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The Democratic Party continues to transform into a party molded after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). The Bernie wing of the party paints itself as the most tolerant collection of “everyman” types fighting for the proletariat, but in actuality, it is a collection of privileged elites and bigots whose policies will make everyday people’s lives worse.
Consider Graham Platner, a Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, portrayed as a working-class oyster farmer. Platner scratches the progressive itch of the Democratic Party base, supporting Bernie’s popularized “Medicare for All” idea, wanting a “billionaire minimum tax,” and demonizing Israel. He’s been endorsed by Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), among others, despite running against Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in a crucial race for Democratic control of the Senate.
MAINE SENATE CANDIDATE PLATNER ANNOUNCES HE COVERED UP NAZI-TIED SKULL TATTOO
But Platner has been plagued by a recent scandal relating to a tattoo he received during his time as a U.S. Marine. The tattoo was of a skull known as the Totenkopf, the symbol that represents the Nazi SS unit that ran Germany’s concentration camps. Platner also has a series of Reddit posts calling for violence, referring to himself a communist, and professing his hatred of police officers.
None of this has bothered Sanders, who mocked anyone concerned about a potential future senator having a Nazi tattoo. Sanders also excused Platner’s comments about sexual assault by criticizing a reporter for not having “served four tours of duty” as Platner has. (Platner said in Reddit posts that people who get raped “make a choice to consume enough of a substance to lose your self control” and should “take some responsibility for themselves”).
But Platner’s everyman persona is a fiction as well. His grandfather was a successful architect and interior designer who designed the interior for the headquarters of the Ford Foundation. Platner’s father is a lawyer, and Platner himself attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut that charges up to $75,000 per year in tuition. Platner later ended up at a cheaper private school that charged tuition that would amount to $12,000 in today’s dollars.
Platner is not a salt-of-the-earth oyster farmer, but an elitist. His private school education is juxtaposed with his promise to “oppose any federal support for private school vouchers” that would allow poor students to escape failing public school systems and seek the same educational opportunity that Platner’s rich family provided him. Platner professes an ideology that benefits the elites, as communism, socialism, or whatever else you want to call it ultimately ends up doing. (Platner is also now reportedly trying to get his staff to sign non-disclosure agreements, which is typical for business and political elites and atypical for blue-collar oyster farmers).
Sanders knows that better than anyone. He has worked on the taxpayer dime for the past 45 years, going from mayor of Burlington to serving 16 years representing Vermont in the House of Representatives and another 18 (and counting) representing it in the Senate. While spending all that time railing against the “millionaires and billionaires,” Sanders has himself become a millionaire. He owns three houses, but he says that isn’t a big deal because they are all “middle-class houses.” The goal has never been to take on the rich, just on those richer than Sanders. He stopped talking about the evils of his fellow millionaires during his 2020 presidential campaign, instead focusing his ire on the billionaires above him.
You can see a similar history of privilege from the most popular Bernie-wing candidate running for office right now, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and frontrunner to become the next mayor of New York City. Mamdani’s father is a professor at Columbia University, and his mother is an Oscar-nominated movie producer. Both of his parents went to Harvard. Just this year, Mamdani got married at his family’s private estate in Uganda, a compound on two acres of land with masked armed guards and cellphone jammers.
Mamdani got armed security for his wedding, but he spent his political career advocating for police departments to be defunded, which would harm poor people who can’t buy their own security as Mamdani’s family can. Mamdani lives the high life, dining at high-priced restaurants while living in a rent-stabilized apartment meant for people who don’t come from millionaire families as he does.
Mamdani, of course, fits the bigotry side of Bernie-wing Democrats as well. He has professed his desire to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested in New York City on fabricated genocide accusations. He protested in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks not against Hamas butchering 1,200 civilians and taking several more hostage, but against Israel and its inevitable response. While condemning any and everything Israel does, Mamdani says he has no opinions about the genocidal antisemitic terrorists in Gaza and whether or not they should remain in power.
This can be seen in other politicians from the Bernie wing of the party as well. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is one of the most antisemitic members of Congress. She came to America as a refugee, but her household net worth is now in the millions thanks to her husband’s ownership stakes in a winery and a venture capital firm. (That, or Omar failed to understand the instructions for her financial disclosure, while condescendingly telling conservatives to “try reading”).
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is Sanders’s top acolyte, a future presidential candidate (possibly as early as 2028) and the obvious heir to Sanders’s national movement. Many have dismissed her pre-politics career as being nothing more than a bartender, but she served as an intern for Democratic Party royalty and “Lion of the Senate” Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. She and Omar seemingly spend more time posing for magazine photoshoots than actually legislating as members of Congress.
BERNIE SANDERS FLEXES MUSCLES WITH PRIMARY AND SWING-DISTRICT ENDORSEMENTS
As the years go by, and the Democratic Party comes to reflect its Bernie wing more and more, this is going to become more common. Champagne socialists will jump into campaigns across the country, touting their workingman credentials and covering up their privileged backgrounds, rich parents, or personal wealth. They will do so in service of an ideology that they profess is all about the working man, all while they defund police departments that those working men rely on for safety and force those working men to pay more in taxes to fund the college degrees of wealthy post-graduates.
Splash a little bigotry (mostly antisemitism) and some outlandish rhetoric about fascism, and you have the model for Democratic candidates for the future. The Bernie wing of the party is taking over, as even the “establishment” Democratic politicians adopt rhetoric and positions pushed to the forefront by Sanders. The result is going to be a party that models the country after socialist Brandon Johnson’s Chicago, with the same street violence, failing schools, and collapsing communities for the poor people that Sanders and co. claim to be fighting for.
