How to Stop Bernie Sanders Before It’s Too Late
Democrats! Time to put aside your differences, and focus on the real enemy: Bernie.
If you’re a true-blue member of the Democratic Party, you should be worried. We have spent the last several years trying to torpedo Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and yet here his is, more popular than ever, coming out on top despite our hard work. This is not good. For a while, his fame wasn’t a concern- after all, our press has been doing a great job of diminishing his presence or simply pretending he doesn’t even exist. But even with our propaganda machine in full swing, the guy’s popularity keeps popping up in new places like an air bubble in bad 70’s wallpaper. When even the Onion is calling us out, it’s time to be concerned.
We’ve tried everything. Our original strategy of simply ignoring him should have worked- after all, Donald Trump was a joke until the press gave him more screen time than any other candidate in 2016. We figured the opposite would be true, too- but that damn Sanders, despite his old age, figured out how to use the Facebook and the Twitter pretty well, allowing him to spread all his lefty bullshit everywhere, even without the help of the corporate media machine.
So then we tried identity politics. He’s an old white man- who wants another old white man? That’s so 20th Century! Apparently, a lot of people do- a lot of young people- which is kind of a surprise. What happened to OK, Boomer, you stupid millennials? It seems they’ve figured out that all old white men are not alike, and that there’s actually a distinguishable between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, despite all that grey hair. Who knew?
More successful was our “Bernie-Bro” angle- claiming that Sanders’ base was mostly comprised of middle-class white guys. It doesn’t matter that the numbers told a different story, or that it was just a handy recycling of the 2008 Clinton strategy calling Obama’s supporters “Obama Boys”. The Bernie Bro label stuck, even years after it had been proven wrong, continually popping up even in respected publications like The New Yorker. It came in really handy for defeating Bernie in the 2016 primary, even if Hillary ended up losing to Donald Trump anyway. Better a Republican in the White House than a Socialist, right?
But that Bernie Bro thing is soooo 2016, and we haven’t come up with an equally catchy slogan to slap on him this time around. Believe me, we’re trying. We’ve managed to get some low-level Warren aide to spread vague rumors about how Bernie said Americans will never elect a woman- right before a debate, conveniently enough. It helped a little, but apparently the American public, dumb as it usually is, seems to be getting tired of this kind of thing, which means we need to start thinking outside the box if we want to kill this guy- without actually, you know, killing this guy. Here’s some ideas:
Racist Bernie
Sure, Bernie has been fighting and marching alongside African Americans since the 60’s, back when no other white person had the guts to do so- including getting arrested for protesting racist policies in Chicago. That pretty much solidifies his street cred… or does it? What if America heard him say something really offensive… like the N-word? Goodbye progressive base for sure! Since Sanders will never actually say such a thing, we had to improvise by making one of those new fake videos that seem real- like the one Jordan Peele made with Barack Obama saying “Ben Carson’s in the Sunken Place”. Unfortunately, even this advanced AI technology couldn’t get Bernie to spit out racial slurs convincingly, so we’re going with Plan B: getting an intern to pose as a reporter, asking Bernie to say the phrase “nifty tiger,” editing the words together on their laptop, and using Adobe Premiere’s morph cut feature to blend it seamlessly. Our intern tells us he’s pretty sure this should work.
Purity Test Fail
Speaking of interns, we have lots of them- and they all have cell phone cameras. Interns that happen to have been stalking Sanders’ assistants around town as they perform random tasks for him. Get this: we caught an assistant picking up his groceries once, and in that bag were some non-organic veggies. Bernie’s always going off about climate change this and Green New Deal that… and yet, he continues to support Big Ag Carrots like the hypocrite he is. We’ve got a picture with him holding a tub of Pringles, and another with Elon Musk sharing a Taco Bell fajita. (At least, it looks like a fajita. Could be a burrito.) We also caught him wearing one of those bootleg Bernie Sesame Street t-shirts… made in China. So much for supporting union labor, Bernie! We got the photos to prove it!
Just Make Up Tons of Shit
If there’s anything Americans love, it’s good gossip. Fake news? Doesn’t matter anymore, baby! Our plan is to just flood the media with click-bait headlines: Bernie Likes to Club Baby Seals on Sundays, Bernie Shoved a Six-Year-Old Off a Swing Set and Then Peed On Her, Bernie Still Refuses to Delete His Napster Account… we have pages and pages of this stuff, and that’s the beauty of this plan. Too many accusations for Snopes to research means more time for this stuff to get passed around on the ol’ Facebook. God bless Social Media!
Help Nature Take Its Course
Let’s face it- Bernie is old. Old enough to die of natural causes, we mean. God forbid that happens… unless, of course, God decides NOT to forbid it, in which case, que será, será- right? What if Bernie were to get some free passes to Six Flags mailed to him from an anonymous supporter, and then he happens to bump into a crowd of “fans” who pressure him into riding a roller coaster with them? And maybe- just maybe- that roller coaster is turned up juuuust a little more intensely than usual, and then maybe Bernie’s ol heart starts to beat a tad faster than it should…
Or how about: Bernie is invited to speak at a conference- a really fancy conference, with great food. Great, rich, food. Great, rich, high-in-cholesterol and other artery-clogging food. And the conference is a week long, with several buffets every day…
No? How about a speaking engagement in a boat over shark-infested waters? A CNN interview while skydiving? Listen, we’re not saying we want Bernie to… you know. We’re just saying he’s getting pretty old.
Stick to the Classics
Finally, it’s worth considering that perhaps we spoke too soon. Perhaps the problem with our original game plan is that we’re not doing it enough. Despite all our attempts at pretending he doesn’t exist:
… avoiding mentioning his name:
…diminishing his ranking:
…or simply assuming he’s wrong about everything:
The guy just keeps getting stronger. We even tried having Google diminish him in search engine results! Check it out: Sanders was ranking #1, so we simply had Google hide the top ranking:
And even if you expanded the window, Bernie was still nowhere to be seen:
These results were based on a Rolling Stone article, but if you actually read the article itself, it was clear that Bernie led the pack:
Thankfully, no one actually reads articles anymore. But even with all our tricks, the guy is still blowing the competition out of the water. Jesus, as of last fall he already had almost twice the number of donors as Warren, which- hello- represents actual people who vote:
And that’s LAST summer. The guy just came in first place this quarter in both amount of money raised ($34.5 bil) and number of donors (5 billion)! And that’s with the average shmoe giving him a measly 18 bucks. EIGHTEEN BUCKS! WTF?
There’s no question this guy is the odds on favorite to beat Trump, but that would mean having a socialist in the White House, which sure as hell ‘aint going to happen on our watch. Democrats, we need you to keep talking about coming together as a party to defeat Trump while making sure to break it apart derailing the one person that can actually- uh- defeat Trump. You do your part, and we’ll do ours. We’ve got Warren in there to draw progressive votes away from him, rob him of a clear win in the Primaries, and let our Super Delegates do their work this summer, hacking him to bits. We’ve stacked the DNC deck with our corporate-friendly best, to make the fuck sure Sanders gets “beaten to a pulp” (as our man Podesta put it.) It may seem un-Democratic, but think of it as a sacrifice for the good of the country- our capitalist, corporate-run country, just like our neoliberal Founding Fathers intended.
