Combating Artificial Narratives in Social Media Related To The Sanders Candidacy

Here’s the “meat and potatoes.”

 “Sanders can’t win”

•  Sanders was winning just fine until people started buying in to this false narrative.  Don’t lose hope.  We all want a better nation, a country we can be proud of that takes care of its people and produces leaders in every discipline.  To do that, we need to get people out from under impossible student loan payments and make college tuition-free so students can afford to attend
•  Nearly every poll published in the last six months has Sanders beating Trump by a significant margin in head-to-head matchups, even among largely Republican and right-wing audiences like Fox News.

 “Socialism”

•  Nearly everything we do is “socialism” in one way or another.  Police, the military, roads, libraries, the NIH, the CDC, standardization of electrical current; every fundamental function of our nation is socialized.
•  Socialized medicine in the norm in the developed world.  While many nations have supplemental private insurance to pay for elective procedures like cosmetic surgery, these are general options that produce no benefit for medical needs but rather cater to a small group who chooses to engage in elective medicine.
  •  Wait times, low quality, and other dogwhistles are just plain not true.  Anyone can cherry-pick anecdotes – which may or may not even be true – to support their existing biases.  The reality is the United States pays twice as much per person as the next-most-expensive country in the world, and has the worst outcomes nearly across the board.  This data is readily available from WHO
  •  If we had a proper universal single-payer system we wouldn’t be waiting for commercial enterprises to negotiate a profit for coronavirus vaccines, and thus those vaccines would be forthcoming much more quickly.  Indeed a vaccine for SARS was developed four years ago that could potentially have been developed and modified for inoculation against nCoV, but there wasn’t enough commercial interest in funding it and our current profit first mindset ensured there was no political support for a federally-funded research path.
•  The Soviet Union and “Red China” were not and are not socialist countries; they are authoritarian pseudo-communist countries.  Confusing “socialism” with “authoritarianism” creates two major problems; first, it allows the word “socialism” to be used as a boogey-man against those who don’t understand what it is, and it also obfuscates the reality that capitalism can also create authoritarian systems, which is exactly what’s happening in the United States right now.

 “The media said…”

•  The mainstream media in the United States is owned by six corporations:  Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom, which own most cable channels, and the Sinclair Broadcasting Corp which owns a majority of local TV stations.  Every one of these companies has a vested interest in defeating Sanders; thus, every one of them has a vested interest in manipulating the news to disinform voters and discourage the rise of a populist movement.  Sanders has repeatedly spoken in favor of the unions present at these corporations and on the side of striking workers at Comcast, which owns MSNBC and CNN.  Furthermore, Sanders supports “net neutrality,” which ensures internet traffic is not sped up or slowed down depending on the provider’s biases toward the content or content provider.  That bias may exist as cash incentives (“fast lane” traffic for big sites) or as socio-political incentives (making access to information like what you’re reading right now inconvenient or effectively impossible).

 “We don’t need a grumpy old man…”

•  The entire race is grumpy old men.  You can vote for the one who has consistently demonstrated a commitment to public interest throughout his career, or you can vote for one of the ones that don’t.

 Nobody likes Bernie

•  I like him.  So do millions of other Americans.  This is a false narrative put forth by his political opponents.

 Congress won’t work with him.

•  They won’t work with Biden either; any president’s success with Congress depends on the individuals serving in that Congress.  If there must be compromise, then isn’t it smarter to begin negotiations from the position you actually want, rather than staking a watered-down position to begin with and then compromising further?  Sanders has a much better chance of elevating down-ballot candidates who will work with him, if we keep public interest and enthusiasm engaged.  If we allow the media to tell us we can’t win, we get nothing.  Get Bernie into the White House and vote for the most progressive down-ballot candidates you can find, and you’ll end up with a Congress that works just fine with Bernie Sanders