If the remaining #BernieOrBusters want to convince the world that they are something other than “ridiculous” — as the far more grounded Bernie fan Sarah Silverman so aptly characterized them at the DNC last week — the Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash on Facebook isn’t exactly helping.
Bernie himself has bowed to political realities, endorsing Hillary and lending his support for her fight against Trump. Not so Bernie’s Dank Memers. The anti-Trump memes there are surprisingly few and far between. Far more common are memes supporting the Green party’s Jill Stein. And far more common than those are memes attacking Hillary and her supporters with all the subtlety of a channer who’s just mastered MSPaint.
While the anti-Hillary sentiment isn’t that much of a surprise, what is surprising, even a little shocking, is how utterly backwards many of the memes are, echoing classic misogynistic tropes and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories, and in a few cases, even more bizarrely, repurposing antisemitic propaganda popular amongst GamerGaters and Internet Nazis.
Why would the supporters of a Jewish socialist repeatedly post pictures of Hillary Clinton as the “Happy Merchant?” You’ll have to ask them.
Let’s take a look at some of the more, well, colorful memes.
There’s this lovely reworking of an old sexist joke:
And this slightly more original offering.
Here’s Hillary as a beauty pageant winner.
And as a porn star:
Here’s a meme inspired, I guess, by Pokemon Go?
This one manages to add transphobia to the mix:
This meme links Hillary with a woman who was famously not convicted of murdering her daughter. At least in a court of law; in the court of public opinion she was considered guilty, guilty, guilty. Apparently in the mind of the mememaker, Hillary not being indicted for deleting emails is the literal equivalent of Casey Anthony getting away with murder?
There are memes that echo Trump’s, er, “critique” of Hillary:
This one, while directed at disgraced DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, offers an apologia of sorts for Melania Trump’s plagiarism.
And here’s one promoting a hashtag that originated with far-right attack dog — and fervent Trump fan — Mike Cernovich.
And no, I have no idea what’s really going on with her tongue.
There are some memes that reek of conspiracy theory, though it’s a little hard to tell how many Bernie fans take these seriously.
There are a surprising number of memes depicting Hillary as a reptilian space alien. I’m going to assume they’re all meant as jokes, because it’s too depressing to contemplate otherwise.
Naturally, there are more than a few memes attacking Sarah Silverman for her “ridiculous” remark, with many of the mememakers assuming she was paid to make it.
But it’s the “Happy Merchant” memes that truly baffle.
Here’s a typical “Happy Merchant” meme, using the now-infamous cartoon that originally appeared in a neo-Nazi newsletter.
And here’s Hillary in the same role, from the Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash:
The most depressing thing? This isn’t just some random Facebook page. The Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash page has more than 438,000 members. I can only hope most of them are less backwards than those posting memes on the page today.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
Answer: Because they’re assholes who don’t really care about the issues that Bernie pushed. /bitter bernie supporter who would be left for dead and/or deported by Trump who is somehow apparently less evil.
Bernie is able to attract one of the key electoral target of Trump : disenfranchised, white poor-to-middle class peoples who see their living condition worsen without understanding really why. They easily cross back to Trump, especially when Clinton is about the worse possible candidate for that demographic.
Which remind that horrible people often bury their awfulness in good conditions. It’s when things go wrong that most assholes reveal themselves.
Point of Information- the admin of BSDMS is taking kickbacks for allowing clickbait. https://nextgenerationblogs.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/viral-group-bernie-sanders-dank-meme-stashowner-involved-in-corruption
I was used to misogynists blaming women for the horrific crime of “hitting the wall” but now it’s women’s fault that men age too? Golly, but aren’t women just the worst!?
Isn’t Bernie at least culturally Jewish? Hillary Clinton is definitely culturally Christian. The anti-Semitism seems a smidge misplaced here.
I think the broiest of the Bernie bros were never progressives. They just went with him because he was the trendy new anti-establishment candidate. Like Ron Paul was the election cycles prior to this. Not that liberals can’t be sexist or anti-Semitic (ahem, Gert) but these guys don’t ever seem to be knowledgeable or concerned about the issues.
The most likely option is what others have already said about the aggrieved white men of the Bernie movement being swayed by Trump. I do recall that some alt-right shitposters bragged about how they were making memes for Bernie’s camp, but that doesn’t explain why Bernie’s Dank Meme Stash kept the images up or why folks aren’t condemning them.
The Casey Anthony meme is especially revealing because these are the same people who will shout about “innocent until proven guilty” with regards to people believing sexual assault victims. By their own reasoning, they should be perfectly happy to let Casey Anthony watch their kids.
http://static5.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/112/1127413/2587842-laugh.gif
Just as surprising as water being wet. Berniebros gonna Berniebro, dude. None of this shit is new. You ain’t new. Quit acting so new, David, you silly goose ?
I also find it interesting that so many Bernie Bros are hyping up Jill Stein now. I kinda suspect they like the idea of supporting a female candidate from a “safe” position of not having to contemplate her actually winning. It’s like how a lot of men will say they love intelligent, confident women but will write off actual intelligent, confident women as insufferable shrews when they actually meet them.
Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Also, some, though not all, of them really aren’t Sanders (or Stein) supporters. They’re Trump supporters and miscellaneous trolls.
(The U.S. has a First Past the Post electoral system. Like it or not, a vote for a third party candidate is effectively a vote for the major party candidate at the furthest remove from your values: a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump. Savvy folks know this; it’s why you’ll always find some Republicans donating to the Green party, and some Democrats donating to the Libertarian party.)
The overlap in rhetoric between the MRA and BoBers is alarming and scary. The Venn Diagram among MRA, Trump, White Nationalist, and BoB discourse has wayyyyyy too much overlap.
I, too, am confused why Bernie supporters would use anti-Semitism memes when Bernie is Jewish. I don’t think they even know they’re using anti-Semitism; they’re probably just using “cues” that they’ve learn make people “bad” and applying it to meme without understanding where such things came from.
Sigh. After a wait this long, I really would have hoped the fight would only come from the right.
When I was still a Sanders supporter back many many months ago I got into an interesting “argument” with some Bernie Bros. They insisted that by even considering voting for Clinton should she win the nomination that I was unfit to call myself a progressive. When I pushed back on that idea it devolved almost instantly into name calling, slurs, memes like the above and even threats. You could have replaced politics with video gaming and I would barely have known the difference in the behavior of these guy. (I’m assuming most of them were men considering what they thought of Mrs. Clinton, her lady parts, my lady parts and the jubilation they showed toward the one who threatened to violate me for my views)
I don’t think these Bernie Bros ever wanted Sanders so much as they hate Clinton (and very likely women in general) and wanted pot legalized.
I;m starting to think that America deserves to have Trump win, Provided He doesn’t start world war 3 maybe 4 years with him in charge will be the wake up call the country needs.
@Loquora Demonisation of opponents, threats, and bioessentialism are fundamentally anti-liberal. You’re the progressive, not them.
The impression I have is that the Bernie Bro themselves are a loud minority of the Sander supporter ; however a significant crop of Bernie supporters are totally able to accept that kind of shit. They are here because they feel wronged, and they will roll with a lot of thing that don’t seem to contradict their quest for better living conditions.
It’s a bit like how a lot of people who voted for the Nazi party did not vote because they wanted to kill all jews, but because they felt that Hitler was the best bet to stop the economic crisis, and killing / ostracizing jews just wasn’t a big deal.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO0OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
@Jack
Preach
On imgur, at least, there’s a definite +ve correlation between people who post (generally already-debunked-conspiracy nonsense) anti-Clinton rhetoric and people who seem to have misogynistic leanings from their post / comment history.
@ Fabe
This…isn’t cool. This is people’s actual lives and livelihoods we’re talking about here. Please miss me with this scorched earth fantasy.
What’s surprising? There are assholes in every group. Feminism includes its share of TERFs and SWERFs and body-shamers and sex-shamers, not to mention a troubling history of racism.
Please don’t fall into the trap of turning this around and assuming this is at all representative of liberals who don’t support Clinton. I’ve seen so much abuse hurled casually, mostly via Facebook, coming from Clinton supporters, and it really hurts.
Look, I get it. Trump is a scary motherfucker. But some people refuse to support lesser-evilism any longer. If you support Clinton because you’re just that scared of Trump, I get you. I respect you. I support you. But I’m pleading with you (and this is directed indiscriminately at any readers, and also at David), please, please return that respect to the rational, intelligent, level-headed people with carefully-considered opinions who don’t support Clinton. Please don’t flippantly dismiss those people as “ridiculous.”
I’ve seen some really shitty sides to some of my “friends” lately, and it sucks to see that.
The Hillary as lizard is possibly related to the conspiracy theory that the world is ruled by lizard people desguised as humans.
There’s a sentence Brazilian feminists say and is very true:
There’s nothing more alike a right misogynist as a left misogynist. They are fighting for equality among theirselves (white cis males), not equality for everyone.
It must be cool to be privileged enough to throw your vote to the garbage like this and still claim it’s a matter of principle. Hey, hello, this is a matter of life or death for some people. You’re choosing someone to RULE THE WORLD, basically. PLEASE be wise and YES, I WILL criticize your voting options harshly. It concerns me. It concerns everyone.
But then, again, those guys are just a few theoretical differences from straight out voting for Trump.
I feel like I’m going to look back on this time and wonder “why wasn’t I more excited about Hillary getting the nomination?”
This blog post explains why it’s hard to feel excited. With all this anger, this senselessness, this willingness to get into bed with Trump (of all people) coming from people who are ostensibly Democrats, it’s difficult to feel happy about my preferred candidate getting the nomination. Instead, I feel like the real fight has only just begun.
And after everything Bill did to Hillary SHE is the one blamed for his aging, cause she was a bad wife, apparently?
HAHAHA, hilarious. When is a woman NOT to blame?