With Bernie Sanders Now Dominating NH Polls, Time to Review: Exactly How Radical is He?

By Rachel Alexander Published on January 22, 2016

Bernie Sanders has come a long way since I called him a long-shot candidate for president in May of last year. Since then, he’s risen to within single digits behind Hillary Clinton in national polls, is about tied with her in Iowa polls, and is well ahead of her in polls for the early, bellwether state of New Hampshire. Reason enough to review the man’s curious background, both because many people weren’t paying attention to the man when he threw his hat into the ring, and because fresh curiosities have emerged since that time.

As for his Senate record, he has sponsored only a single bill during his entire eight terms in Congress, but that hasn’t stopped him from promising the moon on the presidential campaign trail. He has made expensive — and, some would say, wildly unrealistic — promises to make everything from college to healthcare free.

This is in keeping with his long-running flirtations with socialism, and not always just the soft socialism of Western Europe. Sanders may not have gone as far as advocating for a police state and the abolition of private property, but he does appear to have been sympathetic to the Communist movement. In 1985, he took a trip to Managua, where a Marxist-Leninist government had taken power. He called it a “heroic revolution.” While Russia was still under Communism, Sanders hung a Soviet flag in his office.

In 1974, Sanders ran for the U.S. Senate in Vermont while living on unemployment. One of his neighbors in Burlington said he stole electricity from his landlord. “He was living in the back of an old brick building, and when he couldn’t pay the [electric bill], he would take extension cords and run down to the basement and plug them into the landlord’s outlet,” said Nancy Barnett.

His radicalism extends to matters sexual. He wrote articles for a radical left newspaper in Vermont during the 1970s, Vermont Freeman. (WARNING: Offensive.) In one essay, he stated, “A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously.” He went on: “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?” He has also claimed that cancer could be caused by having too few orgasms.

Sanders has said not just that there were racists among the American founders, or that the U.S. Constitution had a terrible flaw in it where it accommodated slavery for the Southern states. He went further to say that the country was founded on racist principles. “A nation that in many ways was created — I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back — on racist principles, that’s a fact, we have come a long way as a nation,” he said in a speech to Liberty University last September. He didn’t explain what those racist principles were, nor how they led to America freeing its many slaves.

During November’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, he bizarrely connected climate change to terrorism, saying, “Absolutely, in fact, climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.” He also warned that the earth was about to become “uninhabitable” for the next generation, reminiscent of Al Gore and his failed fatalistic environmental predictions.

Finally, during one media interview, Sanders claimed that Americans have too many choices of deodorants, 23, and connected it to starving children. Reason spoofed the remarks in a video, which includes these lines: “Meet Hanna. Hanna wasn’t always hungry — but then Old Spice released its Red Zone Aqua Reef Sweat Defense Solid. Now she’s starving.”

 

With the Hillary Clinton campaign now in panic mode, stay tuned for fresh revelations about the socialist senator from Vermont.

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