The “Bernie Bro” meme had three major factors.
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Yes, of course, there were a handful of Bernie supporters who were douchebags. The USA is a misogynist society, and this shapes the culture; for pretty much everyone, the question isn’t “are they sexist?” but “how sexist are they?”. Any sufficiently large group of people is going to contain a subset that is at the far end of the bell curve on that measure. Bernie’s supporters were not notably worse on this factor than any other candidate, and were substantially better than many.
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The Clinton campaign deliberately manufactured and amplified the “Bernie Bros” narrative as a political tactic. We know this from the leaked emails, we know this from an awareness of Clinton’s history of campaigning (“Obama Boys”), we know this because it was screamingly fucking obvious what was going on as it was happening. The attempt to paint Sander’s highly diverse working-class coalition as exclusively white and male was a deliberately engineered propaganda tactic, enthusiastically amplified by the DNC’s tame media representatives.
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A lot of middle class liberals on Twitter gained unfamiliar experience during the campaign of working-class people calling them out on their classist bullshit. When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
