In his Daily Wire podcast Wednesday, Michael Knowles slams the hypocrisy of 2020 candidate and socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who claimed that anyone can be a millionaire by writing a bestselling book. Transcript and video below.
Socialism is not about giving away wealth. Socialism is about the acquisition of wealth. It is never about sharing wealth. Sharing wealth is called charity. People who want to share their wealth give money away to charity. They give it a bum on the street, they give it to their church, they give it to nonprofit organizations and charities. Socialism is about accumulation. It’s about the accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of power. It’s about saying too many people have too many things out there, we’re going to not give anything away, but we’re going to take that wealth away from them and concentrate it in the hands of a small number of people, also known as the government. That’s socialism.
Conservatives think that there’s some contradiction with millionaire socialists. No, of course, a socialist is going to be a millionaire. All a socialist is concerned with is taking money, bringing in money, and accumulating money. You’ll notice most of the people who are pushing socialism are extremely wealthy. Bernie Sanders is a millionaire. All of the leaders of the Democrat party are millionaires. Hillary Clinton, multi-multi-millionaire. Huge slush funds and basically used a non-profit organization as a personal slush fund. How about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? She’s just twenty-nine years old, she was a bartender living in her parents’ house not three years ago, and she’s been in government two months and she’s already taking one million dollars out of her campaign and funneling it to her own uses. She is already embezzling a million dollars. She’s been in office for two months! That’s what socialism does. It’s about taking in and bringing in. That’s not even an irony. We know it from the beginning.
This is what Winston Churchill said, he said: “socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” It’s all about greed. It’s not about charity at all. If you like charity, then you give to charity. You actually don’t want someone stealing your money because you know that they’re not going to put to nearly as good a use are you were going to put it to. Socialism at no point engages the faculties of charity or empathy or generosity, none of those things. It exclusively engages avarice, greed, and envy and inquisitiveness.
The great example, Dinesh D’Souza used to give this example all the time. If I’m walking along the street and I see some bum and he’s some degenerate, drug-addled, lazy bum and I’m eating a sandwich, and he says, “hey! Can I have that sandwich?” and I say, “here’s half my sandwich.” Now, I am glad that I have done some charity. I’ve treated you with compassion. You have a gratitude toward me because I’ve given you a sandwich that I didn’t need to give you, and there’s a nice moral exchange that happened. On the flip side, I’m walking down the street eating my sandwich, and Millionaire Bernie Sanders comes up on his white horse and he points a gun at my head, and he says, “give him that sandwich!” I say, “you give him a sandwich, you’re the millionaire.” He says, “no! You give him your sandwich right now.”
So, I have to give the bum my sandwich. I resent the bum for taking my sandwich, I certainly resent Bernie Sanders for making me do it. The bum isn’t grateful to me. He might be grateful, or at least dependent on Bernie Sanders and he feels entitled to my sandwich. His only attitude toward me is one of entitlement, as though he deserves my sandwich. It cost Bernie Sanders nothing. That’s socialism and Bernie is exposing it.