But by the time Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the race last week, leaving behind the choice of two white male septuagenarians, Biden was hands down my pick to become the Democratic nominee. I've never felt particularly inspired by Biden's candidacy or platform but, bottom line, I simply found myself unable to endorse the misogyny that has seethed from the Sanders campaign, particularly since voting began.

The first jaw-dropping moment for me came the weekend before the Iowa caucuses when three Sanders surrogates were addressing a group of the candidate's supporters at a Friday night rally. When former Sanders rival Hillary Clinton came up, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib led audience members in a round of boos after the host had briefly tried to hush the outburst.

“We’re not going to boo, we’re classy here...” moderator Dionna Langford said as the reaction came at first mention of Clinton.

Tlaib interrupted. “No. no, I’ll boo,” she said, egging on the crowd as her two counterparts on stage, Congresswomen Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota chuckled at Tlaib's side, perhaps a little taken aback by her pronouncement. “No, we’re going to boo," Tlaib continued, "That’s all right, the haters will shut up on Monday when we win.”

For context, Clinton had recently been quoted in a Hulu documentary as saying of Sanders, "Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him." And while it's perfectly reasonable for Sanders supporters to take exception to that comment and be upset by it, having three high-profile surrogates boo the last Democratic nominee on the eve of voting was just unbelievable to me. In fact, when I tweeted out the video registering my shock, I got plenty of responses saying Clinton deserved it and she had started it.

I honestly couldn't believe how shortsighted it was for a candidate who was positioned to do well Iowa and become a real player in the 2020 contest. What Clinton had said should have been entirely irrelevant to the public face of the campaign. However bitter Sanders and his team may have felt about it, Clinton wasn't on the ballot, Sanders was. Best to just ignore her and keep their eyes on the prize. The Sanders campaign needed to move his supporters beyond the hard feelings of 2016 in order to build his campaign into a winning coalition. Any former Clinton supporter who saw that video immediately felt unwelcome in an eventual Sanders coalition. Tlaib ended up tweeting out an apology the next day, but the damage was done.

Of course, what we know now (and Markos has written about) is that the Sanders campaign strategy all along was to get a plurality of delegates in a fractured field where about 30% of the vote could reign supreme. I'm not going to rehash the wisdom of that here other than to say, betting that the field would never winnow to just two candidates has turned out to be a losing strategy. And what that led to, as Markos documented and many of us witnessed, was a campaign where top surrogates and officials were continually more bent on settling petty scores than welcoming new voters into the fold. Sanders himself would sometimes make overtures here and there in his speeches, but that didn't erase the tenor and tone of what was pulsating through much of the campaign, its supporters and the surrogates/personalities it embraced.

Some supporters of Sanders wanted to trivialize it as just a few online bullies being mean. Those dismissals even came on this site. One commenter on a post I wrote posited, "It amazes me that in a world with 7.7 billion people, a few dozen people saying something on Twitter is considered noteworthy." That was a pretty standard reaction to the notion that any of the online bullying really mattered.

My response was that when someone doxxes you, publicizes your home address, and you feel physically threatened—yeah, it matters a lot. That's exactly what happened to the leaders the Culinary Union in Nevada after the organization—which is a statewide powerhouse—put out a pamphlet noting that Sanders' Medicare For All plan would "end" the insurance they had fought so hard to get. The leaders of that union were women of color, a favorite target of Sanders' most virulent strain of supporters. That was a tipping point for me personally—it's entirely unacceptable to threaten average folks who are working to protect their lives, livelihoods, and families in an earnest way. Sanders himself waited more than 24 hours to respond and when he did, he even suggested the threats may not have come from his people at all. For me, that also missed the mark. Here's what he said:

Obviously, that is not acceptable to me. And I don't know who these so-called supporters are. You know, we are living in a strange world on the Internet. And, sometimes, people attack people in somebody else's name. But let me be very clear. Anybody making personal attacks against anybody else in my name is not part of our movement. We don't want them. And I'm not so sure, to be honest with you, that they are necessarily part of our movement. You understand, you know, the nature of the Internet. It's a strange world out there.

But perhaps the most widely known high-profile attacks from Sanders supporters and surrogates have been saved for Elizabeth Warren. The vitriol aimed at her once voting got started has been astounding. (I'm honestly running too short on time to properly recount it here.) But it included Sanders supporters targeting Warren, her campaign staff, and her supporters with an onslaught of snake emojis after Warren and Sanders publicly disagreed over a private conversation they had regarding whether a female candidate could win the presidency in 2020. It was all downhill from there. But to get a sense, here's some Super Tuesday clips from the pro-Sanders podcast Chapo Trap House.

x 1) One of the most vile attacks on @ewarren this week came from the men at Bernie SandersÃ¢ÂÂ favorite socialist podcast, Chapo Trap House. On March 2, 2020, they devoted much of their SF live show to Ã¢ÂÂLyinÃ¢ÂÂ loser Liz Warren,Ã¢ÂÂ repeatedly hissing at her like a snake.



THREAD pic.twitter.com/TYBualoxMJ — John AravoÃ°ÂÂÂis Ã°ÂÂÂºÃ°ÂÂÂ¸ (@aravosis) March 6, 2020

x 4) "These people keep forgetting, when they talk about how Elizabeth Warren and her plans and she's so smart, what they're forgetting is the most important fact which is that Liz Warren f*cking sucks. She f*cking sucks! She just comprehensively sucks ass!" pic.twitter.com/4shPbQUdPW — John AravoÃ°ÂÂÂis Ã°ÂÂÂºÃ°ÂÂÂ¸ (@aravosis) March 6, 2020

After Warren dropped out of the race, Sanders supporters suddenly expected and indeed demanded in many instances that Warren endorse Sanders, as if that would have been the difference between Sanders winning and losing, a specious assertion to begin with. There's a lot of reasons why Warren hasn't and likely won't endorse Sanders, but the venom spewed at her from his corner is certainly one of them. Warren also specifically cited the Culinary Union matter in her exit interview with Rachel Maddow, saying "I think there’s a real problem with online bullying and online nastiness. I’m not just talking about who said mean things; I’m talking about some really ugly stuff that went on."

Sanders supporters have mostly either begged Warren to endorse or tried to bully/shame her into it by suggesting she's a traitor to the liberal cause by failing to do so. One high-profile exception to that has been Sanders surrogate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

“I always want to see us come together as a progressive wing,” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times. “I think that’s important and where we draw strength from. But at the same time, I come from the lens of an organizer, and if someone doesn’t do what you want, you don’t blame them — you ask why. And you don’t demand that answer of that person — you reflect. And that reflection is where you can grow.”

But even Ocasio-Cortez—who helped turn Sanders' campaign around with a major endorsement following his heart procedure—has come under attack as Sanders' prospects dwindle.

x This sounds like blaming yet another person -- this time AOC -- for Sanders' losses. But if it's true she was unhappy re: promotion of the Rogan endorsement, well, then, what did they expect?https://t.co/gOFvNAwVJA via @HuffPostPol — Michelangelo Signorile (@MSignorile) March 13, 2020

This piece hasn't been as considered and well-written as I would like (coronavirus coverage has been crazy/dominant), but I would like to leave this by saying that the potential of Sanders' campaign and how it ultimately played out both angered and saddened me. In particular, I think of all the young people attracted to his movement who have perhaps taken the wrong lessons about how to persuade and treat people in the course of political discourse, especially women. I found this Washington Post piece about a group of young Sanders supporters both very insightful and unfortunate (the entire thing is a worth a read). My takeaway is that, in some ways, the Sanders campaign has served to reinforce some of the most unfortunate behaviors a younger generation has been exposed to through the unrestrained and hateful bullying of social media that’s been so pervasive in their lives.