I will probably not be saying anything you can’t get from a tidal wave of videos and articles on this issue that are already out there. Maybe you will get a good summary.

  • It seems the Democrats only priority was: anybody except Bernie. As others have said before: The Democratic Party has NEVER shown the discipline they had in blocking Bernie in any fight against their Republican ‘opponents’.
  • The mainstream media was universally up in arms against Bernie. It was simply disgusting. On MSNBC the journalists and pundits were close to orgasming when Bernie was doing badly and they were outright despondent whenever he was doing well. It’s undeniable that there was a well-oiled machine to suppress Bernie’s campaign. Negative coverage, aggressive questions other candidates never got, overly simplistic takes on his plans, simply ignoring him, spinning the titles of articles to make him look bad. When Bernie was in first place this was ignored and a big deal was made of minor candidates rising to fourth place. Just disgusting. Just one tiny example: Remember that moment during the debates when Bernie denied having said a woman could not be president? And then the journalist simply stated Bernie had said it anyway as thought it was an established fact? I think that was emblematic of these primaries. Bernie bad. Bernie very bad. These days Biden has credibly been accused of rape and the media ignored this for as long as they could and later came out with articles that defend him. Mind-boggling.
  • I do believe some serious rigging went on. The official narrative is that everything magically flipped after Joe Biden won South-Carolina. The influence ascribed to this state is insane and defies any logic. South-Carolina is an all out Republican state. There is zero chance of that state going Democratic in the general election. It’s insane that this state can now claim to have flipped the Democratic primaries. This state should have no influence in these primaries beyond their normal weight when it comes to electoral votes. Also: the exit polls totally do not match the official results. They are way off. If this would happen in any other country the media would be going berserk. Suspicious is also that the results of contests where Biden won were available immediately. When Bernie won it took weeks to get the final results.
  • Bernie is a terrible strategist and possibly a coward. His campaign was confusingly two-faced. On the one hand he ran as a revolutionary and on the other hand he tried everything he could to be accepted as a normal, establishment friendly Democratic candidate. This is plain stupid as you know the Democratic Party will never accept him. He talked about plans that seriously threaten the status quo. Cancelling student debt. Medicare for all. That’s an existential threat to industries that have billions floating around in them. Individuals getting filthy rich on the backs of people who are struggling. You can talk about stuff like that, but you can’t mean it. Obama had people believe in a more humane, less cutthroat society but at the same time he made all the right deals with big corporations to assure them all that was just talk. That’s the only way to win as a Democrat: Lie your ass off about hope and change and get the big corporations to back you. You can call it the Bill Clinton formula. Perfected by mr. Obama. Back to Bernie: on the one hand he succesfully built a movement that actively questioned the status quo and could potentially have caused a real revolution,  but on the other hand he kept all that energy on a leash and was a good boy at all times. He rolled over when they smeared him, when famous people backed him he threw them under the bus as soon as anyone found the smallest bit of evidence that this famous person was not an immaculate social justice warrior. He did this repeatedly. He basically did not fight back. It got ridiculous when he called Biden his ‘good friend’ and said Biden could defeat Trump. What in the hell was the logic behind that? Nobody who wants to win does that. It may be ‘nice’ or ‘chivalrous’, but you can also call it political suicide. There is something to say for being honest but there is also something to say for running an efficient campaign. You don’t go around telling people that voting for the other candidate is just as good as voting for you. You also don’t completely ignore all seriously stinking dirt that others dug up on your opponent. Even if you want to be nice you can point out that the other candidate is lying about stuff, has a son with a very well paid job off in Ukraine which reeks of nepotism and corruption, is clearly showing signs of severe cognitive decline and has a track record that makes him anything but progressive, a track record that makes him look more Republican than anything else.
  • Bernie did not use alternative progressive media enough. My God, the guy went on the View, a show where the hosts are paid to despise someone like him. Either you choose to go on there and you scorch the despicable human beings that run that show or you stay the hell away. You do not go on it to be meek, to go along with their narrative and to try and paint yourself as a normal candidate. You can’t make your haters unhate you, you can only make your fans love you less. And that’s exactly what Bernie did. He tried to be liked by his worst haters and in the end lost some of his fans. What I wanted to say: there is a lot of influential alternative media out there. Bernie failed to see their power and kept hoping to be thrown a bone by the mainstream media that hates him. Even people who aren’t a fan of Bernie got tired of all the Bernie bashing on television.
    • The whole affair was sad to watch. Just as sad is that the media and pundits are now pressuring Bernie to fight for Biden, much more than Biden is being asked to fight for himself. And again Bernie is a good boy or some weird masochist and he goes along with it.

    The only sane explanation for this is that for Bernie it was enough to get people talking about medicare for all and to keep his senate seat. Because if Bernie would really burn all the bridges with the Democratic establishment they would make him lose his seat in the senate. Bernie clearly thinks that being a senator is everything that gives him any power. This is not a revolutionary. This is not someone who turns his movement into a new party. He thinks he can push the Democratic Party to the left. He is wrong.

    He did the elite a very big favor. He united millions of people who wanted some real fundamental changes in the style of any European nation and then led all that energy, the only real grassroots energy apart from that of Trump fans, safely back to Biden and the democratic establishment.

    Now his only merit is that a substantial number of Americans have started thinking about political reforms that work very well in all other developed nations.

    Maybe we all expected too much of him. He has the ideas, but not the will to see the thing through and risk being even more vilified than he already is. In the end he chose his sort of comfortable position over a real all out fight with the Democratic Establishment. As Jimmy Dore puts it: he does not want to be seen as Ralph Nader…