How to Gaslight a Berniebro

One recent, illustrative kerfuffle happened when Anil Dash, the tech commentator and influential Twitter power-user, tweeted this in a conversation about Sanders supporters:

Here, Dash alleges that Men’s Rights Activists, Pick Up Artists, and NeoReactionaries — three of the most violently misogynistic, racist, and disgustingly revanchist subcultures of right-wing psychopaths on the internet today — had “adopted” Sanders. And further, he argued that said adoption was a distinct nuance that separated Sanders supporters online from the general combativeness of excitable fandoms generally (the argument which Dash was rebutting). Now, you can see why this might irritate Sanders supporters. It irritated me. The suggestion that people like NeoReactionaries, who are usually avowed white nationalists who openly hate Jews and socialists and poor people and women, had “adopted” Sanders seemed both patently ridiculous and like an escalation of the smear that Sanders supporters were riddled with misogyny and racism.

Dash later walked back this comment, saying that he didn’t mean to suggest that these right-wing hate mobs were actually sincere Sanders supporters. What he meant to say is that these vicious harassers had decided to pick their targets based on who Sanders supporters were attacking online — taking their cues from the Berniebros, in other words. Of course, even if this is what he meant, there’s still a pretty obvious criticism embedded, the suggestion that Sanders supporters are so hostile, and direct so much hatred at women and people of color, that right-wing abuse mobs would want to band together with Berniebros in an alliance of convenience. It’s still a guilt-by-association attack. But, also, it’s pretty clearly not what he meant.

See, Dash also argued that the context of his other tweets made it clear that he hadn’t suggested that MRAs and their ilk actually supported Bernie Sanders. He said that, if not for “dudes [taking] my tweet out of context,” any reasonable observer would understand that Dash had never intended to level such an outrageous claim. Hmm:

I honestly, honestly don’t know how to read this in any other way except as stating that “organized abusers” support Bernie Sanders. In the interest of fairness and good-faith, I’ve really tried my best, but there’s nothing in the context here that suggests Dash meant anything except that some members of right-wing hate groups support Sanders. He literally says “all candidates have supporters who suck, but organized abusers have mostly picked Trump & Sanders.” I truly cannot fathom any other way to read this except that the category “supporters who suck” includes the sub-category of “organized abusers,” a further subset of whom have “picked…Sanders” — meaning that said abusers are supporters of Sanders. And this is part of the context that Dash says is exculpatory.

Further, Dash only ever says “Sanders.” Never “Berniebros,” or “Sanders supporters.” If he said MRAs had adopted Sanders supporters, that would make his eventual explanation at least plausible, but he consistently used the name of the candidate himself, not that of his partisans. And, of course, his claim that these alt-right dipshits are “illogical” in adopting Sanders only further reinforces the point — there’s nothing illogical about PUAs and NeoReactionaries merely infiltrating the pro-Sanders crowd to tarnish their name, or making an alliance of convenience to harass the same people. It’s only illogical if you have to explain why people who disagree with all of Bernie’s values and policies would for some reason support him. Indeed, Dash even offers a way to reconcile this totally implausible situation: because these angry white men hate women so much, they’d be willing to endorse any male candidate, no matter how much he might otherwise differ from them. Aside from the fact that this doesn’t explain why they wouldn’t just choose a Republican to support, it also ties in neatly with a pre-existing narrative of support for Sanders being rooted in misogyny.

But, ultimately, my goal here is not to pin down Anil Dash as saying something shitty and false. My point is to illustrate why a reasonable observer — not just the caricature of an abrasive, excitable Berniebro — would read Dash’s tweets the way I did, regardless of his intent, and why it would be reasonable to expect Dash to take some responsibility for his words. At the very least, I would have expected him to acknowledge using misleading and inflammatory language, and maybe even apologize or explain how exactly we were supposed to read his words. Instead, he said that angry Berniebros had deliberately twisted his words for the purpose of harassment. OK.

In any case, people were pissed, including me. A few folks screenshotted or retweeted Dash’s offending tweet, and of course the negative responses rolled in. There was a lot of ridiculing, some insults, etc. But, guess what? He fucked up. When you fuck up online, people get mad at you. And I know Dash doesn’t believe in chickenshit civility policing, because he’s opined many times on how tone policing is wrong, and how sometimes “public shaming” and “political correctness” (to borrow the unfortunately loaded phrases of milquetoast centrist toddlers like Jonathan Chait) are defensible in rooting out racism, misogyny, and other forms of intolerance online. I know Dash thinks that ridicule and insults can be warranted, because he’s defended that practice — and rightly so! I have done the same, at great length. Sometimes people deserve to be publicly shamed, or insulted, or ridiculed, and that’s OK! So he, of all people, should be able to comprehend that when he smears a progressive group of people — a group that includes more women than men among its younger members, a group that includes people of color — as hospitable to virulent white nationalist hyper-misogynists, even in outright alliance with them, he’s gonna get some well-earned blowback. Here’s what he said:

Bra-fucking-vo. That is a masterful bit of gaslighting that Dash just performed. First, he smeared Sanders supporters with an accusation that was (a) undeniably vicious, associating them with actual human scum, (b) based in no evidence whatsoever, and (c) furthered an already-existing line of dishonest attack. Finally, he claimed he didn’t really mean it, but that the backlash his smear earned him proved that he was really right all along. If nothing else, you gotta give him credit for good execution, because people ate that shit up. Oh, and I have to give special kudos for the use of “dudes took the tweet out of context” to erase all the women who criticized that tweet or made fun of it.

Again, let me just distill this down a bit, to be as clear as I can possibly be:

DASH: “Sanders supporters are so hostile that even white nationalists and pro-rape men’s groups have adopted Sanders. They are picking him and Trump, maybe because they just hate women so much they’ll even pick a Jewish socialist over a woman candidate.”

SANDERS SUPPORTERS: “Uh, that’s bullshit. Fuck you, buddy.”

DASH: “Hey, woah, woah. I didn’t mean to imply that NRxers and MRAs actually supported Sanders, but the response I’ve gotten from Sanders supporters just goes to prove how vicious and hostile they are. Draw your own conclusions.”

I truly believe that’s a fair summary of how this went down. That’s why I tried my best to compose this summary from actual phrases and ideas Dash used. And don’t get me wrong; I don’t think that Dash is a bad guy. I don’t think he had the idea to intentionally gaslight Sanders supporters and decided to lie and then backtrack just to infuriate people. I think he thoughtlessly said something that was untrue, and when pressed on it, he refused to take responsibility or back down. That’s something all of us can be guilty of. But I think part of that response has to be credited to the Berniebro meme itself — the reason Dash was so unwilling to critically examine his own words and be accountable for them is probably, in no small part, because he conceives of Sanders supporters as irrationally aggressive. It’s a narrative that allows people to dismiss any criticism from a Sanders supporter as the mere ravings of a Berniebro, the baseless aggression of this particular species online harasser. It closes off those who believe it to self-awareness when receiving criticism. I don’t know if this influenced Dash, of course, but it’s my guess, and I think it’s more charitable than assuming he was just being shitty entirely on his own.

This might seem like a lot of words to expend on some argument on Twitter that will be totally forgotten in a week, but the whole point of this is that I believe this type of gaslighting is emblematic of how the Berniebro meme plays out on a daily basis.

In this instance, which got a lot of play, Emily Nussbaum at least was gracious enough to realize she had been mistaken and retract her initial claim. Unfortunately (and through no fault of Nussbaum’s), it was the initial tweet which made headlines, and got hundreds of retweets — not the correction. And, although she mentions at the end that there is nonetheless a real “abrasive streak among some pro-Bern tweeters,” one has to wonder if that abrasive streak doesn’t have something to do with being constantly accused of things they haven’t done, or being associated with things they aren’t associated with. Maybe that abrasive streak is a perfectly understandable response to being constantly smeared.

It’s been especially fun on Facebook, where friends and former colleagues — that is, people whose opinions I actually care about, as opposed to twitter.com user “HillaryMan43” — have been making posts and sharing articles that impugn the intelligence and character of Bernie supporters. Sanders supporters are called naive, deluded, bigoted, cultish, abrasive, immature, and don’t forget the very first insult that spawned the Berniebro meme itself: pathetically uncool. I’ve had some lovely discussions in which people I used to work with (on political campaigns! The sort of people I expect to be to professional to insult the supporters of different campaigns within the same party) where I’ve been point-blank told to grow up, stop apologizing for sexism, read a book, and other fun bits of condescension, all for politely objecting to being insulted in the first place. It’s a miracle I’m not more abrasive online, frankly.

Ultimately, it has to come back to that fundamental problem: liberals don’t have much at all to say that’s bad about Bernie Sanders personally, so those who oppose him direct all their invective at his supporters instead. The infamous ALL CAPS piece on supporting Hillary does exactly this. The author is quite clear that she likes Bernie, and she really doesn’t have anything bad to say about him! So instead she berates his supporters, CAPS LOCK-style, for 1,000 words. This is an actual quote from the piece:

“I’M SICK OF HAVING TO…SEE YOUR SIDE AND RESPECT YOUR OPINION WHEN I FUCKING DON’T”

This piece went viral to much applause from Clinton supporters, particularly because it was seen as a rebuttal to abrasive Berniebros and their hostility. There’s honestly nothing I can add to that to make the contradiction any more obvious.