Vox: "The "Bernie Bro" is a stereotype -- but the "dirtbag left" is real"

[TwilightZone]

"The Bernie Bro stereotype is reductive. But there’s a specific group of Sanders fans that pose a real problem for him."

(snip)

"But the media’s obsessive focus on Bernie Bros — a term coined in 2016 to describe privileged white male Sanders supporters that doesn’t accurately describe his 2020 base — has obscured the real nature of the problem: a particular subculture among some Sanders fans that flourishes primarily on Twitter.

This group has coalesced around a loose group of left-wing media outlets that call themselves the dirtbag left, most notably the podcast Chapo Trap House. The dirtbag left promotes vulgar online attacks as a means of promoting left-wing politics, often through crass jokes in podcast episodes and on Twitter. (A recent Chapo episode involved hosts joking that Warren would have pretended to be Arab to join with the Flight 93 9/11 hijackers, making a crass sexual comment about Warren-sympathetic New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, and a proffering a jokey, false theory that “Big Vaccine” and/or Bill Gates made up the coronavirus.)

And while it’s true the media can overreact to this kind of taunting, it really does seem to be hurting Sanders’s efforts to expand his coalition beyond his hardcore base. "

(snip)

"The perception that Sanders’s partisans are a fount of online nastiness and harassment is a real problem for Bernie. They make it harder to position himself as a potentially unifying leader at a time when his campaign needs to stop treating Democrats like the enemy."

Much more:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/9/21168312/bernie-bros-bernie-sanders-chapo-trap-house-dirtbag-left

[Cha]

1. KR

[TDale313]

2. There is a real nastiness.

It often seems directed at women... Often ones who should be natural allies. Whether it’s overblown or not, a segment (I’d argue not insignificant) are toxic enough that it leaves a sense that this is not a healthy or particularly safe place. Whether that’s just a perception problem or not, it’s a major problem. And it’s sad. I like Bernie... I supported him in the primaries last time. This time, I was a Warren Supporter. Part of the reason? I felt Bernie was going to have trouble given the tone of some of his most vocal supporters. Nothing this cycle has proven to me that that was an incorrect assessment.