 So the DNC, once again, is exposing itself as the undemocratic, fraud-corrupt institution that it is. Because after setting debate requirement criteria prior to going into the primary, which was the correct move, what they are now doing is altering the rules, presumably at the behest of one candidate. One candidate who is currently trying to buy his way into the White House. Also as Politico reports, the Democratic National Committee is drastically revising its criteria to participate in primary debates after New Hampshire, doubling the polling threshold, and eliminating the individual donor requirement which could pave the way for former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg to make the stage beginning in mid-February. Candidates will need to earn at least 10% in four polls released from January 15th to February 18th or 12% in two polls conducted in Nevada or South Carolina in order to participate in the February 19th debate in Las Vegas. Any candidate who earns at least one delegate to the National Convention in either the Iowa Caucus or New Hampshire primary will also qualify for the Nevada debate. Bloomberg, the self-funding billionaire, has refused to take donations from other individuals which has thus far precluded his participation in any of the debates since he joined the race late last year. Quote, now that the grassroots support is actually captured in real voting, the criteria will no longer require a donor threshold, said Adrienne Watson, a DNC spokeswoman. So understand what they're doing here. They're tweaking the rules that they said were non-negotiable and they're doing it at the behest of a billionaire. Does this seem like an institution that actually cares about democracy? They speak out rightfully so when Republicans try to rig elections with voter purges, with voter ID laws that are meant to suppress the vote, but here they are trying to stack the deck in favor of one candidate. Why? Because Joe Biden may not necessarily have what it takes to beat Bernie Sanders. So they're trying to give Mike Bloomberg a little bit of a boost since he's self-funding his campaign like Donald Trump and they want more voters to know about him and even though he's already spending over a hundred million to flood the airwaves to get his name out there, that may not necessarily be enough. Maybe they think that he'll be more legitimized if voters see him on a debate stage holding his own against other candidates. I don't know what the reasoning is, but I do know that this is unacceptable. You set out the rules and you're changing them midway through the primary and surprise, surprise, they benefit one candidate. Now to make matters worse, what's interesting is that there is a huge conflict of interest that nobody seems to talk about here. So as Ryan Grimm reports, just before jumping into the race, Mike Bloomberg gave $325,000 to the DNC on top of the gobs he spent on ads this month, totally normal system. So just stop and reflect on this. He gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars and even though other candidates have repeatedly condemned the DNC for numerous reasons, we have Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, Julian Castro, Tulsi Gabbard speaking out about the dubious polling criteria that they use to gauge who does and doesn't qualify for debates and all of a sudden this guy who happened to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars is the beneficiary of a rule change that benefits them. Interesting. Very interesting. Now what makes this even more disgusting is the fact that, well, they didn't even follow the rules that they set out. So remember, to get to that first debate, you had to reach 65,000 individual donors and poll at, I think it was 2% nationally. Mike Gravel met that criteria and guess what happened? He still was not included in the debate. Now Mike Gravel's official Twitter account tweeted in July of 2019, the Mike Gravel campaign contacted the DNC after receiving over 65,000 unique donors. On the call, a senior official swore that they would never change the debate rules for any candidate. Six months later, they did exactly that. Listen to them lie to our faces and they brought receipts because here is a video of a DNC official telling them we don't change the rules for anyone. We wanted to get everybody as many chances as we could and I think it's a very generous set of rules but I think the broader issue is that we can't change them later on for the benefit of any candidate. That's kind of rule number one for us here and it doesn't matter who it is. We didn't change them for Governor Bullock and we can't change them for anybody. That is contrary to what I think people expect out of the DNC and what we've committed to in terms of wanting a transparent and a neutral primary. Shameless. They're utterly shameless. So it's not that they won't change the rules. They just won't change the rules if it benefits candidates that they don't like. But they're more than willing to change the rules if it benefits candidates that they do like. Establishment candidates. I mean there are 60 DNC members, half a dozen or so, according to a new political article that are considering changing the rules probably won't go through but nevertheless they want to change the rules to bring back a bigger influence of super delegates like we had in 2016. So they're all about changing the rules if it either helps the candidate that they like or hurts the candidate that they dislike. They're hypocrites. Now they fucked up so badly here because this is such a bad look that even establishment candidates like Julian Castro spoke out to condemn them here. But here's what I find just grating about this and the condemnation from individuals like Michael Bennett and other people running for president. You guys said nothing back in 2016 when the DNC was openly rigging it against Bernie Sanders. Meaning before any debates took place Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a former manager of Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, colluded with Hillary Clinton to set a limited debate schedule on top of that before she even won the primary. They signed a joint fundraising agreement that allowed her to basically take control of the DNC and the party apparatus which you can't do until you win. So I mean they stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders. They rigged it. That's not to say that he couldn't have won but he was heavily disadvantaged and you know you'd think that they would be less conspicuous this time. They tried to at least hide the rigging you know but now they're not. And again this isn't the first time that they have fucked over candidates in this cycle. They did it to Mike Ravel. They did do it to Tulsi Gabbard with the debates right. She qualified. She met the polling requirements and the donor requirements but because it wasn't you know the right polling from the certain poll she wasn't led into the debate. The DNC must be cleansed from top to bottom. The only way that that can actually happen and we can have robust change is if Bernie Sanders wins because once you become the Democratic Party nominee you assume the role of party leader. So you are in control. So if I'm Bernie Sanders the minute I become the nominee I'm firing everyone at the DNC. Everyone's got to leave right because this is unacceptable. This behavior this you know this hubris and duplicity that we are constantly seeing it's hurting democracy. Again you're a party that has democracy in your name but yet you know this billionaire who's trying to buy his way into the White House donates hundreds of thousands to you and all of a sudden you change the rules for him but not for other candidates. The DNC is a joke and the only way they could ever possibly be redeemable is if Bernie Sanders takes over the party and he actually does purge all of them. Now he probably wouldn't take drastic action like this until after the general election I don't think he would be willing to you know fire everyone right away. I would do that but I mean for him he probably wouldn't want to do that. But you know if he becomes the nominee and beats Donald Trump and you know is sworn in I think he would reform the party because you know you have a culture of corruption in the DNC where they are just they're they're open about their corruption they embrace it and this isn't everyone at the DNC it's about half of the party basically everyone who voted for Keith Ellison and Tom Perez where that divide kind of falls. But with that being said I mean if he's not going to fire everyone do mass interviews and reevaluate each and every single one of them because these people are actively hurting the party they are hurting the party they're delegitimizing the party if you want to even say they have any legitimacy left but I mean if they truly want to exist if the DNC and the Democratic Party want to exist as institutions they better hope that Bernie Sanders wins because he is the only way that they will be able to cultivate legitimacy going forward because if you continue with this corruption and rigging and you lose to Donald Trump for a second time I mean how do you ever expect to win back the trust of voters it's it's just damaging to the party long term so they should hope Bernie Sanders wins but I mean honestly as we're kind of seeing here a lot of people in the DNC a lot of Democratic Party elites would rather lose to Trump than win with Bernie Sanders I think that we're seeing that right now you know they don't want to win they don't want to win because you know you can sit on your ass and fundraise off of Donald Trump's craziness and not really offer voters anything if they actually win then that they'd have to put in work so I mean that's fine if you don't want to do anything to help people move aside we'll help people because we actually want to win and we want to elect candidates who are hungry to improve the lives of people to implement reforms that would drastically improve our lives for the better individuals running for Congress like step aside if you're just if you're tired of serving the people and you're not actually doing that functionally speaking then what are you just resign make it easier on all of us don't make us have to fight you you clearly don't care about democracy you don't care about voters so just resign you know if you're part of the DNC and you're doing this but I mean they're not going to they're going to cling to power because that's what people in DC love to do so we're going to have to one by one replace each of these individuals in the DNC with someone who is not corrupt who is not willing to change the rules to benefit a billionaire like that's just so disgusting it's beyond the pale it's low even for the DNC so there's nothing left to say about this.