Clintonite Troll Offers More of the Anti-Sanders Vitriol That Fuels Her Fan-Base

Another piece from Medium. Of the hardcore Clintonite clown contingent on Medium, Sasha Stone is one of the more prominent. Since the election, she's primarily concentrated on expressing her completely irrational loathing of and rage toward Bernie Sanders and progressives. I've rebutted her dismal work a few times now when the mood struck me, and that's how this piece came about as well, as a response to another half-baked rant, "Bernie Sanders Has Yet to Address the Way Misogyny and Russian Trolling Has Fueled His Movement." Subtle, eh?

Stone:

"Every day I think about who Bernie Sanders is and what he represents"

That kind of obsessive nuttiness is obvious to anyone unfortunate enough to stumble upon your dismal work on Medium. It’s interesting that you choose to open with it, given that your central theme here--and in article after obsessive article--is attempting to portray Sanders supporters as the nutty, pathological ones. Sanders’ supporters, you contend, were driven by "shared hatred" of Hillary Clinton and "the hate is non-stop, as though the election never ended," but of the 13 articles you’ve written here since the election, at least 9 of them were primarily devoted to expressing your own completely irrational hatred of Sanders and his progressive supporters. While Democrats have moved on--I’ll get to that next--you’re the one who keeps going back to this matter from last year and pouring on the "pathological hatred."

A helpful tool in contextualizing your unhinged ravings against Sanders supporters is to establish, up front, who it is that actually supports Sanders. A helpful chart from the big Harvard-Harris poll:

These numbers are alone sufficient to consign most of your article to the crank file.

The one that jumps out is Sanders' incredible level of support among Democrats. In light of it, your constant attacks on what you call "the Bernie wing of the party," portraying it as making war on the Democratic party, trying to "disrupt and destroy the Democratic Party" and so on, are self-evidently absurd.

You reference the tired Clintonite line about Sanders supporters being white males and insist Sanders supporters have made "“women and African American activists... their enemy"; in reality, Sanders is more popular with minorities than whites.

You haul out the tired nonsense about "the hatred and misogyny that has infected their [the Sanders supporters] movement from the beginning" and darkly hint that if the party goes with Sanders' progressive policies, "most of us will be long gone by the time 2020 rolls around, especially women"; in reality, Sanders is more popular with women than with men (and his agenda is wildly popular across the board). The other political figures most beloved by the Sanders supporters--Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Nina Turner--are women, not men (and they're all Democrats). A handful of Sanders supporters voted third-party last year; their candidate was Jill Stein. No "y" chromosome there.

You aren’t offering any reasoned analysis with any of this, just the same sort of empty smears of progressives one has come to expect from the right. Describing Sanders’ efforts to build a better, stronger Democratic party that can actually win at the polls as Sanders trying to "disrupt and destroy the Democratic Party" is strictly Orwellian. The beauty of the "Russian trolls" conspiracy narrative is that it allows Clintonites to write things like "Bernie himself was one of Putin’s puppets" without ever having to provide any evidence of anything. Who cast their vote because of allegedly Russian trolls? No one. You insist the Russia matters "remain unaddressed by Bernie Sanders and his top supporters"; in reality, Sanders has been addressing them for months. The claim of “violence and death threats” by Sanders supporters in the Nevada Democratic convention was, like the BernieBros narrative, a falsehood cynically manufactured by Clintonites in the press and the Democratic party.

This is a particularly deep dive into the loon pool:

"All he [Sanders] had to do was convince those who were THAT angry (mostly white males, but some females) to pay her back by voting for him. That’s how caught up in mass hysteria they were, how manipulated by Putin and Banon and Kushner they were. They voted against the environment, civil rights and civil liberties just to pay ‘that bitch’ back."

Fact: The overwhelming majority of Sanders supporters --as in, more than 80%--voted for Clinton. Sanders was the energizing candidate in the race, meaning he brought large numbers of people into the process that wouldn’t ordinarily have participated, meaning Clinton’s final vote tally in the general was padded with significant numbers of votes she wouldn’t have received without Sanders.

Fact: The presidential contest was lost in key Rust Belt states and it wasn’t at the hands of the microscopic number of Sanders supporters who voted for Trump, it was because of normally Democratic voters who, faced with the prospect of so unappealing a candidate as Clinton, opted to sit out the election:

Trump Didn’t Flip Working-Class White Voters. The Rust Belt Revolt Is a Myth.

And then there’s this chestnut:

"The fact that candidates backed by Bernie aren’t winning the way 'the revolution' promised they would has not made them rethink their strategy of alienation or purity tests for candidates"

Rob Quist, the candidate in question, was running in deep red Montana. Trump had just beaten Clinton there by more than 20 points; Quist came within 6% of Republican Greg Gianforte. The Kansas special election in April occurred in a gerrymandered Republican district that went 2–1 for Trump over Clinton; the Berniecrat James Thompson lost by only 7%. These special elections in very red places are the only ones we’ve had so far this year--hardly any basis for declaring Sanders’ candidates failures--and the Sanders-backed candidates have done substantially better than did Clinton.

The complete lack of self-awareness in this judgment speaks for itself:

"Hillary Clinton deserves a lot better than the treatment she’s getting by Van Jones and others who don't know how to lose with dignity."

And observers of the 2016 primary season, who saw Clinton engaged in an active conspiracy with the DNC to rig the process in her own favor and who watched Sanders run a principled issues campaign absent personal attacks while Clinton reacted to this by calling Sanders, among other things, a liar, a smear-merchant and unqualified to be president, will be perplexed by this assertion:

"...she [Clinton] always supported Bernie and was far more kind to him than he deserved"

But, of course, a reasoned analysis isn’t the point of this or any of your other many articles in this vein. The point is just to hate Sanders and progressives, not to have any actual reason for doing so, and to obsessively vent that hatred over and over again while accusing progressives of obsessive hatred.

No sale.

--j.