The Democratic Party is being peak Democratic Party right now, and everyone is noticing. It wasn’t enough coming off the 2016 election cycle, one that started with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (otherwise known as the DNC) rigging a primary against Bernie Sanders, only to turn around and blame her loss to Donald Trump by… an election getting rigged by Russia. You really can’t make this shit up.

Last Monday the Iowa Caucuses took place, the first state that votes in the Democratic Primary. While Bernie Sanders won the popular vote (by more than 6,000), it was actually Pete Buttigieg who brought home more pledged delegates. Democracy, everybody! This, on the heels of the final Iowa/De Moines Register poll getting scrapped because the Buttigieg campaign complained, and another 48 hours of the caucus results not getting fully released. It’s has to be the strangest thing I’ve seen in my five or six years of closely following politics.

Coming off the 2016 charade that was the Democratic Primary, it’s hard not to feel a little cynical about all of this. I mean, all the latest polls before the caucuses took place had Bernie Sanders leading Iowa by between 5 and 10 points, and then all of a sudden the final poll wasn’t released, and then all of a sudden there was a problem with the app that recorded the results. This is not my conspiracy brain trying to twist into pretzels an explanation for why the DNC is screwing my preferred candidate. It’s what actually happened, and it’s at the very least sketchy, and at the very most a deliberate attempt to suppress future voter turnout.

Put another way: If the Iowa Caucus results were favorable to any of Buttigieg, Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, is there any way the DNC would have postponed the results? If Sanders finished in 3rd or 4th place, how long would it have taken the mainstream media to call on Bernie to drop out of the race?

Regardless of the answers to those questions, what we do know is that Bernie won the popular vote. We know he is favored to win in New Hampshire (the second primary state) and Nevada (the third primary state), and according fivethirtyeight Sanders is favored to win all of California, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, Maine, and Vermont on Super Tuesday… and pretty much everything else. In other words, if the Democratic Party wants to defeat Bernie, they are going to have to steal it from him (again).

By now you might be wondering why this article is about Michael Bloomberg. I’ll tell you why: Bloomberg exists in this primary not because he is interested in winning, or being President of the United States. He isn’t. Michael Bloomberg is around simply to soak up enough delegates to stop Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination on the first ballot.

You see, Bernie has enough small dollar donations (from people like me, and average Americans across the country) to hang in there through a general election against Donald Trump. Full disclosure, I donate $27 a month to the Sanders campaign, a symbolic number as that was his average contribution in 2016. This time around, in 2020, Bernie’s average donation is only $18. Tiny money like that may not seem like very much, but when you have over a million people around the United States every month doing the same thing, it adds up.

Michael Bloomberg is not shackled by such small-ball cash. On the contrary. Bloomberg is worth something in the neighborhood of $60 billion, and that’s billion with a B. By the middle of December he had already spent over a whopping $100 million on campaign ads, and according to the New York Times he plans on doubling his ad spending moving forward. Yes, we are talking about a guy who is so fucking rich that he has already spent more money on ads — via television, radio, podcast, Hulu, Snapchat and everything else under the sun — than any other Democratic candidate has raised in about a year on the campaign trail.

All of this might sound like fair game — because the rules do, for some reason, allow it — but there is no mistaking that Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. That doesn’t mean he’s going to win, because of course he is not going to be able to defeat Bernie Sanders by sheer numbers (whether it’s voters or delegates), but then again winning voters or delegates is not Bloomberg’s goal. His goal is to make sure Bernie Sanders doesn’t have enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination.

So you might ask yourself, if Bloomberg has no intention of winning, why would he try to stop a Sanders nomination?

For starters, the writing is on the wall. Billionaires tend to be smart guys. They are surrounded by smart people. They know if Bernie Sanders goes up against Trump head-to-head that Bernie is going to win, most likely in embarrassing fashion. Bloomberg has already admitted as much. And if Bernie wins, the billionaires know that he will raise the shit out of their taxes. Billionaires fund both political parties, and they only care about one thing: tax cuts. They want to retain as much of their money as possible, so it’s a good bet on their behalf to contribute massive sums of money to both Republicans and Democrats to ensure that neither party will come after their money. The way to come after their money is through higher taxes (which go to healthcare, education, infrastructure, et. al).

Many of my conservative and liberal friends try to tell me that the Democrats are moving too far to the left, but that isn’t the case at all. I have said and will continue saying that the Democratic Party establishment would prefer a second Trump term to a Sanders presidency, and it’s obvious. When Trump is in office, the Democrats can pretend to be against something without having to be for anything. This way, the status quo is maintained and both parties continue living off the gravy train of corruption.

If Bernie ever got into office, he wouldn’t be catering to the billionaires who fund both parties. Instead he would only be beholden to his donors, who happen to be everyday working Americans. (Sanders has received the most donations of any candidate, by a mile, from public school teachers, Amazon workers, Wal Mart employees, and Starbucks workers.) Not sure if you know, but ordinary people making $35,000 or $40,000 a year do not have the same goals in mind as the Michael Bloomberg’s and Jeff Bezos’ of the world. All they want are tax cuts. All we want are a shot at the American dream.

How do I know that I’m right? Notwithstanding the Iowa debacle, the DNC has bent their own rules to allow Bloomberg on the debate stage in a couple weeks. While all the other candidates were forced to meet specific thresholds — whether it be a polling average, or an arbitrary number of individual contributions — Michael Bloomberg simply paid $300,000 to the DNC and poof! He made it on the debate stage.

This is obviously ridiculous, and obviously as undemocratic as it gets, but it goes a long way in explaining just where the establishment of Democratic Party is. They are absolutely fine with bending the rules for billionaire Michael Bloomberg so long as he shares in their ambition to thwart Bernie Sanders from being the Democratic nominee. Would Bloomberg be offloading several hundred million dollars of his own money if, say, Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg was the frontrunner? Of course not. Because he knows if either of them were going to square off against Trump in 2020, it would be a win-win: whether Trump or Biden/Buttigieg were President, Bloomberg’s money would be protected.

Above all else Bloomberg’s campaign is an investment. The billion or two billion dollars he spends running for President are only a drop in the bucket compared to the multiple billions of dollars he would be taxed if Sanders ever makes it into office. Trump and other Republicans have tried, and will try, to scare regular workers into thinking Bernie is going to take all their money away from them. The reality is taxes aren’t going to go up for anyone making less than $250,000 a year. If that’s you, then I’m sorry. But I’m guessing if you are reading this then you will be more than okay with dickheads like Michael Bloomberg who have more money than god paying a few extra bucks in taxes every year.

Never forget, the reason the American people can’t have nice things — whether it’s decent healthcare or affordable college — is because incredibly wealthy individuals like Michael Bloomberg have bought out the American government. Working people can’t get the healthcare they desire, or the education they need, or the Social Security benefits they deserve, due to the fact that for any of those items to become a reality it would require the billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes. But since the ultra-rich pay top dollar to corrupt our politicians, the politicians then turn around and take care of them, forever shunning the American worker and his or her needs.

Bernie Sanders represents the poor and working classes. He is literally the only threat to the wealthy that exists in this ever important year for politics, and as a consequence he is the enemy of anyone or anything that stands to lose from his presidency. Those that stand to lose the most are the ones who already have tens or hundreds of millions — or billions — of dollars in the bank. It should tell you something that they are going to such lengths to ensure that anybody but Senator Sanders is running against Donald Trump in 2020. Bernie is the only credible threat (sorry Yang Gang).

Winning isn’t going to be easy. If we’ve learned anything over the last four years it’s that the Democratic Party is willing and able to stop a Sanders insurgency, and if we’ve learned anything from the last few months, it’s that the Democratic Party is willing to allow a billionaire into the race if it means diminishing the chances of a Sanders presidency. The establishment have all the money on their side, and they definitely have the mainstream news on their side. Bernie has only what he needs: the people.

My best guess is that Sanders wins in New Hampshire next week, and then goes on to win Nevada a couple weeks after that. If momentum means as much this year as it typically does, then that means Bernie has a shot in South Carolina, before going on to a crushing win streak across a bevy of Super Tuesday states (including California) all over the country. At that point this race turns rather elementary: either the DNC and Democratic Party establishment try to steal the nomination away from him, or they get behind Michael Bloomberg’s spoiler campaign.

If, from my bird’s eye view, I know the elites as well as I think I do, then it will probably be door number two. Remember, the Democratic Party (like the Republican Party) is funded by billionaires. They don’t give a shit about you or your problems. The mainstream media — the “news” people you see on Fox and CNN and MSNBC — are all millionaires who are funded by billionaires. They all have contempt for a potential Sanders presidency, because they are paid to have contempt for everyday working Americans. You already know they have no respect for you, since they don’t really ever report news that has an impact on your life.

That’s why the news spends virtually no time talking about climate change. It’s why they will talk to you for two years straight about Russia even though nothing meaningful ever came out of it. It’s why they spend hours upon hours talking about the Trump impeachment case even though it was always a dead end — being that the Republicans have a majority in the Senate. Car chases, mass shootings, some fact-free bullshit that Hillary Clinton said about Bernie Sanders, or something Trump tweeted out. None of it has anything to do with you.

They don’t ever talk about how the banks are charging people too much interest on credit cards, or how the drug manufacturing industry continually raises prices on medication, or how people are working multiple jobs just to pay the rent, or how 70 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. And, of course, they don’t spend much time discussing how the planet is literally dying right now. I don’t care what news you watch, it isn’t really the news.

You think Michael Bloomberg is going to solve any of your problems? Fuck no. But when the rubber meets the road, and Bloomberg is the only one left that can come between a Bernie Sanders nomination in the Democratic Party, all those millionaires you see on TV are going to be begging you to fall in line behind the guy worth $60 billion over the candidate who has an agenda that helps the needs of working Americans.

I am not the smartest person, but I do have a tendency to do or think the exact opposite of what places like Fox News, or CNN, or MSNBC try to push on me. And when just about every millionaire and billionaire is on one side of an issue — the issue of stopping Bernie Sanders — it doesn’t take me long to question why they are so afraid of him.