Many Hillary Clinton supporters have been complaining that Bernie supporters (of all people) are hurling sexist insults at Hillary, and that any criticism of her is *clearly* misogynistic in nature. As if no one could possibly just not like her policies or past actions. It *has* to be that you just hate women, right?

Writer Glenn Greenwald calls the “Bernie Bro” narrative an “all-purpose, handy pro-Clinton smear” used to undermine legitimate criticism of Clinton. He argues that Sanders supporters are not “uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online behavior” and points out that there are plenty of women among die-hard Sanders supporters.

The interesting point seems to be that while Hillary supporters expect a certain amount of criticism from the right, when it comes from the left, they are perplexed and seem to feel the need to explain this criticism as unfounded in some way. The old saw of misogyny is their go-to place in cases like these.

So, is it true? Well, the Washington Post published an analysis by Rebekah Tromble, an assistant professor at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. Which looked at the rhetoric being used out there and where it comes from. Their findings?

Of all the negative comments about Hillary that were found (in a sampling of over 50,000 remarks), a little over 1% were sexist. And that considers all remarks, from both the right and the left.

“In the end, we found that 23 of the 30 gendered slurs were directed at Clinton. However, out of a total 52,181 tweets mentioning @HillaryClinton, just 606, or 1.16 percent, contained these insults. While these slurs only represent one particularly overt form of sexism, the fact that so few were present in these tweets is remarkable.”

When Sanders supporters were extracted, they represented about 15% of that 1%. Among the Sanders supporters who made up that infinitesimally small number, about 60% were men and 30% were women (10% couldn’t be determined).

“The vast majority of the slurs were associated with Twitter users on the right — particularly self-identified Trump supporters. But 14.7 percent came from those backing Sanders. Among Sanders supporters, 60.6 percent tweeting gendered slurs were men, 29.2 percent women, and 10.1 percent unknown. “

So, while it may play to someone’s need to explain the seemingly unexplainable, “How could a liberally-minded, intelligent person not support Hillary?”, the reality is that those liberally-minded, intelligent people must have another reason than hating women. While this should have been obvious to the casual observer from the beginning, there now appears to be some numbers to clarify that reality:

“Thus, while we do find some evidence of Bernie Bros’ bad behavior, abuse against Clinton by Sanders supporters — both male and female —seems relatively limited. Clinton certainly faces a barrage of negativity and a heavy dose of sexism on Twitter. But that mostly appears to come from the right.

And though any and all instances of sexist slurs deserve condemnation, Sanders’ keyboard warriors accounted for just 89 such tweets during the New Hampshire primary. That is a mere 0.17 percent of all the tweets mentioning @HillaryClinton that we examined.”

 

Hillary ‘haters’ (on the left anyway), hate Hillary for reasons that have little to do with her sex.

Read full article here…