Summary: Bernard Sanders and his toxic Berniebros are setting up the Democratic Party for another vicious, internecine battle just like the one they inflicted upon the Party in 2016. In 2016, the target of their toxic, misogynistic rage was Hillary Clinton. Now it is Pete Buttigieg. No matter where you go on social media, any news item or mention of Mayor Pete will be polluted by the ineluctable swarm of nasty, hateful, homophobic comments from Sanders supporters. It really is time to put an end to Bernard Sanders’s hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party.
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As the 2016 Democratic primary got underway, with Hillary Clinton quickly emerging as the prohibitive favorite of the Party, Bernard Sanders and his supporters made it very clear that they weren’t having any of it. On leading social media, whether Facebook or Twitter, the Berniebros unleashed a torrent of toxic, hateful misogyny and dog whistle racism.
Sanders, an ideologue of the “my way or the highway” school, made only minimal efforts to control the bad behavior of his supporters. Even when it had become mathematically impossible for Sanders to secure the Democratic nomination, he and his supporters continued their monthslong temper tantrum. When Hillary administered an epic shellacking to Sanders in primaries throughout the deep South, where, as the sometime First Lady to Bill Clinton, “America’s first black president,” she polled remarkably well among electorates of color, Sanders dismissed those results as being, in effect, just the votes of a bunch of uppity Negroes. When Sanders was called upon to explain how he had been instrumental in trying to poison the small African-American community of Barnwell, South Carolina and the minuscule Latino colonia of Sierra Blanca, Texas with nuclear waste from Vermont, he refused to do so.
When the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia nominated Hillary Rodham Clinton to be its candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Sanders was observed to be visibly pouting, and his supporters staged a walkout and a protest in front of the convention center, where they chanted Trump campaign slogans. Instead of committing wholeheartedly and full-throatedly to support the nominee of the Party, Sanders’s support for Sec. Clinton was pro forma, lukewarm, and utterly insincere.
The list of Sanders’s crimes against the Democratic Party in 2016 was lengthy and extensive. His supporters hacked a DNC database. When they were caught, and the party imposed mild, tepid, woefully non-deterrent sanctions, the Sanders campaign turned around and sued the DNC and its leadership. Bernard Sanders failed to reprove in any meaningful way his supporters who had made a pig’s breakfast of the Nevada caucuses, threatening death and other serious bodily harm to senior officials of the Nevada Democratic Party. His remonstrance to his supporters was, again, pro forma, lukewarm, and utterly insincere.
Moreover, as the delegate math made Sanders’s path to the Democratic nomination increasingly untenable, his supporters – with his tacit approval– eagerly fabricated and disseminated what the Germans might call a disinformation Dolchstoßlegende, in other words, a convenient narrative to excuse and exonerate the Sanders campaign for having lost the primary to Hillary Clinton by nearly 4 million votes. This convenient “stab in the back” narrative, accused the DNC and Hillary Clinton supporters of having “stolen” the nomination from Bernard Sanders by every nefarious means available.
This bit of information warfare was eagerly prosecuted by Russian asset Julian Assange through WikiLeaks, a notorious disseminator of Kremlin disinformation. The Dolchstoßlegende of the “stolen primary” was also eagerly and uncritically disseminated by such leftist media outlets as The Nation, the Intercept, Jacobin, and others, including the ridiculous H.A. Goodman writing in the Huffington Post. As much as the forming-at-the-mouth neo-Leninist, neo-Trotskyite militant tendencies of the left rallied to the support of the Burlington Bolshevik, so, too, did the campaign of Donald Trump. Indeed, the extent to which Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers enthusiastically and uncritically availed themselves of Trump talking points against Hillary became something of a scandal within the Democratic Party.
Following the nominating convention at Philadelphia, Sanders’s supporters continued eagerly and uncritically to repeat the Trump/WikiLeaks talking points against Sec. Clinton as if they were gospel. In short, Bernard Sanders and his toxic, redeless, mostly millennial followers did everything they could to harm Hillary Clinton, to harm the Democratic Party, and to make it abundantly clear that Bernard Sanders was, has been, and continues to be, a fifth column operator for Donald Trump.
Now in 2020, not satisfied with having stabbed Hillary Clinton in the back in the 2016 campaign, Bernard Sanders is trying to do it all over again. This time, however, his target is former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg. There is underway, an organized, coordinated, deliberate, open and notorious effort on the part of the Sanders campaign to conduct social media information warfare and agitprop against Mr. Buttigieg.
On every social media thread you can find that even mentions Pete Buttigieg, the hateful, toxic, dog whistle homophobic, obviously-coordinated-by-the-Sanders-campaign attacks are abundant. As in 2016, Sanders and his supporters have eagerly fabricated anew what the Germans would call ein anderer neues Doschstoßlegende, another new, convenient, “we wuz robbed,” stab-in-the-back narrative intended to exonerate or excuse any poorer than expected performance in any given contest in which Sanders is a participant.
For Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers have constructed a mythos of his divine right entitlement to victory in any democratic electoral contest in which his name is on a ballot or a presidential preference card.(referencing, of course, the utterly clusterfucked Iowa caucuses, which ought to be abolished) If Sanders is not victorious in these particular contests, his campaign quickly whips up a set of talking points, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks. The anger of the Sanders campaign at the effrontery of voters who choose other candidates is palpable and Trumpian.
Following the Iowa caucuses, Sanders and his people lashed out at Mayor Pete because Mayor Pete had been an Uppity Enough Homosexual to claim victory, a perfectly reasonable undertaking given how the trendlines and numbers were pointing ineluctably in that direction. The Sanders people threw an earsplitting snit, largely because they had expected to run away with the Iowa caucuses and were pipped at the post by That Uppity Homosexual from South Bend. After all, how dare a “gay dude from Mike Pence’s Indiana” intrude on territory reserved by Divine Right for the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik?
Now, with the New Hampshire primary just three days away, we can expect the Sanders people to enable their candidate’s usual narcissistic, Trumpian behavior. We may expect more and nastier attacks on Buttigieg, on Warren, on Biden, and on just about every other Democratic candidate who doesn’t bend the knee and acknowledge the Divine Right of Bernard Sanders to the nomination.
Unfortunately for him, Bernard Sanders is not a Democrat. His disdain for the Democratic Party is a matter of public record. His numbers in Iowa were less than half of his numbers in 2016, and Buttigieg looks to be surging in New Hampshire. If Pete Buttigieg grabs the New Hampshire primary, perhaps Bernie Sanders’s head will explode, and/or the one or two relatively rational people in his campaign will prevail upon him to suspend his campaign rather than continue to act as some kind of fifth column for Donald Trump.
Sadly, that will probably not happen. As toxic as Sanders’s grassroots ground troops are, the inner circle of his campaign is just as bad, if not worse. They are “loyalists” in the worst, most Trumpian sense of that word. They don’t act as guardrails to keep the Independent Vermont senator within the bounds of rational discourse and defensible policy; instead, they enable all of his worst, neo-Leninist, most doctrinaire impulses. Just the thought of someone like Nina Turner occupying a senior post in a Sanders administration is enough to make a lot of Democrats break out in hives.
In short, Bernard Sanders and his neo-Bolshevik campaign are becoming shopworn, tiresome, and a positive danger to the United States.
The Democratic Party should have had enough of Bernard Sanders four years ago. We were damned fools to let this interloper run to be the candidate of a party of which he is not a member. Enough!
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is a loyal, i.e. non-Sanders, Democrat and an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the city Council. Mr. Marchand also served for 10 years on the Riverside County Democratic Central committee, a hotbed of constipated ineffectuality. To avoid California’s unbelievably arcane and Byzantine conflict of interest laws, with their often conflicting compliance mandates, he practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. Knowing as he does the nastiness and vindictiveness of Bernard Sanders, which are equal in every measure to those of Donald Trump, he expects to be attacked, on digital media, by toxic, pugnacious, petulant, peevish Sanders supporters. Those supporters should be warned, if they descend to the death threats they used during the 2016 Nevada caucuses, Mr. Marchand is armed, cranky, and prepared to be dangerous. The views contained herein are his own, unless you like them, in which case they can be yours, too.
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