The Bernie Bros Have Turned Dangerous in Their Terrifying Witch Hunts

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, February 22, 2020

Sen. Bernie Sanders says he wants “a political revolution.” His most ardent supporters say they want “blacklists” — their word, not mine.

Revolution or blacklists? They are saying the same thing.

If you want to know what Sanders’ “revolution” would look like, the answer is right there in front of your eyes: One part House Un-American Activities Committee, one part Maoist Cultural Revolution.

Matt Bruenig of the left-wing People’s Policy Project and a sometime contributor to The Atlantic is an ardent young Sandersista. Like most vicious ideologues, he reserves his most intense loathing not for those who are opposite him politically but those adjacent, in this case Democrats who support more centrist candidates, especially those working for former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. “It’s very important for us to create a blacklist of every operative who works on the Bloomberg campaign,” he wrote on Twitter, before deleting the post.

David Klion of Jewish Currents also has warned his fellow Democrats that those who back the wrong horse are going to be blacklisted. “It’s a mercy we’re warning you now,” he wrote on Twitter.

Klion presents a funny case: He wants to make a blacklist, but can’t quite get either the “black” or the “list” parts right. He organized a social-media harassment campaign targeting a Nigerian supporter of Pete Buttigieg, insisting — falsely and without evidence — that the black man in his sights was actually a white woman affiliated with the Buttigieg campaign. He has since been publicly corrected and confessed his error. But that is an old story with Democrats of Klion’s stripe: White liberals operate under the assumption that the role of black liberals is to do what white liberals tell them to do.

Sanders puts forward a great many proposals that are, to put it charitably, unlikely to gain traction in DC, where Republicans still have a vote — especially if those Republicans retain control of one or more houses of Congress. When challenged on this, Sanders falls back on his “revolution” talk. That “revolution” covers a lot: organizing strikes and protests against private companies that do not toe Sanders’ socialist political line; using the pretext of “campaign finance” reform to muzzle political opponents and strip them of their ability to deploy their own resources for political communication and activism; using business regulation to punish his political enemies; etc.

And, of course, it means blacklists. Sanders himself has not endorsed such measures, to be sure. But he doesn’t have to. His revolution is already prefigured in the campaign of intimidation and harassment his minions currently are carrying out on social media, with the usual threats and hysteria. “It’s not just about issues,” Sanders organizer Claire Sandberg put it. “It’s about whether you’re willing to pick the big fights.”

And the little fights, too: Bruenig is promising to target everybody who works for Bloomberg, not just the bigwigs. Given the infamous trollishness and sexism of the “Bernie Bros,” that is not likely to end well.

But these are blacklisting times. In Hollywood, Debra Messing is calling for political nonconformists to be blacklisted; on campus, recent research shows that conservative students are obliged to self-censor to an extraordinary degree; in private life, so-called liberals report that they are much more likely to discriminate against someone for their political views than conservatives are. But the Left was never going to be satisfied blacklisting conservatives. Disobedient Democrats must be punished, too.

If that’s what a “political revolution” looks like, then we should take Che Guevara off all those T-shirts and replace him with Joseph McCarthy, who had a real gift for that kind of thing.