Sanders campaign response In February 2016, Sanders distanced himself from the group as a result of alleged sexist attacks against rival Democratic nominee
Hillary Clinton. On
CNN's
State of the Union program
, Jake Tapper asked whether he had heard "about this phenomenon, Bernie Bros, who support you and sometimes attack in very sexist ways". Sanders replied "I have heard about it. It's disgusting...Anybody who is supporting me and who is doing sexist things, we don't want them. I don't want them. That is not what this campaign is about." Max van Dyke made a similar point in 2017. During the
ninth 2020 Democratic debate, Sanders suggested that
Russians were impersonating people claiming to be his supporters online. A
Twitter spokesperson rejected this suggestion, telling
CNBC: "Using technology and human review in concert, we proactively monitor Twitter to identify attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them. As is standard, if we have reasonable evidence of state-backed information operations, we’ll disclose them following our thorough investigation to our public archive — the largest of its kind in the industry."
Other criticism Zeeshan Aleem, a Columnist at MSNBC, argued in August 2021 that the "myth of the white Bernie Bro has quietly vanished". This was because the recent electoral success of a diverse group of Progressives effectively buried the idea of a white and male leftwing movement. Most notably, the Congressional group
The Squad, several of whose members claim the same mantle of
Democratic socialism that Sanders popularized in his campaigns, and which represents the most leftwing bloc in the House, "is composed entirely by people of color and effectively led by women". Even "prominent friends of the squad", like
Congressional Progressive Caucus leader
Pramila Jayapal, and the freshman representative
Mondaire Jones, "hail from diverse backgrounds." According to
Vice News, in September 2019, women under 45 comprised a larger share of Sanders' supporters than men of the same age group. After the 2020 Nevada caucus,
The Washington Post stated that he was "forcing a sudden reckoning in the Democratic party" because of his strong support from Hispanic and Latino voters. In January 2016,
The Intercept journalist
Glenn Greenwald called the Bernie Bro narrative a "cheap campaign tactic" and a "journalistic disgrace" and indicated that more women supported Sanders than Clinton: "one has to be willing to belittle the views and erase the existence of a huge number of American women to wield this 'Bernie Bro' smear." He also asserted a lack of evidence for the concept. He summarized his opinion as follows: "The goal is to inherently delegitimize all critics of Hillary Clinton by accusing them of, or at least associating them with, sexism, thus distracting attention away from Clinton's policy views, funding, and political history and directing it toward the online behavior of anonymous, random, isolated people on the internet claiming to be Sanders supporters." Nathan Wellman asserted in
US Uncut in January 2016 that users of the term "are essentially erasing the contributions of women and people of color to the Bernie Sanders campaign to propagate their own narrative, rendering them as invisible people. This is one of the oldest forms of violence perpetrated by white people of privilege." ==See also==