Clinton similarly knocked Sanders for this in a follow-up interview with Maddow on Wednesday. "To think that this is an issue that is not deserving of reaction just demonstrates a lack of appreciation for how serious this is. This goes to the heart of who we are as women, what kind of rights and choices we have, it certainly is as important as any economic issue," she said.

A Sanders campaign spokesman did not respond to Clinton's comments directly, but said "Sen. Sanders has a 100 percent lifetime voting record defending a woman's right to choose and will do all that he can to protect and expand that right if elected president."

Eight years ago, Barack Obama glided to victory on a progressive platform that promised real change. But after eight years of brutal compromise and frustrating stalemates with the GOP, Gitmo remains open, American troops are still in Afghanistan, the criminals that engineered the financial crisis are at large, and race relations have deteriorated rather than improved. Now Sanders supporters hear Hillary Clinton promising to continue wherever Barack Obama leaves off, and they wonder what the point of four more years of the same would be in an increasingly desperate country and, indeed, world. To the Bernie or Busters, half-measures no longer cut it. It’s why they’re for Sanders in the first place.

You can call adopting such a stance naïve. Ultimately, though, it won’t help to tell the Bernie or Busters that they’re wrong. They want change, not the status quo that the Clinton camp more or less offers. The Bernie Sanders campaign is plainly saying “enough is enough” to the way things are; it’s no good for the Democratic establishment to take a position of presumed superiority and urge Sanders supporters to hand their vote to Hillary Clinton despite their misgivings, when this is exactly the kind of attitude that the Bernie or Busters are rebelling against. After Sanders’ stunning defeat last Tuesday, his voters are now being told they can’t possibly refuse Clinton in a general election.

Sanders supporters see the 2016 Democratic primary as a battle between a candidate that seeks to change the “rigged system,” and a candidate that represents that same old illusion of choice. The Bernie or Busters are simply refusing to vote for the illusion if that’s all it is. For months they’ve been witness to a Clinton campaign that influences how the press think and relies on voters being kept in the dark to win. They see the DNC fixing the race in Clinton’s favour, limiting the number of televised debates, removing corporate funding restrictions just as Sanders’ campaign was becoming a threat, and attempting to silence anyone who threatens to break party ranks and actually endorse Sanders. For a lot of Sanders supporters, Hillary Clinton isn’t an option in November because she is the very embodiment of the rigged, establishment politics they wish to see discontinued.

Currently, the general election is set to come down to a contest between the two least-favorable, least-trusted candidates countrywide.

But both the media commentariat and the Democratic establishment have decided Sanders voters must in November vote the candidate they have come to view as an opponent to their cause – Clinton – in order to keep the other, bigger threat out of the White House. The idea now is not to support the best candidate, then, but to thwart the worst one. It’s cynical, it’s disheartening, it’s the dreaded politics as usual. And after months spent hoping things might finally change under their guy, 33% of Bernie Sanders supporters have, quite simply, had enough of playing the old games.

Furthermore, Sanders has consistently condemned the bigoted, anti-Muslim rhetoric that has become a staple of this presidential campaign season. Black and brown Muslims know only too well how Islamophobia compounds other forms of prejudice and discrimination - especially in the areas of racial and religious profiling by law enforcement, and protection from bias incidents and hate crimes.

To his credit, Sanders voted against the US PATRIOT Act and openly critiqued sweeping surveillance of Muslim Americans after 9/11, which presumes a similar stance against expanding counter-radicalisation (CVE) policing programmes.

The Republican candidates are vying to outdo one another in branding all Palestinians as "terrorists", and Clinton has criticised Obama's lukewarm relationship to Netanyahu. Many American Muslims hope that Sanders' opposition to US militarism will result in a more even-handed approach to Palestine/Israel.