Toxic: The Culture of Bernie's Campaign

[Content Note: Harassment; personal attacks.]

I've got a new piece up at Blue Nation Review, co-written with Peter Daou, on how Bernie Sanders' calling Hillary Clinton unqualified makes clear that he does not stand outside the attacks by his staff, surrogates, and supporters.

Throughout this election cycle, a segment of Bernie's fans have been engaging in bullying behavior and making abusive attacks on Hillary and her supporters. In February, after the growing outcry against these intimidation tactics became a liability, Bernie was finally obliged to address them, saying: "We don't want that crap" and "Anybody who is supporting me that is doing the sexist things—we don't want them."

That is the one and only time Bernie has publicly commented on the relentless nastiness, even as it has continued to escalate. And, abetted by the media, he has managed to somehow maintain the pretense that he is above this toxicity, that he is outside of it.

Certainly, Bernie has never explicitly directed his supporters to harass people who criticize him and/or support Hillary. But this venom didn't emerge from a vacuum.

And when he stood at a podium in front of thousands of people at a campaign event in Philadelphia and declared, unjustifiably, that Hillary is unqualified to be president, every last shred of the pretense that these attacks are not reflective of a top-down strategy was demolished.

Click through to read the whole thing.