What, specifically, in Bernie’s platform is communist?
Bernie’s Red bona fides
In 1971,
Mr. Sanders joined the Liberty Union Party (LUP), which called for a government takeover of all U.S. banks and private utility companies. In the mid-1970s,
Mr. Sanders headed the American People’s History Society, which journalist Paul Sperry describes as “an organ for Marxist propaganda.”
As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s,
Mr. Sanders hung a Soviet flag in his office in honor of Burlington’s Soviet sister city, Yaroslavl, where he honeymooned in 1988 with his second wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders.
Mr. Sanders set price controls, raised taxes and placed restrictions on the rights of landlords. He named Burlington’s softball team the “People’s Republic of Burlington.” Its minor league baseball team the “Vermont Reds” was a Cincinnati Reds affiliate, so that was just a propitious development for
Bernie.
In 1980, he backed for president Socialist Workers Party candidate Andrew Pulley, a Marxist who called for a government takeover of America’s energy industry.
According to Accuracy In Media,
Mr. Sanders collaborated with Soviet and East German “peace committees” whose goal was “to stop President Reagan’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe.”
In 1985, Mayor
Sanders went to Nicaragua to celebrate the sixth anniversary of Daniel Ortega’s communist Sandinista regime and speak at an anti-American rally. He arranged for Burlington and Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, to be sister cities, and also visited communist Cuba.
When Ortega orchestrated mass arrests of critics and shut down opposition media,
Mr. Sanders refused to condemn him, later saying the crackdown “makes sense to me.” He now supports Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, who has turned that once-prosperous country into a communist nightmare.
In 1989,
Mr. Sanders addressed the U.S. Peace Council, a Communist Party USA front whose members were committed, according to the FBI, to advancing “the triumph of Soviet power in the U.S.”
As an admirer of crackdowns on pesky opposition media,
Sen. Sanders in 2007 co-sponsored the Media Ownership Reform Act, which, among other things, would have re-established the misnamed Fairness Doctrine in order to muzzle conservative talk radio.
In 2011, Mr.
Sanders was the first U.S. senator to support the violent Occupy Wall Street movement and opined: “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?”
Lest we write all this off as earlier exuberance, here’s a short list of his current positions:
Government takeover of health care and drug companies; “free” college tuition; “free” child care; confiscatory taxes on “the rich,” and much of
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. That hare-brained scheme calls for a massive government expansion to do away with airplanes, the internal combustion engine, “farting cows” (thus, hamburgers), and all fossil fuels within 11 years. Don’t laugh; they’re serious.
It would take not only trillions of dollars but suspension of most basic liberties to do this. Karl Marx summarized communism as “abolition of private property,” which ultimately requires violence.
