The Bernie Bros. You know them, you know them well, and, of course, you wish you didn’t. Bernie Sanders himself wishes he didn’t, and has said as much multiple times. “Look, we don’t want that crap,” he said in 2016, “anybody who is supporting me that is doing the sexist things is—we don’t want them. I don’t want that. That is not what this campaign is about.”
The moniker has been used since its inception to depict a specific kind of vitriolic Sanders supporter and has, as of late, been halved and amended to refer to the same kind of bad behavior coming from the supporters of the person who it appears will now be the Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden. The Biden Bros, as the New York Post referred to them, have allegedly set their sights on Sanders’ press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, photoshopping her to show her as a McDonald’s employee and a sanitation engineer respectively.
Gray addressed the harassment in a Facebook post on Thursday saying:
Thinking about how Biden supporters immediately photoshopped these images of me as essential workers in an effort to demean me, and what it says about how much they actually care about working class people.
Anyway, keep fighting, and don’t take your moral guidance from folks who treat working people as a punchline.
Above all else, as Gray said, attempting to belittle someone by putting them in the shoes of essential workers that keep the world functioning is both misguided and demonstrates a total lack of respect for the dignity and worthiness of all people.
The images also reflect a misunderstanding of what is essentially Biden’s main campaign promise, a return to civility, decency, and decorum. From pretty much the start of the 2016 election cycle, Democrats have derided the crassness of Sanders’ most misbehaved supporters. In March, Biden addressed so-called Bernie Bros at a rally in Michigan after they attempted to disrupt it, saying, “Folks, look. This is what’s wrong with American politics. Let them go. It’s just a reflection on what is wrong with American politics these days. This is one of the things that Donald Trump has generated. This is not who we are.”
Well, Joe, if your supporters are online mocking the very people you will need to support you come November, you might just have to grapple with the fact that it might who some of them are, and get a hold on that situation fast.
As history has proven, just because Sanders is out of the race doesn’t necessarily mean the Bernie Bros are going anywhere. Quite frankly, I’ve had enough of the bros in general, and would very much like them all to log off the internet and leave everyone alone. There’s quite enough to be dealing with right now anyway, thank you.