Less than two years after liberal New York City mayor Bill De Blasio unveiled his Soros-backed Progressive Agenda for America, the website is offline: a tribute to how well his progressive plans played out in the 2016 presidential election.
In May 2015, De Blasio hosted a group of fellow left-wingers at his home to formulate a Progressive Agenda for America. The Agenda backers were tied to at least $159 million from left-wing billionaire George Soros. But the Progressive Agenda’s website went offline sometime after September 2017 and liberals are now turning against De Blasio, Politico reported on Dec. 26.
“As long as they’re talking off the record, many Democratic leaders and operatives will trash de Blasio. They think he’s smug. Annoying. In it for himself without any follow-through. The rap on de Blasio is that he likes to make a lot of noise but doesn’t like to do a lot of work, that he has an oversize sense of his own importance,” Politico Chief Washington Correspondent Isaac Dovere wrote.
The original supporters for De Blasio’s agenda included George Soros’ son Jonathan Soros, Nation Magazine publisher Katrina Vanden Heuvel, liberal CNN political commentator and host Van Jones and others. In all, those who helped De Blasio draft the Progressive Agenda were tied to more than $159 million in donations from Soros.
The agenda called for universal free pre-kindergarten, a progressive tax where the wealthiest have to pay a higher percentage and a $15 minimum wage. The agenda was supposed to be a “set of line-in-the-sand principles that progressives, and their candidates in 2016, could rally around,” Rolling Stone reported in May 2015.
But the Progressive Agenda Twitter page stopped tweeting on April 12, 2016 and the agenda’s website, progressiveagenda.us, only displays an error page saying “Website is Offline.” The last archived page of the website is from September 2017, while new content hadn’t been posted since January 2016.
The Progressive Agenda’s failure seems to mirror the failure of liberals in general in the 2016 presidential election. De Blasio however blamed Clinton’s loss on being left-wing enough.
“I was telling them they needed to have a clear progressive populist message, and they had to believe it. If they had, they would have won. I stand by it,” De Blasio told Politico.
