Summary: Bernard Sanders’s campaign for the presidency of the United States has become an abomination. It is not even overmatched by the profoundly ugly campaign of Donald Trump. The Senators supporters have demonstrated a combination of hatefulness, defensiveness, and wishful thinking that is offputting to an increasingly large number of American voters. There is an orchestrated effort among Sanders supporters to drive off of social media those who do not succumb to their blandishments or parrot their ridiculous views. I’m sorry, Bernie, but your supporters, and your failure to keep them under control, has caused me to disdain you, and to wish ill of your campaign.
Bernard Sanders’s campaign for the presidency of the United States has become an abomination, surrounded and supported as it is by a legion of assholes who make Donald Trump’s Legion of Assholes look tame.
It has become a commonplace in the United States that if you want to start a fight, say anything at all that any thin-skinned supporter of Bernard Sanders might find it even remotely offensive, and it will guarantee you a raft of nastiness, cyber bullying, and outrage from the unhinged legions of the Leninist loudmouth from Burlington. Indeed, it is becoming apparent that supporters of the Vermont Senator have been engaged in an orchestrated campaign to suppress the speech of anyone with whom they disagree. They have been assisted in this effort by such entities as Facebook, an organization for which I have little use, because its practices and its so-called community standards are nothing more than a vehicle for suppressing the speech of reasonable people, while facilitating treason, sedition, and all round nastiness among organizations and individuals whom Facebook deems worthy of not having their speech censored. I hate Facebook.
I’ve also, and more’s the pity, begun to entertain a real personal antipathy not only toward Sen. Sanders’s supporters, but also toward the senator himself. I had not wanted to be angry at Bernie. I had thought that he was a breath of fresh air in this election season. I had thought, and to some extent still think, that he was doing God’s work, as it were, to pull Hillary Clinton to the left, because, as some time Texas agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower has put it “there ain’t nothin’ in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.”
But as the Vermont Senator’s road to nomination has become steeper and narrower, as Hillary Clinton continues to maintain a solid delegate lead and to hold on to her status as a prohibitive front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination, both the senator and his supporters have become more strident, more prone to magical thinking, and more intolerant of any views or expressions that do not accord with their own, or which do not advance the cult of personality which is so evidently beginning to emerge from the Bernard Sanders campaign.
This phenomenon has been noted by numerous political commentators. It is been described, dissected, and held up to popular scrutiny. Is caused otherwise reasonable journalists like Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi to abandon even the pretense of critical thinking and enthusiastically to repeat discredited conspiracy theories and calumnies against Hillary Clinton that were dreamed up in the fever swamps of the Republican right. But God help you if you call Matt Taibbi on such things, or if you suggest that people like the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald might have potentially impure motivations.
Because if you do, the Sanders people will be after you like a savage horde of cannibals going after a missionary. They will abuse you in highly personal terms on social media, but if you complain to Facebook, Facebook, which is totally in the tank for Sanders, will take the side of your abusers and cast you into the outer darkness, banning you without any means of protesting the ban. Facebook, in short, has availed itself of the same kind of opaque mechanisms as did the apartheid regime in South Africa 30 years back. I had not thought possible that Mark Zuckerberg and P.W. Botha could be brothers under the skin, but apparently they are.
Consequently, I have fallen so completely out of love with Bernie Sanders that, while I will vote blue no matter who, I won’t give him one ounce of support beyond voting for him in the general election if he is the nominee. I will hold my nose hard and mark the ballot for him, but that’s it. But I will certainly work very hard to make sure that he is not the nominee of the Democratic Party. Because Bernie Sanders’s supporters have managed to rouse in me a spirit of revenge and anger, and in a lot of ways, that’s the best possible motivator. I will run, not walk, into Hillary Clinton’s embrace, and I will say to the Sanders supporters: fuck you, you did this. You did it for me, and you did it for countless others, too. You have been some of the best recruiters for Hillary that anyone could imagine. If for no other reason than her nomination to the presidency will give us enormous pleasure as we watch all of Sanders’s Legion of Assholes get well and truly put down.
Because it won’t be enough for me to unfriend Sanders supporters on Facebook, if I ever return to that place. It won’t be enough for me to snub Sanders supporters in public, and it won’t be enough for me to contribute what I can to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. I want to see Sen. Sanders beaten and badly, because he can’t keep control of a group of thoroughly obnoxious people. They will know you by the company you keep and by the supporters you encourage, and Bernie has lost me because of his supporters. And my falling out with him is as poisonous as any falling out can be. You wouldn’t let me love you, Bernie. Because you wouldn’t let me love you, I can only disdain you.
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