Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination who has often polled behind only former Vice President Joe Biden, has long had a soft spot for Communist nations. As Fox News reported last month, a recently unearthed video from 1986 showed Sanders praising the Fidel Castro-led Communist revolution in Cuba:
Unearthed video footage showed 2020 hopeful Bernie Sanders recalling his excitement surrounding the Cuban revolution in the 1950s.
“I remember, for some reason or another, being very excited when [former Cuban dictator] Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba,” he said, while speaking at the University of Vermont in 1986.
“I was a kid … and it just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people.”
The Reagan Battalion has also tweeted out the video of Sanders praising Castro.
In a Daily Wire op-ed in February, furthermore, I elaborated on Sanders’ long history of dalliances with the Leninist thuggery of the Soviet Union:
Toward the end of the hellish Cold War, facing a hegemonic Soviet arch-nemesis whose only reason for not annihilating us via nuclear holocaust was a game theory-backed faith in “mutually assured destruction,” Bernie Sanders honeymooned with his second wife in the Soviet Union. Toward the end of the hellish Cold War, facing a hegemonic Soviet arch-nemesis whose only reason for not annihilating us via nuclear holocaust was a game theory-backed faith in “mutually assured destruction,” Bernie Sanders flew a hammer-and-sickle Soviet flag in his Vermont mayoral office. At the end of the hellish Cold War, facing a hegemonic Soviet arch-nemesis whose only reason for not annihilating us via nuclear holocaust was a game theory-backed faith in “mutually assured destruction,” Bernie Sanders willfully addressed a known front group for a political party whose members swear an oath of allegiance to that very hegemonic arch-nemesis.
Now, according to reporting from the Washington Examiner, it turns out that the FBI has even investigated Sanders for his former ties to and campaigning for an overtly Marxist political party operating in the United States:
Bernie Sanders campaigned for the Socialist Workers Party in the 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns and was investigated by the FBI for his ties to the Marxist group.
Sanders has always played down the extent of his involvement with the party, which included radicals who praised the Soviet Union and Cuban communists, and has denied ever being a member. Asked in 1988 about his role as an SWP elector in 1980, he said: “I was asked to put my name on the ballot and I did, that’s true.” In fact, his ties to the party are deep and enduring. …
[In 1984,] he backed and campaigned for the SWP presidential nominee Mel Mason, a former Black Panther, saying it was important for there to be “fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology.” During the campaign, Mason praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions and said: “The greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it’s still developing.”
It is unclear, at best, whether Sanders will be punished by voters for this revelation in his presidential primary race in an increasingly hard-left Democratic Party.