Total Meltdown: How One Emoji From Hillary Clinton Set Off A Delicious Explosion in The Midst of Bernie Twitter


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One emoji. One emoji from Hillary Clinton is all it took to set the entire Bernie Sanders social-media sphere in complete and total meltdown mode.

Clinton, whose righteous indignation against Bernie Sanders is an oasis of sanity for many, promoted a tweet that featured a video clip of hers from 1993 advocating for health care reform. The original tweet, by the commentator Chantay Berry, noted that Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by about 27 years on the idea of lowering the eligibility age for Medicare, something Sanders’s fanclub has hailed as the best thing since running water now that Sanders has said he’s for it.

Clinton’s contribution to the conversation? One emoji. She quote-tweeted Berry with a single, googly eyed emoji.
She may as well have thrown a lit match into a pool of gasoline. Cosplay socialist Twitter-sphere exploded.

Briahna Joy Gray, former Bernie Sanders national spokesperson who once danced for joy that Donald Trump, rather than Hillary Clinton, would become president because of far left’s hatred for Hillary, scolded Clinton for promoting content from a “#KHive woman,” and demanded that Clinton apologize for doing so.



It’s a little rich for Gray to demand others disavow “toxic, hate-fueled politics” when in literally her next tweet she screenshots an insane article trashing Harris fans by Matt Orfalea, a former colleague of Gray’s at the Sanders campaign. Before he was hired as part of the Sanders video team, Orfalea once edited MLK’s I have a dream speech to insert sexual innuendos. After he left the Sanders campaign, Orfalea recorded himself making live phone calls to trash Joe Biden to voters from a Biden campaign caller list.

Now, I think Chantay Berry would be the first to tell you that she is indeed a “KHive woman,” - the group of online supporters of Kamala Harris led predominantly by Black women - as pejoratively as Gray may have used the term. But the toxic, knee-jerk, anti-Kamala Harris resentment that fueled this phenomenal meltdown from Gray and others is laced with jealousy: The KHive is everything cosplay socialist Twitter fancies itself as but never will be.

That has to do with the purposes of the two groups. Although both the KHive and Berniebros rose to advocate for their respective candidates for president, socialist cosplay Twitter quickly transformed itself into a cartoonish personality cult. They attacked everyone daring to speak ill of their messiah, and deployed abhorrent tactics like ad-hominem attacks, trolling people on social media, and exposing the personal and employment information of private individuals.

The KHive took a different tact to defending its candidate of choice: they call it receipts. Lie about Harris online, and an army of well-informed respondents will come at you with links to news articles, video clips, legislative language, and documented policy positions. They’ll be unforgiving, and they might even dig up your own bad social media takes, but they will not demand that you worship at the altar of Kamala Harris.

Bottom line: The KHive will set you straight for lying about Kamala, but the Benriebros will make your life hell for telling the truth about Bernie.

There’s another important difference between the online supporters of most other candidates and the Bernie Sanders fanclub: for supporters of most other candidates, their candidates exemplified their causes. For supporters of Bernie Sanders, their candidate exemplified their grievances. That is why when Harris dropped out, KHive quickly coalesced around Joe Biden, and in honesty, so did the online supporters of Pete Buttigueg, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, and other Democratic candidates after their candidates left the race. By contrast, Bernie’s true believers continue their nagging grievances against Biden to this day, and outshined by Harris, they are triggered at every time the KHive gets any kudos.

Berniebros had thought they owned the online space, and KHive not only beat them in the primary by getting behind Biden but got their candidate elected as the second-in-command. Cosplay socialists have never gotten over that.

That is why at the center of this recent meltdown is not something that Hillary Clinton said, but her act of highlighting the work done by a Harris supporter. They hate Hillary Clinton, and they hate Kamala Harris, but what they really can’t stand is people in KHive getting any credit.

Clinton, of course, has always been a fan of Harris’s (and vice versa). Those who followed last year’s Democratic primary closely will note that Clinton did not enter the foray until Tulsi Gabbard started smearing Harris. Clinton then torched Gabbard’s candidacy by exposing her for being propped up by Russians without ever saying her name. Sanders backers who were particularly pleased with Gabbard’s sharp jabs against Harris were incensed.

But Clinton had hit Gabbard where it hurt. Less than a week after Clinton took Gabbard to task, Gabbard announced that she would not run for re-election to Congress, effectively ending her political career.

There are some politicians who occupy all their time with their own grievances, and that rubs off on their supporters who become obsessed with birthing conspiracy theories about how their dear leader was cheated. Then there are leaders who come through the most agonizing experiences in their lives and pledge never to let that happen to the next person.

The first group makes noise. The second, history.


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