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“It’s really easy to feel alone in America. It’s the loneliest place in the loneliest time,” the co-host Felix Biederman said, speaking of the early days of their work. “But eventually people started to gather around all these posts into the void.”

The topic is inequality, raging against the rich.

Julius Krein, the conservative founder of the new publication American Affairs, has noticed the new allies.“There is a lot of interesting convergence on some of the anti-woke thinking and many things that, perhaps surprisingly, we agree on, for different reasons,”

“It’s fairly easy to have fun, pretty exciting dialogue between right-wing anti-neoliberals and left-wing anti-neoliberals.”

“‘Chapo Trap House,’ the entire Dirtbag Left, have tapped that male privilege of intimidating people into assuming you’re cool,” said Amanda Marcotte, a liberal feminist writer for Salon

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These Sanders supporters eschew the idea of party unity as a scam: “I won’t vote for anyone but Bernie in the general, can’t say what the hundreds of thousands of people who listen to my show will do, but I’m only speaking for myself,” Mr. Menaker wrote on Twitter a day after the Iowa caucuses.

An additional challenge is that as the free-floating anger they stoke finds community, it is escalating and souring into sometimes violent and ugly rhetoric

For the hosts and their fans, those sort of tweets and the podcast language are all jokes. The audience understands the difference, they argue, and anyway the real problem with the Democrats is that they’re overly sensitive. A bunch of self-serious P.M.C.s (members of the professional-managerial class).

Over the summer, the “Chapo Trap House” message board, which has nearly 153,000 members who chat about the news and memes of the day, was censured by Reddit, which hosts it

“The reason for the quarantine is that we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community, especially in the form of encouragement of violence,”

“We do everything our parents say, and it doesn’t work,” said Brayson Cope, 18, a college student from Altoona and a Sanders volunteer.His reason for listening to “Chapo" is simple, he said.“They’re angry. I like it because they’re angry.”

They want what Mr. Sanders wants: universal health care, canceled student loans, free college, and an overhaul of the tax system. They want to cut the national prison population by half and to install a ban on fracking. And for them anything less than this is nothing at all

according to fans of the podcast and movement, there are a lot of neoliberal shills out there.

For many left-wing groups, the Chapo podcast and its Reddit community are now setting the weekly conversation agenda.

“It’s a touchstone,” said Brendan McGillicuddy, 39, who teaches in the cultural studies department at the University of Minnesota. “At my workplace, everyone listens to it, even if you don’t like it.”

When Hillary Clinton’s name came up, the reaction was nearly indistinguishable from a Trump rally.“Lock her up,” the co-host Matt Christman said to the crowd.The crowd began to chant: Lock her up. Lock her up.

During the three-hour show, there is little vision laid out for what they want, beyond a Sanders presidency. There is a vision for what they want destroyed and how good it will feel to do that. The idea of actually taking power is terrifying, and they say so.“What’s scary is the idea that this could end,” Mr. Biederman said. “What’s scary is we’re not just tossing catharsis into the void, that this is something real. We are there.”

“It’s a common experience to be someone with a crappy job who does not have an outlet for your set of beliefs and you feel insane because you’re surrounded by liberals or Evangelicals or whatever stultifying milieu,” he said. “And one day you find a piece of media with some folks who are articulating what you always believed: You’re not crazy, you’re right, this is exactly how the world works, and you’re getting screwed.”

He said he knew that the anger the podcast was building could be dangerous, but he said the anger — and the fear of violence it brings — was good.

“Educating a generation and saddling them with debt and then not giving them jobs where they have the wage that they presume they should receive based on the amount of time they spent on education,” Virgil said. “That’s a pretty good way to turn them into radicals.”He is a good example of his own target audience: He graduated with $100,000 of debt from Cornell and after college took freelance gigs from Craigslist, hoping to write.

While the Chapo hosts rail against the media establishment, they are also deeply entwined with it and largely beloved by it. (Mr. Menaker, for example, grew up on the Upper West Side, the son of a New York Times editor and a New Yorker editor.)

He does not want to live in a capitalist society at all.“I think it’s a moral stain to live in this society,” he said. “And every day I think, God I’d rather just leave.”But he’s not sure where he would move

Outside the Iowa City show, Adam Angstead, 46, had stepped out of the theater for a cigarette. He works for the Iowa City school district as a substitute teacher five days a week, but he said his employment offers no benefits. On the weekends he works at a diner. Twice a week he sells his blood plasma for extra cash.It’s still not enough. He was trying to pay down his $40,000 in student loans for a while, but it hardly made a dent, and recently he has gotten a deferment. For him, the primary feels like a life-or-death battle.“Being in a room with a bunch of people who think the same thing or close made me think we might not all literally die,” he said. “Bernie’s the only one.”

After the two then parted, Steyer -- who had been standing behind them and looking alternately at each of them -- can be heard saying, "I don't want to get in the middle. I just want to say hi, Bernie."

The tension between the two top-tier candidates has been simmering since earlier this week. In a CNN story published Monday, four sources said Sanders had told Warren during a private 2018 meeting about the 2020 campaign that a woman could not win.

"I really wasn't listening. They were talking about getting together or something," Steyer said. "I really didn't listen. I really -- it was one of those awkward moments where I felt like, you know, I need to move on as fast as possible."

He added, "My goal was simply to say good night to two people who I respect. The last thing I wanted to do was get between the two of them and listen in. That was not my goal and I didn't do it."

Warren and Sanders have had a nonaggression pact throughout the campaign, but that truce was broken following a report from Politico’s Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein that the Sanders campaign had given volunteers a script that attacked other candidates, including Warren.

The Warren campaign responded to this by saying Sanders told Warren during a private meeting that he didn’t think a woman could win the White House in 2020. Sanders and his surrogates said the Vermont senator said no such thing. Warren and her surrogates said he did.

But the peace and goodwill engendered by the debate itself was largely derailed — among the senators’ bases, at least — by the moment CNN captured after, when no handshake occurred.

Obviously, this little moment is getting so much attention because the Iowa caucuses are now about two weeks away. Voting in New Hampshire comes directly after that, then contests in Nevada and South Carolina. In other words, time is running out.

That hesitancy is reflected in polls on the issue, many of which show that individuals want — or at the very least have no problem with — a woman nominee, but that they don’t believe other voters feel the same.

haven’t swayed voters in favor of the Minnesota senator. Instead, Biden, who has lost elections, and who does not have as strong a record of winning in Republican areas, is seen as Democrats’ best chance to beat Trump, according to recent polls. And it is Biden who leads nationally.

In 2020, anything could happen: Trump enjoys the advantages of incumbency and the Electoral College system, but experts have said the Democratic base is incredibly energized and is expected to show a strong turnout. Respondents to polls may believe Biden has the best chance against Trump, but experts have told Vox that no research argues a woman would be destined to lose in November because of her gender.

He fares best among white voters. The electorate was 91 percent white, per the entrance polls. He does well with less affluent voters. The caucus electorate was far less affluent than the national primary electorate in 2008. He’s heavily dependent on turnout from young voters, and he had months to build a robust field operation. As the primaries quickly unfold, he won’t have that luxury.

Iowa is not just a white state, but also a relatively liberal one

But these strengths were neatly canceled by Mrs. Clinton’s strengths. She won older voters, more affluent voters, along with “somewhat liberal” and “moderate” Democrats.

He has nearly no chance to do as well among nonwhite voters as Mr. Obama did in 2008

In the end, Mr. Sanders failed to score a clear win in a state where Mr. Obama easily defeated Mrs. Clinton among white voters.

Mr. Sanders will have another opportunity to gain momentum after the New Hampshire primary. He might not get as much credit for a victory there as he would have in Iowa, since New Hampshire borders his home state of Vermont. But it could nonetheless give him another opportunity to overcome his weaknesses among nonwhite voters.

As a general rule, though, momentum is overrated in primary politics. In 2008, for instance, momentum never really changed the contours of the race. Mr. Obama’s victory in Iowa allowed him to make huge gains among black voters, but not much more — the sort of exception that would seem to prove the rule. Mr. Obama couldn’t even put Mrs. Clinton away after winning a string of states in early February.

ick Santorum, Pat Buchanan or Mike Huckabee, who failed to turn early-state victories into broader coalitions.

Mrs. Clinton holds more than 50 percent of the vote in national surveys; her share of the vote never declined in 2008.

The polls say that her supporters are more likely to be firmly decided than Mr. Sanders’s voters.

Why a ‘Virtual Tie’ in Iowa Is Better for Clinton Than Sanders

Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, share a perspective of “skeptical restraint.” They worry about the unintended consequences of regime change. They are more aware of the limits and costs of military force. They don’t believe the United States can or should police the world. They understand that without restraint abroad, we will never be able to focus on rebuilding our country at home.

In the spring of 2013, Obama spoke at the National Defense University on the war on terrorism. He argued that “we must define the nature and scope of this struggle or else it will define us,” invoking James Madison’s warning that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” He called for new limits on our use of force. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” Clinton would not have delivered those remarks. Sanders would.

After she left office, Clinton criticized Obama’s quip that a central principle of his foreign policy was “don’t do stupid s---,” saying that “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Maybe so, but it reflects a common sense that Sanders and Obama exhibit, and Clinton consistently does not.

Bernie Sanders refuses to get bogged down – or pinned down – on specifics during Democratic debate

Bloomberg improves from his last debate — but is it enough?

"The short answer is yes, I do (think sexism is a hurdle for Democratic women running for president)," Sanders told Tapper after being asked about the issue. "I think women have obstacles placed in front of them that men do not have."

"You, President Trump, Vice President Biden, you're all older Americans," Tapper said to Sanders, 78. "Do you think that all three of you should be limiting your travel and avoiding crowds?" "Well, in the best of all possible worlds, maybe. But right now we're running as hard as we can," Sanders replied.

"It is something -- I got to tell you, I never expected in my life, as an American, to see a swastika at a major political rally. It's horrible," Sander said Sunday.

the leading voices were, like Mr. Sanders, native-born and middle-class advocates of reform within the Democratic and Republican parties, whose bosses they often criticized.

Mr. Sanders sounds like these Gilded Age socialists in part because the issues of their time were similar to ours — immigration, environmental deterioration, declining well-being and growing inequality in a period of rapid technological and economic change

The Gilded Age socialists admitted what their opponents often did not: Americans did not all share common values.

Mr. Sanders’s actual similarity to 19th-century socialists makes him seem unthreatening, even avuncular. He is infinitely closer to William Dean Howells, the 19th-to 20th-century novelist who for a while proclaimed himself a socialist, than to Joseph Stalin.

Howells’s political evolution makes socialism’s American roots clear. Howells wrote campaign biographies for Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes, and remained close friends with John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Even when Howells called himself a socialist in the late 1880s, he continued to vote Republican, although he thought the party was corrupted.

Howells regarded socialism as “not a positive but a comparative thing … Every citizen of a civilized State is a socialist.”

If anyone believed “that the postal department, the public schools, the mental hospitals, the almshouse are good things; and that when a railroad management has muddled away in hopeless ruin the money of all who trusted it, a Railroad Receiver is a good thing,” then that person embraced socialism.

Like Howells, Bernie Sanders embraces a series of modest changes. Mr. Sanders often rightly seems bewildered that free public college education — once the norm in California — and the universal health care of Canada and Europe can seem to be radical solutions to American problems.

Radicals — anarchists, Communists and other Marxists — have at critical moments influenced America’s development, often for the better, and most of them have despised American socialists as insufficiently revolutionary, ideologically incoherent, hopelessly sentimental and utterly enmeshed in existing society.

They were right — which was why American socialists have been far more influential than their radical critics. Socialists appealed to sensibility, values and justice, not ideologies. They put their hope in the benevolence and fairness of the mass of Americans —­ what Howells called the sufficiency of the common — rather than in elites.

Like his boss, the campaign manager believed that this was solely about the establishment’s determination to install a protector of the status quo. He insisted to me that Team Bernie was in fact delighted to see it come down to their boss versus Biden — “a perfect foil,” he maintained.

now the Sanders campaign was confronting the judgment of voters: Biden had a center-left coalition (including the allegiance of the party’s crucial black constituency) that seemed capable of prevailing in a general election, while the Sanders movement relied on young voters who weren’t coming out all that abundantly in February and March and therefore couldn’t be counted on to produce a record turnout in November

the gale force of the post-Super Tuesday “Stop Bernie” movement felt, to Bernie and Jane Sanders, far more brutal than it did during the previous cycle. This was not really about wanting to unseat Trump, in the Sanderses’ view. This was about shutting down Sanders’s anti-establishment critique.

In defeat, Sanders has prompted a reckoning within the Democratic Party. He has forced upon it an airing of ideological differences, compelling progressives and moderates to choose their leader and then make the case in public.

The notion that political change and electoral victory were often two different things — that the former could and did occur without the latter — has been an essential tenet of Sanders’s underdog career.

He observed that many politicians “fade away” as their losing campaigns do. This would not be Warren’s fate, he said. Then he explained why: “She has changed political consciousness in America — which, at the end of the day, is the most important thing that any candidate could do.”

According to January’s filings with the Federal Election Commission, 53% of the $25 million Sanders received in campaign donations were unitemized, or under $200. Biden could say the same for about 35% of his campaign donations. In both fundraising emails and stump speeches, Sanders is using this discrepancy to bolster his claims that “the establishment” — a term loosely defined as longtime party stalwarts and fundraisers that he frequently invokes — is on a mission to undermine his progressive movement.

Sanders’ grassroots support has put him in the unique position of being able to rail against these fundraising practices as part of his platform. Nearly every candidate — including Biden — began the race eschewing super PACs, which cannot coordinate with the campaigns but can spend unlimited amounts. But that stance eventually collided with the reality that it is hard to raise money while competing in a crowded field that until recently included two self-funding billionaires. Even Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who exited the race Thursday, reversed a campaign pledge and did not disavow a super PAC when one formed to support her as she struggled to gain traction.

“They will spend an enormous amount of money fighting us. They will lie about what is in the program. They will frighten the American people,” he said.

But he says the time has arrived to have a debate he believes is fundamental: is healthcare a right or a privilege in America?

Sanders will formally unveil the bill at a press conference on Wednesday, with the backing of nearly a third of the Democratic caucus in the Senate – a record level of support for a bill he introduced just four years ago with only one signature, his own.

The Sanders plan would radically reform the American healthcare system, transitioning it over the course of four years to a federally administered insurance program.

What happens next? Well, Sanders has the AOC endorsement as well as $30+ million in the bank -- two very good things with about 100 days left until Iowa. The question now becomes: Does he have another issue on the campaign trail related to his health or age? If not, Sanders' heart attack might seem like a million years ago by the time Iowa Democrats turn out to vote in the caucuses. But if Sanders has any sort of problem between now and then, it's likely the end of his campaign.

Hillary Clinton started one of the strangest news cycles in the 2020 race at the end of the last week when she seemed to suggest that the Russians were "grooming" Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate. Gabbard, thrilled with the unexpected chance to battle with one of the biggest figures in the party, called Clinton the "queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

And yet, there are cracks. Over the weekend, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich announced that he supported the impeachment and removal of Trump. Florida Rep. Francis Rooney, a Republican, said he would consider impeaching Trump -- and then promptly announced his plan to retire from Congress in 2020.

1. The new Democratic front-runner ... now what?: There's a new top dog in the Democratic field: Elizabeth Warren. As Harry Enten and I noted in our brandnew rankings of the 10 Democrats most likely to wind up as the party's nominee, Warren has overtaken Biden not just in polling but also in money and organization. She also has the clearest path to be the nominee, with a polling and organizational edges in Iowa and a geographic connection in New Hampshire.

Warren's most obvious weakness -- from a policy perspective -- is on her ongoing unwillingness to state, clearly, whether or not middle-class families will see their taxes go up under her "Medicare for All" plan. The answer to that is almost certainly yes -- as Sanders, another "Medicare for All" proponent, acknowledged in the debate.  

Speaking to reporters in Conway, New Hampshire, on Sunday, Sanders said he was "very proud" to have Jayapal's endorsement while touting her advocacy of "Medicare for All."

The Sanders campaign also announced on Sunday that Jayapal will join the presidential hopeful in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday for a campaign rally.

With an impeachment trial looming in the Senate, the presence of high-profile surrogates on the campaign trail has taken on an added importance to senators like Sanders, Warren, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar

Meanwhile, primary rivals like former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg are free to campaign across Iowa.

"It's relatively new for Hillary to talk about that," Biden continued, acknowledging that Clinton has "come forward with some really thoughtful approaches to deal with the issue" of income inequality.

"Hillary's focus has been other things up to now, and that's been Bernie's -- no one questions Bernie's authenticity on those issues," he said.

Biden expressed little shock that Sanders was drawing ample support among Democrats, claiming that Sanders' self-identification as a socialist mattered little to his party's voters.

Vice President Joe Biden offered effusive praise for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders Monday, lauding Hillary Clinton's chief rival for doing a "heck of a job" on the campaign trail

you can limit who can own a gun, that people who are criminals shouldn't have guns,

"People who are schizophrenic and have mental illnesses shouldn't own guns. And he has said that."

Biden offered little praise for the leading Republican in the presidential race, saying Donald Trump would likely come to wish he hadn't used such disparaging language in this year's context.

"If Donald Trump gets the nomination and wins the election, if he's as smart as I think, he's going to regret having said the things he's said and done,

But Biden did reveal a longing for the campaign trail, a setting he occupied regularly for four decades as a U.S. senator,

The onetime prospect that Beau might have to resign as Delaware's attorney general, due to potential cognitive complications after a stroke, prompted a striking moment between Obama and the vice president, Biden recalled

"I think he probably will run," Hightower says, although he quickly notes that he may not be the only progressive candidate in the field. "There's a whole new dynamic sparked by Bernie's presidential run showing that people respond when something big and different and ethical comes their way."

"He looks younger today than he did four years ago," says Danny Fetonte, a retired labour union organiser from Austin who served as a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. "I think they'll have a very hard time stopping him."Jake Stevenson, a 20-year-old student at St Mary's University, said Mr Sanders was the first presidential candidate he voted for and the reason he chose to study political scienc

A young adult — a member of the demographic supposedly most sympathetic to socialism — who attended Sanders’s exegesis of socialism told the Times: “In America we embrace a lot of socialist policies already, like public education and parks.” This understanding of socialism as any government provision of public goods puts Horace Mann (1796-1859), an advocate of public education, and Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), designer of New York City’s Central Park, in the socialist pantheo

Many young people who supposedly are making socialism a “major force” think it is sociability: everyone being nice to everyone.

Sen. Elizabeth (“I have a plan for that”) Warren (D-Mass.), who describes herself as a “capitalist to my bones,” is a more authentic socialist than Sanders because she has more granular plans for government power (a.k.a. politics) to supplant market forces in the allocation of wealth and opportunity

Warren, in an illustration of her new willingness to bash Sanders, confirmed the report’s account.

“Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate,” Warren said in a statement about the meeting. “I said that a woman could win; he disagreed.”

“Let’s get real here: who’s going to beat Donald Trump? Every poll that you look at today of the nation shows that Joe Biden’s the only person that consistently beats him in every state except for a couple where he’s tied,” Kerry said. “Nobody else does that.”

Sanders on wages of US childcare workersSanders said America's childcare system "is an embarrassment, it is unaffordable," claiming that childcare workers take home lower paychecks than people working at McDonald's. "Childcare workers are making wages lower than McDonald's workers," Sanders said. Facts First: While some childcare workers undoubtedly make less than some McDonald's workers, US government data from 2018 shows that childcare workers took home a higher mean hourly salary than fast food workers.

Biden claimed President Donald Trump "weakened" sanctions against Pyongyang in his pursuit of meetings with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. "The President showed up, met with him, gave him legitimacy, weakened the sanctions we have against him," Biden said. Facts First: Trump has not weakened the sanctions his administration has placed on North Korea to date, and has in fact ratcheted them up from the Obama administration. Although Trump did once spark mass confusion among his aides when he tweeted he was ordering the removal of sanctions on Pyongyang that had not yet been imposed or even announced.

In defending her plan to build on the Affordable Care Act instead of pushing for the more sweeping Medicare for All plans proposed by her rivals, Klobuchar pointed out that more people support Obamacare than approve of President Donald Trump.

Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg asserted during the debate on Tuesday that the Trump administration admitted that the Iran nuclear deal was working before pulling out of it. Buttigieg said, "By gutting the Iran nuclear deal, one that, by the way, the Trump administration itself admitted was working, certified that it was preventing progress toward a nuclear Iran, by gutting that, they have made the region more dangerous and set off the chain of events that we are now dealing with as it escalates even closer to the brink of outright war." Facts First: This is basically true. By repeatedly recertifying the nuclear deal and waiving sanctions against Tehran as a result, the Trump administration effectively acknowledged that Iran was abiding by the terms of the deal even as the President publicly criticized it.

Sanders repeated his claim that NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China have cost the US "some 4 million jobs." "I am sick and tired," said Sanders as he drew a contrast with former Vice President Joe Biden, pointing to large multinational corporations that he says have reaped the benefits.Facts First: This is likely an overestimate of the impact trade agreements can have on the country's employment.

Biden repeated his false claim that he opposed the war in Iraq from the moment the war began. Biden said he made a "mistake" in casting a 2002 vote, as a senator from Delaware, to give President George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. But he said he cast the vote because the Bush administration had said "they were just going to get inspectors" into Iraq to check for weapons of mass destruction -- and that, once Bush actually went to war, he became immediately opposed: "From that point on, I was in the position of making the case that it was a big, big mistake." Facts First: As fact checkers have repeatedly noted, Biden did not oppose the war in Iraq from the point it started in March 2003. He did begin calling his 2002 vote a "mistake" in 2005, two years into the war, but he was a vocal public supporter of the war in 2003 and 2004. And he made clear in 2002 and 2003, both before and after the war started, that he had known he was voting to authorize a possible war, not only to try to get inspectors into Iraq

Biden said that President Donald Trump "flat-out lied" when he claimed the US killed Iran's top military general because he was targeting four US embassies. "Quite frankly, I think he's flat-out lied about saying that the reason he went after -- the reason he made the strike was because our embassies were about to be bombed," Biden said. Facts First: Trump has yet to provide evidence backing up his claim that Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani was actively planning new attacks against four US embassies and top administration officials have struggled to defend the President's comments. But there is no way to know if Trump "flat-out lied" without seeing the underlying intelligence, which remains classified.