LIBERAL BETRAYALS

ATILIO BORON—Given all of the above, I request that you do not continue speaking in my name. If all that I have exposed does not seem convincing, go ahead with your preaching, but do so with your own name and not mine. Nobody, not even those who participated in my government, including the leadership of the Socialist Party of which I was a founder, or those who carry my last name or participate in this regrettable loss that affects vast sectors of the Chilean left, constructed on more than one hundred years of efforts, sacrifices, jails, and persecutions of all kinds, have the right to bastardize the political legacy that I sealed with my blood in the Moneda Palace.

RAINER SHEA—The political role of the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party, as the socialist columnist Genevieve Leigh has assessed, is to “attack the wealth of the rich without attacking the social system upon which this wealth is based.” This social system is capitalism, which social democrats like Sanders do not want to get rid of. No one can honestly say that they’re socialists, because they very much embrace a continuation of capitalism. They explicitly promise that their economic model is not based off of history’s existing socialist states, but off of the Scandinavian capitalist welfare states.

JOSHUA CHO—“Trump’s Venezuela Policy: Slow Suffocation,” an Atlantic report (4/17/19) by Uri Friedman and Kathy Gilsinan, passed up a rich opportunity to expose the humanitarian pretexts for economic intervention, and instead exhibited the worst tendencies of corporate media coverage of US policy in Latin America.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Uygur has absolutely no basis for the latest excuse he’s using to continue fanning the flames of Russia hysteria among his millions of followers, but he’s doing it anyway. Today he’s telling American progressives that their president is being puppeted by Putin into taking a weak stance on Venezuela, when they should already have been fighting this administration’s civilian-killing Venezuela hawkishness tooth and claw. Before that he was telling his audience that it’s possible to focus on Russiagate while also advancing progressive agendas (spoiler alert: no it isn’t), before that he was telling them that Trump’s failure to further escalate nuclear tensions with Russia is proof that he’s Putin’s puppet, and before that he was smearing Michael Tracey, his own staff member at the time, on air for being skeptical of the now-debunked collusion narrative.