For a guy who hates capitalism, Bernie Sanders is exceedingly good at it. It’s not just the millions of dollars he’s made (and kept to himself) from his books, but his campaign offers anything the young communist could want to show they are a true believer, short of a billy club or keys to a Gulag.
At his website, the unshowered parental disappointments in your life can buy $27 t-shirts with his name on it or “College for All” across the front, as if to advertise how your priorities are screwed up. If you’re angry about borrowing $25k per year for a worthless women’s studies degree, what business do you have dropping $27 on cotton rag demanding someone else picks up the cost?
For the adventurous granola cruncher, there is the $5 “Medicare for All” bumper sticker. After all, why not lay down what is likely a 10,000 percent mark-up for something to cover the rust on your VW Beetle or to replace the Grateful Dead sticker you bought just after Gerry died? It’s been a while. Time to move on.
Bernie also offers $7 car magnets, for those trust fund babies and yuppies who never grew up, but feel guilty about their wealth. Giving to charity is for suckers, but so is putting something that will be hard to peel off and could damage the paint on that new BMW.
There’s also the $5 “Not me, us” sticker which features a silhouette of Bernie superimposed over a faceless crowd, thereby defeating the message of the sticker by showing that it is, in fact, about Bernie.
Then there are the hats ($18-$27), a $27 rally poster (guaranteed to ensure virginity through middle age for anyone who hangs it on their bedroom wall), buttons ($5), a mug ($18), and more tote bags than PBS during a pledge drive.
For a mere $18 you can buy a canvas tote that will not only allow you to virtue signal everyone at the Whole Foods about how “woke” you are, but you can do so with a pretentious message emblazoned across it. Imagine tossing $4 avocados into a bag reading, “Bernie for the planet." What up-and-coming failure wouldn’t want a “Keep calm and vote Bernie?" Or, if none of those make you tingle in the right places, there’s always the one with what could be a poorly drawn planet Earth in a human hand (it kind of looks like a bar of soap, but that’s highly unlikely given the audience) with the words, “Vote Bernie, save this.”
Bernie Sanders' online store offers everything you need to empower supporters to show the world that the education system has failed them and disappoint parents from coast to coast.
The worst part isn’t that Bernie is selling these and many, many other worthless things to raise money for his campaign, it’s that he’s running to essentially destroy anyone else’s ability to do the same. Not the “to raise campaign funds part,” the to make a living part.
People who make a living through their own initiative are the enemy of Bernie Sanders and his army, and all businesses must be destroyed. He’s not campaigning on that, obviously, but it’s the subtext of everything the man says and advocates.
American citizens are property of the state, not the other way around. Illegal aliens? They get a pass. More than that, they get the same “benefits” as Americans without any of that pesky “having to pay taxes to contribute to the cost” mess that ruins people’s April 15th.
How a campaign blatantly promising to screw over Americans while benefitting people in the country illegally gained traction in a major political party in the United States (or any country, for that matter) is a testament to the power of the fringe, the most extreme elements of the left. Why the Democratic Party can’t rally behind anyone who likes the country, is proud of it, is shocking.
Bernie Sanders is what happens when a party is devoid of leaders. Bernie is popular with a select group of naïve young people who’ve yet to earn anything worth having, so the idea of government-sanctioned theft is appealing to them. But the worst part is no one has stood up to him or his ideas; no one has stood up for the country or what made it great. Instead, they pander to the same people, mistaking enthusiasm for the man as enthusiasm up for grabs.
It’s Bernie or bust for his supporters. They’re already dominated by demographic considered the least likely to vote in the general election. Even if they are enough to win the nomination in a widely split field, they’re not likely to carry anyone over the finish line because there aren’t more of them. And the demographic most likely to vote in the general election are the least likely to embrace Bernie’s vision. They remember the horrors of socialism and communism, they fought them for this country and aren’t likely to embrace them now.
That’s where the other Democrats dropped the ball. Aping the radical left is never going to appeal to people who want it when the real deal is also on the ballot. You can’t out-Bernie Bernie.
Now, with no one willing to leave the race and allow opposition to coalesce around one alternative, it’s close to too late to stop him from at least getting a plurality of the delegates needed to win the nomination. If Bernie goes into the convention with the most delegates and doesn’t win the nomination, well, hell hath no fury like a Bernie-bro scorned.
The t-shirts will be donned, the tote bags will fly, and Democrats will finally get a dose of what everyone else has been warning Antifa has been doing to them.
Comrade Bernie came to win. And just like those historical monsters he admires, he’s not about to let anything stand in his way. If only the other candidates weren’t too busy sucking up to him and his army to notice.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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