Tr🍩ll Smear #2: “You think you know the truth about Bernie, but you don’t”

Joe Brunoli

Aug 22, 2017·2 min read

“Gaslighting” is the process by which politicians and/or the media try to influence public opinion by convincing people that what they think they know isn’t really correct.

In other words, gaslighting is the political equivalent of the old Marx Brother wag, “who you gonna trust, me or your own eyes?”

In attacking Bernie as a “bad person” we are being asked to reject decades of given thought and opinion. We are being asked to mistrust our own evaluation of the man, and we are being asked to believe that the voters of Vermont are completely ignorant about the man who was mayor of their largest city for 8 years and has served them in Congress since 1990.

Bernie’s popularity in his home state is simply unprecedented. In the 2006 Senate election, which was the most expensive in Vermont’s history, Bernie defeated his Republican opponent by 33%. He then won re-election in 2012 with an astounding 71% of the vote. Bernie has repeatedly won the title of “America’s Most Popular Senator” and in a 2015 Morning Consult Poll he was found to have an astonishing 83% approval rating by his constituents in Vermont.

Anti-Bernie gaslighters would have us believe, however, that the people of Vermont are either stupid, naive, or ignorant — or all three. They attack him not only ad hominem as a “bad person” disliked by his Congressional colleagues, but also as an ineffective legislator who has never accomplished anything. In other words, they say his sky-high popularity with Vermonters is based on nothing.

Again, they are wrong.