It was those silencing dissent that handed 2024 to Trump, not those making legitimate critiques during an election and being told to shut up by people who weren’t bothered by their own tacit support for genocides: That is a fundamentally losing approach to elections. And everything we have regarding the 2024 post mortem shows this to be the case.

Demanding voters shut up and fall in line during an election? Its an extraordinarily anti-Democratic, and a fundamentally anti-american sentiment. Americans, as a people, will practically always resent being told what to do. They are willful like a toddler is willful, often times to their own detriment. Do what you are doing here, and you push voters away from your preferred party.

It’s also a fundamentally anti Democratic sentiment, and this is something Democrats need to do far more work to address, because time and time again, they show themselves to be a highly anti-Democratic party. The Hillary campaign and DWS as dnc chair in 2016, where DNC attorney Bruce Spiva argued to the supreme Court that the party had the right to: “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way”. Then their sabatoging of Bernie in 2020, their coronation of Biden and then Harris in 2024, I mean shit, the more recent Mayors race in NYC, and just about every primary where a now leading candidate was being being attacked by the corporate power structurs within the DNC. Democrats as leadership and as a party do not respect the democratic process. Leadership is willing to weight the scales, and voter accept and expect this.

Democrats have a severe problem with both the act and the idea of democracy. And by agreeing with my opponent in this debate, you are showing a preference for an authorarian, anti Democratic, and in my opinion, fundamentally anti American form of politics.