he was not defeated by some scheme
I'm sorry but this is astoundingly untrue. I'll preface this by saying I'm a dyed in the wool socialist and bernie supporter who's going to vote for biden in the general and progressive down the rest of the ballot.
The entire democratic field of candidates dropping out in the 72 hours before Super Tuesday to coalesce behind a single candidate specifically to oppose a single other candidate and bombard the country with 100s of millions of dollars worth of air time in the media is simply unprecedented. The RNC never even got a chance to organize against trump as much as the DNC did against Bernie.
Bernie is a lot of things, but a bad campaigner and unliked person he is not. He lost the primary because the entire DNC apparatus moved to support his only remaining opponent, the first and only candidate to win a state besides him, and disgustingly showed more adept politicking and operating in about 2 weeks than they had in the previous 3 years as trumps opposition.
The argument that he lost states he won in 2016 is also extremely flawed. The majority of voting happened after Super Tuesday as the pandemic began to ramp up, and the demographic taking it most seriously was the younger demographic who did the right thing and stayed home to stop the spread of covid as Biden's camp encouraged his older base to go vote in person.
The race was simply over after Super Tuesday. To say that Bernie somehow lost popularity because he lost elections after Super Tuesday is like criticizing the lap times of a car that stalled and exited mid way through a race. No shit he's not going to win primary elections when for all intents and purposes he's out of the race and not actually competing anymore.
The momentum after Super Tuesday is basically undefeatable if there's a clear victor, and the DNC threw absolutely everything they had and called in every favor they could to stand on the metaphorical scale for biden. That's why Bernie lost, no other reason but that. I don't think anybody seriously knowledgeable about politics would argue that Bernie wouldn't have gone on to get the nomination if he had emerged from Super Tuesday a clear winner, which is why the DNC had to stop him then and there.
Bernie is the essentially the first candidate from both parties in history to ever win the first 3 states and then lose the primary. This simple fact alone should make it obvious he didn't lose in a fair fight, he was deliberately targeted by the special interests of the DNC and their donors.
If Bernie got in, he would've cleaned house and thrown out all the consultant-class and PMC corporate shells that currently inhabit the DNC and got us into this mess with trump in the first place.
But that would end the gravy train for people who essentially do nothing but grift from the DNC's donations and would severely damage the power corporations and big money has over political power in this country. Therefore, the party did all they could to stop that from happening.
It's not some complex grand scheme, Bernie winning the nomination means that the wealthy and powerful would have lost some access to the levers of power and therefore they did all they could to tip the scales for his only opponent left, Biden.
I'm not stubborn though, like I said I'm voting for biden because even the Democrats in their current state as a vessel to peddle influence and wealth for the powerful is a better option than the genocidal freaks of the GOP.
Ignoring what the DNC and those in charge of the party did this past primary however will do us no good. We're doomed to repeat history if we don't learn from it, and I think we've learned over the past 4 years of trump that a moderate approach to progress like Obama had will only lead ground lost to the GOP over time as they drag the country rightward.
A bold, thorough, progressive series of reforms is the only thing that can halt our country from lurching ever rightward. I can only hope that biden will follow through on his promise to us to do that.