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Bernie Sanders showed in 2016 that an unabashed liberal with a fervent following could reach the cusp of the Democratic nomination. Now a slew of progressive Democrats are following his lead.

More than two years before the next presidential primaries, roughly a dozen potential candidates pushing liberal economic agendas are making initial moves in preparation for a run. Sanders himself has visited early-voting states. Fellow senators including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon have been meeting with activists. And governors such as Montanas Steve Bullock are hiring political teams. Even a handful of mayors have started getting into the action.

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Indeed, the lions share of activity among potential 2020 hopefuls so far is on the progressive end of the Democratic spectrum an indication of a broader ideological swing in a party struggling to be seen as more populist.

The maneuvers shed light not only on the contours of Democrats aggressive march toward 2020, but also how fundamentally Sanders 2016 bid reshaped ambitious pols views of what arguments break through in the age of President Donald Trump.

Of the names being talked about [California Sen. Kamala] Harris, [Los Angeles Mayor Eric] Garcetti, [Connecticut Sen. Chris] Murphy, [New York Sen. Kirsten] Gillibrand, and a long list of others almost all have staked out positions on Medicare-for-all, immigration and the economy which are more progressive than any Democratic nominee since 1972, said Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman who ran for president as a liberal insurgent in 2004.

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Its about damn time, added retired Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, the liberal stalwart who ran for president in 1992.

Across the country, Democratic pols have flocked to embrace many of the policy proposals that animated Sanders 2016 campaign, from increasing the minimum wage to lightening college debt loads. And in the Senate, the health care debate has revealed a similar dynamic: potential 2020 hopefuls Harris, Warren, Merkley, Gillibrand and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have announced they will co-sponsor their Vermont colleagues Medicare-for-all bill, and Murphy has proposed an alternative to a single-payer system while praising Sanders.

Sanders still looms large enough that for Democrats considering presidential runs, the first question they must consider is how a potential Sanders bid would affect their own campaign, said multiple leading Democratic operatives. The Vermont independent has refused to rule out a 2020 run and has made political waves by visiting early voting states Iowa and New Hampshire repeatedly this summer.

Sanders who remains in touch with Harkin, and whose top two 2016 Iowa operatives are back in the state has also made political trips to battleground states including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

But his presence hasnt stopped other potential presidential hopefuls from moving toward running, even as they are quick to give him partial credit for forcing the party to move left.

The primary electorates expectations have started moving as well, according to party officials in influential states.

Its migrating that way due to the influence of Bernie Sanders and the impact he had of drawing in that group of people, said Linn County, Iowa, Democratic Party Chairman Bret Nilles. That wing of the party is starting to become more vocal and more engaged.

Aside from Sanders, Warren is the most prominent potential progressive contender, much as in the run-up to 2016, when pieces of the apparatus dedicated to drafting her turned into the basis for Sanders campaign. She is holding donor meetings, having sit-downs with influential activists and making speeches to liberal groups like those gathered at last months Netroots Nation conference. In the run-up to her 2018 reelection and possible 2020 bid, she has also brought on new digital staffers in a likely prelude to a grass-roots fundraising and organizing campaign like the one Sanders ran nationwide.

Sanders lone Senate endorser in 2016, Merkley is also taking far more advanced steps toward a potential bid than is widely recognized.

For months, Merkley has been convening liberal outside groups in his Senate office every two weeks to help guide the messaging and tactics of the Trump opposition. Beginning as an effort to talk about pressuring a President Hillary Clinton on Cabinet picks, Merkleys meetings have turned into convening points for senators including Warren, Sanders, Harris, Murphy, Booker and other possible 2020 hopefuls like Ohios Sherrod Brown, in addition to Hawaiis Brian Schatz.

Merkley is also increasing his presence in early voting states. After placing an op-ed in The Des Moines Register just before Labor Day praising Iowas long, proud populist tradition and noting its outsized role in national politics the second-term senator swung through Iowas capital over the weekend for an event hosted by the Progress Iowa group and town hall-style meetings with students at Harkins institute at Drake University.

Merkley who, like Sanders, keeps in touch with Harkin also scheduled roughly half a dozen private weekend meetings with local donors and liberal activists who are central to the nominating process.

But with Democrats viewing Trump as vulnerable, and upstart progressives feeding off grass-roots energy, the list of potential left-leaning contenders goes far beyond the traditional Senate and gubernatorial routes.

Theres a big reset happening in the Democratic Party right now, so you might as well get out there, said Sean Bagniewski, chairman of Iowas Polk County Democratic Party. People who are calling Iowa have three traits: Theyre a new face in some ways, theyre bolder in their message they know were not going to beat Trump by being Trump, but times are drastic and theres a much more economic focus than ever before.

Former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, for one, has told donors he sees room for a possible nationwide run within Sanders political lane. After falling short with a 2016 Senate bid, Kander launched a voting rights group and quickly became a mainstay in the state Democratic Party speaking circuit. Hes made multiple visits to both New Hampshire which he quietly visited last week to have drinks with the board of the Young Democrats group and Iowa.

Activists immediately ascribed presidential intentions to his groups move last month to open field offices in Iowa, New Hampshire and fellow early-voting state Nevada, dispatching his former campaign manager to run the show in Iowa.

And Garcetti, who visited New Hampshire last month, isnt the only mayor making moves.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has talked to political allies and donors about carving out a broader national stature after whats expected to be a wide reelection victory later this year, pitching the idea of doing a speaking tour all over the country.

Even Pete Buttigieg the 35-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who this year ran unsuccessfully to lead the Democratic National Committee is taking a run at it, with four events in central Iowa over the weekend.

Well stand up to a president who cheapens the most respected office in our land with the heart of a miser, the mind of a cheater, and the soul of a schoolyard bully, Buttigieg said there on Sunday.

Centrist Democrats have for months chafed at the notion that Sanders ideas and politics are ascendant within the party.

But so far before the voting process formally starts, the potential left-wing contenders have faced little blowback.

For too long, liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call them, have been following the polls to a deleterious effect. Theyre chasing poll numbers around, said Harkin, embracing the shift.

Politics is essentially winning the hearts and minds of people, and you cant win the hearts and minds of people by telling them that youve lost yours, and could they please point you in the right direction. And thats what weve been doing.

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Liberals dominate Democrats' 2020 jockeying - POLITICO

MichaelLucas.com

by Aaron Klein9 Oct 20170

Lucas slammed liberals for being largely silent amid increasing reports of gay people being persecuted in the Muslim world. And he said that he has noticed a trend in which theleft-wing focuses on a specific countrys leadership instead of political Islam when attributing blame for anti-gay policies and actions.

Lucas said he is noticing a trend in which more and more gays are leaving their base and the party line because the party line is Islam is a good thing. Islam is our friend.

Lucas is the founder and CEO of Lucas Entertainment, New Yorks largest gay adult film company and one of the biggest gay porn production companies in the world.

He was speaking in an interview Sunday night on this reporters talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, broadcast on New Yorks AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM.

Listen to the interview below:

Fifty-seven people were reportedly arrested by Egyptian authorities in recent days in what the news media have described as the widest crackdown on the countrys gay community.

According to Amnesty International, as well as lawyers for some of those detained, forced anal exams were carried out on some of the individuals accused of having homosexual sex. Egyptian Judicial sources cited by Reuters did not deny the anal examinations, instead defending the procedures as legal and not a form of abuse, as human rights organizations have charged.

Lucas said the liberal world has been struggling to react to the events in Egypt and other recent reports of homophobia across the larger Islamic world.

He stated:

Now that we are talking about Muslim homophobia, it is becoming very inconvenient for liberals because liberals are apologists for Islam. So it is becoming very inconvenient, and that is why they usually tie it to some specific person; specific bad leader. For example, it would be [Egyptian President Abdel Fattah] Sisi, or it would be in Chechnya the leader [Chechen President Ramzan Akhmadovich] Kadyrov, or it would be one individual that is responsible or maybe at the most one political party, but not political Islam. So that is exactly what is happening here in this situation.

This was happening before Sisi. This is happening all over the Muslim world all of those Muslim countries to one degree or another. For example, in Saudi Arabia, it is a daily routine, while in Egypt there are waves.

Gay Media Censorship

Even though Lucas is a celebrity in Western gay culture, he said that most gay publicationswhere he regularly penned articles in the past gradually stopped publishing any of hispiecesrelated to Islam. Hecharged thatthis censorship, as helabeled it,escalatedashe started noticing what he described as a change in theattitude of talkbacks within the U.S gay community toward Islam.

Lucas stated: Gays, no matter how much you brainwash them, it is very difficult in the end to say, No, Islam is not an enemy of gay people. So as public opinion of gay people was changing, gay publications, most of them stopped publishing my articles about Islam.

And that is actually very interesting. I could write about anything but not about Islam because gay people should be in their own box It is becoming dangerous that gays are leaving their base and the party line because the party line is Islam is a good thing. Islam is our friend.

The latest crackdown in Egypt, meanwhile,began on Sept. 22 when a handful of attendees at a concert by the Lebanese alternative rock band Mashrou Leila raised a rainbow flag, and the incident went viral on social media. Authorities arrested at least four people for hoisting the flag at the concert.

Reuters further reported on the timeline of events following the concert:

Almost immediately, local media, dominated by state-aligned television personalities, began a campaign against homosexuals, saying they were receiving foreign funding and hosting callers who compared their threat to Islamic State.

Egypts media regulator then banned homosexuals from appearing in the media unless they were repenting, calling homosexuality a shame and a disease that should be kept under wraps, not promoted in order to protect public morality.

The overwhelming majority of those arrested are not involved in the flag case, however, and have simply been arrested over their perceived sexual orientation in the following days. Police have raided homes, parties, and used online dating apps to lure gay men a common tactic in Egypt to arrest most of them, their lawyers say.

Aaron Klein is Breitbarts Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. Follow him onTwitter @AaronKleinShow.Follow him onFacebook.

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EXCLUSIVE - Gay Porn Kingpin Michael Lucas: Muslim Homophobia ...

The horror show that was the 2016 election will be examined and reexamined for years, and depending on how bad things get, quite likely decadesto come. There were, of course, a lot of factors: Cultural change, economic change, racism, liberal complacency after Barack Obama, the FBI manipulating the election, the Russian government manipulating the election, hatred of feminism and so on.

But it's also important to noticethat Donald Trump's election is the culmination of decades of right-wing media teaching its audience that liberals are subhuman scum, and that hating liberals whatever their stereotype of a "liberal" looks like is far more important that minor concerns like preventing war or economic destruction.

Friday morning, the phrase "preparing for Trump" started trending on Twitter. It appears to have started withliberals tweeting out an article by Peter Dreier laying out a 10-step process to resist Trump's attempts to turn our government into a kleptocracy at best, and a fascist state at worst. But of course the meme was soon taken over by right-wingers eager to exclaim how excited they were about the Trump presidency.

But what's fascinating is how few of them, had anything positive to say about Trump and his coming presidency, despite their apparent love of the Great Orange Grimace. On the contrary, the contributions of Trump supporters on the thread were almost exclusively negative: They are gleefully certain that he will rain destruction on the heads of the hated liberals.

Trump's fans on Twitter don't seem to think that he'll improve the economy or foreign relations or anything at all, really.In fact, they seem wholly opposed to the concept of improvement. Their worship of the man lies with their belief that he's an agent of destruction, who will hurt people they have been trained by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to believe are evil.

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Conservatism turned toxic: Donald Trumps fanbase has no ...

A statue of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee is seen in the crypt of the US Capitol in Washington, DC on August 24, 2017.

AFP/Getty Images

A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.

The monuments debate dominated conservative discourse on Thursday. At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson argued that liberals are unwilling to take down monuments to their racist historical figures:

Liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II while he was Californias attorney general. President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies.

Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes? ...

At the Daily Caller, Rob Shimshock reported that a Canadian teachers union would like to remove the name of Canadas first prime minister from Ontario schools:

The Blazes Jon Street noted that former U.N. ambassador Andrew Youngs opposition to removing Confederate monuments, which he articulated in interviews with CNNs Anderson Cooper and NBCs Chuck Todd, telling the latter that Klan supporters of Confederate monuments are almost the poorest of the poor. Youngs argument for why Confederate monuments should stay in place echo the argument that President Donald Trump made throughout the 2016 campaign, which was that the forgotten man and forgotten woman in the West Virginia coal mines or the Michigan factory would be forgotten no more, Street wrote.

Multiple outlets ran posts on a New York Times article reporting that Hispanic and black students are more underrepresented at elite colleges now than they were 35 years ago. The NYT found that black students only made up 9 percent of freshman students, while Hispanic students represented 15 percent of students at Ivy League Schools, the Daily Callers Amber Randall wrote. White students enrollment also went down, while the percent of Asian-American students on the Ivy League campuses increased slightly. National Reviews David French:

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Today in Conservative Media: Are the Liberals Ever Going to Admit They Have a Racist Past Too? - Slate Magazine (blog)

In that guide, the S.P.L.C. claims that I am a propagandist far outside the political mainstream and warns journalists to avoid my damaging misinformation. These groundless smears are deeply offensive, as I have dedicated much of my adult life to calling out the true extremists: organizations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Yet you will look in vain for the S.P.L.C.s Field Guide to Muslim Extremists. No such list exists.

Thats a shame, because Islamic extremism a movement that aims to impose a caliphate and Sharia law by violent means is as toxic as white supremacy. In the past two decades, it has certainly been responsible for many more deaths.

Like neo-Nazis, Islamic extremists despise liberalism. They deny the equality of the sexes, justify wife-beating and, in some cases, even the enslavement of female unbelievers. The Islamic State and groups like it regularly murder gay people in the most heinous ways. Islamic extremists are also virulently anti-Semitic, like the Nazis before them. And like todays American Nazis, they brandish swastikas, chant slurs and peddle conspiracy theories.

The terrible consequences of Islamic extremism are on display on a weekly basis around the world. In the days after Charlottesville, five men in Barcelona used a van and knives to kill 14 and injure scores of innocent people. Another Islamic extremist went on a stabbing rampage in Finland. In wealthy societies like the United States, most plots to kill in the name of Islamist supremacy are foiled. But poorer societies in the developing world lack the means to do that, which is why the majority of victims of the extremists are in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria.

It is not surprising that, when I point out such facts, I am viciously attacked and threatened by those who are dedicated to Islamic extremism. But it has always struck me as odd that so many supposed liberals in the West take their side rather than mine, as happened three years ago, when Brandeis University rescinded their offer to me of an honorary degree. I would have expected a civil-rights organization supposedly committed to justice to speak out against those who would oppress women, gays and people of other faiths. But the S.P.L.C. has nothing to say about Islamic extremists; only about their opponents.

Another voice the S.P.L.C. has tried to silence is that of Maajid Nawaz, who was included in the same field guide as me. (He is suing the organization for defamation.) Mr. Nawaz has written extensively about his past as an Islamic extremist in England and Egypt, just as Ive written about my time in the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager. For the past decade, he has run Quilliam, an organization dedicated to countering Islamic extremism in Britain and elsewhere, notably in Pakistan.

I met Mr. Nawaz in 2010 at a debate in New York City, where the subject was the nature of Islam. Our passionate disagreement was on full display: Mr. Nawaz is a secular Muslim, whereas I am not a believer any longer. Yet we both agreed the path to a successful reformation of Islam lies in more debate, more scrutiny and more critical thinking. It is exactly these activities that our opponents, now including the S.P.L.C., describe as extremism.

Cui bono? That question is nearly always the right one to ask of organizations like the S.P.L.C. Who really benefits from their activities? Repeatedly, and for more than a decade, journalists at publications ranging from Harpers to Politico to The Nation to The Weekly Standard have pointed out that the centers founders seem more interested in profiting off the anxieties and white guilt of Northern liberals than in upholding the civil rights of poor Southerners, or anyone else. Theres a less cynical explanation, though, which is that liberals are deeply and increasingly uncomfortable with calling out Islamic extremism for fear of being smeared as Islamophobic, or worse.

Regardless, the S.P.L.C.s decision to target those who speak up for the civil rights of Muslims is a travesty.

Muslims today cannot freely debate the role of their religion in most Muslim-majority countries, where the charges of heresy or apostasy can mean a death sentence or a lynch mob. Here in the West, too, free discussion of Islam is getting harder not least because Islamic organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations pounce on any criticism of Islam, branding it hate speech, the modern word for heresy. Unwittingly or not, the S.P.L.C. is abetting Islamic extremists by branding critical thinkers like Mr. Nawaz and me extremists.

Taking a stand against the neo-Nazi display we saw in Charlottesville is an impulse that should be cheered and Apple, JP Morgan and the Hollywood A-list can and should do more to counter political violence and intolerance in all its forms. But they need to find more trustworthy and deserving partners to work with than the S.P.L.C.

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of an organization. It is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, not the Council of American Islamic Relations.

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Why Is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals? - The ... - New York Times