“This is not who we are,” has become standard PR boilerplate groups and organizations use to distance themselves from embarrassing situations. The absence of those words from a major Presidential campaign, however, should make honest voters question that candidate’s credibility.
Less than a month before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, four field organizers for Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa and South Carolina advocated violence, slave labor and the Stalinist repression of dissent while expressing sympathy for Marxist ideology. Two even bragged about their Communist credentials.
All four spoke to undercover reporters for Project Veritas, which released videos of the surreptitious interviews. Yet no major national newspaper or television network has pursued the story, nor confronted Sanders about those comments. Nevertheless, the senator’s campaign went into siege mode.
Misty Rebik, Sanders’ state director in Iowa, called Project Veritas’ interviews “political gossip” on Twitter before locking her account. The state director in South Carolina, Jessica Bright, followed suit. So did 14 other field directors and coordinators in both states — and Georgia Parke, Sanders’ national deputy digital communications director.
On Jan. 31, John Robinson, the campaign’s chief operations officer, told campaign workers by e-mail to “avoid saying anything that would reflect poorly on the campaign” and to “always assume that you are being recorded.”
In South Carolina, Sanders’ representatives called police when Project Veritas’ reporters appeared unannounced at a field office and tried to interview campaign officials. When an officer confronted the reporters, he told them none of Sanders’ officials would offer any public comment. Then he made a remark with amazing implications.
“They are aware of the videos you guys took, the undercover stuff,” the officer said. “It’s one of those things where they wish he hadn’t said that, but they’re still standing by him.” (emphasis added)
“Him” is Martin Weissgerber, a field organizer whose father was a Marxist and whose home contained copies of Marx’s and Engels’ works.
“I always said that I’m a Communist,” Weissgerber said. “I believe everything has been formed by class struggle. I’m all about the complete seizure of the means of production, nationalizing everything. Guillotine the rich.”
Kyle Jurak, one of Sanders’ organizers in Iowa, called himself “an anarcho-Communist … as far to the left as you can possibly get” and added that other campaign workers shared his world view.
“There’s a lot of me’s in the Bernie campaign,” Jurak said. “(F)our of the organizers in this office … are all definitely further left than the Democratic Socialists.”
Like fellow Marxists, they reject the Constitutional idea of the three Federal branches of government operating under checks and balances.
“If we have Bernie in the White House,” said Mason Baird, an organizer in South Carolina, “we’re going to have a real plan for dual power, where we’ll have the Presidency and a mass movement right alongside it that’s going to be institutionalized and supported.”
Like fellow Marxists, they support violence as a political tool. When asked what would happen if President Donald Trump won re-election, Jurak replied, “(fornicating) cities burn.”
Milwaukee, the site of the Democratic Party’s convention, could be one of those cities.
“If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second ballot at the DNC convention, (fornicating) Milwaukee will burn,” Jurak said. “The cops are going to be the one who’ll get (fornicating) beaten in Milwaukee. They’re going to call out the National Guard for that (excrement). I promise you that. It’ll start in Milwaukee and when the police push back on that, other cities will start (fornicating)….”
Jurak finished by vocally imitating an explosion.
Should Sanders win the Democratic nomination and defeat Trump, Jurak promised more violence for those who refused to be “re-educated,” which he said was Sanders’ ultimate goal.
“Germany had to spend billions of dollars re-educating their (fornicating) people to not be Nazis,” Jurak said. “We’re probably going to have to do the same (fornicating) thing here. That’s kind of what Bernie’s whole, like, ‘Hey, free education for everybody because we’re going to have to teach you to not be a (fornicating) Nazi.’ “
That re-education would include, in Jurek’s mind, concentration camps.
“There’s a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags, right?” he said. “Not only to remove people who were insidious to the state from the state — like, ‘Hey, you guys are all causing problems. You’re, like, working against the revolution. We’re just going to remove you and put you in Siberia, where you can learn the (fornicating) value of, like, being a comrade.’ That’s what is has to be.”
Weissgerber supported instituting gulags in the United States, claiming they had value. He cited the construction of the Belomorkanal, which connected the Baltic Sea with the Arctic Ocean and used inmates as labor. Depending on the source, between 12,000 and 250,000 workers using only shovels and hoes died before the canal opened in 1933.
“People came from America to work on the Belomorkanal, for the Soviet project, for the Communist project,” Weissgerber said passionately. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
For those who resist, only death awaits.
“In Cuba, what did they do to reactionaries?” Jurak asked. His interviewer responded, “They shot them on the beach.” Then Jurek bobbed his head up and down to the beat of background music and asked, “Do you want to fight against the revolution? You’re going to die for it.”
Even those who would seem sympathetic to Sanders would not be immune.
“Walk into that MSNBC studio, drag those (maternal fornicators) out by their hair and light them on fire in the streets,” Jurak said. “Liberals get the (fornicating) wall first. Reign of terror.”
Yet Daniel Taylor, who works with Baird and Weissgerber, wants to hide the campaign’s more violent personality.
“We don’t want to scare people off,” Taylor said. “So you’ve got to feel it out first, before you get into the crazy stuff. You know, what we were talking about, more ‘extreme’ (air quotes with fingers) organizations like Antifa. But we’re keeping that on the back burner for now.
“Even if Bernie is elected, change will not come swiftly or easily. The connections that we’re making now in the campaign with people and volunteers, and at events, it’s very important that we retain that, regardless of the outcome. It is unfortunate that we have to make plans for extreme action. But like I said, they’re not going to give it to us.”
Would Sanders support such extremes?
“I would absolutely think he would endorse that kind of action,” Taylor said, “because, you know, sometimes that’s what you’ve got to do to get it done.”
Why would Taylor receive that impression? The answer lies in Sanders’ past, as his archives at the University of Vermont attest.
During the 1980 and 1984 Presidential elections, Sanders endorsed candidates from the Socialist Workers Party, which supported Fidel Castro. Sanders said he “proudly endorsed and supported” the party’s 1980 candidate, Andrew Pulley, who once encouraged American soldiers to “take up their guns and shoot their officers.” Sanders, one of three Vermont electors for Pulley, also said in a press release he “fully support(s) the SWP’s continued defense of the Cuba revolution.”
Four years later, while mayor of Burlington, Vt., Sanders campaigned for Mel Mason, a former member of the militant Black Panthers. Mason praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and stated that, “the greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it’s still developing.”
Sanders often expressed admiration for both Cuba and Nicaragua while minimizing their cruelty. The Burlington mayor visited Nicaragua in 1985 and talked about his experience on the city’s cable television channel, saying that he was “impressed” with the Sandinistas’ “intelligence and sincerity.”
During that interview, Sanders was asked whether President Ronald Reagan’s support for the anti-Marxist Contras would plunge Nicaragua into civil war. Sanders’ response mentioned the failed CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
“Everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world,” he said. “All the Cuban people were going to rise up in rebellion against Fidel Castro. They forgot that he educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.”
When interviewed by the Burlington Free Press about his trip, the mayor even defended the long food lines that typify Marxist economics.
“That is a good thing!” Sanders proclaimed. “In other countries people don’t line up for food: The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
Sanders even “attempted to cut off” questions about the Sandinista regime’s brutality toward the Miskito Indians, the Free Press reported. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, no friend of Reagan or conservatives, said the Miskitos were marched at gunpoint into “forced-labor camps which resemble concentration camps.”
Given Sanders’ past, Jurak’s assessment of him offers frightening clarity.
“I think he’s a legit socialist masquerading as a democratic socialist,” Jurak said. “I think a lot of the things that he’s suggesting in moving forward take us further than democratic socialism.”
In Marxist terminology, “socialism” means Communism. As Lenin said, “the goal of socialism is Communism.”
Sanders employs Marxist rhetoric about equality and fairness to seduce the unsuspecting. But Marxist reality delivers slavery to the masses.
Sanders might not say that. But his field organizers did. So does history.
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