The New Democratic Mantra of “Thou Shalt Not Criticize a Democratic Candidate”is an instrument of establishment power. It isn’t about “unity”, regardless how many well-meaning people say it is. Or rather, it is the means of defining who is included in this unity and who is not.

It is also a projection of the narrative I have been calling Operation Gaslight, according to which Hillary lost because of the negative information that was deviously deployed against her. Jim Comey (prior to being sainted) figures into this narrative, as do Wikileaks and Vladimir Putin.

The charge that Trump colluded with the Russians is a subset of the Operation Gaslight narrative, as well as its culmination. Trump’s illegitimacy is proven by the conviction that he conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the DNC emails and use them to destroy the illusion of fairness and inevitability that the Clinton campaign was working desperately to create, by giving people a ringside seat to how the sausage was being made. It was dirty pool, even though the Clinton campaign was engaged in a mirror effort to dig up dirt in Russia on Trump. That, however, was merely opposition research.

Slithering underneath all that, the very First Offender, the Serpent in the Democratic Eden, was Bernie Sanders. When Democrats now say “thou shalt not criticize a Democratic candidate for president” they are invoking the Gaslight narrative, according to which Bernie Sanders is ultimately to blame for spoiling HRC’s image as the most qualified candidate to ever run for president, only kept from the office this long by the fact that she was a woman. Frustrating her candidacy was not just an offense against her, but against social progress itself, which must either move forward or fall back.

Though the criticisms Sanders leveled at Clinton were widely held, his sin was in giving them legitimacy by expressing them. The real “Blue Wall” was not a collection of Democratic-leaning states, but an agreement among Democrats to reflexively treat all criticisms of Clinton as smears and sexism. The sin of Sanders was to treat some of these criticisms as reasonable and based on fact.

This is the subtext of Operation Gaslight, which is Biblical in structure and wherein Bernie plays the Serpent who misled the young progressive Eve and all her Bros. Eve, in this case, is Tulsi Gabbard. Or rather, she’s their symbolic rep.

It must be recalled that Bernie, like Lucifer, was not even really a Democrat, but an interloper. He was a fallen angel who considered himself too pure to play along with the Establishment, but kept his conscience clear by posturing on the margins of politics, safely away from ever having to participate in power.

So, when Democrats say “thou shalt not criticize Democratic candidates” they are not talking about Bernie Sanders, who never really was a Democratic, or Tulsi Gabbard, who betrayed her membership and is now outside the pale. It is rather, as Hillary makes plain in a recent interview, an attempt to affirm a boundary to the party that excludes them as traitors and apostates.