This is completely out of control
If the Democratic nominee ends up being just a bag of fire ants, we should all go door to door campaigning for the fire ants. We have that much of a moral imperative to defeat Donald Trump in 2020 and replace him with someone who’s, you know, not Donald Trump. The trouble is, we’ve got a crisis erupting within the Democratic primary race, and it’s rapidly spiraling so out of control, it could cost us everything. In fact it could cost one candidate everything, if he doesn’t do something about it.
In 2016 and again in 2020, Bernie Sanders has had two entirely distinct support bases. He’s had the feel-good foot stompers who really just want the nation to shift in a progressive direction, and more power to them. But Bernie’s other base consists of rabid trolls and tinfoil hat conspiracy lunatics who think their job is to dishonestly and psychotically destroy anyone who gets in Bernie’s way.
As the 2016 primary went on and Bernie fell behind by millions of votes, he started to embrace his goon squad more and more. As a result, many of Bernie’s feel-good supporters have abandoned him, and his 2020 campaign is dominated by the goon squad. To give you an idea of how Bernie feels about all of this, he took some of the most notorious outside goons and trolls who supported him in 2016, and hired them as campaign advisers in 2020. One of them in particular (name rhymes with “Savid Dirota”) pretty much just goes around and trolls journalists and pundits all day. So Bernie can’t pretend he doesn’t approve of this kind of behavior, when it’s coming directly from his own campaign advisers in plain sight.
But hey, candidates all have a few bad supporters in the mix, and plenty of them even have a few bad people working for them, right? The trouble is, with the Bernie 2020 campaign, the bad eggs aren’t the exception; at this point they’re so pervasive, Bernie’s reasonable supporters are starting to become the exception. This has gotten so out of control,Bernie’s fans in New Hampshire were seen booing other Democratic candidates during their speeches, to try to prevent them from speaking. In the days since New Hampshire, the whole thing has gotten much worse.
This week the Culinary Union in Nevada issued a statement about why it doesn’t support Medicare For All. In response, Bernie’s goon squad began sending profane and threatening communications to various union workers, which were then shared widely online. Oddly enough, this was right around the same time that Bernie’s surrogates began admitting that Medicare For All will never get through Congress anyway. But hey, let’s harass a bunch of union workers because they raised concerns about the viability of that same Bernie proposal.
Bernie was then prompted to release a generic statement saying that he doesn’t support this kind of thing – but he also threw in the assertion that the people doing this goon squad stuff are probably just pretending to be his supporters anyway. He might deserve some benefit of the doubt on this, if his own campaign advisers weren’t leading the charge on so much of the trolling. Today in particular, things have hit the fan.
Take Fred Guttenberg, for instance. He’s the Parkland father who lost his daughter two years ago this week, and who has spent these past two years working tirelessly in support of gun control reform. The guy’s a hero. He hasn’t endorsed anyone in the 2020 Democratic primary yet, but this week he dared to say something positive about Mike Bloomberg’s gun control efforts. In response, Bernie’s goon squad harassed him so viciously, he ended up posting this:
Anyone who follows me knows that I have not yet endorsed anyone. In the past few days I have shared my positive thoughts on @MikeBloomberg, @JoeBiden, @PeteButtigie, and @amyklobuchar. The person I will not support, endorse, or help is @BernieSanders. Why? While Bloomberg, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar focus positive campaigns as alternatives to Trump, Bernie is running against the Dem party and did so last night in Vegas. Bernie supporters will go full Trump on me for this. I do not care. He will cost the Dems the election.
That’s right, Bernie’s worsening goon squad is now costing Bernie support – at a time when he’s in a tight primary race. He’s far from the only one. Longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum has also had enough. A group called “New York Communities for Change” showed up to a Joe Biden event holding a coffin, insisting that his campaign was dead. Considering how many family members Biden has tragically had to bury, this is just beyond the pale. Shrum called the group out accordingly:
This is Trumpism on the left. And I’m a progressive Democrat. It’s obscene and debases you as you assault a man who has lost a wife and two children in the most painful ways. I denounce you; Sanders should too.
Bernie’s supporters also spent today pushing the absurd claim that Pete Buttigieg campaign adviser Lis Smith has allegedly been masquerading as a Buttigieg supporter from Nigeria. It took BuzzFeed and others just a short time to track down the actual Buttigieg supporter from Nigeria, thus proving that the guy wasn’t secretly Lis Smith. But so many Bernie fans pushed this nonsense, her name ended up trending on Twitter. Meanwhile, some obscure Buttigieg fan in Nigeria with a handful of Twitter followers is being harassed up and down today by Bernie’s hit squad.
You may be tempted to point out that none of these groups are officially associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign. But these groups are carrying out their psychotic antics in Bernie’s name, and – apart from a generic statement in which he basically painted himself as a victim – Bernie isn’t doing anything to try to stop it.
Either Bernie Sanders knows he can’t win without the “help” of his increasingly deranged goon squad, or he’s afraid his own rabid goons will turn against him if he tries to rein them in. Either way, Bernie is now siding with his goon squad over his remaining feel-good supporters who just wanted some progressive legislative reform. Bernie’s candidacy has become a parody of itself. Issues like Medicare For All are no longer nearly as important to Bernie movement, as is the need to arbitrarily destroy anyone who doesn’t worship Bernie.
Bernie Sanders and his goon squad are dishonestly damaging every other Democratic candidate, meaning any of them will have a harder time in the general election than they should. And because Bernie and his goons are quickly destroying his reputation in the eyes of everyone outside his base, his odds of winning the nomination are now dropping by the hour. Can Bernie show an ounce of leadership and pull his campaign out of the gutter, or is he content to try to take the entire Democratic field down with him?
