Presidential Election: 11/3/20 ---Now the President Elect Joe Biden Thread

[PleaseBlitz]

20 minutes ago, No Excuses said:

Bernie’s most rabid supporters just spent the past 24 hours harassing a Nigerian man who supports Buttigieg, who they determined was really just a white woman pretending to be black. Thousands of people harassed him enough that he had to deactivate his social media handles. And it turned out, that he is indeed Nigerian. 
 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/pete-buttigieg-campaign-sockpuppet-nigerian

 

And a Nicaraguan woman who helps run a union that doesn't support M4A.  Maybe not overtly racist, but certainly not acceptable behavior.  And, as ever, Bernie's response was tepid, at best.  Sounds familiar .......

 

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/culinary-union-officials-face-profanity-laced-attacks-after-scorecard-says-sanders-would-end-their-health-care

 

Quote

Two top Culinary Union officials have faced threatening phone calls, emails and tweets and say their personal information was shared online after the release of a union scorecard that took particular aim at Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

 

Secretary-Treasurer Geoconda Arguello-Kline, for instance, has come under attack for her Nicaraguan heritage, and union spokeswoman Bethany Khan was accused of being paid off by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Democratic establishment types. In tweets, the union and its leadership have been referred to as “****es,” “whore,” “****ing scab” and “evil, entitled assholes.”

....

In one email, which the union provided to the Independent, Culinary leaders are referred to as “corrupt mother ****ers” and says that it’s “time for people like me to go after you.”

 

“This is your chance to fix your mistake before the millions and millions of Bernie Sanders supporters will find you and end your ability to earn a living,” the email says. “We will find you corrupt mother ****ers of that you can be sure and we will make sure you wallow in poverty and suffering.”

 

“Apologize and fix your mistake or else you will pay … I know tens of thousands of Bernie supporters and we will come after you fascist imbeciles,” it continues. “#Bernie2020 #NotMeUs.”

 

Khan said the union has received dozens of phone calls, more than 300 emails and thousands of tweets over the last 48 hours.

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

Should be interesting

Had not seen the video. 1.5 million views. Not a full on Sarah Palin moment but it is embarrassing.

[PleaseBlitz]

"Still better than Trump." 

 

[Dan T.]

"Michael Bloomberg is a greedy billionaire with a deplorable record with women in his workplace who as New York City mayor implemented racist law enforcement policies, and now he's trying to buy an election.  Still better than Trump, tho."

[Momma There Goes That Man]

 

[tshile]

 

41 minutes ago, Cooked Crack said:

Had not seen the video. 1.5 million views. Not a full on Sarah Palin moment but it is embarrassing.

 

Not a good look for her there...

[Larry]

1 hour ago, Cooked Crack said:

Had not seen the video. 1.5 million views. Not a full on Sarah Palin moment but it is embarrassing.

 

Still better than Trump.  

 

Trump doesn't know who's the President of the Virgin Islands.  (He is.)

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Larry]

@visionary's Red T Racoon tweet

 

I'm seeing several posts claiming threats directed at people simply for not being Bernie.

 

Several thoughts I'm having.  

 

1) I wonder if it's fair to tar the candidate for the actions of his supporters.  

 

I mean, I think it's fair to blame Trump for the actions of his.  (At least most of them.)  Because the guy actually encourages the ugly in them.  When he witnesses it, he's visibly pleased.  (Yeah, sometimes he makes a big show of officially not agreeing with it, but look how fake my protests are.  Y'all can tell I'm lying, right?)  

 

I haven't seen Bernie actually doing that.  Worst I've seen directed at him, is that his protests against it seem to well, they look more genuine than Trump's.  But not much.  

 

2)  And I wonder if the behavior actually is his supporters.  

 

I mean, I assume the vast majority of said threats are in the form of tweets or emails or similar.  Has anybody verified that these are actually coming from Bernie supporters?  (Or even from actual people?)  

 

The feeling I get is that Russia spent a lot of effort, 4 years ago, to convince the Bernie Bros that every election in the US was part of a conspiracy to deprive The Bernmeister of the position he's entitled to.  (And they should stay home and not vote, n protest.)  Pretty sure they've spent the last 4 years working on doing it, again.  It doesn't seem beyond belief that those same agents might also be trying to drive a wedge between Bernie voters and the rest of the Dems, by making non-Bernie Dems believe that Bernie supporters are all conspiracy theory borderline terrorists.  

 

I'm not saying that we should automatically assume that every online profile that comes across as a potentially violent paranoid whackjob Bernie supporter is a false flag operation.  Just saying that I'm not 100% sure that many of them aren't, too.  

 

Maybe, I dunno, some Clark Kent type whose job is to check into stories and investigate them should see if one of the threatened people could forward a collection of threats, pick out a random representative sample thereof, and see of he can find out how many of them are 

1) Real people and 

2) Real Bernie supporters.

[visionary]

A lot of them are definitely Bernie supporters, though Russia has obviously boosted the hashtags and name-calling that Bernie folks happily tweet out and repeat.  Some are even relatively famous or popular and have continued this behavior in person or in videos.  I will say that Bernie himself has said not to bully other voters or attack his opponents, but on the other hand his surrogates and his campaign have contributed to the attacks with their own name-calling hashtags and retweeting conspiracy theories and other attacks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[LadySkinsFan]

Unless Sanders comes right out and denounces this rhetoric against other Democrat candidates, he's part of the problem. I mean a major address for party unity while having different ideas about governing.

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dan T.]

It does seem like the hard core Bernie bros and the Trump morons are two sides of the same coin.

[Larry]

33 minutes ago, visionary said:

A lot of them are definitely Bernie supporters, though Russia has obviously boosted the hashtags and name-calling that Bernie folks happily tweet out and repeat.  Some are even relatively famous or popular and have continued this behavior in person or in videos.  I will say that Bernie himself has said not to bully other voters or attack his opponents, but on the other hand his surrogates and his campaign have contributed to the attacks with their own name-calling hashtags and retweeting conspiracy theories and other attacks.

 

Looking at some of those, have to say, I'm savoring the irony of Bernie's spokesmen attacking Bloomberg with:  

 

1)  He can't be trusted, because he's self financing, and therefore he's not beholden to anyone.  

 

2)  And he thinks he can jump into the party's election whenever he wants to, and have a say in the party's rules.  

 

[visionary]

Since there's been a lot of talk about billionaires and buying the election....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[RemoveSnyder]

 

[LadySkinsFan]

19 minutes ago, Larry said:

 

Looking at some of those, have to say, I'm savoring the irony of Bernie's spokesmen attacking Bloomberg with:  

 

1)  He can't be trusted, because he's self financing, and therefore he's not beholden to anyone.  

 

2)  And he thinks he can jump into the party's election whenever he wants to, and have a say in the party's rules.  

 

 

Especially ironic is Sanders' spokesman #2 point. 

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

[Llevron]

I fail to see how “Trump has a better record on criminal Justice than Bloomberg” is a step too far, personally. I feel like much of that tweet in particular is pretty benign and typical campaign stuff. 

 

And didnt Burnie already say the online jerks are not people he wants? What’s the problem with that? 

 

Serious inquiry not snark 

[PleaseBlitz]

1 hour ago, Larry said:

1) I wonder if it's fair to tar the candidate for the actions of his supporters.  

 

It is when it's been going on for the better part of 5 years now and his responses are just like Trumps.  A "oh, they shouldn't do that" and a wink. 

[Larry]

4 minutes ago, Llevron said:

And didnt Burnie already say the online jerks are not people he wants? What’s the problem with that? 

 

Pretty sure the point of @visionary 's post is that those particular online jerks are Bernie's staff.  

[tshile]

59 minutes ago, Dan T. said:

It does seem like the hard core Bernie bros and the Trump morons are two sides of the same coin.

And their grand argument to sway anyone not on their side:

don’t worry about his policies, they won’t get passed

 

sounds similar to the trumpers:

don’t worry about his lack of experience, he’ll surround himself with the best people

 

the whole “don’t worry about the merits of candidate, <reason>” is dumb. How about that’s exactly what we worry about? 

[Larry]

6 minutes ago, tshile said:

on’t worry about his policies, they won’t get passed

 

sounds similar to the trumpers:

don’t worry about his lack of experience, he’ll surround himself with the best people

 

"The grownups in the room".  

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

 

Retweeted by Nina Turner (Bernie's campaign co-chair)

Long rant, quite NSFW

 

 

 

 

I should point out though, it's fine to criticize Bloomberg or other candidates' records, but the name calling and hash-tagging is over the top.   

Calling Pete a rat or Warren a snake (though I don't think I've seen an official surrogate do this so much as popular Bernie supporters), harassing and attacking journalists online, promoting conspiracy theories and hashtags like MayoPete or MayorCheat, etc. is more annoying to me, and talking about blacklisting and punishing people who vote for someone other than Bernie.

[PleaseBlitz]

Tone comes from the top of every organization.  Bernie created this intentionally.

 

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/20/why-did-bernie-hire-a-twitter-bully-who-attacks-democrats/

 

Quote

A lot of Democrats have been worried that the 2020 primary could turn ugly. Before announcing his presidential candidacy, Bernie Sanders urged his supporters to engage respectfully and talk about issues, not personalities or past grievances.

 

That is why it’s surprising that, only after the Atlantic‘s Edward Isaac-Dovere contacted the Sanders campaign and asked about David Sirota, did they announce that he’d been hired as a senior communications adviser and speechwriter. Even more importantly, Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, confirmed that Sirota had been working for the campaign in an advisory capacity as a trial run for months.

 

Among progressive bloggers, Sirota has been a known quantity for years; he has a reputation as a relentless attack dog. He was a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders in 2016, having worked for him previously as press secretary in the House. But after the Democratic Convention, when Sanders endorsed Clinton and campaigned for her, Sirota continued to attack her right up until the November election.

 

Now we know that around the time Sirota was launching attacks against Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Beto O’Rourke, he was working for the Sanders campaign in an “advisory capacity.” For those of us who followed the response to those attacks on Twitter, we watched Sirota get incensed when challenged. He defended himself as an unbiased journalist merely reporting a story, all while ruthlessly attacking his opponents as “mentally incapacitated” or “positively unhinged.”

 

In any other situation, I would document what I’ve just written with links from Twitter. But here is what Issac-Dovere reports:

 

On Monday night, after being contacted for a second time by The Atlantic with a list of specific questions about his undisclosed work for Sanders, Sirota did not respond to the email but deleted more than 20,000 tweets. He left fewer than 200 online…

 

In a brief emailed response, Sirota attributed the scrubbing of his account to having an “autodeleter that periodically and automatically deletes tweets. I started doing this many months ago.” He did not respond when asked if it was a coincidence that the tweets were deleted hours after I contacted him and the morning before he was announced as a Sanders employee.

 

Luckily, Isaac-Dovere had already preserved some of Sirota’s vituperative tweets through screenshots, including the aforementioned attacks.

I tend to be a trusting person. But the BS is piling up in this story. First we learn that Sirota has been working for the Sanders campaign for months. Whether or not that arrangement began before he started attacking other Democratic candidates is currently in dispute. Then, we’re supposed to believe that his Twitter feed was coincidentally scrubbed the same day that his employment with the campaign was made public.

 

What concerns me is that there is no way that Bernie Sanders or the people who are running his campaign could be ignorant about David Sirota’s style of engagement. Even if they were, with his work over the last few months getting widespread attention, they must have seen his attacks and liked them, because they decided to bring him on in an official capacity.

 

There is no one that I can think of who, if hired by a campaign, would more strongly suggest that a candidate intends to treat their opponents as enemies than David Sirota. It’s not that I dislike the guy, I don’t actually know him. It’s just that he has made his modus operandi very clear. If we are to judge the candidates based on the people they hire, this one reflects very badly on Bernie Sanders.