By JOEL B. POLLAK

24 Feb 2020

Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are beginning to understand how badly the mainstream media has abused President Donald Trump — now that the abuse is being turned against them.

In the past several days, Sanders has been the target of withering, over-the-top attacks from journalists, sometimes backed by the Democrat establishment, which is terrified of him winning the nomination.

Some of Sanders’s positions are, in fact, extreme, such as his support for the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, or his opposition to Israel, fueled perhaps by the antisemitic leftists who back his campaign.

But some of the criticism has been fraudulent, below-the-belt, unfair and plainly offensive.

On Saturday, for example, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Sanders’s looming takeover of the Democratic Party to the Nazi invasion and occupation of France in 1940. The comparison was doubly offensive because Sanders, who is Jewish, lost relatives in the Holocaust. And it was also surprising because the attack came from left-wing MSNBC, the go-to network for many Sanders supporters.

Last week, prior to Sanders’s victory in the Nevada caucuses, the media reported that U.S. intelligence officials had given him a defensive briefing about Russian effotts to intervene in the Democratic Party primary on his behalf.

That, at least, was an improvement over how the Obama administration dealt with such reports: rather than warning the Trump campaign, the FBI obtained warrants to spy on it.

But the Sanders camp believed that the story had been leaked to damage him politically, especially since the briefing had actually taken place a month before, not during the week of the Nevada caucus.

Another example is the media obsession with “Bernie bros,” the name given to Sanders supporters who are particularly aggressive in support of their candidate, and hostile to rivals’ supporters.

The phenomenon is real, but it is also not unique to the Sanders campaign.

In 2016, conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe uncovered how Democrats linked to the Hillary Clinton campaign were instigating fights at Trump campaign events in an effort to associate the candidate with anarchy.

This reporter has been accosted by Sanders fans — but also by others’, and inexplicably booted from an event by former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), something the Sanders campaign has never done.

Even if Sanders supporters could be said to worse than other candidates’ supporters, the media lens appears to be focused on Sanders alone among his Democratic rivals.