SocraticGadfly: The conspiracy-minded cult of Berners, an update

April 03, 2020

The conspiracy-minded cult of Berners, an update

And yes, there's enough people out there that act in cultlike ways that make it one.

I've written before about some claiming one of his two Twitter accounts was hijacked by David Brock, about Berners trying to spin away his past record on gunz, and about all other Dem candidates conspiring to pick and choose states of focus. (Obviously, if true, it didn't work.)

By last fall, I rated Bernie backers (note that I did NOT say "Bernie Bros," so don't try to spin my callout) fourth among candidates by backers' cult levels. Gabbard, Buttigieg and non-candidate Mike Gravel were the only ones I ranked as worse.

Well, Super Tuesday was a new toppper.

Biden voters as well as Berners claimed conspiracy over ballot order when voting. Read Texas law, then read Aristotle above before commenting, I told both on Twitter.

#RiggedPrimary then trended on Twitter, from Berners.

No, no, no, if one means the sense of Gab-ber Jared Beck and his DNC Fraud Lawsuit. Going way back to Will Rogers being "a Democrat ... not a member of any organized party," Democrats are too disorganized to pull off a stunt like this. Crowdstrike letting the DNC get hacked when the Russians tried the same on the Republicans and, overall, failed. (They did; shut up.) NGP VAN letting the Bernie staffer in 2015 peek at stuff unknowingly also comes to mind. The idea that Democrats are organized enough to rig elections SHOULD be laughable after the Iowa caucuses.

And, in other places, Democrats are behind the voting fuckup.

In Dallas, Jim Schutze squarely points the finger at Our Man Downtown, John Wiley Price.

Sadly, the actual likely conspiracy of endorsements has people not seeing straight beyond it. (By that, I mean it's possible that Harry Reid called some other candidates, or some national Democratic officials, or both, before calling Sanders' campaign to say he was endorsing Biden. And I mean nothing more than that.)

And, speaking of conspiracy theories, it's probably easier, or "easier" to retweet this:
Rather than accept that you might have hit either an overall follow limit or a rate of new followers limit.

Such limits do exist, of course. And it took me 10 seconds of Teh Google to find that. As well as to find information that Twitter limits your daily Tweeting and breaks that daily limit into half-hour time blocks.

As of right now, Ms. Bouvier wasn't at the 5K limit, but at nearly 4,500, she may have been yesterday, or else she hit the new follower rate limit. The reality if, of course, that she wouldn't have 30K followers if Twitter were censoring her.

Per the embedded Tweet, it's most likely that, at or near the 5K limit (her numbers have changed since I first posted this) she was hitting her Tweeting limits.

There's the added irony, or hypocrisy, that Twitter has these limits to restrict paid human accounts and pure bots, and that many Berners in the previous week or two complained about Bloomberg buying followers.

The conspiracy theorizing continued on "Little Tuesday" or "Second Tuesday" a week later. Berners claimed that in Michigan, a Democratic conspiracy was reducing the vote total. It is true that Michigan's Secretary of State, an elected official, is a Democrat. It's also true that in all primary states, the state Secretary of State or whatever department oversees elections runs the duopoly's primaries, not the parties. For example, also on Little Tuesday, Missouri's SoS is a Republican (and a son of John Ashcroft).

And now, a certain Judith Hilton Coburn, with a very low activity rate on Twitter for someone allegedly so active, is asking people to sign a Change.org petition about election rigging.

I smell several rats.

First, it ignores what I've said time after time: In states with primaries, the state Secretary of State or equivalent, not the state parties, are responsible for overseeing duopoly primaries. Within that, at the county level, the county clerk or a county elections official in a large county, does that. The Secy of State and the county clerk? Elected. Republican elected in South Carolina, Texas and Missouri, among conspiracy-theorizers focus. (Dem in Michigan.)

Second, the repeated use of "Democrat" without the "-ic" to be "Democratic"? Rethuglicans do that. And I told her so.

Third, of course, is that if anybody has elections rigged against them, it's third parties, and both duopoly parties willingly participate.

And fourth, it's off-putting to me with bad grammar and other language use problems.

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