Longtime Democratic Campaign Operative Quits the Party After What She Saw at the DNC
Many of our fellow Americans have yet to discover the truth about the elitist, authoritarian, modern Democratic Party.
Thus, when someone witnesses it from the inside and then sounds the alarm, it deserves our attention and applause.
In a Newsweek opinion piece published on Tuesday, former Democratic campaign operative and fundraiser Evan Barker explained why, after what she saw at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August, she decided to leave the party.
“I felt submersed in a hollow chamber whose mottos were ‘Brat summer’ and ‘Joy’ — totally out of touch with regular, every-day Americans and their pressing needs; instead, the most elite people in the world chanted in unison that ‘We’re not going back!'” Barker wrote.
The experience left her “feeling disenchanted, lost, sad, and alone.”
“As someone who has given her life to Democratic politics, it was devastating,” she described.
Indeed, Barker has not merely dabbled in Democratic politics. She worked as an intern on President Barack Obama’s campaign, as an alternate-delegate for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then as a major fundraising consultant for Senate and House Democrats at the federal level.
But she could not stay quiet as the Democratic Party morphed into the party of elitism, endless war and identity politics.
Barker grew up in a working-class family of lifelong Democrats near Kansas City, Missouri. She believed, therefore, that the Democratic Party represented her interests and values.
Over time, however, the grueling and degrading task of begging rich people for money helped her slowly realize the truth.
“At first, I naively thought the system was broken. But now I realize, it isn’t broken; it’s doing what it was designed to do, which is to keep working class people from true representation. That is the point, a feature, not a bug,” she argued.
Meanwhile, progressive politics left her equally disillusioned.
In fact, she described progressives as “compromised by the social justice language and divisive identity politics that now dominates the entire Democratic ecosystem.”
Likewise, she felt shocked to learn that “the Democrats have embraced [President George W.] Bush-era foreign policy to become the party of war.”
“It was the cherry on the cake that Vice President Kamala Harris has been proudly touting an endorsement from Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney!” she wrote, her words dripping with exasperation.
In the end, she decided that the Democrats have grown too “condescending and paternalistic.”
The 2024 DNC in Chicago made all of this clear.
“It’s impossible to unsee what I’ve seen. I can only go forward,” she wrote.
In an ironic jab, Barker even used one of Harris’ campaign trail slogans against the Democrats: “I’m not going back.”
Earlier this month, in a video posted to the social media platform X, Barker made many of the same points.
In that video, however, she provided quantifiable evidence of her longtime commitment to Democratic politics.
For instance, she estimated that she had raised at least $30 million for Democrats.
She also included photos of herself with many prominent figures in Democratic politics, including Michelle Obama, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Apparently, some rank-and-file Democrats had called Barker a liar and suggested that she never worked for the party.
Having established her credentials, she proceeded to decry the Democrats’ “hypocrisy,” citing “a massive difference between what they say and what they do.”
She also bemoaned Democrats’ “toxic weaponization of identity politics” and declared herself “tired of endless proxy wars.”
Having encountered so many elitist Democrats, she reported feeling “exhausted from the coastal condescension toward Middle America.”
And she also called the DNC the “tipping point” in her disillusionment.
Thus, she had a message for other Democrats who secretly believe as she does.
“If it no longer feels right, make peace and move on. Goodbye, Democratic Party,” she said in conclusion.
I’m the real deal, and I’m done with the Democrats. #DNCConvention2024 #DNC2024 #DNC #JoeBiden #Trump #KamalaHarris #RFKJr #politics #Democrat #Republican pic.twitter.com/KGmXOWq5LU
— Evan (@evanwch) September 9, 2024
The Democratic Party began in the 1820s as the party of slavery and Indian removal. Had justice prevailed, it would have collapsed by 1865.
After the Civil War, however, Democrats lingered as a mostly regional party devoted to racial segregation.
Then, by the 1930s, Democrats realized that they could acquire national power again by posing as friends of the working class. Some good-hearted Democrats meant what they said, and others believed them. By and large, however, powerful Democrats campaigned on envy and then forgot their voters after the elections. For the most part, the party’s policies harmed the very people its leaders claimed to represent.
By the late 20th century, working-class people began to notice that Democrats merely used them as a means to power. Thus, elitist Democrats turned on the working class and once again began trying to divide the country on racial lines. Hence the party’s new “social justice” flavor.
Some of us have known this about the Democratic Party for decades.
Other well-meaning Americans and former Democrats, however — former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and X owner Elon Musk leap to mind — have discovered it in recent years, when the Democratic Party abandoned all pretenses and openly embraced censorship, endless wars, open borders, COVID mandates, gender-related madness and every other form of elitist authoritarianism.
No one blames those former Democrats for taking so long to see the truth. After all, some of us were duped by the likes of Bush and Cheney, too. We had to learn the hard way about our own Republican establishment.
Barker might or might not yet consider herself a MAGA Republican — if she attended the DNC as recently as last month, then perhaps that is still too much to ask — but we applaud her honesty and welcome her to the fold all the same.
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