Throughout the primary season, smearing Bernie Sanders and his supporters established itself as a full-fledged media industry. Sanders, we were told, was an egomaniacal, sexist, old white man on a delusional and quixotic campaign promoting pie-in- the-sky policies like single payer health care, free college tuition, viewing Palestinians as people, and not destroying the planet. Exerting his male privilege, he bullied Hillary Clinton into nominally opposing a secretive, Frankensteinian trade agreement. He even forced her to embrace a $15 federal minimum wage with a sexist condescension that far outweighs the material benefits that would be reaped by women who make up the majority of the minimum wage work force.

In his Utopian quest, Sanders was more than happy to drag down the Democratic Party and thwart history, by opposing the candidate who could become the first female president of these United States. And he recklessly strung along an army of all white ‘Bernie Bros’ and some white women who had internalized misogyny. There were, simply put, no people of color who supported Sanders. It was that simple.

Little did we know, the media was actually pulling its punches. Once Hillary won the nomination and Vermont senator graciously and enthusiastically endorsed her, the gloves really came off. In a display of shameless schadenfreude, the media gleefully mocked Sanders supporters for being emotionally weak and cognitively damaged. If they wanted to hang around with the cool crowd, they had to remove their aluminum foil antenna from their heads, lick off their patchouli, and sit in the back, silent, hands-folded, and listening to the winners. Stinky, crazy, loud-mouthed losers, needed to get in line, sit down and shut up, immediately.

The media’s “Mean Girls” style contempt isn’t just for Bernie or Busters or Stein supporters. It’s for anyone who is, ever has been or ever might be one. Curiously, the criticism is much harsher than anything we see hurled at people supporting Trump… you know… the fascist whose potential presidency makes not supporting Clinton such an act of lunacy.

Let’s take a look at some schoolyard bullying and berating techniques the media is using that will do little to distinguish Democratic Party shills from you know who.

1. Ridicule people in pain.

Slate editor, Jeremy Stahl, was the schoolyard terror, lobbing Sanders supporters for being sad. In his piece, “Photos of Angry, Sad, Horrified Bernie Sanders Supporters During His Convention Speech”, Stahl compiled nine photos (none of which he took, as he’s more of a curator). Two of the selected photos have the same bummed out white guy and three of them have the same very sad white gal. There there was no shortage of photos of people of color with the Sanders Team in Philly (I know because I was there). But when your strategy is ridicule, why waste time on research?

And Stahl more than makes up for this with the witty descriptions he inserts under the photos such as, “Just please take me home now. I want to go home,” “poor souls,” “I mean, nobody died,” or my personal fave, “[Insert Celine Dion lyrics here.]” This blunt object hit piece wacks anyone who felt low watching their candidate officially leave the race, especially knowing that the DNC had employed dirty tricks to defeat him.

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