After Bernie Sanders‘ Nevada caucus win, Americans were reminded just how strange and unprepared the senator from Vermont really is.
During a “60 Minutes” interview, he unleashed a nonsense word salad when pressed to explain how he would pay for all of his socialist policy ideas. Details apparently irritate Mr. Sanders, like they do the left in general. This is a crowd used to selling snake oil on the side of the road; the last thing they want to do is tell you what’s actually in it.
The Fiscal Times reported, “Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t want to get into any details when pressed about the price tag for his ambitious agenda. He said his Medicare-for-All plan would cost about $30 trillion over 10 years, which would, he argues, cost ‘substantially less than letting the current system go.’ Asked about a total price tag for his entire agenda — which includes free public college, cancellation of all student debt and a Green New Deal to tackle climate change — Sanders said he doesn’t have a total cost figure. …”
During that same interview, Mr. Sanders doubled down on earlier praise for the totalitarian Castro regime in Cuba by insisting that not everything was bad because the tyrant implemented a “literacy program.”
He was rightly torched on social and other media, with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tweeting, “Likely Dem nominee praised the supposed ‘achievements’ Castro regime. And he’s wrong about why people didn’t overthrow Castro. It’s not because ‘he educated their kids, gave them health care’ it’s because his opponents were jailed, murdered or exiled.”
With all history has taught us, one can wonder what compels an adult American to make excuses for murderous regimes while running for president promoting economic schemes that even he has no idea how they would be implemented, let alone paid for.
But funding madness isn’t the issue; the question is what sort of person thinks so little of the normals that they promote schemes that would destroy the nation’s economy while making Venezuela look like an appealing all-inclusive resort.
This is at the heart of what drives socialism — the notion that people can’t be trusted, are dumb and therefore must be controlled at all cost. This retrograde attitude about the power and value of humanity doesn’t just manifest in politics — if you look closely enough, you see rancid elitism informing socialists and communists throughout history. Malignant elitists selling socialism as a cure for malignant elitism has got to be the most successful con game in the 20th and now 21st centuries.
Mr. Sanders is now the torchbearer for the same con that has destroyed countries and cost more than 100 million lives in the modern era.
How little does one have to think about humanity in order to promote a theory that condemns the individual to be a mindless cog in a socialist system? (Warning: the following descriptions may offend some readers). More recently, a senior adviser to former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, another Democratic presidential candidate, mentioned Mr. Sanders‘ “loopy” history to CNN host Alisyn Camerota. The Washington Examiner reported:
“[Senior advisor to the Bloomberg campaign Tim] O’Brien also condemned some of Sanders‘ academic writings from the 1970s, in which he covered topics such as rape and sexuality. In one 1972 article, Sanders wrote that women ‘fantasize’ about being raped. O’Brien argued that Sanders needed to address his ‘loopy’ views, saying, ‘Bernie has a very trippy record. … Bernie has all of this loopy stuff in his background, saying things like women get cancer from having too many orgasms or toddlers should run around naked and touch each other’s genitals to insulate themselves from porn. Why has this stuff not been more surfaced?’ O’Brien asked. ‘He has written about women’s rape fantasies, that hasn’t been surfaced. That’s the loony side of Bernie.’ “
Mr. O’Brien is not exaggerating. These essays of Mr. Sanders, written when he was in his 30s, provide a window into his opinion of humanity. The Examiner called these “academic” writings. They were not. The leftist magazine Mother Jones first uncovered this rambling philosophical history of Mr. Sanders back in 2015, when they reported, “He dabbled in carpentry and tried to get by as a freelance journalist for alternative newspapers and regional publications, contributing interviews, political screeds, and, one time, a stream-of-consciousness essay on the nature of male-female sexual dynamics: ‘A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused … A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously. … Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like ‘Girl 12 raped by 14 men’ sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?’ “
Back in May 2015 after the Mother Jones expose, the then-Sanders campaign responded by stating, “[T]he article was a ‘dumb attempt at dark satire in an alternative publication’ ” that “in no way reflects his views or record on women.”
In other essays for the same alternative rag, according to Mother Jones, is what Mr. O’Brien is referring to regarding Mr. Sanders‘ linking breast cancer and “other things” to not having enough “biosexual excitation.” He also extols the benefit of having children touch each other’s sex organs in order to make them immune to pornography.
When we think about what sort of attitude one has to have about other human beings to drive them to embrace and promote the disaster of socialism, writings like these provide part of an answer. Socialists and communists have so little regard for the individual, they’ve conjured up a system for which they believe the … deplorables should be grateful.
Only those who think so little of others embrace a system that destroys lives. With all we’ve seen in the last 100 years, Mr. Sanders knows the scourge he’s promoting, and he doesn’t seem to care.