Sen. Bernie Sanders (Loonbag – VT) is best labeled as not merely a “democratic socialist,” as is voguish for the mini-Robespierres du jour. He is not even merely best described as a run-of-the-mill “socialist” — you know, your typical pothead college sophomore who hasn’t even taken an introductory macroeconomics course but just knows that true justice requires state seizure of the means of production.
Instead, as Paul Sperry argued at the New York Post in 2016, Sanders is actually best described as a “diehard communist.”
In the early ’70s, Sanders helped found the Liberty Union Party, which called for the nationalization of all US banks and the public takeover of all private utility companies.
After failed runs for Congress, Sanders in 1981 managed to get elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., where he restricted property rights for landlords, set price controls and raised property taxes to pay for communal land trusts…
In 1985, he traveled to [Nicaragua] to celebrate the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. He called it a “heroic revolution.”…
Sanders also adopted a Soviet sister city outside Moscow and honeymooned with his second wife in the USSR. He put up a Soviet flag in his office, shocking even the Birkenstock-wearing local liberals. At the time, the Evil Empire was on the march around the world, and threatening the US with nuclear annihilation.
Then, in 1989, as the West was on the verge of winning the Cold War, Sanders addressed the national conference of the US Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to “the triumph of Soviet power in the US.”
The Daily Wire has also covered Sanders’ 1980s-era pro-communist, pro-Sandinista radicalism.
Let us state this as explicitly as possible. In the 1980s, in the midst of a Reagan-Gorbachev détente that ultimately led to the dissolution of America’s existentially threatening superpower foe, the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, Bernie Sanders stood not with America — but with the Soviets.
That is not an exaggeration.
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.
As The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote yesterday, this can only be described as “morally deranged” behavior.
[Sanders] is not some stupid college student who champions communism because he has no idea what happened in the world prior to 2005. He lived through much of the 1900s and very well knows that it was a century bathed in the blood shed by communist governments. He knows that communism very recently killed 100 million people, and that it continues to add to the body count even today. Yet he advocates for communist policies and wishes to see the great evil of the 20th century reborn in the 21st. What else can we call this but morally deranged?
Even holding aside rudimentary economic literacy and the uncontested macroeconomic wonders of free-market capitalism in lifting generations of people out of real, inflation-adjusted poverty, socialism is itself a stridently immoral ideology.
At its core, socialism is about not altruism, but about pure, self-aggrandizing selfishness. The economic class warfare that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the professional grievance peddlers push is, ultimately, rooted in nothing other than good ol’-fashioned envy. None of the great Western religions teach that envy of one’s fellow man is anything other than sinful. In the Abrahamic tradition, envy violates at least one (and, arguably, more than one) of the Ten Commandments; in Catholicism, envy is one of the seven deadly sins. Indeed, America’s entire founding political philosophy is based on a powerful rejection of envy as an overarching principle of governance: Our social contract, as established by the Declaration of Independence, is one of natural rights-based negative liberty. Free enterprise, then, is inherently moral insofar as it merely connects freedom of labor, freedom of contract, and private property protection to the natural right to liberty of which our Declaration speaks.
But Bernie Sanders’ dystopian death cult ideology is even worse than merely being economically misguided or morally perverse. And the reason for that is simple: The loonbag openly, proudly, and defiantly stood with the genocidal, mass-murdering Soviet regime when that regime stood at existential loggerheads with the United States of America. The same Soviet regime that willfully committed the Holodomor mass famine in the Ukraine. The same Soviet regime that quite possibly — indeed, quite likely — ended up killing more innocents over the course of its bloody reign than did the Third Reich. The same Soviet regime that sent up to 18 million to the gulags. The same Soviet regime that brutally and persistently repressed Sanders’ very own religious/ethnic brethren. The same Soviet regime that consistently meddled in domestic American political elections. The same Soviet regime that, for decades, constantly threatened to launch nuclear missiles into the heart of the American homeland.
Bernie Sanders’ ideology is grotesquely immoral. But what he has publicly stood for throughout his career is not merely grotesquely immoral. It is also affirmatively evil.