong with the Civil Service, entrenching its destructive imperative to preserve the status quo, unable to imagine an alternative to the way it works, wasteful of time and resources, and ultimately incapable of adapting to sudden change it never foresees—Brexit chief among them.

The point is not that the Civil Service should have forecast these events, but that it should confront its inability to predict the unpredictable. To Cummings, politics is like the weather: Forecasts are valuable, but limited. In politics, he wrote: “Unfathomable and unintended consequences dominate. Problems cascade. Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.” The key is the ability to adapt—and to adapt, one has to embrace the reality of uncertainty. Government machines instead are built to try to eliminate uncertainty. What is required is a more scientific approach to government, learning from experience as Buffett proposes. The British government should take its cue from the human immune system, Cummings argues, where there is no plan or central control; its strength lies in reacting to attack, experimenting, doing whatever works, discarding what doesn’t. Such a system is messy but adaptable, and therefore stronger.

Here we come back to Patel, the theory of government, and Brexit itself.

Government supporters argue that the civil servant who quit in protest was acting as a block to democratic change: a post-Brexit immigration system. He has responded that he and his staff were subject to “unreasonable and repeated demands” from the government, as well as personal abuse. Brexiteers therefore have held up Patel as the hero for taking on the system (#IStandWithPritiPatel was trending on Twitter this week); Remainers have held up the official as the hero for standing on the side of the experts warning that such demands were impossible. This argument, though, is meaningless if it is the system that is at fault, not individuals within it.

[Read: Brexit has triggered Britain’s most ambitious migration exercise ever]

The row also reveals the deeper philosophy of Brexit, which drives this Johnson administration and has yet to be fully grasped by those who routinely show exasperation at its apparent refusal to listen to expert advice. Johnson, they say, is pursuing a future that makes no sense, one in which sovereignty is prioritized over economic alignment with the EU, meaning that Britain will be poorer than it needs to be.

But this misunderstands the core of the Johnson-Cummings project. It is not that they disagree with experts’ forecasts, or that they are attempting to be populist. They actively reject this model of government, believing it to be systemically and empirically flawed. They argue that Britain needs to free itself from centralized bureaucratic control, rather than rely on it, to be able to react both to domestic crises and the ever-changing international environment. This is a project to remake Britain into a country agile enough to adapt quickly to the dramatic change that is inevitable and unpredictable, not to perfect an existing system that avoids unwanted shocks.

This, then, is not a row about what immigration regime Britain should adopt after Brexit or how quickly it can be put into place, but about the very nature of government and how to be a successful country in the 21st century. It is an experiment. Sometimes experiments succeed and sometimes they don’t. The question, taking Cummings at his word, is whether Britain is institutionally capable of adapting to make it work.

The Delhi Riots Show the Perils of Government Inaction

Violence has become a familiar feature of many of the places convulsed by protests around the world—especially when the government gets involved. Such is the case in France, where clashes with police have resulted in numerous injuries. In Iraq and Chile, they have even led to deaths.

The unrest emerging in India, however, is of a different breed. There, the sectarian violence that has resulted in dozens of deaths in the capital city of Delhi follows months of peaceful protests against a new citizenship law. In this case, it wasn’t a government crackdown that spurred the deaths, but rather, the government’s seeming unwillingness to quell the rampage in the first place.

The scale of the violence in Delhi, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s muted reaction to it, raises questions about the obligation of governments to stem violence. Is it enough to call for calm, as Modi has done, or is a more robust response required? Is failing to stamp out turmoil any different from being the cause of it in the first place?

Compared with some mass demonstrations around the world, Delhi’s have been relatively peaceful. Galvanized by the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which excludes Muslims from the list of religious groups in neighboring countries eligible for Indian citizenship, nationwide protests have largely centered on the law’s constitutionality and what it means for India’s identity. Critics argue that the law implicitly makes religion a criterion for nationality, thereby threatening the country’s status as a secular and pluralist democracy. In Delhi, this opposition has manifested in sit-ins, candlelight vigils, and public readings of the preamble to the Indian constitution.

In the last week, however, things have taken a turn. A recently unseated local politician belonging to Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) delivered a speech demanding the police to clear the roads in northeastern Delhi that were being blocked by the protesters—or he and his followers would do it themselves. Within hours of the ultimatum, The New York Times reported, violence broke out, including clashes between Muslim and Hindu groups. To date, dozens have been killed and scores of businesses, homes, and mosques have been burned down.

[Mira Kamdar: What happened in Delhi was a pogrom]

Sectarian violence of this nature would ordinarily prompt a swift response from the Indian government, Gareth Price, a senior research fellow at the London-based Chatham House, told me. “Historically, when communal violence breaks out, what you do is you impose a curfew straightaway, and you put out a lot of police on the street, and you make everyone go home and calm down a bit,” he said. “If you want communal violence to carry on for a little bit, you don’t do that.”

If governments have an obligation to rein in violence, and the necessary resources, then why hasn’t Modi done so? Though some officials have proposed that the army be deployed and a curfew enacted, the government has so far resisted the pressure. Instead, Modi issued an appeal for calm, urging people in the capital to “maintain peace and brotherhood at all times.” The request is likely to fall on deaf ears, though. After all, the government hasn’t been completely restrained in its handling of the anti-CAA demonstrations. During the early days of the protests late last year, it arrested thousands of people in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where its use of force resulted in more than a dozen deaths—in this case, it was opposition to the government’s agenda that prompted the backlash; the violence in Delhi, which has been ostensibly driven by those who support the government’s legislation, did not warrant a similar reaction. In other parts of the country, according to human-rights groups, it shut down the internet and limited public transportation.

The government’s willingness to countenance tough measures against those opposing its citizenship legislation, but not against the communal violence in Delhi, has earned Modi and the BJP allegations of complicity. Modi stands accused of having been too preoccupied with President Donald Trump’s visit to heed warnings about the tumult. (A BJP spokesperson told reporters that the party does not support any kind of violence, before making an unsubstantiated claim that the unrest had been “pre-planned” by rival parties trying to damage India’s reputation.) Meanwhile, authorities have been criticized for standing by as Hindu mobs confront Muslim protesters and even participating in the violence themselves. (Delhi’s police department dismissed allegations that it failed to supply sufficient forces as “baseless,” and in a statement last Tuesday said it is “making all earnest efforts … to restore the normalcy.”)

Though this scale of violence between Hindus and Muslims in India is rare, the tensions stoking them have been building for a while. When Modi ascended to the premiership in 2014, he campaigned on an agenda to revive the country’s stagnant economy and improve its infrastructure. But he also brought a zeal to transform India from a secular democracy into a Hindu-nationalist state. Since his reelection last year, that goal has manifested in a number of contentious policies, from the decision to revoke the constitutionally enshrined autonomy of India’s sole Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, to the imposition of a citizenship registry that has rendered nearly 2 million people, many of whom are Muslim, stateless. The passage of the CAA was regarded by some as one step too far, prompting the protests.

[Read: When is a protest too late?]

When it comes to handling communal violence, though, Modi’s response is par for the course. The last time clashes like these occurred in India, it was 2002 in his home state of Gujarat, where he was serving as chief minister. When riots broke out between Hindu and Muslim groups following a deadly train fire, Modi and his state government were seen to quietly sanction the violence, which persisted for months. In the end, 2,000 people—the overwhelming majority of whom were Muslim—were killed and thousands were displaced. Though a court-appointed panel later cleared Modi of responsibility, his role in presiding over the riots proved enough to deny him entry to the United States and Britain for nearly a decade.

By not employing measures to curb the rampage in Delhi, Modi can perhaps claim to have avoided the severe government response to protests seen elsewhere around the world. But permitting unrest at the hands of violent mobs—while cracking down on protesters voicing opposition to the government’s legislation—signals where leaders’ priorities lie. The Indian government may not be actively involved in the sectarian violence, but in failing to stop it, leaders become responsible for it.

The Far Right Loves to Hate Sanders Surrogate Linda Sarsour, and She “Has the Wounds to Prove It”

On February 11, the night Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, Linda Sarsour was in Queens, New York, vying on his behalf for an endorsement from the Muslim Democratic Club of New York — a small subset of the American Muslim community, among which Sanders is the most popular presidential candidate.

Sarsour, a Sanders campaign surrogate and executive director of Muslim social justice group MPower Change, was speaking to club membership on home turf. She co-founded the organization, New York’s first Muslim political club, in 2013, and is a star in New York Muslim circles. But she didn’t take the club’s endorsement for granted.

“Bernie Sanders is the candidate for the Muslim American community,” Sarsour told the crowd during her five-minute spiel. “Bernie Sanders is the most consistent anti-war candidate in this campaign. He voted against the war in Iraq. He voted against the Patriot Act, which is a policy that allows unwarranted surveillance of our communities and takes our civil liberties away.”

Sanders, who was only competing against Sen. Elizabeth Warren for the small group’s endorsement, swept the vote. It was a minor victory for Sarsour, but she’s hoping a series of similar endorsements for Sanders across the country will add up to a big wave of Muslim groups backing the senator, giving him a boost to win states with sizable Muslim populations.

Soon, Sarsour, one of the most prominent Palestinian-American Muslims in the country, was on to the next thing. As a volunteer for the campaign, Sarsour is talking to Muslim community leaders nationally about why he is the best choice for president, rallying the Sanders faithful at campaign events, encouraging people to join phone banks for Sanders, and publishing a steady stream of pro-Sanders commentary on her Facebook (216,000 followers) and Twitter (313,000 followers) pages.

As a loud advocate for Palestinian rights and an unabashedly Muslim activist at a time when U.S. policy mirrors the Israeli government’s positions and anti-Muslim bigotry is largely tolerated, Sarsour is a lightning rod for bad-faith attacks. Right-wing voices who use Sarsour’s every criticism of Israel as an opportunity to smear her as an anti-Semite are pressuring the Sanders campaign to drop her as a surrogate, in only the latest example of the torrent of abuse she faces.

She explores her place at the center of so many contradictions of U.S. political life in her new memoir, “We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love and Resistance,” due to be released on March 3. In the fast-paced account of her rise from daughter of Palestinian immigrants to confident leader at the top of the social justice activist world, she deploys her personal story in service of her larger political goals. She uses the experience of seeing black students at her Brooklyn high school go through metal detectors, for example, as an entry point into discussing the pervasiveness of racism is in the U.S., the school-to-prison pipeline, and why she’s committed to building multiracial coalitions for change.

In the memoir and in a recent interview with The Intercept, Sarsour expresses some vulnerability. Still, she remains deeply guarded over some aspects of her personal life and the biggest controversies of the last few years. In her memoir, she skips over the root causes of her exit from the Women’s March, the organization she co-led until just a few months ago. She makes scant references to her husband, and despite sharing some parenting anecdotes in the book, she showed little interest in answering questions about her three children — an understandable impulse from someone whose family has been hounded by the right-wing press.

“I am one of those Palestinian Americans that has the wounds to prove it. I feel, like, scarred. I’ve taken a lot of hits over the last few years, but I feel more hopeful than ever,” she said in the interview. “It seems bleak when you think about what’s happening in Palestine and Gaza. But I think from a political perspective in the United States of America, there has been great progress.”

Sarsour, center, attends a meeting at the Muslim Democratic Club of New York in Queens.

Photo: Kholood Eid for The Intercept

The 39-year-old Sarsour seemed to be everywhere at once over the past few years, fundraising for Muslim and progressive activism around the country, rallying for Sanders, and helping to lead the Women’s March, the group that spearheaded the largest single-day demonstration in American history following President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

But she got her start on a smaller stage.

Just a few months after the September 11 attacks, she began her local activism career when she joined the Arab-American Association of New York, working under her father’s cousin, Basemah Atweh, who had started the organization.

Four years later, as the post-9/11 surveillance state bore down on Muslim New Yorkers with a disturbing zeal, making AAANY’s work all the more important, a tragedy hit. In May 2005, Sarsour was driving Atweh and three others late at night when a tractor-trailer drove toward her, forcing Sarsour to get out of the way and drive off the road, in the process flipping over, going down a steep slope, and spinning the car around. Atweh died from internal bleeding, but Sarsour survived with only a few minor cuts.

When Sarsour returned to work at the AAANY offices a few days after the accident, she vowed to “continue this work for Basemah because this is all she ever wanted,” she recalls in her memoir.

By the fall, at the age of 25, AAANY’s board appointed her as the new executive director. In her 11-year tenure, Sarsour oversaw a team that registered Arab voters in New York, helped families navigate the immigration system, and successfully lobbied the New York Department of Education to give public school students off for major Muslim holidays. She also helped forge a multiracial coalition to curb the New York Police Department’s excesses, work that became especially important to New York Muslim activists after the Associated Press revealed that the NYPD had been spying on Northeast Muslims since the September 11 attacks. (I once spoke on a panel with Sarsour about Islamophobia, Israel, and New York City politics, and my name is listed as an adviser, alongside Sarsour, to a group called Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism.)

Sarsour chats with attendees of a Muslim Democratic Club of New York meeting.

Photo: Kholood Eid for The Intercept

Sarsour’s charisma, relationship-building with local politicians, and show-up-to-everything attitude endeared her to many progressive activists in New York, who would rush to defend her after local politicians targeted her over Sarsour’s criticism of Israel.

“She’s a hero to a good number of people, especially to young women,” said Shahana Masum, a Sanders delegate in New York and community outreach liaison for the Muslim community group Muslim Sisters of Staten Island. “No other Muslim women talks like she does. She’s fearless. And she’s a person that has reached a level that many Muslims don’t get the chance to get to.”

The admiration for Sarsour is not universal. Some Muslim community activists in New York say she is more focused on her brand and getting media attention than doing the hard work of organizing or mentoring other activists. Sarsour rejects this line of criticism and says it stems from being a brash woman in a patriarchal society. “I am the person that stands on the street corner to register voters. I am the person that gathers petitions,” she said. “I’m always uplifting the work of others around me.”

Sarsour has sometimes struggled to balance her activism with her family life, she admits in her memoir. She recalls the time her son posted the news of his college acceptance on Facebook without telling her first. She was in Washington, D.C., planning the Women’s March, and she broke down crying.

“[I was] distressed that my child did not understand that no matter what I was doing, he and his sisters came first for me,” she writes.

But even after bringing attention to some aspect of her family life, there’s only so much Sarsour is willing to share. When I started to ask about her kids, she told me that two are in college and one is in high school, and with a smile said, “That’s all the demographic information you’re getting.”

It’s a natural response for a mother who is constantly on the receiving end of death threats. (In August, Sarsour revealed that the FBI had told her that Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man and Trump supporter arrested and convicted for sending pipe bombs to prominent Democratic politicians, had her name on a list of people to target.) She is willing to bear the costs of her activism, but as a mother of three, there’s more than her own life at stake.

“The impact on my family is more troublesome,” she said. “When my cellphone rings and [my kids] see an unknown number, they say, ‘Who is that? Who do you think that is?’”

Sarsour at the Muslim Democratic Club, New York’s first Muslim political club, which she co-founded.

Photo: Kholood Eid for The Intercept

The right-wing barrage against Sarsour reached its peak in early 2017, after she helped lead the Women’s March rally. Addressing a crowd of thousands of people, she said, to cheers, that she “stands here before you … unapologetically Palestinian American.”

What followed was a string of attacks on Sarsour from commentators on Fox News and articles in Breitbart and the right-wing Jewish press. Many of the articles focused on Sarsour’s penchant for tweeting out harsh attacks on her political opponents. The right went after Sarsour for two tweets in particular: one, written in 2011, in which Sarsour says she wishes she could “take” two anti-Muslim activists’ vaginas away, and another written in 2012, where Sarsour said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” alongside a YouTube video of Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian American poet. (Sarsour said she regrets how she worded the tweet about vaginas. As for the Zionism tweet, she said she did not write the message herself but copied the prewritten tweet from an email sent around to promote Kanazi’s video.)

“We all have our faults. Sometimes she’s a little careless, sometimes she’s a little imprecise, and she’s paid the price for that dearly,” said Moustafa Bayoumi, a Brooklyn College professor whose writing focuses on Muslim Americans.

In liberal spaces, the kinds of attacks that focused on stray tweets didn’t have much impact. But what did blossom into a full-blown crisis for Sarsour and the Women’s March centered on Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who frequently makes anti-Semitic remarks. Tamika Mallory, a co-chair of the Women’s March, had long been close to the Nation of Islam. Critics used her attendance at a February 2018 Nation of Islam event as cover to claim the Women’s March as a whole was tolerant of anti-Semitism within its ranks, also citing Sarsour’s anti-Zionist positions. They wanted to see Mallory and Sarsour gone.

The Women’s March succumbed to those external pressures. Sarsour and Mallory stepped down from the group’s board in 2019, after their board terms expired, they said.

“Things could have been done differently. But I hate that that’s become the story of the march. There was an incredibly effective campaign to utilize real issues of anti-Semitism, and inflated and even manufactured issues of anti-Semitism, to attack the progressive movement and leaders of color,” said Sophie Ellman-Golan, a prominent Jewish activist who helped organize the Women’s March.

In the same week Sarsour’s departure was announced, the Women’s March named its new board members. Among them was Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations chapter in San Francisco. Almost immediately, critics brought to light old tweets of Billoo’s in which, in 2018, she harshly criticized Israel by comparing it to the Islamic State and in 2010 said notions that Israel was “defending itself” were akin to saying that Nazi Germany defended itself from Jewish resistance. (Looking back, Billoo said she could have worded the tweets differently.) Pro-Israel groups demanded her ouster. Two days later, she was gone.

The Women’s March, apparently, had learned the wrong lessons from its experiences with Sarsour, she said.

“We had been targeted for three years consistently at the Women’s March, with lies, media requests by right-wing media, and still forged forward and did the work,” Sarsour said. “The new board caved to pressure within 24 hours and could have showed the kind of solidarity we were preaching and teaching over the years. Zahra is a brilliant leader and attorney and was treated unfairly.”

“I see Bernie as someone who listens,” said Sarsour. “And for the first time in at least my lifetime — and even I would say since my father has come to this country 45 years ago — we have a presidential candidate who is invoking the Palestinian plight on such a high level.”

Photo: Kholood Eid for The Intercept

The kind of social movement work Sarsour is engaged in fits right in with the political priorities of the larger Muslim American community. A 2017 poll conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that 66 percent of Muslims in the U.S. supported the Black Lives Matter movement — higher than any other religious group.

“Muslims’ progress is inextricably connected to other communities,” said Dalia Mogahed, director of research at ISPU. “People who endorse anti-Muslim stereotypes are much more likely to hold negative views about black Americans and Jews. And so [coalition-building is] really understandable. Beyond just being morally correct, it’s strategic to be building coalitions across these communities.”

The activism of Sarsour, and the broader Muslim American community, goes beyond racial justice, though. Sarsour has courted controversy, and risen to the top of her community, in large part because of her outspokenness on Palestinian rights in recent years. She is harshly critical of Israel’s human rights abuses, is a supporter of a one-state solution, where Israeli Jews and Palestinians live equally, doesn’t believe a two-state solution is possible, and supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting Israel.

For those reasons, pro-Israel groups have repeatedly called for the Sanders campaign to drop Sarsour as a surrogate.

The calls are an attempt to exploit the gap between Sarsour’s positions — which are not mainstream views but are increasingly invoked on the left — and Sanders’s more moderate stances. He does not support BDS and favors a two-state solution, though he has voiced the most criticism of Israeli policy in the 2020 primary.

“Bernie doesn’t agree with me on everything. And I don’t agree with Bernie on everything on that particular issue,” Sarsour said. “But I see Bernie as someone who listens. And for the first time in at least my lifetime — and even I would say since my father has come to this country 45 years ago — we have a presidential candidate who is invoking the Palestinian plight on such a high level.”

The Sanders campaign has given no sign that it will drop Sarsour, disappointing groups like Democratic Majority for Israel, the AIPAC-linked group that has repeatedly complained about Sarsour to the Sanders camp. That kind of loyalty has energized Muslim American activists.

“As a Palestinian Muslim woman of color, that sends a message that Bernie Sanders and his future administration isn’t going to leave any community behind,” said Rasha Mubarak, a Sanders supporter, friend of Sarsour’s, and Florida community leader. “It sends a message that we can win being inclusive and talking about the very real occupation of the Palestinian people.”

Sarsour outside a Muslim Democratic Club of New York meeting on Feb. 11, 2020.

Photo: Kholood Eid for The Intercept

Even after Sarsour stirred controversy with her remarks at an American Muslims for Palestine conference that Israel was built on the idea of Jewish supremacy — she later clarified that she meant to refer to Israel’s nation-state law, which enshrines Israel’s status as a Jewish state, while saying nothing about Palestinian rights and downgrading the official status of Arabic — the Sanders campaign didn’t blink. “I’ve never been chastised by the campaign. No one ever told me what to say, when to say, not to say it,” said Sarsour.

The Sanders campaign must know, after all, that Linda Sarsour cannot be silenced.

The post The Far Right Loves to Hate Sanders Surrogate Linda Sarsour, and She “Has the Wounds to Prove It” appeared first on The Intercept.

Bernie Sanders Meets His Biggest Threat

Senator Bernie Sanders knew he wasn’t going to win South Carolina, and he knew he didn’t need to win South Carolina. So by the time polls closed today, he was long gone.

As the Democratic front-runner, he had that luxury.

“You can’t win ’em all,” Sanders told a rally in Virginia tonight before congratulating former Vice President Joe Biden on his first primary win.

The real march to the party’s presidential nomination begins on Tuesday, when 14 states vote. More than one-third of the delegates who will convene at the national convention in Milwaukee this summer are at stake Tuesday. The biggest prizes include California, Texas, and Virginia, where Sanders had already flown to tonight in a bid to make sure that his blowout loss to Biden was merely a hiccup, and nothing more.

Sanders remains well positioned in the Super Tuesday states, and unlike Biden, he has the money to capitalize on his narrow victory in New Hampshire and his much larger caucus win in Nevada last week. He also is benefiting from early voting: More than 2 million people have already cast ballots in Democratic primaries in Super Tuesday states, potentially limiting the bounce that Biden will pick up from South Carolina. Nowhere is that more significant than in California, where Democrats have been voting for nearly a month and where polls show that Sanders is leading by as many as 20 points. The senator from Vermont is also up, though by a narrower margin, in Texas, and victories in those two states, along with strong results elsewhere, could ensure that Sanders emerges from Tuesday with a significant lead in overall delegates.

[Read: Joe Biden’s first-ever primary win is a big one]

A split among the moderate candidates—Biden, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg—is also helping Sanders maintain his perch atop the field. Although Sanders is likely to cross the 15 percent threshold needed to collect delegates in virtually every contest on Tuesday, none of his opponents can say the same—at least according to the polls. Biden is strong in Virginia, North Carolina, and across the South, but weaker elsewhere. Klobuchar is battling to win her home state of Minnesota, while Senator Elizabeth Warren is looking to win in Massachusetts and rack up some delegates in California.

Then there is Bloomberg, the billionaire who has warned that Sanders cannot defeat President Donald Trump but whose candidacy may be helping the democratic socialist win the Democratic nomination. Bloomberg has shown strength in Texas and North Carolina, but his weak debate performances have stalled his rise in the polls. In a late bid to recapture support, the former mayor has purchased three minutes of national airtime on CBS and NBC tomorrow night to deliver a presidential-style address on the coronavirus.

Indeed, Sanders’s biggest threat is not any one of his opponents but a party establishment that remains nervous about his potential nomination. Within minutes of the polls closing in South Carolina tonight, pressure was building for some of the lagging candidates to drop out and rally behind Biden. “I’m hoping some of the candidates tomorrow get out,” former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a previous chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said on CNN as he endorsed the former vice president.

Sanders, however, would rather most of his rivals stay in for now—even if that means he takes a few losses on Super Tuesday. “A lot of states out there,” he said tonight. “That will not be the only defeat.”

In a sign of the increasing urgency of the calendar, Sanders devoted part of his speech to imploring young people to vote and to rebutting critiques of his electability in a race against Trump. Sanders needs a larger turnout among young voters to hold off his rivals and convince Democratic skeptics that he can win in the fall.

His double-digit defeat in South Carolina was a shellacking. If his landslide in Nevada suggested that Sanders had made deep inroads among the Latino community, the result in South Carolina is a reminder that he has a much tougher challenge in winning over African Americans, and particularly older voters.

More important, however, Sanders must hope that South Carolina is not the first sign of a broader national reconsideration of his candidacy. The answer to that question could be clear by Tuesday night.