Bernie Sanders bullied off stage by black lives matter protesters

[Marokai Backbeat]

I think referring to Sanders' past support for civil rights causes when it was far less politically rewarding to do so is relevant in the context of a lot of people genuinely assuming the guy is a secret racist.

I think it's fair to say that Sanders' hasn't really been super specific on this issue (though not for lack of caring about the issue; it's just not what he's devoted literally his entire time to as a politician in the spotlight) but the fact that this is happening in a primary battle against Hillary Clinton is hilarious, because by absolutely no measure has Hillary's actions on this issue been any better. Sure, she's sucked up to a lot of rainbow coalition demographics since her campaign kicked off, but this is the woman who happily played race with Obama (remember when it was super obvious the Clinton campaign leaked those pictures of Obama in african garb, or whatever?) during their 2008 battle. The fact that Bernie, who has held solid and respectful positions about these issues going back for decades, is the one being painted as the candidate with the lack of respect for race, while his main opposition has demonstrated a total lack of respect for race outside of early campaign policy drafts that don't matter at all at this point, is pretty f**king sad.

Bernie is the best candidate for the left, and is the only one willing to go to more root causes of inequality as opposed to band-aid solutions, and it seems the left will happily run in the arms of a person who would sell them out for a few more percentage points if she could, instead.

Anyone being intellectually honest (which is not an activists' strong suit) knows Bernie supports all the things Hillary does on this issue and more. He's just not very good at selling that to people. Though admittedly, that's difficult to do when you're ran off stages by people who won't let you speak.

[Marokai Backbeat]

I wish Bernie showed some backbone, kinda disappointed he just let them take over his event like that.

What was he supposed to do? Shove them off the stage? He stood there respectfully for 20 minutes, the arguably best thing to do.

Calling security would have been the best coarse of action

That's the problem. These people are protesting about police brutality so he can't do that. Even if it's a private security firm, it's still going to look very bad. These people are obviously not going to go down quietly, they will resist being taken away, they may even hurt themselves in the process. Say they do end up getting a twisted arm or a Black eye in the process of flailing around, in the current atmosphere of the left, even if it's apparent that they did it to themselves, you can't say anything negative about Black activists. The whole story will be "BLM activists injured by security at Bernie Sanders rally". He won't be able to refute it, he knows that, that's why he never criticizes these people, he just walks away and says nothing, that's all he can do.

This is unfortunately true. If the protesters were forcibly removed it would be a story plastered all over Vox in a heartbeat.