Action Items … Accusations of Rigging Primaries
I next visited the Bernie or Bust site Action Items for Jill Stein, formerly Action Items for Bernie Sanders. Like most such sites I’ve visited, it saw conscious fraud in every glitch in the primaries. Thus, regarding the Washington state caucuses, it made this accusation against the Clinton campaign.
The obvious question is, how did the Clinton campaign find out who the Bernie supporters were to send them this faulty information. The Bernie or Bust-leaning source The Inquisitor reported an unconfirmed claim that these messages had been sent out to Democratic Party voters in a certain age group, as well as other such rumors. I am unaware of any confirmation of these rumors. The Sanders campaign refuted these rumors in an official statement. Action Items did not post the official campaign statement.
Again, it posted about the previous Illinois primary circulating similar charges. It is not enough to call the irregularities “shady.” To demonstrate this, you’d have to at least take the effort to show that it was the districts in which Bernie was strongest which suffered these irregularities. No such effort is made. The US Uncut piece makes the case that the election
might have gone the other way and that Bernie might have come out ahead. Assuming this is true, we are only talking about two or three delegates out of about a hundred. A Bernie win would’ve been a big moral shot in the arm for his campaign, but in terms of the delegate amount, would not rise to the level of significant.
Moreover, let’s make a back-of-the -envelope-calculation. Let’s add the differences between the Bernie’s numbers and Hillary’s, using this site, which the USUncut.com article uses.. We get 20,463 in Bernie’s favor. Now assume that that Bernie if the the polls had been open for the additional hour or two they should have been, an additional 10% of the voters would have been added to the count. So Bernie was cheated out of a grand total of 2046 votes. Hillary’s lead over Bernie was 34,989. In other words, all this fuss is over less than 10% of what Hillary won by. These numbers were available to our Bernie or Buster, but it is much easier for him to feign shock and outrage over another bit of “fraud” than to actually do the math.
Finally, it a reading of the day’s online makes it clear that all of this could easily be explained by bureaucratic inertia and the continuing decline of our voting system.
And, of course, we have no idea where the author of the post gets the idea that Bernie should’ve beaten Hillary “by at least 5 points.” Even the Sanders-friendly Inquisitor showed his number were mixed.
This post shows some common sense, combined with a certain paranoid conspiratorial streak. Of course, when Bernie loses California, the idea that this would doom his candidacy will be forgotten and the cries of vote rigging will become ever the more shrill. 
The Nevada Democratic Party State convention was in some sense a turning point in the sharpening of the belief that the primaries were rigged. For background, see these articles, from a pro-Clinton site to a pro-Sanders site (which supports the meme about Democratic Party vote rigging). The crisis came to a head as the time was coming to evacuate the meeting hall, the Democratic Party chair, Roberta Lange, interrupted a Sanders motion for a recount of petitions and called the question, seconded the call, and accepted a voice vote and not a count of hand to pass it. This led to pandemonium. T
he Sanders campaign post this comment. It did not mention any of his supporters’ grievances. Here is another summary of the events.
Ultimately, everything started looking like proof of a conspiracy to cover up a huge Democratic Party establishment hoax. Efforts by the cash-strapped press and polling agencies to save money by cutting labor-intensive exit polls, for instance, showed that the polling agencies were puppets of this conspiracy. This conspiracy theory is shared by Action Item’s milieu. None of the sites I’ve visited which share this view actually refer to the formal reasons given for this decision or the fact that many important states will indeed have exit polls taken. The fact that these polls were clearly inaccurate and out of line with the changing American demographic is not discussed. An obvious alternate explanation for the discrepancy in the exit polls vs. the actual vote in favor of Clinton is that Sander’s constituency is much whiter than Clinton’s and so will be over-counted by exit pollsters. This seems to me much more likely than a giant conspiracy involving thousands of pollsters.
As the make-or-break California primaries loomed, Action Items moved from the sensible
to the ridiculous, of forming an alliance with Trump to discredit Clinton’s likelihood of winning.
and
(On Mike Canada, see his Twitter feed. His latest fascination is with Clinton’s health, with speculation into Clinton having a body double.)
Despair Breeds Denial
But as Bernie’s July 12 endorsement of Hillary approaced, Action Items was thrown into a crisis. Denial met reality and led to despair.
Enter the Green Party
Interest grew in an alternative, i.e., the Green Party, although there did not seem to be any clear idea of how Bernie would fit into this.
Enter Right Wing Alliances
In the meantime, the death of John Ashe, a UN official who was scheduled to testify allegedly regarding a Singapore millionaire concerning a 1990’s Clinton fundraising scandal, sent Action Items to dredging up the so-called Clinton kill list.
He also showed more interest in other right-wing speculation, such as the Breitbart disinformation cite’s Clinton Cash. Breitbart is cited at a source, without any mention of its history of perpetrating very destructive hoaxes. It has lately come under scrutiny for its alliance with the neo–Nazi right. Sieg heil, y’all.
Action Items showed growing reliance on right wing sources, including pro-Trump sources.
Notes on the posts in the above gallery:
Anti-Clinton movie dominates Google searches about her
The idea that a “progressive” would cheer the popularity of this movie is just weird. It was slammed by reviewers as crude propaganda and pseudo-history, filled with conspiracy theories. Here are some more reviews, including one from The National Review if you need to actually read up on the movie you’re cheering on. Here is the producer’s Wikipedia page. Just google the rest yourself. In the meantime, welcome to the right-wing Hillary-bashing lunatic fringe.
Hillary was, in fact, wearing an earpiece
This is reposted from a pro-Trump reedit site. The rumor, which has become gospel on the right, has been debunked on many sites, including snopes.com . A history of this disinformation has been presented dailywire.com. It is in any case clearly a fake as anyone not blinded by fanaticism who watched Clinton’s appearance.
Republican National Committee
Action Items deleted this. It is odd that it was posted as an RNC post in the first place. If you’re looking for anti-Clinton stories, true or false, it’s better to go to rabidly anti-Clinton sources on the right (and left). A few seconds’ googling led me to the CNN original. By the way, this and many other reports puts the lie to the common B o B and Trump meme that CNN is Clinton’s News Network.
Boston Herald
I lived in greater Boston for four years and remember the Boston Herald-American (as it was then called) as being reaction and militarist. Nothing seems to have changed since. It endorsed Chris Christie last January and then Marco Rubio.
Iowans
The author was a journalist for The Washington Times, the right-wing daily founded and run by the Unification Church cult, patronized by President Reagan. A look at his LinkedIn.com page makes it clear that he is anti-regulation. The article by him Action Items posted is clearly
The Federalists of Paul Revere
A classical right woos left group. Virulently racist anti-immigrant, strongly pro-Trump on a white nationalist platform, trying to attract disaffected Sanders supporters. Take this video as an example. Here is their complete video collection. Here is the group’s Facebook page.
Candidate Misdeed Comparison
The first instance tineye.com found of the earliest appearance of this image was on Wikileaks, posted by a Trump supporter. Google images returns several dozen pages, almost all of which are identifiable pro-Trump and right wing.
Enter Wikileaks, Another Alliance with the Right
Perhaps the most frequently used on this Facebook page was Julian Assange’s Wikileaks and people who recycled Wikileaks, adding their own embellishments.
On the Seth Rich hoax, see this post and the articles referred to there. The FB page’s proprietor’s comments are particularly amusing: “Julian Assange implies that the recently murdered DNC staffer … was their source for the recent #DNCLeaks. This explains yesterday’s announcement that Wikileaks is offering a $20,000 reward for information on his murder which now makes much more sense [not, presumably, the murder].” That Assange would have exposed a true source, something he’s never done, in a way that anyone with even sub-average intelligence could figure it out is unthinkable. It takes a certain level of gullibility to fall for this transparent dodge. In the next post, Action Items claims that Assange had actually “confirmed” that Rich was his source. (See the amusing exchange on this between Action Items and some followers of his who at least have enough sense to challenge him.)
On the post headlined “FBI interview files with Hillary Clinton over death of her White House aid”, see this post. Interestingly, you can see that one of the Action Items members objected to using the Daily Mail as a source, to be answered by someone with touching faith in Wikileaks’ good judgment/integrity.
Action Items and Foreign Affairs, or Action Item’s Aleppo Moment
Action Items doesn’t much get into specifics regarding foreign policy, but when he does, it’s a bit of a howler. Apparently moved by pictures of a victim of an aerial bombing in Syria, the author posts pictures of atrocities committed in the Syria war, not noticing that these atrocities were committed by the side the Green Party is shamelessly promoting, the Syrian government and its brutal allies, above all, the Russians.
The post dated August 18 features a video of a Syrian child whose relatives were killed in an air strike in rebel-held territory, i.e., an air strike carried out by the Syrian government and/or its allies.
It is hard to understand how Action Items could not understand that the September 6 post is posted by anti-Assad forces on an anti-Assad fight which specializes in exposing Assad/Russian atrocities in Iran. He would have to be more deaf than Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. If he is that clueless, then ten seconds within the end of this short clip, the handy subtitles show the child cursing Bashar and praying for his death.
Action Items clearly read the article he posted marked Yesterday, since he pulls a quote from it. And yet he managed to overlook the following, which situates the atrocities he sheds crocodile tears over: “Madaya, a town of 40,000 people northwest of the capital of Damascus, has been under siege since July last year, cut off by forces of both the Syrian government and Hezbollah, its Lebanese ally. It is also peppered with landmines, thwarting aid efforts.”
The post marked 20 hrs requires no comment. It is clearly marked “The Bashar Regime Targeted His Neighborhood in Aleppo.” This takes Gary Johnson dementia a step deeper. 
Moving from Syria to Venezuela, Action Items reposts a video of a September 1, 2016, demonstration. The original poster’s comment end saying, “demostrar que queremos revocar este gobierno,” “to demonstrate that we want the removal of this government,” i.e., the Nicolas Maduro government, which the United States would dearly like to go away. See this and this.