Bernie Sanders Voters Helped Trump Win and Here's Proof

[JHan]

133. Let's really tackle this..

2016 saw a massive dezinformatsiya campaign against a candidate, which affected electoral politics in profound ways. Protecting electoral systems and data are now paramount.

Data was weaponized effectively to "suppress" votes with the sophisticated targeting of some swing states. All of this caught conventional Data analytics on the backfoot.

If you invested everything in Sanders to the point of demonizing his opponent, then it's expected you'd feel justified voting for Trump - after spreading lies about Clinton what else are you gonna do?

There are also "progressives" who don't hate Trump. Case in point Ted Rall.

This isn't me paraphrasing, these are Rall's words which he chose to put in the Wall Street Journal:

"I was at a friend’s daughter’s confirmation party in eastern Long Island, N.Y. The family Volvo and the Tesla bore Bernie Sanders stickers, one from 2016 and the other from 2020. “The thing about Trump . . .” I began, and the father interrupted me: “. . . he’s not all bad, right?” he said. “I actually like some of the things he’s doing.” He mentioned North Korea and trade protectionism. He cast his eyes about, worried about being overheard.

My friend didn’t vote for Donald Trump and doesn’t intend to in 2020. But he doesn’t despise the president nearly as much as he—being a leftie—is supposed to. I hear that from a lot of my fellow progressives.

“Disgusting,” a friend in academia told me as we discussed the separation of children from their illegal-alien parents at the border. “But isn’t it weird to just leave the border open?”

Centrists who supported Hillary Clinton go crazy when Mr. Trump tweets. His gleefully crass style drives them bonkers. His contempt for identity politics appalls them. Many progressives, on the other hand, are primarily motivated by economic and class justice. That isn’t to say that the Bernie Sanders people approve of family separation or pretending that police brutality isn’t real. But left populists are not entirely unsympathetic to economic nationalism or stronger border controls. For them, American workers come first, and Donald Trump is the first (far less than perfect) president in most people’s lifetimes to walk that talk."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-progressives-who-dont-hate-trump-1530572149

There's the tired old "centrist" trope against Clinton supporters, the slight against "identity politics" favored by conservatives, and not only is he confused about "open borders" and the whole issue of immigration on a whole, he and the "progressives" he chatted to are confused about a ton fuck of other things. A Venn Diagram would make the overlap clear between Trumpism and this odd expression of "progressivism" - horseshoe theory at work?

It gets so ridiculous his defense of these "progressives" ends up reading like a slander of Bernie himself and a gross mischaracterization of Bernie's position on some issues.

There's no conceivable reason for anyone calling themselves a progressive to vote Trump or be comfortable with his Presidency unless this isn't about Progressiveness and never was..

So I can't blame the BernieOrBust crowd solely. What this madness points to are the ISMS Clinton faced which were immeasurable and larger than any one group.

I could blame the pundit class for their bothsideism narratives, their obscene focus on emails and false equivalencies. I could blame the constant apologia for white supremacy, dressed up as "economic anxiety", I could blame nihilism, and don't get me started on the sexism ( one particular reply in this thread is very revealing). I could blame the decades-long hate campaign against HRC by the GOP, so successful some Democrats swallowed it wholesale. It wasn't one person or one thing, it was a mass of very fucked up shit.

Marco Rubio said in 2015, that if Republicans made it a contest of resumes Clinton would win easily - which was telling. As qualified, experienced and a woman of substance she was, there was a determined effort to erase her very accomplishments.

A couple events post election just confirmed what I had already observed during the election. The reaction to Hillary publishing her election memoir, where even some so-called progressives lost their shit over her daring to write a book about her experience. Crazed reactions to her stating indisputable facts like Kremlin interference and Voter Suppression which would otherwise be considered reasonable. Reactions to her making magazine covers, and the fury she incites in people who agree with her on principle but still feel the need to hate her or deride her or minimize her.

The rage is beyond astonishing. It's something for the ages, it has no grounding in logic or reason. Her male colleagues (often on the same side of the aisle) do the same or worse, and it barely makes a blip.

Now we have to deal with the consequences of this craziness or continually see a repeat of it, the set back to the progressive agenda is already in swing. We're already having to take several steps backward to get where we thought we were. SCOTUS looks dire.

Maybe in future, we could stop being dupes and focus on the prize but first, we have to recognize the toxic mess which got us here in the first place.