 Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign recently made history when they announced that their staffers would be the first ever in the history of presidential campaigns to unionize, which I think is fantastic. And they additionally also announced that they'd be adding 15 new individuals to the team, 10 of which are women, including Brianna Joy Gray, who's going to be acting as his national press secretary, Sarah Badawi, who will be his national political director, and there's plenty of others. I'm all for it because I really think that his team is shaping up to be progressive Avengers, and I really am confident in these people and their ability to run a fantastic campaign. However, there's some individuals in the mainstream media who are, we'll say less enthusiastic, about one specific hire that Bernie Sanders recently made. And the individual who they're freaking out about is journalist David Cerota, who's a long time Bernie Sanders backer. He's been outspoken about the fact that he's a supporter of Bernie Sanders. But the reason why they're against him is because as Talking Points memo puts it, he's a fierce critic of Sanders opponents. And if you want things to remain civil, then you probably shouldn't hire somebody who's going to be your, quote, attack dog as Edward Isaac Dover of the Atlantic puts it. Now, it's not just like they're peeved about Bernie hiring David Cerota because he's supposedly overly aggressive and acts as a as an attack dog to Bernie. But the reason why they're against him is because they claim that David Cerota lacks journalistic integrity because while he was criticizing all of Bernie Sanders opponents, he wasn't disclosing that he was tied to Bernie financially. He worked for Bernie Sanders and did not disclose that fact. And additionally, he then went on to after announcing that he was hired, delete thousands of tweets that hid evidence that he was attacking Sanders opponents while still working for Bernie Sanders. So there are so many allegations and claims to unpack here. But first, let's talk about the supposedly aggressive nature of Bernie's 2016 campaign as Edward Isaac Dover of the Atlantic writes shortly before he gave speeches launching his 2020 campaign earlier this month, Bernie Sanders emailed his supporters urging them to do our very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances. I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space. What he didn't include was that one of the people already advising him and helping him write those launch speeches is one of his most famously aggressive supporters online. The online theory of Sanders supporters was one of the most defining characteristics of his 2016 campaign. Sanders himself said he is sensitive to that as well as to accusations that he created divisions within the Democratic Party during his 2016 run against Hillary Clinton. Now just by reading those paragraphs, ask yourself this question. Do you think this journalist is for or against Bernie Sanders? I think it's evident. He is trying to construct this narrative that Bernie Sanders supporters were uniquely aggressive when that is a disprovable lie that was spread by the mainstream media before and Vox even conducted a study where they found out that Hillary Clinton supporters were actually more aggressive online than Bernie Sanders supporters. But what this journalist here is trying to do is lend credence to the claim that this Bernie bro myth actually is still feasible and that Bernie Sanders supporters are uniquely aggressive and everyone else is just angels and they're being victimized by Bernie Sanders supporters. And the only reason why Bernie Sanders decided to come out and condemn online bullying and harassment is because it was obviously the case that he was trying to placate his critics. But Kyle Kalinsky pointed this out as well as I did that he shouldn't have done that because by condemning harassment as if your supporters are unique and they're the only ones culpable there. What you're doing is you are validating these false claims and you are legitimizing these false narratives. So Bernie should have never done that. And this is why because now they're saying well look even Bernie admits that his supporters were overly aggressive and it was one of the most defining characteristics of his campaign unbelievable. So let's get to David Sarota specifically because the way that they make it seem is like he's comparable to someone like David Brock who was an attack dog and smear merchant really for Hillary Clinton. But what they describe as attacks aren't attacks in actuality. They're just criticisms that are objective of Bernie Sanders 2020 opponents. So he's accused Harris of giving in to big donors and changing her stance on healthcare and questioned how she will defend and define being tough on crime. He responded to Booker getting into the race by reminding people of the New Jersey Senator's defense of Bain Capital. Mitt Romney's former company in 2012 and a 2017 vote favored by the pharmaceutical industry that has become a big target for Sanders and his supporters. Responding to an NBC News op-ed in January calling Biden the Democrats best chance to beat Trump. Sarota highlighted that the author used to work for the American Legislative Exchange Council and wrote that Biden was just endorsed by a former spokesperson for the group that pushes right wing legislation in state capitals across the country. Reacting to a CNBC article about Gillibrand's outreach to big donors. He wrote at the beginning of February welcome to the oligarchy and attacked her for the time she spent at a law firm with a tobacco company Philip Morris as a client. Now, in addition to those attacks, we all know about the more recent kerfuffle where he supposedly attacked Beto O'Rourke in a capital and main article by simply pointing out his abysmal record. He highlighted the times that Beto O'Rourke sided with Republicans over his own party and that to them constitutes an aggressive attack. So all of these supposedly aggressive attacks by David Sarota. They're nothing more than objective substantive criticisms of the candidates own records themselves. And wait for it. That's important. We should be doing that. And journalists should be encouraging us to look through the records and properly vetting these candidates. There's nothing wrong with that during primary season. But they're not necessarily against any and all attacks because we know firsthand that mainstream media pundits love attacks. They say nothing about attacks on Bernie Sanders. But what they really want and what they're pushing for specifically is for us to unilaterally disarm while they continue attacking Bernie Sanders as a socialist. They have no problems with anti Bernie Hader, Jonathan Chate pondering if Bernie Sanders will, you know, maybe just split the Democratic Party again in 2020. That's not an attack to them. That's not aggression to them. They don't mind Barry Weiss going on Joe Rogan's podcast smearing Tulsi Gabbard as an Assad apologist when she only went to Syria to literally advocate for peace. They have no problem with those attacks. It's just the attacks against the candidates that they support. So in other words, they can dish it, but they can't take it. And if they can get you to feel guilty about the fact that you're concerned about the red flags that we're finding in the records of other candidates, then they've accomplished what they sought to do. They've gotten you to think about unilateral disarmament and that's not going to happen. So they can try to pretend as if we're uniquely aggressive, but understand that's not backed up by evidence because what constitutes aggression in their view is a substantive criticism of the candidates own records. And what makes this a double standard is that we're not allowed to do this to the candidates that they support, but they're allowed to do it to the candidates that we support. And it's not like their criticisms are even substantive. Oftentimes, they're just smears. So getting to the second component of the attack because I think that it's safe to say that to allege that David Sarota is an attack dog of Bernie Sanders is a stretch, but they contend that he deleted 20,000 tweets on the day he was hired. And the author explains that he obviously deleted all of these tweets because he wanted to hide these tweets because they were attacks that he lobbed against other candidates while he was secretly colluding with Bernie Sanders. And because he deleted these tweets, he must have had something to hide. Now, to be fair, David Sarota probably should have known better that deleting thousands of tweets on the day that there's big news announced about you, it's going to arouse suspicion. So that was his first mistake. But let's get to this accusation, which I think is really serious because it throws David Sarota's integrity as a journalist into question. So this is a very serious accusation that the author is lobbying here against David Sarota. So what the article tries to establish here is that David Sarota is someone who is sleazy. He lacks journalistic integrity because he didn't disclose his ties to Bernie Sanders while writing articles about other candidates, presumably at the behest of Bernie Sanders. But the timeline is a little bit unclear because once Sarota was officially in contact with the Sanders team in January, he then informed the Guardian, which was his employer, that he was in contact and he stopped writing columns after that point. And then he wasn't officially hired until March. Now, there's one article in Capital in Maine that he published after he was in contact with the Sanders team and talking about, you know, possibly joining the team. You can say that he should have disclosed it at that point, but I actually don't really think that's too big of a deal because he wrote an article that doesn't have anything to do with Bernie Sanders. It was an interview with Bill de Blasio. So you can make the case that, yeah, he should have been transparent there. But overall, from what we know, David Sarota stopped writing articles once he was in talks to officially join the Sanders campaign and he specifically stopped writing articles about the other candidates. But in this Atlantic piece by Edward Isaac Dovir, it also reports that David Sarota was in contact with certain aides of Bernie Sanders team through 2018. Now, the problem with this claim here is that we have no evidence that David Sarota was talking to Sanders aides about potentially being employed by the Sanders team. For all we know, he was talking to them for journalistic reasons. So we don't know, but I do think that David Sarota should probably come out and clarify just so that way it doesn't arouse any more suspicion and there's less speculation. But as far as we know, what we've established so far is that David Sarota was only officially in talks with the Sanders team in January and then he stopped writing articles at that point and then officially joined the Sanders team in March. So as far as we know, he's following journalistic standards and he has integrity. However, what Edward Isaac Dovir points out on Twitter is a particular tweet where David Sarota says that people were speculating about his attack on Beto O'Rourke being motivated by something nefarious. Maybe he's motivated because he's working for Bernie Sanders and he's being overly critical of Sanders' opponents under the guise of objective journalism when he is simply in the tank for Bernie Sanders. He was acting as a covert Sanders surrogate. And the author explains in this tweet here saying, Here's another tweet deleted last night in which Bernie Sanders speechwriter and previously undisclosed advisor wrote that people who accused him of having motives in digging in on O'Rourke were quote deranged and or running a deliberate disinformation campaign. Now, if you are covertly working for a candidate and you are writing articles criticizing his presumptive opponents, then I do think it would be disingenuous if you call out people for questioning your motives. I think that that would have been fair, but there's one problem and you kind of discover this problem by taking a closer look at the screenshot of David Sarota's tweet that Edward Isaac Dovir posted. Do you notice anything odd here? Anything at all? Anything out of place? If not, let's get a little bit closer. Notice anything now about the screenshot that just kind of stands out to you? No, well, let's get even closer. Now, if you look in the right hand corner there, what you can see is that there's a little bit of a smudge leftover by Edward Isaac Dovir literally photoshopping out the date of David Sarota's tweet. What reason would Edward Isaac Dovir have to photoshop the date out of David Sarota's tweet? He presumably did that because he wanted you to think that David Sarota made this tweet when he was already in contact with Bernie Sanders team about joining the team. However, this tweet was made before David Sarota was in contact with Bernie Sanders team where he had no underlying motives as an employee of Bernie to write the article about Betel Rourke. And as Natalie Shore points out, a Google search shows that this tweet was posted on 1225, which again predates the alleged onset of contact between Sarota and the Sanders campaign. He didn't want you to see that David Sarota made this tweet before he was in talks to be hired by Sanders team when it actually was not correct to question his motives or question whether or not he was motivated to write that article about Betel Rourke as an employee of Sanders because at that point he was not in contact with the Sanders team. So take a moment and just think about the irony here of this attack on David Sarota. He's being criticized for lacking journalistic integrity. Meanwhile, what Edward Isaac Dover is doing is he's photoshopping the date out of a tweet in a screenshot in order to mislead you into believing that David Sarota was lying about having deeper motivations about writing that article. And another irony is that it was already evident that David Sarota was a Sanders supporter. He was open about that and we all knew where he stands as he wrote these articles, but they were still credible and he still maintained that journalistic integrity because he was being objective and just providing us with the facts. And meanwhile, you'll see other political hacks write hit pieces about Bernie Sanders and they won't tell you where they stand. They'll try to pass partisan hit pieces off as objective pieces of journalism all while claiming that it's everyone else who's being dishonest. So we already knew where David Sarota stood. I think most people knew that he was a supporter of Bernie Sanders. My only question is since we know where he stands, when will political hacks actually be honest to us about who they support and whether or not they hate Bernie Sanders or not. So this is just an insane story to me. The fact that he would go out of his way to Photoshop the date out of a screenshot poorly so by the way, because he's not covering his tracks in order to get us to believe that David Sarota was lying is just a new level of disingenuous. Now you can make the case to be fair that David Sarota does need to come out and say whether or not he was in talks with Sanders campaign back in 2018 and specifically what he was talking to Sanders AIDS about and if that was about employment as far as we know, he was only talking about employment back in January. But to suggest that he is working covertly to smear all of Bernie Sanders opponents while he's working for Bernie Sanders. There's just no factual basis for this yet is him deleting 20,000 tweets, something that is suspicious and not what you should do if you are savvy with social media. Yeah, but at the same time, does that mean that David Sarota is guilty of anything and is a bad journalist? No, I don't think it does. And is he an attack dog for Bernie Sanders? No, he's doing what a lot of people should be doing journalism because if you simply report the facts about someone's record who's running for president, that's not just something that's reasonable, but it's necessary because going into the voting booth, we need to be educated about their record. We need to know who they voted with, be it Republicans or Democrats and what they voted for. So by doing that, he's not trying to covertly prop up Bernie Sanders. He's trying to educate people because more information is better than no information. And since everyone else in mainstream media is unwilling to do that, then David Sarota provided us with a service. So they're going to look for everything. This is all par for the course. So this was all expected. So this isn't surprising to me. I'm just a little surprised that they would sloppily photoshop out the date and be that disingenuous in order to make it seem like David Sarota is a liar. 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