Hacker News Reader

Comment by meinmissoula | Hacker News Reader

Bit of an aside, but the socially acceptable levels of casual-hate when directed at "white men" is sometimes shocking to me.

> Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters.

The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing.

The story arc isn't that anything changed about Bernie's policy views, history or anything else. The bad thing that happened is a rumor that "young white men" liked him, which was bad, and the good news was that Bernie supporters were actually from the morally good races and genders.

View on HN

Did we read the same article?

> But then repeated news cycles about “toxic Bernie Bros” seemed to drain the movement’s momentum. Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement.

What I read is a description of how media portrayed Bernie Sander's supporters. Nowhere here does it say that white men are bad. In fact, it's calling out negative stereotyping used by mainstream media. Why do you think the author hates you?

> Did we read the same article?

Isn't that the point: Different people read/ hear the same thing but interpret it differently based upon their biases.

"Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement."

Why was their skin color and sex relevant?

If the issue was that they were "cyberbullies", then why does she follow up with this defense:

"Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters."

That is only important if "young white men" are, by definition, A Problem.

I'm so used to it I read right past it, but yeah, on closer inspection if any other race was used in this context or the source material I suspect it'd get cut real quick. And the author doesn't even bother to mince in some quotation marks to baffle the connotations.

> The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing.

No, there's nothing like that in the article. You imposed this strange interpretation on it. After all, Bernie himself is a white man, so why would someone who thinks white men are inherently evil support him, especially when some of the other candidates (e.g., Clinton) were women?

The "Bernie bros" meme was a cynical ploy to undermine the Sanders campaign by trying to show that only sexists would support him over his female opponents (Clinton or Warren).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com