The woman who made the mittens worn by Sen. Bernie Sanders in a viral meme says she no longer sells those mittens due to high taxes placed on her business.
“People have been contacting me thinking that they can get mittens, and actually, they can’t,” Vermont school teacher Jen Ellis said about the mittens that Sanders wore on Inauguration Day, adding that high taxes drove her out of business.
“I don’t have any more, and I don’t have much of a mitten business anymore because it really wasn’t worth it,” she continued. “Independent crafters get really taken for a ride by the federal government. We get taxed to the nth degree, and it wasn’t really worth it pursuing that as a business, even as a side hustle.”
Still, despite Sanders’s strident support for raising taxes, including on the middle class, to pay for “Medicare for all,” Ellis says she supports the senator.
“I’m also super pro-Bernie and as a public school teacher, I can see every day how families are struggling,” she said. “People are just trying to make ends meet, and they need things like student loan forgiveness and free education and a lot of the things that Bernie is fighting for.”
Ellis says she sent Sanders the mittens in 2016 and was “heartbroken” after Sanders lost the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton.
Bernie’s mittens are made by Jen Ellis, a teacher from Essex Junction, Vt. She gave them to him 2+ years ago and was surprised when he began wearing them on the campaign trail. They are made from repurposed wool sweaters and lined with fleece made from recycled plastic bottles. pic.twitter.com/ErLr29lY2t
— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) January 20, 2021
Those mittens became part of a viral meme following the inauguration, resulting in photos of the bundled Sanders being superimposed onto a wide variety of backgrounds and shared by millions online.
Bemittened Bernie Sanders: The meme that rang around the world https://t.co/PFbfBVba73
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 22, 2021
Sanders appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers Thursday night and said he has seen the viral memes, and he also laughed when Meyers showed him a version of the photo.
