Yesterday Bernie Sanders announced that he was running for president in 2020, which of course garnered a variety of reactions: His base was excited (donating over $4 million on the first day, from over 300,000 people); liberals, predictably, went for a variety of personal attacks toward him and his supporters, but this time around, with Sanders as the front-runner going in and not a crank outsider simply trying to draw attention to key issues against a pre-anointed nominee, the viciousness has become both more overt and explicitly racist.
Of course, you have the usual suspects– in what I’m sure is a coincidence, it’s almost entirely white women with cushy professional jobs and multiple expensive residences– doing their usual attempts at identity weaponization, throwing around “old white guy” to denigrate Sanders and pretending, once again, that his supporters are all well-off white men. (The latest: serial liar, racist plagiarist, and all-around virulent person Amanda Marcotte, although Soledad O’Brien was notable for pushing a lie then doubling down that the people who disagreed with her are “fake black people.“) I guess erasing the voices of minorities who don’t agree with them and then claiming the people who disagree with them are all white men isn’t just for white liberals anymore.
the white liberals snarking on "white bros" aren't doing so in the name of solidarity with everyone else.
they're doing it to assert their superiority over other white people.
— koholint island yacht club 🏳️🌈 🌺 (@disco_socialist) February 19, 2019
Then there’s also the usual weird psychosexual projection, where Sanders is somehow the worst ex-boyfriend you’ve ever had (see Amanda Marcotte, again), or otherwise, policy and politics amount to good and bad (and sometimes indeterminate) sexual experiences, nothing more:
I think we all know what happens when men base their politics solely on the sexual rejection they've experienced but the "everyone i disagree with is a bro" thing is absolutely the result of women doing that
— Cloacal Kiss 💋 (@victoriaxxviii) February 6, 2019
You're right, Bernie Sanders is exactly like that guy that did that thing to you in college
— Cloacal Kiss 💋 (@victoriaxxviii) February 19, 2019
(I would post more, but my brain hurts already from searching for those.)
But what’s really fascinating is how some of the people closest to the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign have bypassed any sort of political arguments against Sanders and have jumped straight into the anti-Semitic tropes, decrying Sanders as greedy, thieving, sneaky, duplicitous, a foreign infiltrator, a backstabber, and the like.
Here’s Adam Parkhomenko, National Field Director for Hillary 2016, a man who pledged his life to Hillary Clinton at age 17 and volunteers as a cop on the weekends, engaging in some classic anti-Semitic tropes, along with his response when Jewish people tell him his rhetoric is anti-Semitic:
Tom Watson, founder of Hillary Men and someone who already compared a Sanders rally to a Nazi rally and implied Bernie is a (((sneaky infiltrator))):
You actually compared a Bernie rally to a Hitler rally. You are trash, Tom Watson. pic.twitter.com/kjWIs3hbBj
— beth, here for it (@bourgeoisalien) December 9, 2017
Tom Watson co-founded 'Hillary Men' with Peter Daou. He spends an inordinate amount of his time on Twitter smearing Bernie Sanders.
So, when we see vile tweets like the one yesterday about falsely accusing Sanders to get rid of him, please remember the hate comes from the top. pic.twitter.com/FKSKmlHJV6
— beth, here for it (@bourgeoisalien) December 9, 2017
Watson with some more attacks yesterday upon the announcement:
Deeply troubled by the ice cream Jews. pic.twitter.com/UIIZrUigqb
— Goy Division/Jew Order (@ben_geier) February 20, 2019
Feel free to read his timeline; it’s all nakedly dishonest attacks on Sanders, many of which rely on the anti-Semitic trope of being a traitor in league with shadowy foreign powers.
(It’s a good time to remember that Watson was a close friend, promoter, and fundraiser for Al Giordano, another notorious anti-Bernie crank / attempted Senate challenger, and who was revealed to be a grifter, an abusive boss who stole the work of his charges, and a sex predator. Watson has never answered for his role in promoting this man and will block anyone who brings it up to him.)
And someone who seems like a nobody, but has been well-connected and well-promoted enough to stand out even among the weird hanger-on cult that is still angling for well-paid pundit or think-tank jobs, “Mr. Weeks”:
i’ve got a couple of resistance type mufos who follow @MrDane1982 and i just want you all to know that he’s really, unapologetically anti-semitic. pic.twitter.com/fTqbEPrMyH
— isaiah breen (friends call me isi) (@isaiah_kb) February 20, 2019
Guy gets RTs from Debra Messing, Joy Reid. He literally got a letter from Hillary praising his work “defending her on social media.”
— Goy Division/Jew Order (@ben_geier) February 20, 2019
His supporters are just as bad.
Brace yourselves. After Hillary Clinton ran an explicitly racist campaign against Obama in 2008, and with her supporters blaming Sanders for being insufficiently loyal to Infallible Her Whose Turn It Was in 2016, they no longer have any pretense or reason to hold back; they’re going to use everything in their playbook to tear down the (((greedy traitor.)))
It’s the classic dirty trick: Deny everything and accuse your critics of the things you’re doing. The Hillary Clinton campaign had a bot network funded for the purpose of attacking Sanders supporters. But it’s Bernie voters who are bots and Russian operatives. (Russia, of course, being scapegoated for Clinton’s loss by a campaign and candidate who didn’t want to take responsibility for their own shortcomings less than 24 hours after the loss, according to Shattered.) The Clinton campaign invented “Bernie Bros” and pitched it to reporters after “Obama Boys” didn’t stick in 2008. Clinton supporters are some of the most abusive online, but “Bernie Bros” are unique in that regard. A lie we hear over and over again.
Since Centrists always complain about “Bernie-bros” here, i decided to compile a list of tweets over the past years to show how kind and loving these people can be 🙂 pic.twitter.com/IwFCIWfXsR
— Brustie Baby (@Jigglybrust) February 20, 2019
Weirdly, Chelsea Clinton could find time to stick her nose into Ilhan Omar’s business, with a racist (“As an American…”) and demeaning lecture about anti-Semitism after Omar spoke out against AIPAC, but she hasn’t said a word about her mother’s own staffers and hangers-on engaging in anti-Semitism directly targeted at America’s most prominent Jewish politician. Is she obligated to? Not really, but she wasn’t obligated to speak up about Omar either, and she has much closer ties to Watson and Parkhomenko than Omar. (Perhaps it’s because Watson and Parkhomenko are white men and Omar is a black Muslim woman; perhaps it’s because Tommy Boy and Fake Cop Adam have high enough loyalty scores not to merit public chastisement.)
It’s not just limited to Chelsea Clinton, that’s for sure. Despite all their cries that Sanders needs to do better about calling out his mythical Bernie Bros, none of the anti-Sanders liberals seem to feel the need to do the same in their own camp. Not a one. Not even in a case like actor Wendell Pierce’s, where he stalked three Sanders supporters in 2016 to their hotel room and then committed battery against a woman. Civil behavior is for thee, not for we.
Even three years later, after she lost and isn’t running again (probably, let’s hope) her bitter hangers-on are happily engaging in anti-Semitism because they’re fueled by nothing but rage now.
Who will be the first other candidate or major name to denounce these anti-Semitic attacks on Bernie Sanders? We’re still waiting. On the bright side, Sanders already has the one endorsement that matters:
Bernie 2020
— Danny DeVito (@DannyDeVito) February 20, 2019
(Thanks to any of my followers who helped me source the tweets used in this article.)