Today, as is my wont, I was wandering around the Way of the Bern subreddit, and I came across a thread about recent trolling of that site by Clinton/DNC supporters. One comment struck me as heartbreaking. A woman spoke about how she had been cut off by many of her wealthy "limousine liberal" friends, because she refused to sing the praises of Hillary Clinton.

The individual in question has gone through some tough times, and according to her comment is not in the same socio-economc strata as her "life-long" friends.

Some excerpts from her her comments:

Because of my background, all my old friends are limousine liberals. It was startling, when my family experienced numerous tragedies and traumas during the years of the Obama administration due directly or indirectly to his governing and policies. They simply refused to make the connection, refused to accept it when I explained how one of his policies had led to our suffering in a direct and material way. My oldest friend in the world, who has known me since high school, so known me since I was a truly hardcore leftist (I retreated into the mainstream in college, a woman who gave me the nursing rocker for my infant daughter that is still in her room now, when she is away at college), tried to badger me into cheering on Hillary in the Clinton-Trump debates, and when I refused, she hung up on me. We have not spoken since. I do not think we ever will. [...] Even recognizing as I do how neoliberal ideology renders all relationships transactional, and all community monetarily determined and market-defined, I still can't quite accept how effectively it severs people from one other, from any kind of human decency and human fellowship.

An experience that I expect has occurred to many people who have family or friends that are dyed-in-the wool Democrats come hell or Hillary Clinton. It might have ended there, but her comment was picked up by Top Minds of Reddit, where it was linked as follows:

TopMinds have a unique opinion about "neoliberals" -- "neoliberal ideology renders all relationships transactional, and all community monetarily determined and market-defined"

When one subredddit site links to another, an automated bot posts that link in the original subreddit's thread. Being the curious person that I am, I clicked on the link and the very first comment I read was, shall we say, less than charitable to people like the woman who posted her comment at WOTB. It seems the individual who posted it took offense at the use of the term neoliberal to imply that a person who self-identifies as one holds views that are harmful to the majority of the people outside the top 10 percentile of income.

Here is how that individual began their response:

Neoliberal is actually the most infuriating buzzword on the internet. 99.9% of the time the term is used the user is a disabled Berntard that has no idea what it means. To this day I don't think I've ever even seen the term neoliberal used correctly, every time someone throws it at me I ask them to define it and they can't.

He or she then cited the definition of term from the "neoliberal sub," which I suppose is a subreddit where self-identifying neoliberals go to talk among themselves. That definition given for "neoliberal" was very flattering. and I won't bother reciting it here. I frankly don't care what labels people give to the global elites, liberal or not, who advance policies that favor free markets and capitalism over the needs of most people.

No, what bothered me was the defamatory and negative slur this person used, where he or she stated that "99.9% of the time the term is used the user is a disabled Berntard..."

As someone who is disabled and a former Bernie Sander's supporter, I found that remark outrageous in the extreme. So I responded to it as follows:

Hard to respond to someone who begins their comment with a defamatory slur: "99.9% of the time the term is used the user is a disabled Berntard that has no idea what it means." As a disabled individual with a disabled spouse, both of us Bernie Sanders supporters, and as a person who has known developmentally disabled people including one of my nephews, I find your attitude lacking in compassion, empathy and simple ordinary respect for the dignity of all people.

In case the thread or my comment is deleted I took a screenshot of the page where this "conversation" appeared.

Sadly, I find that, at least online, this is a common response to anyone who refuses to accept the current policies of the Democratic Party have harmed the vast majority of its citizens, all while claiming that Democrats care about people. We saw this with Hillary Clinton, and her "deplorables" comment, and I've seen "Berntard" used before, or variations equally as foul. Just one more sign that for many of the top ten percent in this country, and certainly the elite establishment of the Democratic Party, do not have our interests at heart, and indeed don't want to be reminded that they are the people responsible for much of what is wrong with this world, including the election of Donald Trump.

This is why they lie and slander us. They have convinced themselves that a system that heavily benefits them (the few) at the expense of the many (the rest of us) must be good, and that therefore that any legitimate criticism of their ideology is irrational, deluded, abd laughable, at best. They don't care if we are suffering and that their perverted ideology is to blame. A fictional movie character says it best: