Like a once-victorious barbarian general captured by Roman legionaries and paraded around in chains for amusement, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is hitting the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton again on Monday afternoon.

The formerly independent, formerly principled senator is making a stop at a Clinton campaign rally in Fort Collins, Colorado, to try to convince his laid-back, hemp-clad supporters in the Centennial State to vote for a woman almost entirely opposed to what he and his primary campaign stood for.

“I think this is terribly important, especially with people like Bernie’s sometimes self-righteous ideologues.”

Sanders’ betrayal of his own ideals is bad enough, but the fact that he continues to stump for Clinton amid continued revelations about her underhanded primary campaign is cringe-worthy to behold.

In one leaked email published by WikiLeaks, former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton supporter Mark Siegel called Bernie Sanders supporters “self-righteous ideologues.”

“It’s critical that all delegates, especially those representing losing candidates, emerge from the convention feeling that they have won something, achieved something tangible. I think this is terribly important, especially with people like Bernie’s sometimes self-righteous ideologues,” Siegel writes. “We want them to go home happy and enthusiastic in working their asses off for Hillary.”

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To do so, Siegel proposed hoodwinking Sanders’ supporters into believing they actually gained something from the utter charade that was the Democratic primary race. “Bernie and his people have been b****ing about super delegates and the huge percentage that have come out for Hillary … why not throw Bernie a bone and reduce the super delegates in the future to the original draft of members of the House and Senate,” Siegel proposed.

“If we ‘give’ Bernie this in the Convention’s rules committee, his people will think they’ve ‘won’ something from the party Establishment. And it functionally doesn’t make any difference anyway. They win. We don’t lose. Everyone is happy,” Siegel concluded.

Also published by WikiLeaks is an email which proves Donna Brazile, acting chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, conspired with the Clinton campaign to sink Sanders’ efforts — while posing as a neutral third party. In January, Brazile forwarded a planning email from Sanders’ African-American outreach team about a Twitter event to the Clinton campaign. “Thank you for the heads up on this, Donna,” replied Adrienne Elrod, a Clinton’s campaign aide.

Adding a delicious dose of irony to Brazile’s duplicity is the fact that she took over as interim DNC chair only after Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign following other leaked emails — courtesy of WikiLeaks in July — that suggested DNC officials were conspiring to scuttle Sanders’ campaign.

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In one of those exchanges, DNC communications official Mark Paustenbach writes to a colleague about the possibility of getting reporters to write negative stories about the state of Sanders’ campaign.

“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” Paustenbach wrote to Luis Miranda, DNC communications director.

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Another email appears to show Brad Marshall, DNC CFO, floating the idea of using Sanders’ religion as a weapon against him. “It might make no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God,” wrote Marshall. “He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps.”

Following revelations last week of some of the content included in Clinton’s infamous Wall Street speeches, Sanders basically told his supporters to ignore the fact that Clinton resides comfortably in the pocket of globalist financiers.

“The job of the progressive movement now is to look forward, not backward,” Sanders said last Wednesday in a statement to NBC News. “No matter what Secretary Clinton may have said years ago, behind closed doors, what’s important today is that millions of people stand up and demand that the Democratic Party implement the most progressive platform in the history of our country.”

What is actually important, however, is the inescapable fact that to the Clinton camp, Bernie Sanders and his brand of progressivism are little more than a tool to be exploited for electoral gain — and Sanders is willingly allowing himself to be a pawn in Clinton’s grand strategy.