It seemed natural to many that when Sen. Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race, she would endorse her longtime ally for Bernie Sanders for president. Yet she didn’t — and one reason, judging by her Thursday exit interview with Rachel Maddow, is anger at the way Bernie’s online supporters have behaved.
“I think there’s a real problem with online bullying and online nastiness. I’m not just talking about who said mean things; I’m talking about some really ugly stuff that went on,” she said.
The behavior in question ranges from angry Sanders fans tweeting snake emojis at Warren accusing her of being an anti-Sanders backstabber to online harassment of (generally female) Warren supporters. There have also been accusations that possible Sanders supporters published the home addresses and phone numbers of two women who worked for the Nevada Culinary Union after it produced a fact sheet critical of Sanders’s health care plan.
When Maddow asked if “it’s a particular problem with Sanders supporters,” Warren replied bluntly: “It is. And it just is. It’s just a factual question.”
Warren’s frustrations cut to the heart of a debate that’s been raging throughout the Democratic primary, but has come to a head since Biden supplanted Sanders as the race’s frontrunner on Super Tuesday. Observers have started assigning blame for the Vermont senator’s fall from grace — and one purported culprit, though certainly not the only one, are the antics of the “Bernie Bros.”
But the media’s obsessive focus on Bernie Bros — a term coined in 2016 to describe privileged white male Sanders supporters that doesn’t accurately describe his 2020 base — has obscured the real nature of the problem: a particular subculture among some Sanders fans that flourishes primarily on Twitter.
This group has coalesced around a loose group of left-wing media outlets that call themselves the dirtbag left, most notably the podcast Chapo Trap House. The dirtbag left promotes vulgar online attacks as a means of promoting left-wing politics, often through crass jokes in podcast episodes and on Twitter. (A recent Chapo episode involved hosts joking that Warren would have pretended to be Arab to join with the Flight 93 9/11 hijackers, making a crass sexual comment about Warren-sympathetic New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, and a proffering a jokey, false theory that “Big Vaccine” and/or Bill Gates made up the coronavirus.)
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Despite the Bernie Bro stereotype’s obvious deficiency, the term hasn’t gone away. Here’s a Google Trends chart of search interest in “Bernie Bro” over the course of five years, showing that interest has really picked up recently in the 2020 race:
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This peak in interest has largely coincided with Sanders becoming first the frontrunner and then, shortly thereafter, the only serious remaining challenger to a surging Joe Biden. In January, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece on anger inside the Democratic Party over the behavior of those believed to back Sanders. A few examples:
Some progressive activists who declined to back Mr. Sanders have begun traveling with private security after incurring online harassment. Several well-known feminist writers said they had received death threats. A state party chairwoman changed her phone number. A Portland lawyer saw her business rating tumble on an online review site after tussling with Sanders supporters on Twitter.
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To understand how this works, it’s worth watching the entirety of Warren’s interview with Maddow on the subject. She starts off by talking about her long friendship with Sanders, how much respect she has for him. And then she pivots to an emotional discussion of online harassment; you can hear that it’s clearly shaped her perception of the race...In the interview, it’s clear that Sanders’s disavowals of online harassment ring a little hollow in Warren’s ears. Given that the candidate and his staff have appeared on Chapo, you can understand her thinking. It might seem like Sanders is speaking out of both sides of his mouth: vaguely disavowing online anger in public statements while his campaign reaches out and appeals directly to the people purveying it.
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The dirtbag left sees the race in such starkly moral terms — either you support Bernie or you want poor people to get sick and die — that they’re willing to countenance abusive tactics in order to get people on board. They don’t understand how anyone could disagree with Sanders in good faith, or how treating someone viciously might be counterproductive to the cause they profess to care about.
Wrong. Read it again and then take a remedial course in logic and language. 
