Hillary Clinton's Internet Supporters Desperately Want This Campaign to be about Sexism
Considering the renewed calls that Bernie supporters are sexist, I thought it was a good time to address it.
If any of us see sexist or personal attacks against any democratic candidate, it needs to be denounced immediately.
Sexist and personal attacks are unrepresentative of who we are. At the same time, it is not a personal attack to cite facts. Speaking of which... lets delve into some.
1. Among female voters under the age of 45, Bernie Sanders holds a significant lead in the polls.
2. He’s received far more donations from females than Hillary Clinton.
3. Iowa showed that he won handily in the under-45 category, regardless of gender.
It’s simple math: Older people vote for Clinton, younger people vote for Sanders. I saw it at the precinct I observed Monday night, and the stats back it up.
In terms of the primary process, any sane candidate would much rather be in Clinton’s shoes—older voters are reliable, and the young are famously fickle. But when it comes to the Internet, youth abounds, and the overwhelming preference for Sanders in that domain is starting to anger Clinton’s small but devoted band of young supporters. Internet politics have a definite progressive slant—witness the thriving Sanders Reddit page, with 170,000 supporters and over a million dollars raised, compared to Clinton’s anemic answer —and it has quickly become clear to the Clinton devotees that comparing the two candidates on policy always ends poorly for their preferred candidate. Without getting into issues of honesty and authenticity, the fact is that Sanders is a far more progressive politician. In our noisy little online kingdom, that plays well.
The strategy of Clinton supporters had to shift, and the solution was obvious: Avoid policy, and make the campaign about sexism. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch. In fact, they simply had to reprise the old tactics from 2008, when “gender bias” was one of the most reliable arrows in Clinton’s quiver, and Obama supporters fretted about losing the female vote because of perceived abuse toward Clinton’s backers. It’s the same today, and it started with the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon—a fabricated demographic supposedly chock-full of misogynistic dudes whose support for Bernie is less about policy and more about keeping a hated female out of office.
The entire concept of a vast sexist conspiracy operating from the political left is ridiculous, and has been effectively debunked by Glenn Greenwald and Sam Kriss at Vice, but it’s worth looking at a specific example of its origins to examine the absurd, dishonest way it has gathered steam. I’ll take you step by step, with this post as a guide.
There's lots more at the link... including the step by step dismantling of the misogynistic dudes for Bernie myth. I also recommend viewing the comments as they're also interesting reading.
http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/02/hillary-clintons-internet-supporters-desperately-w.html
But let's not stop there. A single article is rarely accepted as proof enough... even though Paste boasts 5.6 million unique visitors/month... which, to put into perspective, DailyKos, a mainstream liberal blog, averages 3 million unique visitors/month.
Let's see what Glenn Greenwald and Sam Kriss have to say:
First, here's Glenn with: "The “Bernie Bros” Narrative: a Cheap Campaign Tactic Masquerading as Journalism and Social Activism"
It’s become such an all-purpose, handy pro-Clinton smear that even consummate, actual “bros” for whom the term was originally coined — straight guys who act with entitlement and aggression, such as Paul Krugman — are now reflexively (and unironically) applying it to anyone who speaks ill of Hillary Clinton, even when they know nothing else about the people they’re smearing, including their gender, age, or sexual orientation. Thus, a male policy analyst who criticized Sanders’ health care plan “is getting the Bernie Bro treatment,” sneered Krugman. Unfortunately for the New York Times Bro, that analyst, Charles Gaba, said in response that he’s “really not comfortable with referring to die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters as ‘Bernie Bros'” because it “implies that only college-age men support Sen. Sanders, which obviously isn’t the case.”
It is indeed “obviously not the case.” There are literally millions of women who support Sanders over Clinton. A new Iowa poll yesterday shows Sanders with a 15-point lead over Clinton among women under 45, while one-third of Iowa women over 45 support him. A USA Today/Rock the Vote poll from two weeks ago found Sanders nationally “with a 19-point lead over front-runner Hillary Clinton, 50 percent to 31 percent, among Democratic and independent women ages 18 to 34.” One has to be willing to belittle the views and erase the existence of a huge number of American women to wield this “Bernie Bro” smear.
But truth doesn’t matter here — at all. Instead, the goal is to inherently delegitimize all critics of Hillary Clinton by accusing them of, or at least associating them with, sexism, thus distracting attention away from Clinton’s policy views, funding, and political history and directing it toward the online behavior of anonymous, random, isolated people on the internet claiming to be Sanders supporters. It’s an effective weapon when wielded by Clinton operatives. But, given its blatant falsity, it has zero place in anything purporting to be “journalism.”
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/31/the-bernie-bros-narrative-a-cheap-false-campaign-tactic-masquerading-as-journalism-and-social-activism/
Lastly there this from Sam: Bernie Bros and Momentum Bullies: How the Powerful Use Internet Trolls to Play the Victim
It certainly hasn't stopped him being the subject of a recent flurry of anthropological studies: TIME magazine warns against the "smug-sounding Sanders supporters", Mashable calls them "the most obnoxious people on the internet", and even the BBC reports that "Bernie Sanders supporters get a bad reputation online." As has been pointed out, there's scant evidence for any of this, but it doesn't matter – if you can successfully collapse thousands of people into some hideous metonym, it's impossible to prove that this fictional character did or didn't do anything.
This isn't to say that some Sanders supporters haven't been occasionally vitriolic. But if you're on the internet and you say anything that anyone might plausibly disagree with, you will immediately find yourself encountering dozens of implausibly angry single men looking to talk to someone new. (Look out for them below the line on this article!) There is no cause so peaceful and progressive and self-evidently justified that it won't have, scurrying behind it in the churned-up mud of the social field, thousands of fanatical cockroaches. The idea that there's a concerted campaign of abuse coming from the political left has a lot to do with selective focus: you're much less likely to see the abuse when it's coming from your own side. The Bernie Bro became a phenomenon because opinion writers in establishment publications tend to support Clinton, and because these people labour under the bizarre and false impression that their audiences want to read about how unpleasant other people were on Twitter.
There's no better example of this than The Sunday Times's Camilla Long, who voiced a fairly thoughtless and insensitive opinion on the death of David Bowie and then managed to spin the inevitable backlash into a long blubbery column on the cruelty of crowds. For reasons that still don't entirely make sense, it's people like this who get to shape the general discourse. They're famous, so when they're rude to people it's just a case of poor judgment, while when other people are rude back, it's violence on the part of an angry, faceless, idiot mob, and everyone needs to know about it.
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/sam-kris-bernie-bros-internet-abuse-820
In short? Hillary supporters should focus less on deflection and more on actual defense of their candidate.
And if they're still not convinced... they should probably read this... or at least the last few sentences of it: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1280142453
= new reply since forum marked as read
That's exactly what's going! 
Stick to your facts. Be ever vigilant. Keep up the good work! 
I'm not sure why that's so low. I can only think of one reason and that's ascribing a motive to such things. And one would only see a motive in it if they thought there were no problems to begin with. And since there are, well 
Anti-semitism exists. So does sexism. Bernie would be perfectly within his rights to call out the anti-semitism that is out there. I not only would have no problem with it, I'd fully support him all the way.
The denial speaks volumes about the deniers. 
leads all candidates in both parties then, isn't it? And by significant margins.
Just another "sad pitiful clown" here. 
Or do you mean that the nearly 5 million Americans who have already cast votes for HRC and those of us who have not yet done so but will do so are not "decent" Americans? 
How can you stoop to such a level! Playing the woman card
You should have consulted the sexism/not sexism manual.
LOL! 
from certain quarters. As we have learned here, it's obvious bull, and there's no need for anyone to soft-pedal their views for such nonsense. However, I will say this...
I'm a boomer woman, one of MANY who support Sanders, and every time I see myself referred to as a BernieBro, my regard for that side goes down a few more notches. Between that and the other stunts that have been pulled during this campaign, that stock has crashed at this point. There is nothing whatsoever that will ever redeem it.
In 66 years I have come to know that there are two kinds of people in this world, and that group is not my kind. It's just that simple They stand for everything I cannot (will not) stand. And putting a Dem label on that doesn't make it one bit better.
If not for tos, I'd use the term my grown daughter and I use at home, which is two words that both begin with "s" and the first one invokes the possessive form of an apocalyptic character.
This campaign isn't about anything so ephemeral as crap taunts of sexism. It's about betrayal. And I am not amused by that one little bit. Gambits like this are just a little bit more on top of the heaping pile.
