I’m heartened to read your continuing advocacy of and (implicit) support for Elizabeth Warren.

I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, or give me ideas above my station, and I don’t mean to imply that you’d vote for Warren, were she to get the nomination. That’s not my business to assert.

I’m just glad to take a break from seeing Bernie progressives, the pious, self-appointed spokespersons for, apparently, all progressives, foaming at the mouth at the mention of anyone but Bernie. Trump is a proud, self-proclaimed misogynist; Bernie supporters are closet cases, which may make them just as dangerous as The Great Mouth Breather.

I hadn’t even finished counting to ten before I read on Twitter that she should “step down and allow the obvious contender, Bernie Sanders” to take up the banner of progressive policy; that she had “plagiarized” Bernie’s platform (as if, by virtue of being a white unelectable male, Sanders has official ownership of social democracy’s principles) and that this fearless woman, who in video after YouTube video is seen mercilessly cutting down the entitled males of Wall Street, is a “corporate lackey;” the most preposterous lie since Hillary started running that child-sex brothel from the basement of the basement-less pizza parlour.

Anything but admit what is so transparently the case: Anyone but a woman. You’d rather have querulous old Bernie Sanders in sandals and socks eating a tuna salad sandwich as he addresses the UN than Liz Warren, who has the gravitas and the gumption to confront corporate CEO’s, who she has stammering and sweating like high school punks caught scrawling graffiti in the bathroom and sent to the principal’s office. Corporate lackey? Are you kidding me?

They’d rather assert that she’s a “closet Republican” because, by her own admission, she was a Republican in her youth before she delved into the topic of credit card debt and was appalled by what she found, by how the system was rigged against consumers.

Yes, she became a progressive after examining the facts. That doesn’t mean she’s a “closet Republican.” That means she’s smart. There’s no one more zealous than a convert, after all.

Welcome to the new misogyny, in which any female who dares to question St. Bernie’s right of primogeniture to carry the US into a future of Swedish social democracy and Marimekko bed linens must be stopped, pilloried and Hillary’d, whatever mud-throwing it takes.

You think the Sanders supporters who can attempt to eliminate Elizabeth Warren with absurd ad hominem attacks actually give a shit about women’s rights? They’re misogynists. They claim to base their attacks on social justice, on economics, but they’re lying to themselves and to you. They’re like the white people who think Trump was elected because of the falling fortunes of the working- and middle-class, and can’t see that racism, rage at your having had a black president, was the actual impetus.

I get it, kids. It’s hard to think of your own country as racist, and it’s equally hard to think of yourself as misogynist, but when you can look at Warren, then look at Sanders, and think Sanders is the electable choice, you have a problem, brother.

“Fresh” mouth? I hadn’t heard that phrase since about 1965, when the last of my great-aunts, Victorian women all, passed away. If it weren’t Trump voicing the opinion there might even be a certain retro charm to this; but Trump it is, god help us, and dreams of banana republics dance in our heads, including a smiling Mike Pence, newly-appointed Minister of Love, assuring us that the rounding up of dissidents is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.

From “Shut the bitch up,” the quintessential meme of Sanders supporters, to “She had to open her mouth,” it’s obvious that women still pay the price for daring to be seen and heard.

Some Americans still see Trump as a dumb doofus, a bumbling anomaly, including some fellow commenters in this thread. Yeah. That’s what you thought in 2016. Now that Trump has officially made the US into a nation of men, not laws, and has explicitly put himself above your Constitution, maybe it’s time to take him seriously.

You have a constitutional crisis, if you haven’t noticed. And you may be approaching the time when a comment like “fresh mouth” is followed by a 3AM knock on the door.