trying to set up virtualenv gives error 'cannot import name _remove_dead_weakref' while installing vatic

Im trying to install vatic, and one requirement is to run 'virtualenv .env' from the vatic workspace. When I run this, I get that ~/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/weakref.py has an error 'cannot import name_remove_dead_weakref.

virtualenv .env
New python executable in /home/tyler/vatic_ws/.env/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...
    Complete output from command /home/tyler/vatic_ws/.env/bin/python - setuptools pip wheel:
      Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 7, in <module>
      File "/home/tyler/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/virtualenv_support/pip-9.0.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl/pip/__init__.py", line 5, in <module>
      File "/home/tyler/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/logging/__init__.py", line 26, in <module>
        import sys, os, time, cStringIO, traceback, warnings, weakref, collections
      File "/home/tyler/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/weakref.py", line 14, in <module>
        from _weakref import (
    ImportError: cannot import name _remove_dead_weakref

But when I try to run a python script of my own with

from _weakref import _remove_dead_weakref

I dont get an error. Why cant I replicate the error, and how do I fix it?