Memoirs of a Bernie Bro

After every prolonged and pointless online battle, I knew I wasn’t handling this correctly or even, well and I promised to just let it go the next time someone posted the photo of Bernie Sanders in a Lamborghini or when the average voter proclaimed Hillary Clinton to be a progressive; not for any other reason but hanging onto my own sanity. But there I was, wasting all day the next day having the same arguments with different people (and sometimes the same people), unable to let even one opportunity pass to deliver my most money comment, (“incremental change is the new trickle down economics”).  All those “likes” I experienced on my Sanders posts in December of 2015 turned into proverbial “crickets” in May of 2016. Those who condescendingly used to say they “liked Bernie but…” were starting to turn, calling him an ego maniac and claiming he was actually hurting his supporters by staying in this race. I started to soothe myself by reminding me that they just hadn’t been unplugged from the Matrix, yet and they were just suckling at the cable news teat.  I wasn’t a #neverhillary but the DNC and the #voteblue demo pushed me, a life long Democrat close to that edge with their smug declarations that there was NOTHING strange about any of these primary contests and that the previously self described moderate turned “Clinton the progressive” would undoubtedly ram through her liberal agenda.  The shrapnel and shards of that glass ceiling would shred both Mitch McConnell AND any paper an indictment was written on.

I dug in further because in all the time since the first signs of my early developing, pre pubescent political awareness, back when George H.W. Bush was chirping about a New World Order, there has never been a politician I’ve seen that was so dedicated and unwavering to The People and failed so miserably at enriching himself through his own public office.  I first became aware of the then Congressman Bernie Sanders when he cast one of the sole Nay votes on the Patriot Act; as the media mind control first sunk it’s teeth DEEP into the neck of American News in the form of color coded terror alerts.

Yes. I am a “Bernie Bro”. What is a Bernie Bro? As any Bro (female Sanders supporters are included) will tell you, it’s a variation on the moniker given to 2008 Democratic Primary supporters of Barack Obama by the Clinton camp, “Obama Boys”. Bernie Bros and Obama Boys were the name given to the most ardent boosters of those respective candidates.

Not coincidentally, that run by Clinton in 2008 is when my opinion of her first started to turn, along with my previously fond sentiments of the Clinton administration in the light of the effects of the “crime bill” and NAFTA. Up to that point, I defended Hillary Clinton from the manufactured controversies of the GOP for the better part of 20 years, but when she wouldn’t shoot down the question about whether Obama was a secret Muslim, as John McCain was able to do in the general, I realized this person would say anything to get what she wanted and was suddenly quite relieved she wasn’t going to be POTUS.

“We can either just watch from a distance the slow decay and moldy, white bread curmudgeonry of an America that would’ve much sooner hung Obama from a tree than vote for him or we can deal with their politicians passing more tax cuts for the super wealthy, more attacks on Planned Parenthood, more climate change denial and more cries of socialism as they deny workers a raise in the minimum wage and audaciously allow their buddies on the board of Walmart to subsidize the lack of paying their workers a living wage”.

It’s not that Hillary Clinton was so much more corrupt than say, President Barack Obama or “Dubya” (And to be fair, Obama’s “fuck you tour” this past year has been incredible and has displayed SOME care for the American people through executive order and veto), Clinton has just had more decades pretending to be for the people, pushing through corporate military conflicts and selling legislation to the public that actually bankrupt regular Americans than Obama has; The Status Quo.  The American Way.

Judging by the reactions online when I would make statements like that, I knew I was turning into being a part of a group of people that have become pariahs on social media; like anti vaxxers or chem-trail enthusiasts… but I couldn’t help myself.   I don’t care what detractors think so much as I care about the momentum of this movement and that’s why I’m writing this piece.

The reason why “Bernie Bro” has become more derogatory than it’s predecessor is because of the taunting over the fact that Bernie Sanders will NOT get the nomination. It’s all over. Really. It is. I know there are those of you “non-bros” out there that might say this was over a long time ago and while it’s true that the media and hardcore Clinton supporters, along with casual observers of this election have been saying this is over since March, a big win in California and other states in the last Super Tuesday election would’ve provided Sanders and us supporters with legitimate claims and arguments to create absolutely justified chaos at the DNC Convention in July; no matter how many pundits and someone with 16 mutual friends on Facebook proclaimed was impossible. But that won’t happen now even if California eventually flips for Bernie; at least not with the perception of legitimacy.

Make no mistake; Yes, there was voting irregularity. Yes, there was a media black out of the Sanders campaign up until the very first vote was cast. Yes, the debates were DEFINITELY scheduled on days and times when the fewest people would be watching. Yes, the DNC colluded in ALL of this and things MIGHT be different right now if none of this occurred but we’ll never know because at our current levels, we can easily be dismissed as a fringe group, not unlike the Tea Party, to people who wholeheartedly still believe in the Democratic Party to regulate Wall Street and protect the environment as a part of their platform.  When you embark on a revolution, political or otherwise, you must leave no doubt and it seems like so many of us were more interested in rallies than actual voting. And to be completely honest with my opinion at the risk of being stoned by fellow bro’s, I don’t think Sanders made the necessary pivot into money in government and away from policy points that American’s have been convinced could never be adopted here. There, I said it.  There is no way to eradicate the grid lock in government without insuring that no politician ever becomes wealthy from their public office ever again.  If we can achieve that, watch how quickly our energy grid transforms and how quickly we end the debate over female reproductive rights.

Related: Millennials: Is The World Right About You?

If I were reading this piece I’m writing now 4 weeks ago, I would’ve been sure that this was written by some Super PAC-funded-internet troll. I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s what we ALL are in the end and we don’t know it; Just a cog in this global economic infrastructure- Just a cell in a worldwide Excel spreadsheet but I woke up the Wednesday morning after the last Super Tuesday shell shocked, angry and disillusioned. Much more so than waking up on Tuesday, ready to cast my vote for Bernie the night after the AP and almost every other “reputable” news source called the primary for Clinton with her overwhelming advantage of Super Delegates… that have yet to even vote.  As soon as I saw that announcement from the AP, I was MORE charged to cast my vote. This calculated announcement wouldn’t deter us Sanders supporters, I thought. By the time 10pm Tuesday night rolled around, and the precincts counted showed the huge Clinton lead was stuck on 35% of precincts reporting for 3 hours, I was ANGRY. I woke up on Wednesday morning and suddenly, I remembered the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that, as of yet, no one has gone to prison for knowingly crashing the American housing market. My decades of outrage over corruption and the seeming inability of Americans to unite and fight for even the most obvious transgressions crystalized the results of this election cycle; This primary was over and the status quo won this round.

Now that I’ve come to these realizations, the cloud of dust I’ve been kicking up is settling, the smoke of digital gunpowder is clearing and I’m starting to think about Clinton and whether I’m #neverhillary. Then I think about Donald Trump. Even as the automatons chirp in concert; “a vote for anyone but Clinton is a vote for Trump”, I am able to dismiss my internal, passive aggressive desire to spite the sheeple with a vote cast in vengeance and ignore those comments as easily as those who offer the unsolicited and rare wisdom like “You know how bad smoking is for you?” Suddenly, I see Clinton for what she really is and what she’s really always been; a supremely talented, intelligent and highly awkward individual who thrives in this cess pool we call a government. Really thrives.  To really thrive in U.S. politics you are going to get your hands dirty; and not planting seeds in the garden dirty but rooting around in septic plumbing dirty. Now that she’s not in a side-by-side comparison with Sanders; a complete freak of nature in politics, A glitch in the matrix, I can now go ahead and compare her time as Secretary of State with that of a Condoleeza Rice. Or I can compare her to George W. Bush. Or Laura Bush. Anyone looks like a criminal when compared to Bernie but in all likelihood, Senator Sanders will drop out of this race no later than the convention and she will then be standing next to and being compared to the pile of shit whose parents named him Donald Trump. And now the S in Shillary has once again become silent.

Elizabeth Warren has already endorsed Clinton and is acting like a running mate. Obama has endorsed her and hell, the Dalai Lama might endorse her to insure The Donald doesn’t sell a sponsorship to himself the moment of his inauguration. “The Trump International Whitehouse”.

Now that I’ve made this pivot in all my status updates and tweets, I’ve been getting eaten by my own, to some degree.

“It’s pathetic to give up in the face of election fraud”, said one of my new but fast, fellow Bernie friends online.

Another one whom I’ve known for quite some time seems to have disowned me outright in this FB message.

But listen up bros.  Have you been paying attention to American Politics for the past few decades?  Do you recognize the lies and swindles our government has gotten away with in the last 100 years?  Aside from a violent revolt, what action can be taken?  I’m almost relieved that Sanders is out of the running. Genuinely. Now that the fog has cleared I can see past the desperation I’ve had to either convince everyone to see everything I’ve seen in Sanders or dismiss them as someone who doesn’t really understand the bigger picture, (which they don’t). The media machine was beginning to sink it’s teeth into the Sanders’ jugular and if you can discredit the figurehead of a movement, you can discredit the movement itself.  Now the weaponized media, (minus Fox News) will pivot from Sanders and focus on The Donald to insure the economic and military candidate of choice sits in the Oval Office beginning in January of 2017. Our masters are telling us, point blank, we have the choice between the lesser of two evils. Are we going to choose the greater evil just to deny the financial overlords their proxy and risk all our social progress while we legitimize Trump and the hate-speech which can only lead to an even greater divide between us?

Sanders and us Berners have the opportunity to take all this momentum and reclaim the Senate and a bigger stake in the house. To take our issues locally and in YUGE numbers to affect the realest kind of change there is. And to achieve ANY of this we have to accept the reality that so many have so openly offered to us throughout this primary; the establishment was NOT going to let Sanders happen and a majority of voters didn’t even want him. This year. Even if you consider the certainty (and sizeable evidence) most of us have about the manipulation of the voting process, we didn’t turn out in big enough numbers to leave no doubt. But we did our job well enough to take some REAL momentum into the convention and either make a serious impact on the Democratic platform or to rise up into a desperately needed third American party; as long as we don’t euthanize ourselves with obstinacy. And minus a Sanders 3rd party run (in which event I WILL cast my vote for Bernie), there are some concrete reasons to vote for Hillary over Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.

To be completely cliché, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. And while I have no illusions that Hillary Clinton is my friend or gives one shit about my well being, I do believe she is supremely interested in building and preserving her legacy, in the most traditional, mainstream and megalomaniacal way. And while Obama has clearly shown that he is no progressive, I see what he wants his legacy to be with all his late term executive actions and the one signature piece of legislation that is buried under all the shrapnel of drone rockets and record number of deportations; The Affordable Care Act. Obamacare; the one bone the oligarchs have thrown The People in decades. A hand out to insurance companies? Sure it is but it’s also saving my family of 4, 30% on our monthly costs on health insurance. You say there is no difference between Trump and Hillary? That’s the kind of shit talk that will kill all credibility of this organic and unlikely progressive movement. Even if it were true. Which it’s not.

We can either just watch from a distance the slow decay and moldy, white bread curmudgeonry of an America that would’ve much sooner hung Obama from a tree than vote for him or we can deal with their politicians passing more tax cuts for the super wealthy, more attacks on Planned Parenthood, more climate change denial and more cries of socialism as they deny workers a raise in the minimum wage and audaciously allow their buddies on the board of Walmart to have the American people subsidize the lack of paying their workers a living wage by having us pay for the shortcomings in in their paychecks. That’s the only kind of “free stuff” that both the dirt poor and affluent conservatives ignore, ironically. As the last vestiges of TRUE American culture rant and rave about Radical Islam, Mexicans and other such demagoguery, I’d rather not have those ancient artifacts make one last stamp on THEIR legacy on the Supreme Court for the next 3 decades; A stamp that will last well after they’ve left this earth.

Those are just the most obvious differences between Trump and Clinton.  Do you really believe Clinton’s policy will be much more egregious than the status quo of the past 30 years?  The status quo does includes such classic hits as pre-emptive war and supply side economics, granted but we can either take 3 steps back and regroup or we can take 50 steps back and regroup.  It’s not a good thing that a politician like Trump is a complete wildcard.  Beyond his recently found nationalistic rhetoric, he’s a lifelong Democrat but let’s face it, that’s only because Manhattan high society has been filled with liberal politicians and that’s who he kicked it with. Why? Because the man is the definition of the term, “Crony Capitalism”.  Those are the people he’s been greasing in 50 years of New York real estate deals which includes 8 years of Clinton in Senate.  I’m a businessman and I know those type of businessmen and you can learn about that singularly focused mindset very succinctly by reading The Trump University Sales Handbook.

Will Clinton change a foreign regime in her time as president? Absolutely. Anyone but Bernie will. But will she fight to get a raise in the minimum wage to solidify her own legacy?  Absolutely; Faster than you can say Goldman-Sachs because if this election year has taught our masters anything, it’s that the pitchforks-are-a-comin.

So what do you want to do?

-Continue to pursue the voter irregularities in this primary at the risk of alienating those who have not yet been converted

or

-Do you want to regroup, work to get more progressives in the legislature THIS November and build our numbers for the next fight?

Bernie has always said, “Not Me, Us”. Let’s not let the cult of personality destroy his core message. After the demise and dismemberment of Occupy Wall Street, I saw how easy it was to discredit a movement through the media. After the Tea Party, I saw how easy it was to infiltrate. (Koch). We are already bigger than Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party and every other grass roots movement that has been discredited or infiltrated by monied interest over the past 50 years. I think progressives have to be smarter and not fall in the trap of assuming the main stream will follow along just because we are “right” and our intentions are pure. We have to build our numbers or we’ll go out the way of the anti vaxxers. It’s already happening. We just don’t have the numbers yet. We’re close but not quite there. Let’s get support from un-corrupted politicians on our way. One man can’t do it alone. Even with all this public support.

So, #imwithher, reluctantly until MORE people are feeling our Burn. I WILL vote for Sanders if he runs independent but if he does that, he’s not the person I thought he was or that he has been his entire career. In the meantime, let’s work our asses off to over turn citizens united.  Lets get some progressives into our legislative bodies and lets get rid of these super delegates. They used their one get out of jail free card.

Your truly, a Bernie Bro.