Minnesota Democrat Attorney General Keith Ellison suggested on Thursday that supporters of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who are often referred to as “Bernie bros,” are not mean or rude to other people despite numerous reports showing the opposite.
Ellison, who is a supporter of Sanders, wrote on Twitter, “I have never seen @BernieSanders supporters being unusually mean or rude. Can someone send me an example of a ‘Bernie Bro’ being bad? Also, are we holding all candidates responsible for the behavior of some of their supporters? Waiting to hear.”
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana, quickly responded to Ellison, writing, “I can think of an example.”
I can think of an example. https://t.co/KwuvyYgyGw
— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) February 20, 2020
Scalise was referencing the Democrat terrorist, who was a supporter of Sanders, who shot up a baseball field full of Republican lawmakers in June 2017.
Scalise was seriously wounded in the politically motivated terrorist attack and spent six weeks in a hospital fighting for his life.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who was at the Virginia baseball field during the terrorist attack, later mentioned that the Democrat terrorist was screaming, “this is for health care!” as he shot at lawmakers.
“I was there at the ball field when Steven Scalise almost died from a very, very angry violent man who was incited really by rhetoric on the left,” Paul said. “And this hasn’t been reported enough, when he came on the field with a semi-automatic weapon firing probably close to 200 shots at us, shooting five people and almost killing Steve Scalise, he was yelling ‘this is for healthcare!’ He also had a list of conservative legislators, Republicans, in his pocket that he was willing to kill.”
“So what happens is that when Democrats say ‘get up in their face,’ they need to realize that there are a lot of unstable people out there,” Paul continued. “There are people with anger issues, there are people who are prone to violence.”
Ellison’s suggestion that Sanders’ supporters are not “mean” or “rude” also ignores the explosive videos that were released by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas earlier this year that showed paid Sanders staff allegedly talking about wanting to kill or harm political opponents.
In South Carolina, Project Veritas provided the following highlights of things that Sanders’ campaign field organizer Mason Baird allegedly said:
- “A lot of the stories we’re told in the United States about, you know, the gulags and the persecution of the Kulaks and things like that are exaggerated … we certainly don’t have, uh, a straight perspective on that stuff here in America.”
- “We would need a federal government and a labor movement that is working together to strip power away from capitalists and preferably directing that violence towards property.”
- “It would, it’s gonna take, you know, it’s gonna take militancy … like a militant labor movement that’s willing to … strike, and if necessary, you know, just destroy property and things like that.”
- “… after we abolish landlords, we don’t have to kill them …”
In South Carolina, Project Veritas provided the following highlights of things that Sanders’ campaign field organizer Daniel Taylor allegedly said:
- “We don’t want to scare people off, you first have to feel it out before you get into the crazy stuff … You know we were talking about more extreme organizations like Antifa, you were talking about, Yellow Vests, all that but we’re kinda keeping that on the back-burner for now.”
- “We have all this momentum, where do we go, regardless of the outcome, after it’s all over? Change won’t come easily, regardless. Even if Bernie is elected, change will not come swiftly or easily, so the connections we make now in the campaign with people, and volunteers, it’s important we retain that regardless of the outcome. It’s unfortunate that we have to make plans for extreme action but like I said, they’re not going to give it to us even if Bernie is elected.”
In South Carolina, Project Veritas provided the following highlights of things that Sanders’ campaign field organizer Martin Weissgerber allegedly said:
- “Let’s force them (billionaires) to build roads … rebuild our roads, rebuild our dams, rebuild our bridges. Let’s force them to do that.”
- “Well, the gulags were founded as re-education camps. … What will help is when we send all the Republicans to the re-education camps.”
- “I’m already on Twitter, following numerous groups around the country that are ready to organize yellow vest protests. I’m ready … I’m ready to start tearing bricks up and start fighting. … I’m not — no cap, bro. I’ll straight up — I’ll straight up get armed, I want to learn how to shoot, and go train. I’m ready for the f***ing revolution, bro. … I’m telling you. Guillotine the rich.”
- “I think I was radicalized from the day; first day I was born … my dad, is a Marxist. Like, straight-up from Belgium … he took part in Paris ’68 and all that, which is really cool. … I’ve always made it, I’ve always been unapologetic about it since I was younger, I always said, you know I’m a Communist … in my house, we had, you know Das Kapital, Engels, and Marx and all that sh*t. … I’m a Communist that believes in direct democracy, direct communes on everything. Pretty much, anarcho-syndicalism. Unions everything. I hope, but I don’t know how effective that is in addressing climate change, for instance.”
- “Oh, yeah. My dad is real; my mom is, but my mom is really left as well. But she can’t make her views known, because she works for WBUR, which is NPR, so she’s more held back. But you know … But then I went, I started studying it. That’s what I studied in college, I studied Russian his–., Soviet history … I became the resident Marxist. … But, yeah, I’m all about the complete seizure of the means of production, nationalizing everything.”
- “I only learned this sh*t in college when I started studying the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not horrible … I mean, for women’s rights, the Soviet Union — I think — the most progressive place to date in the world.”
- “The first gulag that was opened; have you heard about Belomorkanal? They dug a canal; the plan was, in 1922, I think, to dig a Canal from the White Sea all the way to Saint Petersburg … a long way, if you look on a map … and, the whole point — it was going to be called the Belomorkanal, and I read — I spent a whole semester actually studying primary accounts from the Belomorkanal. The whole point of the Belomorkanal, there were no machines allowed. They forced the people to dig with shovels and hoe the whole canal, right? You should see the people writing about their time at the Belomorkanal. There’s this one guy, he was a thief from Georgia who had been captured. He was sent to the Belomorkanal to work and in his writing, like ‘I reject all thievery, I reject that past life.’ He said, capitalism made me into this thief, because when there’s poor people, there’s going to be crime. He said, ‘I went to the Belomorkanal and I worked.’ He became a shock worker, which is what they call the leading workers, people who always met the quota and exceeded the quota … and, like people came from America to work at the Belomorkanal for the Soviet project, the communist project. It was a beautiful thing.”
- “Leave it to the Soviets to make the most badass f***ing, most effective gun in the world … AK-47 … the destroyer of imperialism and coloniali[sm] … that’s why I want to get it [AK-47] tattooed on me.”
- “So, do we just cease — do we just dissolve the Senate, House of Representatives, the judicial branch, and have something Bernie Sanders and a cabinet of people, make all decisions for the climate? I mean, I’m serious.”