Bloomberg ad hits back at Sanders & his supporters: This kind of "energy" won't help Dems unite

[Mike 03]

9. A short extract from the NYT article cited in the Bloomberg ad:

Barbara Boxer minces no words when it comes to describing the people usually known as the Bernie Bros — a subset of Bernie Sanders supporters who hope to take over the Democratic Party and remake it in their image.

“There is so much negative energy; it’s so angry,” says the former four-term Democratic senator from California. “You can be angry about the unfairness in the world. But this becomes a personal, deep-seated anger at anyone who doesn’t say exactly what you want to hear.”

This too:

Boxer’s story is one of the milder ones The Times tells about the Internet trolls whose goals seem to have less to do with building Sanders up than with hounding and humiliating anyone who stands in their man’s way.

“When Mr. Sanders’s supporters swarm someone online, they often find multiple access points to that person’s life, compiling what can amount to investigative dossiers,” The Times reported. “More commonly, there is a barrage of jabs and threats sometimes framed as jokes. If the target is a woman, and it often is, these insults can veer toward her physical appearance.”

Does this mean Sanders himself supports this kind of behavior? No, and occasionally he tries to disavow it. But not very hard: Last year, he hired as a top aide and speechwriter David Sirota, accurately described by The Atlantic as “his Twitter attack dog.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/opinion/sanders-bernie-bros.html