You’ve seen ”The Manchurian Candidate,” right? Not the lame modern version with Denzel, but the cool 1962 one with Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra, and Angela Lansbury. In it a Chicom mole is trained to assassinate a presidential candidate and bring the murdered nominee’s secret communist running mate to power. It’s a brilliant film. Its premise is communist infiltration by covert means.
But hey! Why go undercover when Dem primary voters will make a communist a frontrunner? No, you say. Sanders is just a socialist. Oh, really?
In 1964, while in college, Sanders organized meetings for a communist front organization, the United Packinghouse Workers Union. He then spent some time at an Israeli kibbutz. Not a crime, right? Well, this kibbutz was founded by Aharon Cohen, a Soviet spy.
After graduating, Sanders headed a Marxist publication, the American People’s History Society. Over the years he became (according to the FBI) involved with numerous Marxist groups. He’s taken more than several “goodwill” trips to communist nations including the USSR, Cuba, and Nicaragua. I’m betting while there he had pleasant conversations with intelligence officers of those countries.
When in Nicaragua in the 80s he denounced the U.S. and the Reagan administration, openly siding with the communist government. In the 80s he also served as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party, a party that hailed Leon Trotsky as its inspiration. What hotspot did he take his wife to for their honeymoon in 1988? Yaroslavl, USSR.
What a romantic!
While mayor of Burlington, Vermont he hung a Soviet flag in his office. In 1989 he spoke and endorsed the U.S. Peace Council, a group that pledged fealty to the goal of “the triumph of Soviet power in the US”. Since then he has consistently opposed funding the U.S. military to any level other than sclerotic. Today he has a poster in his Senate office of Eugene Debs, who “hailed the triumphant Bolshevik revolution in Russia.” He has called for the nationalization of all U.S. banks and the entire energy sector.
There’s more but you get the drift.
This isn’t someone conservative snarky exuberance labels a Bolshie or a commie. This is very likely an actual communist. The Sanders campaign denies the label, but refuses to talk about any of the above matters or dismisses them as old news. To them, if you scream “Trump” loud enough people will forget that in the most decisive struggle for world freedom of the 20th century, Sanders was on the other side.
How ironic that almost thirty years after America won the Cold War, communists are alive and well in two places: American university faculties and the U.S. Democratic Party. Sanders, as a leading member of that party, a party that has won the popular vote in six of seven presidential elections since 1992, could realistically win its nomination for president.
This is not cinematic fiction or the rantings of the ultra hard-right fever swamps. This is here. This is now. This is America.
At least, it still is for now.
