I’ve been away from Daily Kos for the past 10 days. I intended it to be longer, because kos has made it more explicit than ever that he believes independent citizens have no business attempting to influence the policies or nominations of the Democratic Party; declare yourself a Democrat, he says, join your local party, work from inside to change it, or begone. Well, I have been and remain an independent, so who am I to stay where I’m not wanted?
But then this incident happened—an illustration of how insurgents are often greeted when they do join the party and try to change it from within. And since it appears to have gone completely largely unreported here, except to paint Sanders supporters in a bad light, which should surprise no one, I felt I needed to return in order to share it.
Two things occurred; one led to the other. But I’m going to lead with the second one first, because it’s the greater outrage: a white, elderly, male delegate for Hillary Clinton allegedly first slapped a young, PoC, female delegate for Bernie Sanders, then hit her with his cane, then hurled a homophobic taunt at her.
Her first-person account of the incident doesn’t appear to be on YouTube, so I can’t embed it, but it’s viewable on Facebook here.
So as I was running down the aisle, this old, white man with a cane decided to take his hand and slap me and say, “Sit down, behave.” To which point I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is insane. You can't just hit a woman. You can’t just hit me like that.” . . . I told a couple staffers, and then when they looked at the guy, they were like, “Who?” And when I pointed at the guy, they were like, “Oh, he's old, he’s harmless, just let it go.” . . .
I decided not to let it go, and I went to my friend, and I told her what happened . . . and she was like, “Let’s confront him.” So we went back to the guy, and I said, “Don't you ever touch me again.”
[sound of smack]
And that’s on camera. . . .
It wasn't a great experience, and what I learned that day is that we still have a ton of work to do. This was a Democratic Party event, in New York, one of the most progressive states in this country. . . . Think about how this event was supposed to be for the first woman president. And someone, a young woman, me, I was assaulted.
The last portion of the exchange between Ahmed and the delegate is on YouTube:
Moumita Ahmed: Don’t ever fucking touch me again.
[sound of smack]
Delegate: You don't like touching guys?
Woman with smartphone: Ohhhhhhhh . . . ohhhhhhh . . .
Delegate: Why don’t you sit down?
So why was Moumita Ahmed running through the aisle in the first place?
Because of a disregard of parliamentary procedure.
In the Facebook video, she recounts how nominations were taken for chair of the New York delegates to the Democratic convention, and the first person nominated was Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Then the chairman of the meeting, Michael Reich, immediately said, “All in favor of closing the nomination, raise your hands,” while other members of the meeting were still calling to be recognized in order to make motions to nominate from the floor.
A show of hands was taken, which did not appear to be nearly sufficient to call the question (under conventional parliamentary procedure, closing nominations requires a two-thirds vote). Nevertheless, Reich closed nominations anyway, to the sound of boos.
A Sanders delegate, Nomiki Konst, rushed up front to take a microphone and raise an objection. Reich ordered the mike cut.
From the YouTube video:
We trained. We follow the rules. We met. We did our motions. There were 10, 15 motions. And then he ignores the motions. So I come up, and this guy’s told to cut the mike. You know, in mock trial, in model U.N., you grab the mike to do a motion, so that’s what I did. . . .
I used to play nice with these people. I used to play nice with them. But I saw them treating others like this for far too long, and we just saw it in a very public way. . . . They’re causing problems for no reason.
You can’t change the system from within if the people operating the system are willing to disregard their own rules of order to block you.
I know kos is no great fan of Andrew Cuomo. Well, kos, what we see here is the machine that promotes and perpetuates Andrew Cuomos. This is what makes many of us want to see proof that the Democratic Party is changing before we swear our fealty to it. This is why we think shutting independents out of the nominating and policymaking process is bad for the Democratic Party, bad for democracy and bad for the country.
Also, it leaps out at me that while one reported incident—later debunked—of a Sanders supporter allegedly throwing chairs in Nevada brought on a category 5 shitstorm here at Daily Kos, this incident of assault recorded on camera, which took place two days ago, has produced . . . crickets. Nary a peep, nary a murmur. Will Clinton partisans step up to either defend this delegate’s actions or condemn it? Or will they pretend there’s nothing to see here?
“There is a time and place for everything,” Greg Dworkin wrote yesterday. I respectfully disagree. I submit that there is no time or place for the kind of chicanery and casual violence we see here.
Moumita Ahmed has filed a police report against the delegate, who has been identified as Nicholas Silitch of Washington County.