At its peak, the Netroots Nation conference was a must-attend event on the Democratic Party presidential campaign trail. In 2007, it hosted a forum featuring Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson. In later years, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) also attended.
However, this year, attendance was far more sparse, especially among elected officials. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) was there to call the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency a “terrorist organization.” Beto O’Rourke, who is running for either senator or governor in Texas, was there too, but that’s about it.
Hard times have fallen on the conference, a yearly gathering of online activist Democrats that started in 2006 under the name Yearly Kos (a reference to the Daily Kos website). The conference has been held in 14 cities across the country, including twice in Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, as well as Baltimore, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Phoenix, and San Jose. This year it was in New Orleans, a city that also hosted in 2018.
(Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Image/AFP via Getty Images)
“I’ve attended most Netroots conferences since 2007,” journalist David Weigel reported from the Big Easy, “though, and I noticed that still more had shifted. The buttons that used to be offered to attendees, clarifying their preferred pronouns or whether they were open to hugs, were missing this year … There was really no talk about 2028 or who’d be fighting for the next Democratic nomination.”
Democratic online activists have always been hyperinterested in the minutiae of electoral politics: recruiting candidates, perfecting messaging, manipulating search engine results, and most importantly, fundraising. For over a decade, ActBlue fueled an online fundraising behemoth that the conservative movement could never match until recently with WinRed. Now, ActBlue is under investigation by the Justice Department after it lost most of its senior staff, and the only remaining person left in the legal department sent a company-wide email advising everyone in the organization that “we have Anti-Retaliation and Whistleblower Policies for a reason.”
Despite its fading star, the conference is still a telling window into where the Democratic Party is heading. And if Netroots Nation is any indication, the party is heading further left. At the very first conference, the keynote speaker was Gen. Wesley Clark, a moderate Democrat who opposed the Iraq War. Any such moderation has long since left the party.
In addition to Ramirez, who recently said she was more proud of her Guatemalan heritage than being an American, O’Rourke outlined where the party was moving on foreign policy.
“I was talking with someone about the American government’s complicity under Donald Trump and under Joseph Biden in the bombing and starving and slaughtering of innocent children in Gaza,” O’Rourke said from the conference’s main stage. “And so if our party cannot say that out loud and cannot say that we want to use the awesome power of this country to establish an independent sovereign state for the Palestinian people to work towards their safety, the safety of Israelis, the safety of everyone there, then what the HELL are we doing?”
Ramirez said in her speech, “We are a movement, a global, interconnected movement, from Humboldt Park in Chicago to Honduras to Palestine to Ukraine to Haiti and the Congo.”
DEMOCRATS PROVE ONCE AGAIN THAT THEY’RE THE STUPID PARTY
The Democratic Party is no longer an American party that supports democratic allies in the Middle East; the Democratic Party is now a globalist party, with no special ties to or feelings toward America, that actively supports terrorists and their homicidal goals.
The 2028 Democratic Party will be a campaign to remember.