TRUMP SUES CNN AS CONSERVATIVES RISE UP & TAKE FAKE NEWS TO COURT

TRUMP SUES CNN AS CONSERVATIVES RISE UP & TAKE FAKE NEWS TO COURT 
★★★ A NEW CONSERVATIVE AGE IS RISING ★★★
Things just keep getting worse and worse for CNN; now President Trump is suing them for their fake news coverage. We’re going to take a look at the latest lawsuit to CNN and see how it’s all part of a larger trend of conservatives rising up and fighting back by taking the fake news media industry to court; you’re going to love it!

JOE BIDEN EXPOSED IN FULL

JOE BIDEN EXPOSED IN FULL
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research 
purposes:

Joe Biden

individualLast updated: March 7, 2020
© Image Copyright : Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Author of Photo: U.S. Government


Overview

  • Was elected Vice President of the United States in 2008
  • Democratic U.S. Senator from Delaware, 1972-2008
  • Believes that global warming is caused by industrial and automotive pollution, and that broad and immediate action must be taken to curb its effects
  • Consistently opposed all bills seeking to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration
  • Received an 8 percent rating from the U.S. Border Control, signifying that his voting record on immigration issues reflected an open-borders stance
  • Supports affirmative action

Early Life, Education, & Launch of Political Career

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. was born in November 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and lived there for ten years before moving to, and growing up in, New Castle County, Delaware. He graduated from Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware in 1961. In 1965 he earned his undergraduate degree (with majors in history and political science) from the University of Delaware in Newark, and in 1968 he earned his Juris Doctor degree from Syracuse University College of Law. Biden then found work as a public defender in Wilmington, Delaware. He also spent some time working as an attorney for a member of the Black Panther Party.
In 1972 Biden ran successfully for one of Delaware’s seats in the U.S. Senate, beating Republican incumbent J. Caleb Boggs.
Biden became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 1975, and of the Senate Judiciary Committee two years later.

Death of Biden’s Wife & Daughter

Just 16 days prior to Biden’s January 3, 1973 swearing-in as a senator, his then-wife Neilia Hunter and the couple’s three children were involved in an automobile accident. Neilia and daughter Naomi died from the injuries they sustained, while Biden’s two sons, Beau and Hunter, eventually made full recoveries.
For many years thereafter, Biden would repeatedly claim that his wife and daughter were killed by a “drunk driver.” For example, in mid-September 2001 he told an audience at the University of Delaware: “It was an errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive and hit a tractor-trailer, hit my children and my wife and killed them.” Similarly, in a 2007 speech at the University of Iowa, he said: “Let me tell you a little story. I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. And on Dec. 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly, and killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons, with what were thought to be at the time permanent, fundamental injuries.”
But Biden’s claims were false. Curtis C. Dunn, the man driving the truck that broadsided Mrs. Biden’s vehicle, was never charged with drunken driving. In fact, some investigators thought at the time that the accident had occurred because Biden’s wife pulled into the intersection not having noticed Dunn’s approaching truck. “The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect,” said Delaware Superior Court Judge Jerome O. Herlihy, the chief deputy attorney general who worked with crash investigators in 1972. Each time Biden uttered his false account of the event, Dunn’s family suffered great anguish.
When Biden was sworn in to office at his son’s hospital bedside in Wilmington, Delaware on January 5, 1973, he became the fifth-youngest senator in American history. Biden would win each of his reelection bids — in 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996, and 2002 — with relative ease, becoming the longest-serving U.S. Senator in Delaware’s history.

Biden’s Support for Busing — Followed by His Opposition to Busing

When Biden ran for the Senate in 1972, an election which he won by a margin of by just 1.4 percent, he supported busing as a public policy. But as it became increasingly clear that the vast majority of Biden’s majority-white constituents passionately opposed the policy, the senator reversed his position. In September 1975, for instance, he supported a federal anti-busing amendment proposed by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a former segregationist. Later that same month, Biden also supported an amendment introduced by Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, to forbid the busing of children to any school other than the one nearest to their homes.
In a September 1975 interview with the Washington Post, Biden boasted about the love and respect that Delaware’s black community felt for him: “I still walk down the street in the black side of town. Mousey and Chops and all the boys at 13th, and — I can walk in those pool halls, and quite frankly don’t know another white man involved in Delaware politics who can do that kind of thing.”
In yet another 1975 interview — this one with NPR — Biden argued that black people in fact preferred segregation because they felt it was in their best interests:
“I think the concept of busing … that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality….
“There are those of we social planners who think somehow that if we just subrogate [sic] man’s individual characteristics and traits by making sure that a presently heterogeneous society becomes a totally homogeneous society, that somehow we’re going to solve our social ills. And quite to the contrary….
“I give you my word as a Biden, I put in over 100 hours, by far — I would say close to 300 hours — on just torturing this [anti-busing concept]. Calling my staff together, and the blacks on my staff together, saying ‘Look, this is what I think. Do you think I am [racist]? Is there something in me that’s deep-seated that I don’t know?’”
Biden’s present-day account of his voting record on busing is highly misleading. In a March 2018 interview with the “Pod Save America” podcast, he said: “I have never, ever, ever voted for anything I thought was wrong. In the middle of the single most extensive busing order in all the United States history, in my state, I voted against an amendment, cast the deciding vote, to allow courts to keep busing as a remedy. Because there are some things that are worth losing [elections] over.” In short, Biden singled out and highlighted his lone pro-busing vote from an anti-busing record that lasted for years.
Member of Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Remarriage

On June 17, 1977, Biden married schoolteacher Jill Tracy Jacobs.

Biden’s Senate Voting Record & Policy Positions

Following is an overview of Biden’s policy positions and his voting record on key pieces of legislation during his years in the Senate:
Opposed Funding for South Vietnam in 1970s
Shortly after he was first elected to the Senate, Biden voted against U.S. funding to help the South Vietnamese government stave off its North Vietnamese Communist invaders. He insisted that “the United States has no obligation to evacuate one — or 100,001 — South Vietnamese.” Biden’s vote, which was in line with the votes of most in Congress’ new Democrat majority, paved the way for the ultimate fall of Saigon (in April 1975) and the subsequent mass slaughter of Indochinese peasants.
Favored Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 Rise to Power in Iran
In 1979 Senator Biden shared President Jimmy Carter‘s belief that the fall of the Shah in Iran and the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule represented progress for human rights in that country. Throughout the ensuing 444-day hostage crisis, during which Khomeini’s extremist acolytes routinely paraded the blindfolded American captives in front of television cameras and threatened them with execution, Biden opposed strong action against the mullahs and called for dialogue.
Opposed Reagan’s Funding of Nicaraguan Contras in 1980s
Biden opposed President Ronald Reagan’s effort to fund the Contras, an anti-Communist rebel group in Nicaragua. As the New York Sun points out:
  • “On October 3, 1984, Mr. Biden voted to prohibit the Reagan administration from spending money against Nicaragua from the intelligence budget.”
  • “On June 6, 1985, the Senate approved an amendment offered by a Georgia Democrat, Sam Nunn, to release $38 million in humanitarian aid to the Contra rebels fighting Mr. Ortega’s Sandinistas. The amendment passed, but Mr. Biden was one of 42 Senators who opposed it.”
  • “In 1986, Mr. Biden wanted to require the Reagan administration to negotiate with Mr. Ortega’s government before sending any money to the Contras.”
  • “Mr. Biden voted again in March 1987 for halting aid to the Contras.”
Opposed Reagan Military Buildup in 1980s
Throughout the 1980s, Biden opposed Reagan’s proactive means of dealing with the Soviet Union. Biden instead favored détente — which, in practice, meant Western subsidies that would have enabled the moribund USSR to remain solvent much longer than it ultimately did. Biden was a leading critic of the Reagan defense buildup, specifically vis a vis the MX missile, the B-l bomber, and the Trident submarine.
Missile Defense
Biden criticized President Reagan for his “continued adherence” to the goal of developing a missile defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, calling the President’s insistence on the measure “one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”
Biden’s opposition to missile defense continued for decades thereafter:
On July 24, 2001, on July 24, 2001, Biden chaired a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in which he said in a prepared statement:
“I worry that funds devoted to missile defense, or the recent tax cut, are hurting our ability to meet these more current and realistic threats. And I worry that a narrow-minded pursuit of missile defense, without having any notion of what missile defense to develop, could derail both our programs in Russia, as well as our negotiations with North Korea.”
On July 31, 2007, Biden said:
“In 2001, Bush’s new foreign affairs team were so intent on going ahead with Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense shield that they were willing to pull out of earlier arms control treaties to get there, inviting, in my view, another arms race. The missile defense system seemed to be the perfect metaphor for the neoisolationist policy. Let’s arm the heavens, they were saying, and protect the US, the rest of the world be damned. The [Bush] administration had said they were willing to walk away from the decades-old ABM Treaty in order to unilaterally develop and deploy the missile defense system, and now they were putting real money behind it. They were willing to put tens of billions of dollars into the Maginot line in the sky that could quite likely set off another arms race, while cutting funding for a program to help Russia destroy its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons before they got into the hands of terrorists.”
On December 13, 2007, Biden said:
“[We should] cut somewhere in the order of $20 billion a year out of the military for special programs, from Star Wars, to a new atomic weapon, to the F-22, to the Nimitz-Class Destroyer. You can save $350 billion. That would allow me to do everything I want to do — my priorities on education, health care and the environment — and still bring down the deficit by $150 billion.”
Environment
Biden believes that global warming is caused by industrial and automotive pollution, and that broad and immediate action must be taken to curb its effects. In 2007 he co-sponsored the BoxerSanders Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, perhaps the most stringent climate bill in the history of the Senate. Labeling the U.S. as the world’s “largest emitter of greenhouse gases,” the bill sought to implement a cap-and-trade system requiring the U.S. to reduce its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Biden has called for the raising of fuel-economy standards for automobiles to an average of 40 miles per gallon by 2017.
During a September 2008 vice presidential debate against his Republican opponent Sarah Palin, Biden said: “I think it [climate change] is manmade. It’s clearly manmade. If you don’t understand what the cause is, you cannot come up with a solution.”
Alaskan Oil Pipeline
In the midst of the Arab oil embargo of 1973, Biden was one of only five U.S. senators to vote against the first Alaskan pipeline bill. That pipeline has since yielded many billions of barrels of oil for the United States.
Oil Drilling 
Biden consistently opposed all bills seeking to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.
In 2006 he voted against a bill “providing for exploration, development, and production activities for mineral resources in the Gulf of Mexico.”
And in 2007 he voted against a bill that would have allowed for natural gas exploration and extraction off the coast of Virginia.
Regarding the use of coal, Biden has said: “We’re not supporting clean coal,” and “no coal plants here in America.”
Abortion
His Roman Catholic beliefs notwithstanding, Biden believes that abortion should remain legal in the United States, and that the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision should not be overturned. “The best policy for our country on the question of abortion is a policy of government neutrality,” he once said. “Put another way: I do not believe that the government should be involved in making judgments on whether a woman can, or should have an abortion, or — if she chooses to do so — in paying for that abortion.”
In 1997 Biden voted against the continuance of a policy stipulating that federal health insurance plans would not pay for abortions except in cases where the woman’s life was in danger or the pregnancy was the result of incest or rape.
In 2004 Biden voted against a bill that would have attached criminal penalties to the killing or injuring of a fetus while carrying out a violent crime on a pregnant woman.
In July 2006 he voted against parental notification laws and against punishing those who would transport minors across state lines to get an abortion.
In 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2003, Biden voted in favor of bills to prohibit the procedure commonly known as partial-birth abortion.
Gun Rights
In 2007, Biden received an “F” rating from the Gun Owners of America, and in 2008 he garnered a 7% rating from the National Rifle Association — all for his consistent record of voting to limit the rights of gun owners and manufacturers.
Biden also voted in favor of exposing the firearms industry to potentially crippling lawsuits when guns they produce are used in criminal activity.
Counter-Terrorism
In 2007 Biden voted against a bill permitting the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General “to authorize foreign intelligence acquisition concerning those reasonably believed to be outside of the U.S., provided that written certification is presented that the procedure does not constitute electronic surveillance under existing law, the surveillance is made with the assistance of a communications provider, and the significant purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence information.”
Immigration & the Border
Biden voted “Yes” on allowing illegal aliens to participate in Social Security, and “Yes” on allowing more foreign workers into the U.S. for farm work.
In 2006 he voted in favor of erecting a fence on the U.S./Mexico border, but later explained that for him, the vote was an anti-drug trafficking vote, not one aimed at curbing illegal immigration.“I voted for the fence related to drugs,” Biden said. “A fence will stop 20 kilos of cocaine coming through that fence. It will not stop someone climbing over it or around it.”
In 2007 Biden voted against a bill to prohibit illegal aliens convicted of serious crimes — such as aggravated felonies, domestic violence, stalking, violation of protection orders, crimes against children, or the illegal purchase or sale of firearms — from gaining legal status.
That same year, he voted to scrap a point-based immigration system (i.e., a system which seeks to ensure that people with skills that society needs are given preference for entry into the United States). He advocates instead a system focusing on the reunification of family members, even if that means permitting the foreign relatives of illegal aliens to join the latter in America.
Sanctuary Cities
Biden voted in favor of continuing to send federal funds to sanctuary cities.
Voter ID
Biden voted against requiring a photo ID from people registering to vote.
English Language
He voted “No” on declaring English the official language of the United States.
In 2006, Senator Biden received an 8 percent rating from the U.S. Border Control (a nonprofit lobbying organization dedicated to ending illegal immigration and securing our America’s borders), signifying that his voting record reflected an open-borders stance.
Taxes
Throughout his Senate career, Biden, with few exceptions, generally supported higher taxes, though he did vote against specific tax increases which were advanced by Republican presidents.
When President Reagan pushed for across-the-board-tax cuts in 1981, Biden twice voted for bills that would have watered down Reagan’s proposal. When the full Reagan tax cuts came up for a final vote, however, Biden voted in favor of them, as did 88 of his 99 Senate colleagues.
In March 1983 Biden voted for a $40 billion increase in Social Security taxes.
In June 1986 Biden supported Democrat Senator George Mitchell’s effort to raise the top income tax rate to 35 percent.
In October 1990 Biden voted against President George H.W. Bush’s proposed 5-year, $164-billion tax hike.
Also in 1990, he supported an amendment sponsored by then-Senator Al Gore to raise the income-tax rate on middle-class Americans (i.e., married couples earning more than $78,400 a year and individuals earning more than $47,050) from 28 percent to 33 percent.
In August 1993 Biden voted in favor of Bill Clinton’s proposed $241 billion in new taxes over five years.
In May 2001 Biden voted against both of President George W. Bush’s major tax cut proposals — one for $350 billion and another for $1.35 trillion over a ten-year period.
In all but three of the 16 years spanning 1992 to 2007, the non-partisan National Taxpayers Union (NTU) — which grades each member of Congress on taxing and spending issues — gave Biden an “F” rating. In 2007, NTU gave him a 4 percent rating and ranked him 94th out of 100 senators.
On September 18, 2008, Biden (who was then Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate) said this about Obama’s proposed tax hike on people earning more than $250,000 per year: “We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people…. It’s time [for high earners] to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”
Supreme Court
In 1987 Biden was a key player in preventing the confirmation of President Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, warning that Bork would strip minorities, women, and children of their civil rights.
In later years, Biden similarly (though unsuccessfully) sought to derail the Supreme Court nominations of Clarence Thomas, William Rehnquist, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito, who, like Bork, were all strict constructionists who opposed judicial activism; i.e., they subscribed to the tenet that a Justice’s duty is to interpret the law and the Constitution as it is written, and not to legislate from the bench.
The First Gulf War
In 1990 Biden opposed President George H.W. Bush’s decision to forcibly drive Saddam Hussein‘s army of occupation out of Kuwait. He stated that the U.S. had no “vital interests” in repelling the invasion, and he predicted that American casualties would be astronomical in number.
The 9/11 Attacks: Biden Calls for U.S. to Send $200 Million to Iran
Shortly after 9/11, Biden told his staff that America should respond to the worst act of terrorism in its history by showing the Arab world that the U.S. was not seeking to destroy it. “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran,” he said.
Iraq War (2003-07)
Prior to the Iraq War, Biden consistently spoke out about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. “He’s a long-term threat and a short-term threat to our national security,” Biden said of Hussein in 2002. “… We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.” Also in 2002, Biden said: “Saddam must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.”
Consequently, in October 2002 Biden voted “Yes” on authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. He continued to express his resolve on the matter in 2004, emphatically stating: “I voted to give the President the authority to use force in Iraq. I still believe my vote was just.”
In 2005 Biden told the Brookings Institution: “We can call it quits and withdraw from Iraq. I think that would be a gigantic mistake. Or we can set a deadline for pulling out, which I fear will only encourage our enemies to wait us out — equally a mistake.”
In April 2007 Biden appeared with the late newsman Tim Russert and defended Vice President Dick Cheney and the international community’s assessment of Saddam’s WMD (weapons of mass destruction) program. “[E]veryone in the world thought he had them [WMD]…. This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream.”
But later in 2007, while running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden said that his 2002 vote authorizing the use of force against Iraq “was a mistake” that he regretted. “I vastly underestimated the incompetence of this administration,” Biden said during a 2007 Democratic primary debate in Carson City, Nevada.
Iraq War (Troop Surge of 2007)
In June 2007 Biden told the Boston Globe that General David Petraeus’s “surge” strategy of sending an extra 20,000 troops to Iraq “is not going to work either tactically or strategically” in terms of quelling the insurgency. On Meet the Press, Biden said that while Petraeus “believes that it [the surge] is a good idea,” “[v]irtually no one else believes it’s a good idea.”
Syria
In 2007, Biden scolded then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for testifying (to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations) that for the foreseeable future the Bush administration would not be negotiating with Syria or Iran because “they are not engaging in constructive behavior.” Said Biden:
“I do not agree with your statement, Madame Secretary, that negotiations with Iran and Syria would be extortion, nor did most of the witnesses we heard in this committee during the last month. The proper term, I believe and they believe, is diplomacy, which is not about paying a price but finding a way to protect our interests without engaging in military conflict. It is, I might add, the fundamental responsibility of the Department of State, to engage in such diplomacy, as you well know.”
Civil Rights
Biden is a defender of affirmative action (i.e., race-, ethnicity-, and sex-based preferences) in academia and the business world.
He was also a supporter of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Biden’s response to a November 2006 U.S. Airways incident involving six Islamic imams is instructive. The imams in question were removed from a plane shortly before takeoff because several passengers and crew members had become alarmed by what they perceived to be their (the imams’) suspicious behavior. The Council on American-Islamic Relations subsequently filed a lawsuit on behalf of the imams, against both the airline and the complaining passengers. In response to the suit, two Republican congressman, Peter King and Steven Pearce, crafted an amendment seeking to create legal immunity for citizens who report suspicious behavior in good faith. The amendment was initially approved by lawmakers in March 2007, but Senator Biden voted against it.

Failed Presidential Run in 1987

Biden first ran for U.S. President in 1987. He was considered a strong contender for the Democratic Party’s nomination, but in April of that year controversy descended on Biden’s campaign when he told several lies about his academic record in law school. In an April 3, 1987 appearance on C-SPAN, a questioner asked Biden about his law school grades. In response, an angry Biden looked at his questioner and said, “I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.” He then stated that he had gone “to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship”; that he had “ended up in the top half” of his law school class; and that he had “graduated with three degrees from college.”
But each of those claims proved to be untrue. In reality, Biden had: (a) earned only two college degrees — in history and political science — at the University of Delaware in Newark, where he graduated only 506th in a class of 688; (b) attended law school on a half scholarship that was based on financial need; and (c) eventually graduated 76th in a law-school class of 85. “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Biden would later concede, “but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”
Then, in August 1987 Biden plagiarized a portion of a speech made by British politician Neil Kinnock. Before long, revelations surfaced that Biden also had plagiarized extensive portions of an article in law school and consequently had received a grade of “F” for the course. (He eventually was permitted to retake the course, and the failure was removed from his transcript.)
As a result of these embarrassing examples of dishonesty, Biden withdrew from the presidential campaign on September 23, 1987 and resumed his duties as a U.S. Senator.

Publicly Casting Doubt on the Legitimacy of George W. Bush’s 2000 Presidential Victory

In 2004 Biden told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the U.S. had no moral authority to preach about the need for democracy in the Middle East. “We don’t have much of a democracy ourselves,” he said. “Remember our own presidential election; remember Florida!” — a reference to the disputed ballot recount in 2000.

2008 Bid for the Presidency

As early as June 2005, Biden first made public his intention to seek the nomination for U.S. President in 2008. On January 31, 2007 he officially entered the presidential race. His campaign failed to gain any traction, however, and on January 3, 2008 he withdrew from the race, which by then was being dominated by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Controversial Comments Regarding Race During His Presidential Campaign

In July 2006, Biden made a remark that was intended to be humorous, but sparked some criticism: “In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. And I’m not joking.”
In a February 2007 interview, Biden, in the course of evaluating presidential rival Barack Obama, said: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
At a June 2007 Democratic presidential forum at Howard University, Biden responded to a question about AIDS in the black community by saying: “I spent last summer going through the black sections of my town holding rallies in parks trying to get black men to understand it’s not unmanly to wear a condom. Getting women to understand they can say no. Getting people in the position where testing matters. I got tested for AIDS. I know Barack [Obama] got tested for AIDS. There’s no shame in being tested for AIDS.” At that point, Obama said, “I just gotta make clear I got tested with Michelle [Obama] when we were in Kenya in Africa. I don’t want any confusion here about what’s going on.” Biden then said, “I got tested to save my life, because I had 13 pints of blood transfusion.”
In an October 27, 2007 interview with The Washington Post‘s editorial board, Biden, while discussing race and education, gave the impression that he believed that the reason why so many District of Columbia schools failed, was that they had large numbers of nonwhite minority students. After criticizing the Bush administration education policies, Biden attempted to explain why schools in Iowa performed better academically than those in Washington, DC.: “There’s less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”
Prior to his selection as Obama’s running mate on August 23, 2008, Biden had been consistently effusive in his praise of John McCain, the eventual Republican nominee.
  • In a March 2004 appearance on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC program Hardball, Biden suggested that “maybe it is time to have a guy like John McCain — a Republican — on the ticket with” the then-Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry.”
  • In two separate television interviews later that spring, Biden stated that Kerry ought to select McCain as his running mate. “I think John McCain would be a great candidate for Vice President,” Biden told Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press on one occasion. “I’m sticking with McCain,” Biden added. “I think the single most important thing that John Kerry has to do is … to say … that guy could be President, or that woman could be President.”
  • “The only guy on the other [Republican] side who’s qualified [to be President] is John McCain,” Biden said in October 2007. “John McCain is a personal friend, a great friend, and I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off …”
Conversely, Biden had often been critical of Obama and his judgment on matters of import:
  • In a February 2007 interview with the New York Observer, Biden expressed doubts that American voters would elect “a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate.” “I don’t recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic,” Biden added.
  • Around that same time, Biden, in an interview with the Huffington Post, said: “The more people learn about them [Obama and Hillary Clinton] and how they handle the pressure, the more their support will evaporate.”
  • In August 2007, Biden was asked during a debate if he stood by his previous criticism of Obama’s inexperience when he said that “the presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.” Biden responded, “… I stand by that statement.”
  • Assessing Obama’s Iraq plan, Biden said on September 13, 2007: “My impression is [Obama] thinks that if we leave, somehow the Iraqis are going to have an epiphany [of diplomatic coexistence among the warring factions]. I’ve seen zero evidence of that.”
  • In December 2007, Biden said in a campaign ad: “When this campaign is over, political slogans like ‘experience’ and ‘change’ [the latter was Obama’s signature slogan] will mean absolutely nothing. The next president has to act.”

Lies & Errors During His 2008 Vice Presidential Run

During his vice presidential campaign, Biden occasionally exhibited a tendency to exaggerate and misrepresent facts, just as he had done in 1987. At a September 9th fundraiser, for example, he spoke about “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down [during a February 2008 fact-finding mission Biden had taken with fellow senators John Kerry and Chuck Hagel]. John McCain wants to know where [Osama] bin Laden and the gates of Hell are? I can tell him where. That’s where al Qaeda is. That’s where bin Ladin is.” During a speech in Baltimore later that month, Biden said: “If you want to know where al Qaeda lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.” Two days after that, in Cincinnati, Biden reiterated that al Qaeda had re-established a safe haven “in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where my helicopter was recently forced down.”
Though Biden’s implication was that his plane had been forced down by enemy fire, in fact the unscheduled landing was due to a severe snowstorm that had suddenly hit the area. “It went pretty blind, pretty fast and we were around some pretty dangerous ridges,” John Kerry told the Associated Press immediately after the incident. “So the pilot exercised his judgment that we were better off putting down there, and we all agreed…. We sat up there and traded stories. We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn’t have to do it…. Other than getting a little cold, it was fine.” Biden’s plane was traveling with air cover from an F-16.
In the midst of a major stock-market crisis in late September 2008, Biden told CBS interviewer Katie Couric that it was incumbent upon the U.S President to demonstrate leadership and allay public fears by clearly explaining how the crisis will be solved. Said Biden: “Part of what being a leader does is to instill confidence, is to demonstrate that he or she knows what they are talking about and to communicat[e] to people … this is how we can fix this…. When the stock market crashed [in October 1929], Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”
Biden’s error was twofold: First, when the stock market crashed in 1929, Herbert Hoover was the U.S. President; FDR would not take office until March 4, 1933. Nor could any President have addressed the American people on television in 1929, because TV would not be introduced to the public until a decade later, at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Vice President Biden

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were elected President and Vice President of the United States, respectively. The Obama-Biden ticket defeated the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin by a margin of 364 electoral votes to 162. Obama-Biden received a total of 64,538,980 votes (52.5%) from the American public, vs. McCain-Palin’s 56,802,609 (46.2%).

The Biden and Kerry Families’ Profitable Deals With Communist Chinese Firms, and the Selling Out of America’s National Security[2]

In the summer of 2009, Vice President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, collaborated with two individuals – Chris Heinz (the stepson of Senator John Kerry) and Devon Archer (Chris Heinz’s former college roommate who had served as a major fundraiser for Senator Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign) – to form Rosemont Capital, an investment firm that was, according to author Peter Schweizer, “positioned to strike profitable deals overseas with foreign governments and officials with whom the U.S. government was negotiating.” Rosemont Capital also had several separate branches, including Rosemont Seneca Partners and Rosemont Realty.
Schweizer asserts that the financial relationship that Hunter Biden, Chris Heinz, and Devon Archer established with China, strongly influenced the Obama administration’s posture toward that country. Consider, for instance, what occurred in 2013 and 2014, while China – to the deep consternation of other countries in the region – was unilaterally creating artificial islands equipped with sophisticated military bases in the South China Sea and claiming ownership of them. In December 2013, Joe Biden, accompanied by Hunter, visited China, where he publicly emphasized the importance of an American-Chinese trading relationship but avoided talking about what China was doing in the South China Sea. During the Bidens’ stay in China, reports journalist Tyler O’Neil: “Hunter Biden was negotiating a major deal between Rosemont Seneca [Partners] and the state-owned Bank of China. As the vice president discussed China’s trade with the United States, his son was putting these economic ties into practice, and the U.S. effectively caved in the conflict over the South China Sea.”
Ten days after the Bidens’ visit to China, the state-run Bank of China created an investment fund with Rosemont Seneca Partners, called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). In 2014, writes Schweizer, BHR became an “anchor investor” in the China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC), a state-owned nuclear company which was under FBI investigation at the time, and which eventually charged with stealing U.S. nuclear secrets. “In short,” says Schweizer, “the Chinese government was literally funding a business [BHR] that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers.” As a result of that business relationship, Rosemont Seneca Partners, unlike any other Western investment firm, “could take Chinese government funds and invest them in China or outside the country, even in the U.S.”
When Senator Kerry visited China in July 2014, he, much like Vice President Biden, echoed President Xi Jinping’s call for a bilateral commitment to “boost Sino-U.S. economic ties.” “China and the United States represent the greatest economic alliance trading partnership in the history of humankind,” said Kerry.
Meanwhile, a former subsidiary of the Chinese government, Gemini Investments, was trying to purchase the Rosemont Realty branch of Rosemont Capital. (Gemini’s parent company, Sino-Ocean Land, grew out of the the China Ocean Shipping Company, which in turn has close ties to the People’s Liberation Army Navy. And the director of Gemini Investments, Li Ming, served for several terms as a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s elite conference.)
By December 2014, Gemini had bought out the Rosemont Opportunities Fund II for $34 million.
When Kerry visited China again in May 2015, he emphasized, as Schweizer puts it, that “the two powers shouldn’t let the South China Sea issue get in the way of broader cooperation.” Three months later, in August 2015, Gemini Investments bought a 75% stake in Rosemont Realty, including a $3 billion commitment from China.
In September 2015, BHR teamed up with the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) – a Chinese state-owned military aviation contractor which in 2014 had stolen technologies related to the U.S. F-35 stealth fighter – to purchase Henniges, an American “dual-use” (meaning civilian and military uses) parts manufacturer. The transaction gave 49% ownership of Henniges to BHR, and 51% ownership to AVIC.
Because the Henniges technology was considered a strategic asset with implications for American national security, it was on the restricted Commerce Control List, and thus the sale to BHR and AVIC could not be permitted without the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a panel composed of several of the most powerful members of the cabinet — the Attorney General as well as the Secretaries of Defense, Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security, Energy, and State. (The State Department, of course, was headed by Kerry.)
Schweizer adds that even after it was well known that “Chinese companies have a long history of stealing American nuclear secrets,” “Rosemont did not change its relationship with its Chinese partners, nor did BHR divest from the state-owned Chinese company [CGNPC] that had been stealing America’s nuclear secrets.”
Moreover, in 2016 BHR invested in China Molybdenum, a state-owned company with deep ties to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, and whose goal is to acquire large quantities of molybdenum and other rare-earth minerals that have both military and nuclear applications. Then, in the latter part of 2016, China Molybdenum helped BHR purchase a 24% stake in the Tenke Fungurume copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As Schweizer sums it up: “[T]he son of the vice president and a confidant of the secretary of state where invested in deals that would help Beijing win [the global minerals] race.”

Biden Says U.S. Must Spend Its Way out of Recession

In July 2009, when the debate over healthcare reform was in full swing, Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported healthcare plan became law, “we’re going to go bankrupt as a nation.” Biden continued: “Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’ The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Biden Wrongly Predicts a Peaceful and Successful Transition for Iraq As the U.S. Military Leaves That Country

While the Obama administration was drawing down America’s military presence in Iraq in 2010, Biden said the following in February of that year:
“I am very optimistic about Iraq. I think it’s going to be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. I spent — I’ve been there 17 times now. I go about every two months — three months. I know every one of the major players in all of the segments of that society. It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

Removal of U.S. Troops from Iraq, and the Rise of ISIS

After President Obama and Vice President Biden completed the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011, the genocidal terrorist group ISIS (Islamic State) filled the vacuum and increased its terrorist activities dramatically. As ISIS continued to expand the breadth of its dominion, especially in northern and western Iraq, it earned a fearsome reputation for unspeakable barbarism as manifested in kidnappings, forced conversions, mass slaughters, and public executions via such methods as crucifixions, beheadings, pushing people off the tops of tall buildings, confining people in cages and burning them alive, and beating people to death before ceremoniously dragging their corpses through the streets.
In addition to the aforementioned atrocities, ISIS also engaged in the widespread destruction of “pagan” archaeological relics, museum collections of priceless statues and sculptures dating back thousands of years, and ancient shrines considered holy by Christians and Jews. Charging that these items promoted idolatry, one ISIS member said: “The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him.” When ISIS blew up the Mosul Public Library in Iraq, sending 10,000 books and more than 700 rare manuscripts up in flames, another ISIS terrorist declared: “These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah. So they will be burned.”
On June 29, 2014, ISIS announced the existence of what it called a new Islamic caliphate that would thenceforth go by the name “Islamic State” (IS) and would recognize no existing national borders. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for his part, declared himself master of all the world’s Muslims and began using the name Al-Khalifah Ibrahim.
By July 2014, IS had overrun every Syrian city between Deir Ezzor and the Iraq border. As of September, the organization was believed to have somewhere between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters in its ranks. Among these were numerous foreign jihadists from the Arab world, the Caucasus, the U.S., and European countries like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
By this time (August 2014), IS was the world’s wealthiest terror group, possessing some $2 billion in cash and other assets.
As of January 1, 2015, IS controlled at least 45 separate cities and towns across northern Iraq and eastern Syria. In December 2014, an IS spokesman ceremoniously announced his group’s genocidal intentions: “We will conquer Europe one day. It is not a question of [whether] we will conquer Europe, just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain…. For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines…. Our expansion will be rapid and perpetual. The Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons. Those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed—150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it does not matter to us, we will kill them all.”
The rise and expansion of ISIS — which occurred as a direct result of the Obama-Biden administration’s ill-advised withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 — resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the Middle East. It was not until the Trump administration subsequently escalated America’s military support for ISIS’s adversaries, that the terror group was finally decimated.

Biden Opposed the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden; Later Says He Actually Supported the Mission

When President Obama authorized the May 2011 mission in which a U.S. Navy SEAL team ultimately killed Osama bin Laden, Biden was the only one of Obama’s advisors who opposed the plan. Mark Bowden — author of a The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden — wrote in October 2008: “It was widely reported in the weeks and months after the raid that most, or at least many, of the president’s top advisors opposed the raid. That is not true. Nearly everyone present favored it. The only major dissenters were Biden and [then-Defense Secretary Robert] Gates, and before the raid Gates would change his mind.”
According to Bowden, the two options under consideration were a drone strike and the special operations raid. Most of the President’s advisors favored the latter. But when it was Biden’s turn to speak at the Situation Room meeting, he told Obama: “Mr. President, my suggestion is: don’t go.” Wrote Bowden, “Biden believed that if the president decided to choose either the air or the ground option, and if the effort failed, Obama could say goodbye to a second term…. So in the end, every one of the president’s top advisors except Biden was in favor of immediate action.”
Biden confirmed this account in January 2012, when he said that he had directly advised President Obama against the bin Laden raid. “Every single person in that room hedged their bet except Leon Panetta,” Biden recalled. “Leon said go. Everyone else said, 49 [percent], 51[ percent]. He [Obama] got to me. He said, ‘Joe, what do you think?’ And I said, ‘You know, I didn’t know we had so many economists around the table.’ I said, ‘We owe the man a direct answer. Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.’”
But in October 2015, when Biden was contemplating the possibility of running for President, he altered his account of what had occurred in the lead-up to the bin Laden operation, telling an audience at George Washington University that he had given his direct support to President Obama after a cabinet meeting. Said Biden:
“It was something that was a difficult call for the president. So, we sat in the cabinet room at the end of the day making the decision. He said, ‘I want everybody’s opinion.’ Everybody went around the room. There were only two people who were definitive and absolutely certain: Leon Panetta said go and Bob Gates said don’t go, and others were 51-49, some ended up saying go, but it was such a close call. I joked and I said, ‘You all sound like 17 Larry Summers,’ the economist, on one hand then on the other. They said, ‘Joe, what would you do?’ There was a third option I didn’t really think we should do. I said, I think we should make one more pass with a UAV to see if it is him. The reason I did that is because I didn’t want to take a position to go if that was not where [Obama] was going to go. So as we walked out of the room and walked upstairs, I said, I told him my opinion that I thought he should go, but follow his own instincts. But it would have been a mistake – imagine if I had said in front of everyone, don’t go or go, and his decision was different. It undercuts that relationship. I never say what I think finally until I go up into the Oval with him alone.”

Biden Announces Support for Gay Marriage, Then Is Ostracized by Obama Administration

In a May 2012 television interview, Biden stated that he favored the legalization of gay marriage. This forced President Obama, who had been planning to wait until a later point in time (perhaps after the 2012 elections) before publicly adopting that same position, to announce immediately that he, too, was in favor of gay marriage. Biden’s gaffe came with significant political consequences for him. He apologized personally to Obama and offered to do all the less glamorous assignments — “every [expletive] job in the world,” as Biden put it — so long as he could still be included in major White House decisions. But from that point forward, White House staffers treated Biden with coldness; essentially froze him out of all internal discussions; prevented him from attending planning meetings; kept him out of key private dinners with fundraisers; limited his public appearance schedule; and failed to emphatically refute rumors that Hillary Clinton might replace him as the 2012 vice presidential candidate.

Biden Says Romney and Republicans Seek to Put African Americans “Back in Chains”

In an August 2012 campaign appearance before a predominantly African American crowd in Virginia, Biden quoted Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as having said that in his first 100 days as president “he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules — unchain Wall Street.” Then the vice president added angrily: “They’re going to put y’all back in chains!”

Biden Says Middle Class Has Been “Buried” for the Past Four Years

During an October 2, 2012 campaign stop in Charlotte, North Carolina, Biden misrepresented the Republicans’ economic plan as a proposal to lower taxes on the wealthy and raise taxes on the middle class. Said Biden: “This is deadly earnest. How they can justify — how they can justify raising taxes on the middle class that’s been buried the last four years? How in the lord’s name can they justify raising their [the middle class’s] taxes with these tax cuts?”

Biden Pledges to Raise Taxes on the Wealthy by $1 Trillion

In an October 4, 2012 campaign appearance in Iowa, Biden made reference to a Democratic proposal to let the Bush-era income tax rates for households making $250,000 or more expire (and thus increase) at the end of the year, while maintaining existing rates for everyone else. (This proposal was in contrast to the Republican plan, which called for maintaining the current rates for all income groups.) Said Biden: “On top of the trillions of dollars in spending that we have already cut, we’re going to ask the wealthy to pay more. My heart breaks. Come on, man.” Biden then made reference to a Republican claim that, as the vice president phrased it, “Obama and Biden want to raise taxes by a trillion dollars..” “Guess what?” Biden continued. “Yes, we do, in one regard: We want to let that trillion dollar tax cut [i.e., whatever portion of the Bush-era tax cuts benefited high earners] expire so the middle class doesn’t have to bear the burden of all that money going to the super-wealthy. That’s not a tax raise. That’s called fairness where I come from.”

Biden Says Immigration Reform Is a Matter of “Dignity”

Speaking at the Conference on the Americas (in Washington, DC) on May 7, 2013, Biden said that every nation has to make “tough choices,” and continued: “In the United States, it means reforming our immigration system and 11 million undocumented men, women and children being able to come out of the shadows and be full participants in American life. Imagine that — the dignity … Granting them the dignity and respect they deserve.”

Keynote Speaker for J Street

In September 2013, Biden was the keynote speaker at J Street’s 4th annual conference.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates Criticizes Biden

On January 7, 2014, Time magazine reported that in his soon-to-be-released memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, President Obama’s former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, wrote the following about Biden: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
In a January 12, 2014 interview, Gates told CBS News: “[W]here I have particular problem with the vice president was in his encouragement of suspicion of the military and the senior military with the president. [Biden said] ‘You can’t trust these guys. They’re gonna try and jam you. They’re gonna try and box you in,’ and so on. And that did disturb me a lot.”

Biden’s MLK Day Speech

On January 20, 2014, Biden spoke at the annual Martin Luther King Day Breakfast held by Al Sharpton‘s National Action Network. Condemning Republican-backed voter-identification laws, the VP said: “Our opponents know, they know, the single most dangerous thing to give us is the right to vote! They know what that is.” Further, Biden criticized the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act which required certain states and localities with a history of pre-1965 discrimination to have any changes to their election laws cleared by the Justice Department or a federal court. “I have to admit, I never thought we’d be fighting the fight again on voting rights,” Biden remarked.
The vice president also said that the U.S. was:
  • “on the brink of bringing 11 million people [illegal immigrants] out of the shadows, onto a path to citizenship, making us not only a more humane country but [a] more economically successful country”;
  • “in the process of guaranteeing that no one who works 40 hours a week will have to continue to live in poverty; we’re going to raise that minimum wage”;
  • “in the final stages of rectifying the injustice of income [in]equality between women and men; not only is it unjust for women to make 70 cents on the dollar compared to a man, it’s stupid economically.”
“And it’s way past time that we stop arguing whether every American has the right to adequate, affordable healthcare,” added Biden. “Thanks to Barack Obama, that fight is over and we are not going back, period.”

Claiming That Voter ID Laws Are Evidence of Racism and Hatred

During a Black History Month event on February 25, 2014, Biden expressed frustration with a recent Supreme Court ruling that had struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required certain (mostly Southern) jurisdictions with a pre-1965 history of voting suppression to pre-clear any changes in their voting laws (such as the implementation of Voter ID requirements, or changes to early-voting or same-day-voting regulations — with the Justice Department. Biden also claimed that new voter ID laws in North Carolina, Alabama and Texas were evidence of “hatred” and “zealotry.” Said the Vice President:
“At least 11 states have introduced legislation recently requiring voters to show ID at the polls, making existing voting laws more restrictive. Lawslike in North Carolina which imposed a new photo ID requirement, shortening early voting, and eliminating same-day registration and early voting. These guys never go away…. You guys [African Americans] know it, but it’s an important lesson for me. Hatred never, never ultimately goes away…. The zealotry of those who wish to limit the franchise cannot be smothered by reason…. This fight has been too long, this fight has been too hard, to do anything other than win — not on the margins, but flat-out win.”

Biden Says Illegal Immigrants “Are Already Americans”

In a March 2014 speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Legislative Summit, Biden said:
“Eleven million people living in the shadows I believed are already American citizens. These people are just waiting, waiting for a chance to be able to contribute fully, and by that standard, 11 million undocumented aliens are already Americans in my view…. Teddy Roosevelt said it better. He said, Americanism is not a question of birthplace or creed or a line of descent. It’s a question of principles, idealism and character….
“It takes a whole hell of a lot of courage to be sitting at a wooden kitchen somewhere anywhere in the world and say, you know, ‘I tell you what kids. Let’s all pick up and go to America where we don’t speak the language, where they don’t seem to want us, where it’s gonna be really, really rough to get there, but let’s go. Won’t that be fun?’
“All they want—they just want a decent life for their kids, a chance to contribute to a free society, a chance to put down roots and help build the next great American century. I really believe that. That’s what they’re fighting for.”

In Midst of Border Crisis, Biden Calls for Massive Numbers of New Immigrants

On June 6, 2014, the Obama administration announced that it would be paying approximately 100 American lawyers to help young illegal immigrants — a rapidly growing demographic — settle in the United States. Attorney General Eric Holder said that these hundred-or-so attorneys — dubbed “justice AmericaCorps” — would “protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society … particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings.”
The number of youths illegally crossing the border into the southern U.S. had reached staggering proportions since 2012, when President Obama had announced that his administration would no longer deport minors who were in the country illegally, so long as they met certain basic requirements. Whereas in 2011 about 6,000 young people were apprehended by border personnel, government officials now estimated that the corresponding totals would exceed 90,000 by the end of 2014, and 140,000 in 2015 — not including the many tens of thousands more who would avoid capture.
Notwithstanding this crisis — and the fact that the open southern border left the U.S. vulnerable to infiltration by Islamic terrorists who had long been known to be working with Mexican drug cartels — Biden, speaking at a National Association of Manufacturers’ meeting, called for a “constant, unrelenting stream” of new immigrants — “not dribbling [but] significant flows” that could bolster the national economy. “We need it badly from a purely — purely economic point of view,’ said Biden. The vice president later tweeted: “The final thing we need to do together is pass immigration reform … We need it badly. -VP at manufacturing summit.”
As the Daily Mail reported, Biden’s comments came as border patrol agents were “appealing to the federal government to help with the thousands of illegal children pouring across the border.”

Profligate Use of Taxpayer Money for Personal Flights

In August 2014, the Daily Mail reported that according to author Ronald Kessler’s forthcoming book, The First Family Detail, Vice President Biden had spent more than a $1 million of taxpayers’ money traveling on Air Force Two for weekend and day trips between Washington, D.C. and his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Kessler claimed that when he filed a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2013 to get accurate numbers on the dates, details, and costs of Biden’s trips, the vice president’s deputy counsel, Jessica Hertz, instructed the Air Force not to provide the data. According to Kessler, an Air Force officer once told him: “They are covering up. We spent a lot of time compiling the records, but Biden’s office said logs for each flight would have to be consulted. This is a smokescreen to delay providing any records as long as possible.” These actions by Biden and his operatives were “unprecedented,” said Kessler, and contradictory to President Obama’s pledge that his administration would “apply a presumption of openness” in fulfilling FOIA requests.
Eventually, Kessler learned that between January 2009 and March 2013, Biden had flown back and forth between DC and Wilmington 225 times. But as the Daily Mail noted, “those trips actually required a total of 400 flights … because of what Kessler calls ‘deadhead’ trips — return flights when Biden was not on the plane.” All told, the cost of just the fuel and maintenance associated with those flights — and not including the salaries of the Air force Two and helicopter crew members — was $979,680.
A Secret Service agent reportedly told Kessler that “the Air Force Two guys pull their hair out over” Biden’s same-day trips back and forth between DC and Wilmington. The agents were also especially vexed, said Kessler, when Biden would travel to Wilmington one day and then jet back to Andrews Air Force Base the next morning to play a five-hour round of golf with Obama while the plane waited on the tarmac at Andrews.
Moreover, Kessler noted that when Obama in 2011 had placed Biden in charge of the administration’s Campaign to Cut government waste: (a) the president claimed that Biden would “hunt down and eliminate misspent tax dollars in every agency and department across the federal government,” and (b) Biden told supporters of the administration that he was the “new sheriff in town.”
Also in July 2014, broadcaster and bestselling author Mark Levin reported that an “incredibly good source” had informed him that Biden sometimes flew to Delaware, at taxpayer expense, to get his haircuts.

Biden’s Use of an Ethnic Slur

At a September 16, 2014 conference marking the 40th anniversary of the Legal Services Corporation, Biden made reference to his own son having met fellow members of the U.S. military in Iraq who were in need of legal help because of foreclosures and other problems that they and their families were facing back at home. Said the vice president: “That’s one of the things that he [Biden’s son] finds was most in need when he was over there in Iraq for a year. That people would come to him and talk about what was happening to them at home in terms of foreclosures, in terms of bad loans that were being—I mean these Shylocks [predatory bankers] who took advantage of, um, these women and men while overseas.” The remark created controversy because it derives from the name of a ruthless Jewish money-lender in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice and is widely considered anti-Semitic.

Biden Calls for the “Emancipation” of Wealthy People’s Money and Additional Government Spending on Education, Childcare, and Job Training

At a February 23, 2015 Black History Month event, Biden said: “A lot of wealthy white and black people aren’t bad but they control 1 percent of the economy and this cannot stand…. It’s not fair because the business experts are saying that concentration of wealth is stunting growth. So let’s do something that’s worthy of emancipation…. You know better than other groups that there is so much more to do. We find ourselves where a lot of disparities still exist…. We have a chance right now and in the next two years to make a fundamental change in that equation…. We know that 60 percent of jobs require a college education but middle class and poor folks have been left behind. That’s why we’re about changing the equation for working families in America and that’s why the president is focused on childcare to job training to college help and education to free community colleges. This is the way to change the equation and shame on us if we miss the opportunity.”

Biden’s Ukraine Scandal, And Allegations Against President Trump

In February 2014, Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine use. On April 21-22, 2014, Joe Biden, in his role as overseer of the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine, visited that country to urge its government to increase its natural gas production. That same month, British officials who were investigating allegations of money laundering by Burisma Holdings, a large Ukrainian natural gas company, froze a number of London bank accounts containing $23 million that belonged to Burisma owner and president Mykola Zlochevksy.
On May 13, 2014 — just three weeks after Joe Biden’s visit to Ukraine — Hunter Biden was appointed to the Burisma board of directors. That position paid him approximately $50,000 per month, even though he had no background or expertise in either Ukrainian matters or natural gas.
In August 2014, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Vitaly Yarema opened a corruption investigation into Burisma. Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States were partners in this probe.
In February 2015 Yarema was succeeded as Prosecutor General by Viktor Shokin, who continued the Ukrainian investigation into Burisma.
In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, publicly called for an investigation into Burisma president Zlochevsky.
According to journalist John Solomon: “[In] January 2016 … the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country. The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.”
On February 2, 2016, the home of Burisma owner Zlochevksy was raided by the Ukrainian state prosecutor’s office. Joe Biden subsequently called Ukrainian president Poroshenko at least three times that same month, following the raid.
In March 2016 – while Prosecutor General Shokin was still actively investigating Burisma’s alleged corruption – Vice President Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the Ukrainian government unless it agreed to fire Shokin immediately. Because the revocation of American aid would have been devastating to Ukraine, President Petro Poroshenko caved to Biden’s threat and fired Shokin on March 29. At the time of Shokin’s termination, he and other Ukrainian prosecutors were in the midst of preparing a request to interview Hunter Biden about his activities and the funds he was receiving from Ukraine.
In a sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin later testified that he had been told that the reason for his firing was that Joe Biden was troubled by the Burisma investigation. “The truth,” said Shokin, “is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors. On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and [to] consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation.”
And here is how Joe Biden himself – in a January 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations – boastfully recollected his own role in getting Shokin fired:
“I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. I had gotten a commitment from [Ukrainian President] Poroshenko and from [Prime Minister] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor [Shokin]. And they didn’t. So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, ‘you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president [Obama] said’ — I said, ‘call him’ [Obama]. I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in,’ I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
Biden claimed that he had pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin not because the prosecutor was investigating the vice president’s son, but rather, because Shokin himself was corrupt and incompetent. But that narrative was debunked by journalist John Solomon, who wrote in September 2019:
“Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative…. For instance, Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered ‘an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures’ about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government’s official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor’s firing was announced. In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails.
“The memos raise troubling questions. If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma’s American legal team refer to those allegations as ‘false information’? [And] if the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?”
On August 12, 2019, an unidentified “whistleblower” from the intelligence community filed a complaint in which he expressed his own “urgent concern” regarding a July 25, 2019 conversation between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The day prior to that phone call — July 24, 2019 — special counsel Robert Mueller had testified publicly before two separate congressional panels regarding his probe of President Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential race. Mueller’s testimony was disastrous for Democrats, as it demonstrated quite clearly that his long and costly investigation had not turned up any evidence of wrongdoing by Trump. Thus the Democrats now turned their attention immediately to the Trump-Zelensky phone call.
According to the new whistleblower, Trump on July 25th had asked Zelensky to look into why Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin had been fired in 2016 as a result of political and financial threats by then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Critics and opponents of President Trump claimed that the whistleblower’s allegations provided evidence that Trump had sought to pressure Ukraine’s new president, Zelensky, to dig up political dirt on Trump’s rival, Joe Biden, as a precondition to Ukraine receiving nearly $400 million in congressionally approved military aid from the United States. They also asserted that Trump, seeking to extract a political quid-pro-quo from Zelensky, had delayed the issuance of that aid for 55 days, until its release in September 2019.
But as The Federalist website noted: “The formal complaint from an anti-Trump ‘whistleblower’ alleging various crimes by President Donald Trump is riddled with third-hand gossip and outright falsehoods…. The document itself is riddled not with evidence directly viewed by the complainant, but repeated references to what anonymous officials allegedly told the complainant.” Under traditional whistleblower rules – which required whistleblowers to provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings – this “whistleblower” would not have been able to file his complaint. But sometime between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community had secretly eliminated that rule; now, whistleblower complaints could be filed even by individuals who had only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”
On September 24, 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that House Democrats would seek, because of what they viewed as the impropriety of President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelensky, to open an impeachment inquiry against Trump.
On October 8, 2019, newsman John Solomon reported that a newly unearthed document showed that Ukrainian officials in the NABU — an FBI-like anti-corruption agency in Ukraine — had already opened a new probe into Burisma Holdings, the firm on whose board Hunter Biden had served, five months prior to the July 25, 2019 telephone conversation between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. “The U.S. government had open-source intelligence and was aware as early as February of 2019 [when Petro Poroshenko was still Ukraine’s president] that the Ukrainian government was planning to reopen the Burisma investigation,” said Solomon. “This is long before the president ever imagined having a call with President Zelensky. This is a significant shift in the factual timeline.” This information, Solomon added, had been omitted from the whistleblower’s complaint recently lodged against Trump. Solomon’s revelation was monumentally significant because it meant that Trump’s calls for a Ukrainian investigation of Biden and Burisma would not have changed anything; the investigation had already been active for five months.
On October 10, 2019, it was learned that the whistleblower was a career CIA analyst who had been detailed to the National Security Council at the White House, where he had worked with Joe Biden during the latter’s tenure as vice president.
On October 30, 2019, journalist Paul Sperry published additional information about the whistleblower:
Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election…. “He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” said a former NSC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. Also, Ciaramella huddled for “guidance” with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, including former colleagues also held over from the Obama era whom Schiff’s office had recently recruited from the NSC. Schiff is the lead prosecutor in the impeachment inquiry. And Ciaramella worked with a Democratic National Committee operative who dug up dirt on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, inviting her into the White House for meetings, former White House colleagues said.
For details about the impeachment inquiry and the testimony that was provided therein, click here.

Scandals Where Biden Used His Political Influence to Gain Advantages for His Family Members (1973-2017)

* Joe Biden’s Brother James Receives Unusually Generous Loans While Joe Biden Sits on the Senate Banking Committee
In 1973 Joe Biden’s younger brother James, who had served as the chief fundraiser for Joe’s Senate campaign in ’72, received a series of unusually generous loans that enabled him to raise enough capital to open a nightclub in Delaware. What made the loans so unusual was the fact that James, at that time, was a salesman with no entrepreneurial experience and a net worth of less than $10,000. Eyebrows were further raised by the fact that Joe Biden had just been appointed to the Senate Banking Committee. “No sooner was freshman lawmaker Joe Biden seated on the Senate Banking Committee,” Politico reports, “than James became the beneficiary of business loans that were described … as unusually generous because of the relatively large amount of money he was able to borrow with little or no collateral and a lack of relevant prior experience.”
The first series of loans to James Biden — totaling $165,000 — were provided by Wilmington’s Farmers Bank. When Biden’s nightclub eventually ran up debts totaling more than $500,000 by 1975, he and his business partners applied for a $300,000 bailout loan from First Pennsylvania Bank. Only after the incumbent governor of Pennsylvania made a recommendation on the nightclub’s behalf, did the bailout loan come through for Mr. Biden. The money did not last long, however. By 1977, James Biden’s debt exceeded $700,000 and he was forced to surrender the club to creditors.
“During the same time period James Biden was receiving the extensive lines of credit,” reports Breitbart.com, “Joe Biden was sitting on the Senate Banking Committee, which had purview over the financial sector. A specific jurisdiction of the committee was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which provides bailouts to banks if they should become over leveraged. Such a bailout was required by Farmers Bank in 1976 when it nearly collapsed after all the troublesome loans [it made], like those to James Biden,… could not be repaid. The bank only survived after the FDIC and the state of Delaware threw it a lifeline by purchasing a majority of the problematic loans.”
A number of the bank’s leading executives were subsequently indicted for fraud and other financial crimes. Additional Delaware banking authorities and the elected officials who supposedly regulated them soon became embroiled in the scandal as well. “A Delaware banking commissioner was found to have received a loan from Farmers [Bank] while overseeing its finances, an apparent violation of federal law,” Politico reports. “Separately … The DOJ also scrutinized unusual loans made by Farmers, including the Biden loan.”
A few months after the height of the controversy, Joe Biden left the Senate Banking Committee in order to join the more prestigious Senate Judiciary Committee.
* Trial Lawyers Enlist James Biden’s Assistance in a Multibillion-Dollar Tobacco Case
In the 1990s, a group of Mississippi trial lawyers enlisted the help of Joe Biden’s younger brother James Biden in securing congressional support for a mega-settlement in a tobacco case. A decade later, those same Mississippi attorneys hosted a fundraiser for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. They also “accept[ed] an invitation to accompany Joe to a high-profile Washington dinner,” reports Politico, “while they simultaneously prepared to launch a lobbying firm with James and his wife, Sara.”
* Joe Biden’s Sister Steers Campaign Money to Her Political Consulting Firm
When Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, was a senior partner in the political messaging firm Slade White & Company, she served as the campaign manager for her brother’s presidential campaigns. During the 2008 campaign alone, she steered $2.5 million from “Citizens for Biden” and “Biden for President Inc.” to Slade White & Company.
* James Biden’s Construction Consulting Firm Receives $1.5 Billion in Government Contracts for Projects with Which It Has No Past Experience
In 2010, the Obama administration tasked Vice President Joe Biden with the responsibility of overseeing the allocation of government contracts for construction projects aimed at rebuilding various decimated regions of post-war Iraq. In November of that year, Kevin Justice, a longtime Biden family friend who served as president of the Philadelphia-based construction consulting firm HillStone International, visited the White House to meet with Michele Smith, a top Biden aide. Less than three weeks later, HillStone announced that Joe Biden’s younger brother, James Biden, would be joining the firm as its executive vice president. Six months after that, HillStone received a $1.5 billion government contract to build more than 100,000 homes in Iraq, even though the firm had no experience whatsoever in handling projects of that magnitude. When HillStone eventually backed out of the deal because it was incapable of seeing it through, the firm nonetheless managed to secure a $22 million construction contract with the U.S. State Department in 2012.
* Frank Biden Is Linked to Solar Power Projects Receiving Millions in Taxpayer Loans from the Obama Administration, Despite Having No Experience in That Field
Shortly after President Obama took office in 2009, his administration sought to mend U.S. relations with Costa Rica following a period of acrimony that had existed during the George W. Bush years. Vice President Biden, who had longstanding ties to the Caribbean region dating back to his tenure in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was put in charge of this Costa Rica initiative. At that point, his youngest brother, Frank Biden, began looking for real-estate opportunities in that country.
In March 2009 Joe Biden visited Costa Rica. Just a few months later, Costa Rica News announced that Frank Biden had entered into a multilateral partnership “to reform Real Estate in Latin America” with a developer named Craig Williamson and a posh resort village — expected to include thousands of homes, a world-class golf course, and a number of casinos — which was slated for construction in Costa Rica. The Costa Rican government, knowing of Frank Biden’s connection to the White House, announced that it was “eager to cooperate.”
But in order to carry out the massive construction project, Costa Rica would have to update its electrical grid. Despite having no experience at all in the energy sector, Frank Biden and his company, Sun Fund Americas, entered into a partnership with the Costa Rican National Power and Light Company (CNFL) to construct a solar power complex in the northwest region of the country. The project specifically earmarked more than $6.5 million in taxpayer-backed loans that the Obama administration’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) approved in 2015.
The Biden family’s influence over U.S. activities in the Caribbean did not end there. In June 2014 the Obama administration announced that it was putting Joe Biden in charge of its new Caribbean Energy Security Initiative (CESI), which would use American taxpayer dollars to support additional energy-sustainability projects in the region. One of those projects was the construction of a 20-megawatt solar power plant in Jamaica, for which OPIC had approved a $47.5 million loan. Like the aforementioned solar power project in Costa Rica, the Jamaica contract likewise went to Sun Fund Americas. All told, Frank Biden’s Caribbean projects benefited from more than $54 million in U.S. taxpayer loans during the eight years of Obama-Biden.
* Hunter Biden’s Firms Scored Big Business Deals with People & Entities Tied to the Governments of Kazakhstan, China, and Russia
There is clear evidence that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his business partner, Devon Archer, used their involvement with the Burnham Financial Group, an asset-management corporation which they co-chaired, to make deals with foreign governments and oligarchs. One of those oligarchs was Nurlan Abduov, an associate of Kenges Rakishev, son-in-law of the former vice prime minister of Kazakhstan. Specifically, Hunter Biden regularly received funds from an account that was funded in part by a firm run by Rakishev in 2014.
Burnham Financial Group also had business dealings with two Chinese companies, Kirin Global Enterprises Limited and Harvest Global Investors, both of which were linked to the government in Beijing
In addition, Burnham had a financial relationship with the billionaire Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, who had extensive political connections in Moscow and ties to Russian organized crime, According to Devon Archer, Baturina invested some $200 million into “various investment funds” with which Archer was involved.
Moreover, Burnham was involved in a fraudulent bond scheme that stole at least $60 million from eleven labor-union pension funds and the poorest Indian tribe in America, the Oglala Sioux. In May 2016, Archer was arrested and charged with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal entity of tens of millions of dollars.”
* Joe Biden Aggressively Promotes His Son-in-Law’s Startup Investment Consultancy
In June 2011, Vice President Biden aggressively promoted StartUp Health, a fledgling New York City-based investment consultancy whose mission was to provide technical and relationship advice to new companies in exchange for a stake in their business revenues. The firm was established by three siblings from Philadelphia: (a) CEO and co-founder Steven Krein, (b) chief strategy officer Bari Krein, and (c) chief medical officer Dr. Howard Krein, who also happened to be the husband of Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley.
Though StartUp Health barely had even a website in place as of June 2011, two of the company’s executives were ushered into the Oval Office of the White House that month for a face-to-face meeting with President Obama and Vice President Biden. The following day, the company was featured at a large healthcare tech conference run by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Over the next four years, StartUp Health executives became regular visitors to the White House. And Joe Biden continued to personally help his son-in-law promote StartUp Health at a number of appearances which the vice president made through the end of his tenure in the White House.

Presidential Run in 2020

On April 25, 2019, Biden announced that he planned to run for U.S. President in the 2020 election.

Biden’s Presidential Campaign Platform

Below is an overview of the Biden presidential campaign’s positions on a wide array of major issues:
Workers’ Wages: Biden aims to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
Reparations for Slavery: In 2019, Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield said that in Biden’s view, the U.S. should “gather the data necessary to have an informed conversation about reparations” payments to African Americans as compensation for the centuries of slavery and discrimination that afflicted black people in the United States.
Charter Schools: Biden is opposed to publicly funded, independently-run charter schools, on grounds that they “sipho[n] off money for our public schools, which are already in enough [financial] trouble.”
Universal Pre-School: Biden is in favor of making taxpayer-funded pre-school “available to every three- and four-year-old” in America. He also aims to “triple funding for Title I, the federal program funding schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families.”
Free Community College: Biden favors the use of taxpayer dollars to give all students an opportunity to attend two years of community college, tuition-free.
Student Debt: To address the issue of student debt, Biden seeks to expand and modify the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, an existing federal benefit that cancels the remaining debt of borrowers who work in public-service jobs for ten years after they graduate.
Oil & Gas Drilling: Biden vows to issue no new leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands or offshore areas.
Carbon Taxes: On the premise that the carbon emissions associated with human industrial activity are a major contributor to the potentially catastrophic global warming/climate change, Biden would impose carbon taxes on the businesses and industries that produce such emissions.
Banning “Assault Weapons”: Calling for “bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” Biden would “institute a national buyback program” for semiautomatic firearms.
Abortion: Biden states that if the Supreme Court were ever to rule that abortion is unconstitutional, he would circumvent such a decision by passing a law permanently enshrining Roe v. Wade, the Court case that legalized abortion in the U.S. in 1973, as the permanent law of the land. “If they [the Supreme Court] ruled it to be unconstitutional, I will send to the United States Congress, and it will pass I believe, a bill that legislates Roe v. Wade adjusted by Casey. It’s a woman’s right to do that. Period.”
Health Care: Biden seeks to build on, and expand, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which was signed into law by President Obama in 2010. Toward that end, Biden favors the creation of a “public option” —i.e., a government insurance agency to “compete” with private insurers. Because such an agency would not need to show a profit in order to remain in business, and because it could tax and regulate its private competitors in whatever fashion it pleased, this “public option” would soon force private insurers out of the industry.
Drug Costs: Biden wishes to link drug costs to the typically lower prices of those same medications in other countries around the world. He would establish an independent board within the Department of Health & Human Services to set prices in this manner. Moreover, Biden would try to limit drug prices through a tax penalty on manufacturers that raise their prices above the general inflation rate in Medicare and his public option plan.
Immigration & Citizenship: Biden is in favor of granting citizenship to so-called “Dreamers” (illegal aliens who first came to the U.S. as minors), and to illegals affected by President Obama‘s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The latter was an executive action that allowed hundreds of thousands of illegals to gain temporary legal status, work permits, access to certain publicly funded social services, and protection from deportation.
Infrastructure Spending: Biden calls for a $1.3 trillion investment in infrastructure and transportation (roads, bridges, etc.) over a ten-year period. He would pay for this by rolling back some of the 2017 GOP tax cuts, increasing taxes on the “super-wealthy and corporations,” and ending fossil fuel subsidies.
Capital Gains Taxes: Biden is in favor of taxing the capital gains of people with more than $1 million in income at the same (higher) rate as ordinary income.
Corporate Income Taxes: Biden aims to raise the U.S. corporate income tax rate to 28 percent, and to impose a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations with at least $100 million in net profits.
Personal Income Taxes: Biden seeks to raise the top income tax rate for high earners to 39.6 percent. He would also put a 28 percent cap on the value of tax breaks for wealthy taxpayers.
Criminal Justice, Racism, & Alternatives to Incarceration: Lamenting that “too many people are incarcerated in the United States – and too many of them are black and brown,” the Biden campaign stated that “our criminal justice system cannot be just unless we root out the racial, gender, and income-based disparities in the system.” Toward that end, Biden proposed to “create a new $20 billion competitive grant program to spur states to shift from incarceration to prevention.” This money would be given to help states, counties, and cities initiate “efforts to address some of the factors like illiteracy and child abuse that are correlated with incarceration.” The overall objective would be to “get people who should be supported with social services – instead of in our prisons – connected to the help they need.”
Death Penalty: Biden calls for the abolition of capital punishment, on grounds that it is applied unfairly and it runs the risk of taking the lives of innocent people.
Cash Bail: Biden wishes to end the cash bail system because it “disproportionately affects low-income Americans — those who can’t afford to post bond.” Instead, he favors a system that would release all defendants prior to their trial, except those charged with the most serious, violent crimes. Said the Biden campaign: “Cash bail is the modern-day debtors’ prison. The cash bail system incarcerates people who are presumed innocent. And, it disproportionately harms low-income individuals. Biden will lead a national effort to end cash bail and reform our pretrial system by putting in place, instead, a system that is fair and does not inject further discrimination or bias into the process.”
Drug Crimes: Biden would “end all incarceration for drug use alone and instead divert individuals to drug courts and treatment.”
Cocaine Sentencing Disparities: Biden calls for the termination of all sentencing disparities for crimes involving crack or powder cocaine. For a detailed explanation of this, see Footnote #1, below.[1]
Mandatory Minimum Sentences: Biden would end mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses — sentences which were significantly expanded at the federal level in 1986.
Private Prisons: Biden aims to eliminate all private prisons, and to have only government-run prisons, so as to “stop corporations from profiteering off of incarceration.”
Decriminalizing Marijuana: Biden favors the decriminalization of marijuana at the federal level, and the automatic expungement of all past convictions for marijuana possession.
Police Misconduct: Biden would expand the power of the U.S. Justice Department “to address systemic misconduct in police departments and prosecutors’ offices.”
Housing Assistance for Ex-Convicts: Citing “a national goal of ensuring 100% of formerly incarcerated individuals have housing upon reentry” into society, Biden pledged that he would direct the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to “only contract with entities that are open to housing individuals looking for a second chance.”

Misrepresenting Himself As “Middle Class”

A few days after the launch of Biden’s presidential campaign, National Review wrote: “Biden insists that he’s been ‘referred to for the last 35 years in Washington as Middle-Class Joe,’ despite no record of anyone else ever calling him that.” Added National Review: “[Biden] proclaimed that he didn’t ‘own a single stock or bond . . .  I have no savings accounts.’ His wife Jill had plenty of stock and bond investments and the couple had five savings accounts in both their names.”

Biden Lies About His Encounter with A Navy Captain

In an August 2019 campaign appearance in New Hampshire, Biden told a poignant story of a four-star general who allegedly had asked him, when he was vice-president, to travel to Kunar province in Afghanistan in order to award a Silver Star to a Navy captain who had rappelled down a 60-foot ravine under fire to retrieve the body of a slain American soldier. In his story, Biden said that when he was warned in advance about how dangerous such a trip would be, he replied, “We can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.” Biden then claimed that when he subsequently attempted to pin the medal on the Navy captain, the latter — distraught that he had not been able to save the aforementioned soldier’s life — told Biden: “Sir, I don’t want the damn thing! Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!” “This is the God’s truth,” Biden concluded. “My word as a Biden.”
Noting that “almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect,” The Washington Post — after interviewing more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders, and Biden campaign officials in an effort to verify the details of the story — explained how Biden had conflated different events in order to create his fictitious tale. Said the Post:
“Biden visited Kunar province in 2008 as a U.S. senator, not as vice president. The service member who performed the celebrated rescue that Biden described was a 20-year-old Army specialist, not a much older Navy captain. And that soldier, Kyle J. White, never had a Silver Star, or any other medal, pinned on him by Biden. At a White House ceremony six years after Biden’s visit, White stood at attention as President Barack Obama placed a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, around his neck. The upshot: In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.”
National Review cited a pair of additional fabricated stories which Biden had previously told regarding his interaction with the alleged Silver Star recipient:
“Biden also employed the story of the fictitious Navy captain during a World War II memorial event in Australia in 2016. In that telling, the captain ‘climbed down about 200 feet’ into a ravine in Afghanistan to rescue a comrade. Then, while stumping for Hillary Clinton that same year, Biden told the story of an Army captain who pulled a soldier out of a burning vehicle in Iraq but resisted the resulting medal. ‘He died. He died, Mr. Vice President,’ Biden recalled the officer saying. ‘I don’t want the medal.’”

Biden Mistakenly Says He Is a Candidate “for the United States Senate”

In a February 24, 2020 campaign appearance in South Carolina, Biden mistakenly described himself as a candidate for a Senate seat rather than for the presidency:  “[Y]ou’re the ones who sent Barck Obama to the presidency, and I have a simple proposition here. I’m here to ask you for your help…. My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Look me over, if you like what you see, help out. If not, vote for the other Biden. Give me a look, though. okay?”

Biden Mistakenly Says He Negotiated the 2016 Paris Climate Accord with Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping (Who Died in 1997)

On February 24, 2020, Biden, while citing his accomplishments in President Barack Obama’s administration, mistakenly claimed that he had worked on the 2016 Paris Climate Accord with former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping — who left office in 1992 and died in 1997. “One of the things I’m proudest of is getting passed, getting moved, getting in control of the Paris Climate Accord,” said Biden. “I’m the guy who came back after meeting with Deng Xiaoping and making the case that I believe China will join if we put pressure on them. We got almost 200 nations to join.” It was President Xi Jinping who signed China onto the 2016 agreement.

Biden Mistakenly Vows to Appoint First Black Woman to “Senate”

During a February 28, 2020 stump speech in Sumter, South Carolina, Biden pledged to “appoint” the first black woman to the “Senate,” where members are elected rather than appointed, and where two black women (Carol Moseley Braun and Kamala Harris) had already served. Biden likely meant to say “Supreme Court” rather than “Senate.”

Biden Lies About His Visit to Nelson Mandela

In February 2020, Biden suddenly began claiming that he had been arrested many years earlier in Soweto, a city in northeast South Africa, while on his way (with a congressional delegation) to visit then-anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. “This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Biden said during a campaign stop in South Carolina. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador [Andrew Young] on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.” Later that same week in February 2020, Biden mentioned the arrest two more times, claiming that he had been arrested in between attempts to persuade Jill Stevenson, the woman who would become his second wife, to agree to marry him. That meant the arrest would have occurred in 1977, the year in which both the marriage proposal and the wedding took place.
Biden ended his story by claiming that Mandela himself had subsequently thanked him for getting arrested while trying to visit the South African activist. “After he got free and became president [in 1994], he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said in Las Vegas. “He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said, ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’”
But Biden’s story was dubious, as The New York Times reported: “[I]f Mr. Biden, then a United States senator from Delaware, was in fact arrested while trying to visit Mr. Mandela, he did not mention it in his 2007 memoir when writing about a 1970s trip to South Africa, and he has not spoken of it prominently on the 2020 campaign trail. A check of available news accounts by The New York Times turned up no references to an arrest. South African arrest records are not readily available in the United States.”
Casting additional doubt on Biden’s story is the fact that during the time period in question, Mandela was being held in a prison on Robben Island, near the southwest part of South Africa, some 900 miles away from Soweto. Biden’s campaign did not respond to five separate attempts by the Times to have the campaign clarify the events in question.
Andrew Young, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 1977-79, said he had traveled to South Africa with Biden but had never been arrested. Young was skeptical, moreover, of the notion that any members of the U.S. Congress would have been at risk of arrest in South Africa at that time. “No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either,” Young told the Times. “Now, people were being arrested in Washington. I don’t think there was ever a situation where congressmen were arrested in South Africa.”
On February 25, 2020, Biden’s presidential campaign backed away from the candidate’s claim that he had been arrested while attempting to visit Nelson Mandela in the 1970s. Said Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield: “He was separated from his party at the airport. They, he was not allowed to go through the same door that the — the rest of the party he was with. Obviously, it was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door, there was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go through the black door. He was separated. This was during a trip while they were there in Johannesburg. When making that remark, he was talking about his long record fighting apartheid; he was one of the leading voices in the United States Senate in the ’80s.”
On February 28, 2020, Biden personally walked back his claim about his alleged arrest in South Africa. He said in an interview on CNN:
“When I said arrested, I meant I was not able to, I was not able to move. Cops, Afrikaaners, were not letting me go with them, made me stay where I was. I guess I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go. They had me get off a plane — the Afrikaaners got on in the short pants and their guns. Led me off first and moved me in a direction totally different. I turned around and everybody, the entire black delegation, was going another way. I said, ‘I’m not going to go in that door that says ‘White only.’ I’m going with them.’ They said, ‘You’re not, you can’t move, you can’t go with them.’ And they kept me there until finally I decided that it was clear I wasn’t going to move. And so what they finally did, they said OK, they’re not going to make the congressional delegation go through the black door, they’re not going to make me go through the white door.”

Biden Botches the Words of the Declaration of Independence

During a March 2, 2020 campaign rally — one day before the so-called “Super Tuesday” presidential primaries in 14 separate states — Biden tried to recite the Declaration of Independence but bungled the words badly, saying: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men and women created by — co, you know the, you know the thing.” The Declaration of Independence actually reads as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Biden also mistakenly referred to Super Tuesday as “Super Thursday” before correcting himself.

Footnotes

  1. The Congressional Record shows that in 1986, when the strict, federal anti-crack legislation was first being debated, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—deeply concerned about the degree to which crack was decimating black communities across the United States—strongly supported the legislation and actually pressed for even harsher penalties. In fact, a few years earlier, CBC members had pushed President Reagan to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy. – It should further be noted that the vast majority of cocaine arrests in the U.S. are made at the state—not the federal—level, where sentencing disparities between cases involving crack and powder cocaine generally have never existed. Moreover, drug possession accounts for fewer than 2 percent of all the offenses that propel individuals into federal prisons. Those most likely to be incarcerated for drug convictions are not mere users, but traffickers who are largely career criminals with very long rap sheets. – It is also noteworthy that critics of the crack-vs.-powder penalty gap generally view the alleged injustice solely from the criminal’s perspective. That is, they ignore the fact that the harsher punishments for crack violations harm only a small subset of the black population—namely drug dealers and users—while benefiting the great mass of law-abiding people in black neighborhoods. – Also commonly overlooked is the fact that black Americans constitute a smaller proportion of the people arrested for drug violations, than of those arrested for violent crimes. Thus, even if federal courts punished crack violations as lightly as powder cocaine infractions, the black prison population would scarcely shrink at all. – Remarkably, critics of the crack-vs.-powder penalty imbalance have been largely silent on the matter of federal methamphetamine-trafficking penalties—which, it could easily be argued, discriminate heavily against whites. Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald explains: “The press almost never mentions the federal methamphetamine-trafficking penalties, which are identical to those for crack: five grams of meth net you a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants (nearly as many as the [5,619] crack defendants) were 54 percent white, 39 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black. But no one calls the federal meth laws anti-Hispanic or anti-white.”
  2. The information in this section of the Biden profile is derived mainly from the article, “As Biden and Kerry Went Soft on China, Sons Made Nuclear, Military Business Deals with Chinese Gov’t,” authored by Tyler O’Neil and published by PJ Media on March 21, 2018.

Additional Resources

BERNIE SANDERS EXPOSED IN FULL

BERNIE SANDERS EXPOSED IN FULL 
SEE: https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/bernie-sanders/republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:

Bernie Sanders

individualLast updated: March 7, 2020
© Image Copyright : Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Author of Photo: United States Congress

Overview

  • Self-identified socialist
  • Served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 2007
  • Founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus
  • Has served in the U.S. Senate since 2007
  • Believes that global warming is caused, in large measure, by human industrial activity
  • Favors a single-payer, government-run healthcare system

The Development of a Radical

Bernard “Bernie” Sanders was born in Brooklyn, New York on September 8, 1941, to Polish immigrants of Jewish descent. After attending Brooklyn College for one year, he transferred to the University of Chicago (UC) and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1964. At UC, Sanders joined the Young Peoples Socialist League (youth wing of the Socialist Party USA) as well as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Peace Union. He also was an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; participated in an American Friends Service Committee project at a California psychiatric hospital; and worked briefly (as an organizer) for the United Packinghouse Workers Union (UPWU), which, like all the CIO unions, had a number of influential Communists among its ranks. At that time, UPWU was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
After college, in 1963, Sanders lived and worked for a number of months in an Israeli kibbutz known as Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim (KSH), which was co-founded by Aharon Cohen, an Arabist who was a harsh critic of Israeli policy and was arrested for spying for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The founders of KSH referred to Joseph Stalin as the “Sun of the Nations,” and a red flag was flown at outdoor events held at the kibbutz. Sanders stayed at KSH as a guest of the Zionist-Marxist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair (HH), which pledged its allegiance to the Soviet Union; some left-wing groups described HH as Leninist and even Stalinist. HH made it plain that its cooperation with Zionists was a temporary expedient designed to help pave the way for a socialist revolution; that it viewed Israel’s independence as a transitional phase in the development of a bi-national socialist state which would ultimately end Israel’s existence as a Jewish entity.
HH founder Ya’akov Hazan described the USSR as a second homeland, and in 1953 he lamented “the terrible tragedy that has befallen the nations of the Soviet Union, the world proletariat and all of progressive mankind, upon the death of the great leader and extolled commander, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin.” “We lower our flag in grief in memory of the great revolutionary fighter, architect of socialist construction, and leader of the world’s peace movement,” Hazan added. “His huge historical achievements will guide generations in their march towards the reign of socialism and communism the world over.” In a similar vein, Eliezer Hacohen, one of HH’s ideological leaders, called Marxism “the key to renewing our spiritual creativity.” (Another individual who gravitated to an HH kibbutz as a young man was Noam Chomsky.)
Following his time at Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, Sanders moved to Vermont where he worked variously as a carpenter, filmmaker, writer, and researcher. In 1964 he married a young woman named Deborah Shiling; the marriage lasted only until 1966. Over the next few years, Sanders worked variously as a psychiatric-hospital aide and a Head Start preschool teacher in New York; as a Department of Taxes employee in Vermont; and as a staffer for a nonprofit organization called the Bread and Law Task Force, where he registered people for food stamps. In 1969 he fathered a child out-of-wedlock.
In the 1960s as well, Sanders, a self-identified pacifist, applied for conscientious objector status in order to avoid military service. His application was eventually rejected, but by that time he was too old to be drafted.
In 1971 Sanders joined the Liberty Union Party (LUP), which strongly opposed the Vietnam War, called for the nationalization of all U.S. banks, and advocated a government takeover of all private utility companies.
That summer, Sanders went to live briefly on a hippie commune in northeast Vermont called Myrtle Hill Farm. According to the Washington Free Beacon: “Sanders came to the farm while researching an article on natural childbirth for the Liberty Union’s party organ, Movement. Interest in alternative medicine was strong among members of the counterculture as part of their wider suspicion of modern science, which was associated with the sterility of hospitals and the destruction of war.” In his piece, Sanders criticized traditional methods where “infants were bottle fed on assembly line schedules designed by assembly line doctors in order to prepare them for assembly line society.” “All of life is one and if we want to know, for example, how our nation can napalm children in Vietnam—AND NOT CARE—it is necessary to go well beyond ‘politics,’” he wrote. In her 2016 book We Are As Gods, author Kate Daloz writes that Sanders spent a great deal of his time at Myrtle Hill in “endless political discussion” rather than doing any work, a habit that annoyed many of the commune’s other residents. For example, writes Daloz, one resident, a man named Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.” Consequently, “When Bernie had stayed for Myrtle’s allotted three days, Craig politely requested that he move on.”
Sanders made unsuccessful runs for the U.S. Senate in January 1972 and November 1974, and for Governor of Vermont in November 1972 and November 1976—all on the LUP ticket. Sanders’ LUP platform called for the nationalization of all U.S. banks; public ownership of all utilities, drug companies, capital, and major means of production (such as factories); and the establishment of a worker-controlled federal government. According to the Guardian, a press release from his 1974 campaign stated that as a means of addressing the problem of rising energy prices, Sanders advocated “the public takeover of all privately owned electric companies in Vermont.” Moreover, Sanders called for a 100% income tax on America’s highest income earners. (Sanders chaired the LUP from 1973-75.)
In a 1973 open letter to Vermont Sen. Robert Stafford, Sanders called for the nationalization of America’s energy industry: “I would also urge you to give serious thought about the eventual nationalization of these gigantic companies. It is extremely clear that these companies, owned by a handful of billionaires, have far too much power over the lives of Americans to be left in private hands. The oil industry, and the entire energy industry, should be owned by the public and used for the public good — not for additional profits for billionaires.”
During his 1974 Senate run, Sanders said that one plan he was considering would make it illegal for anyone to accumulate more wealth than he or she could spend in a lifetime, and that any income above $1 million per year would be taxed at a rate of 100%. “Nobody should earn more than a million dollars,” he stated.
Sanders reiterated a number of his positions in 1976. “I will be campaigning in support of the Liberty Union utility proposal which calls for the public ownership of Vermont’s private electric companies without compensation to the banks and wealthy stockholders who own the vast majority of stock in these companies,” he said in a July press release. “I will also be calling for public ownership of the telephone company — which is probably the single greatest rip-off company in America.”
In a press release the following month, Sanders introduced a proposal to crack down on private companies wishing to relocate: “We have got to begin to deal with the fact that corporations do not have the god-given right to disrupt the lives of their workers or the economic foundation of their towns simply because they wish to move elsewhere to earn a higher rate of profit.” He stated that large businesses should not be able to leave a city without first obtaining permission from that locale and the workers therein; and that if the company failed to get that approval, it should be required to pay the workers a guaranteed two years of severance, and to pay the town 10 years of taxes. “In the long run,” Sanders added, “the problem of the fleeing corporations must be dealt with on the national level by legislation which will bring about the public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.” In a 1976 LUP brochure, Sanders said: “I believe that, in the long run, major industries in this state and nation should be publicly owned and controlled by the workers themselves.” Speaking at a forum that same year, Sanders said: “There is a handful of people sitting at the head of the main banks controlling the destiny of underprivileged nations, the country as well as Vermont’s economy. That is not tolerable. That control cannot be held by them. We need public control over capital; and the capital must be put to use for public need not for the advancement of those who made the investments.”
Also in 1976, Sanders said: “I believe in socialized medicine, public ownership of the drug companies and placing doctors on salaries. The idea that millionaires can make money by selling poor people drugs that they desperately need for highly inflated prices disgusts me.”
Sanders left LUP in 1977, over what he described as the party’s inactivity between election seasons. “The function of a radical political party is very simple,” he said in his farewell speech. “It is to create a situation in which the ordinary working people take what rightfully belongs to them. Nobody can predict the future of the workers’ movement in this country or the state of Vermont. It is my opinion, however, that if workers do not take power in a reasonably short time this country will not have a future.” After splitting away from LUP, Sanders became a political Independent.

Reverence for the Marxist Eugene Debs

In the mid-1970s, Sanders spent about two years as an amateur historian and film-maker, selling educational film strips to schools in New England. Sanders also became the head of the American People’s History Society, which journalist Paul Sperry has described as “an organ for Marxist propaganda.” “There,” writes Sperry, “[Sanders] produced a glowing [1979] documentary on the life of socialist revolutionary Eugene Debs, who was jailed for espionage during the Red Scare and hailed by the Bolsheviks as ‘America’s greatest Marxist.’ This subversive hero of Sanders, denounced even by liberal Democrats as a ‘traitor,’ bashed ‘the barons of Wall Street’ and hailed the ‘triumphant’ Bolshevik revolution in Russia.” (To this day, Sanders continues to hang a portrait of Debs, who ran six times for U.S. president on the Socialist Party ticket, on a wall inside his Senate office.)

Supporting Khomeini and Iran During the 1979-80 Hostage Crisis, & Supporting Socialist Workers Party Candidates for U.S. President in 1980s

After Iranian extremists took control of the American embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and began a 444-day siege during which 52 American diplomats and citizens were held hostage by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini‘s theocratic government, Sanders in 1980 aligned himself with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which was founded in 1938 by devotees of the Russian revolutionary communist Leon Trotsky. Promoting an ideology of international revolution, SWP at its founding declared its purpose to be “the abolition of capitalism through the establishment of a Workers and Farmers Republic” and — in accordance with the teachings of Trotsky, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin — the organization advocated the elimination of most private property. In addition, SWP lauded the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro‘s Communist Cuba during the Cold War era, and a 50th anniversary issue of the Party’s official publication, The Militant, featured a series of articles celebrating the paper’s “tradition of revolutionary Marxism in the United States.”
As historian Ronald Radosh notes, Sanders “became [SWP’s] presidential elector in Vermont [in 1980], and campaigned for its candidates and platform that defended the Iranian hostage seizure.” “In fact,” says Radosh, “SWP’s position on Iran is part of what distinguishe[d] it from democratic socialist groups” [of that period]…. Sanders could have supported the Socialist Party, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, or Social-Democrats U.S.A., the three leading democratic socialist organizations existing in 1980. He rejected them. Instead he embraced a Marxist-Leninist communist sect that proclaimed its solidarity with Iran.”
Sanders chaired an October 1980 meeting where SWP’s candidate for U.S. president, Andrew Pulley, spoke at the University of Vermont. According to The Militant, Pulley that day: (a) condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages”; (b) denounced President Jimmy Carter‘s “war drive against the Iranian people”; and (c) claimed that the U.S. “was on the brink of war with Iran” because of “American imperialism” and its desire “to protect the oil and banking interests of the Rockefellers and other billionaires.” As for the hostages, Pulley said “we can be sure that many of them are simply spies … or people assigned to protect the spies.”
Pulley had a long history of anti-American radicalism. During the Vietnam War era, he had urged American soldiers to “take up their guns and shoot their officers.” When he ran for president on the SWP ticket in 1980, a New York Times report stated that Pulley advocated the abolition of America’s military, the nationalization of “virtually all private industry,” and the establishment of “official … ‘solidarity’ with the revolutionary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada and Cuba.” Moreover, Pulley cited the Cuban revolution as a model for the U.S., and he claimed that “racism [had] been abolished” under Castro. With all these things in mind, Sanders “proudly endorsed and supported” Pulley in the 1980 U.S. presidential race, emphasizing that “I [Sanders] fully support the SWP’s continued defense of the Cuban revolution.” Meanwhile, Pulley’s vice-presidential running mate, Matilde Zimmermann, said that Americans “could learn a lot from the Cuban example,” and she characterized the claim that Castro was running a “dictatorship” as nothing more than American “propaganda.”
Six months after the 1980 election, on May 21, 1981, Sanders spoke at another Pulley rally where he (Sanders) lamented that SWP had been wrongly maligned and targeted by the U.S. government for many years.
In 1982 Sanders was a featured speaker at a Boston rally for SWP’s Massachusetts candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and Congress.
In 1984 Sanders spoke out in support of SWP’s then-presidential candidate, former Black Panther Mel Mason, who praised the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions and said: “The greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it’s still developing.” “At a time when the Democratic and Republican parties are intellectually and spiritually bankrupt,” Sanders told The Militant in January 1984, “it is imperative for radical voices to be heard which offer fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology.” In that same issue of The Militant, the newspaper’s editorial board called for the “nationalization of America’s steel industry” as a necessary component of the “revolutionary struggle” by which “workers” would eventually “form” a new government in the U.S.  During the 1984 campaign as well, Sanders told Mason that if he were ever to visit Burlington, Vermont (where Sanders was mayor), Sanders would give him a key to the city.
The FBI at one point investigated Sanders for his ties to SWP, and it is not known when he ended his affiliation with the organization.
(Note: The information in this section of the Sanders profile is derived mainly from “Bernie Sanders Campaigned for Marxist Party in Reagan Era” (by Joseph Simonson, 5-30-2019), and “When Iran Took Americans Hostage, Bernie Backed Iran’s Defenders” (by Ron Radosh, 1-16-2020).

Sanders Kept Many Socialist Publications in His Personal Files During the 1980s

During the 1980s as well, Sanders kept dozens of socialist publications in his personal files. One of these was the Socialist Republic, a paper published by the Marxist Industrial Union Party. Other leaflets and papers in Sanders’s collection celebrated Marxist revolutionaries in Latin America.

Mayor of Burlington, Vermont

In 1981 Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by a margin of just 10 votes. He was subsequently re-elected three times and served as mayor until 1989.

Asserting That Government Should Replace Charities

Shortly after his first electoral victory in 1981, Sanders told an audience of charity workers: “I don’t believe in charities, because only government should provide social services to the needy.”

Rejecting the “Profit Motive” and Human Nature

In 1981 as well, Sanders said: “Do I believe that the profit motive is fundamental to human nature? The answer is no. I think the spirit of cooperation, that you and I can work together, better, rather than having to compete against each other … and destroy each other.”

Affinity for Communists and Socialists in Russia, East Germany, Nicaragua, Castro’s Cuba, & China

Russia & East Germany:
Sanders created some controversy when he hung a Soviet flag in his mayoral office, in honor of Burlington’s Soviet sister city, Yaroslavl, located some 160 miles northeast of Moscow. During his tenure as mayor, Sanders placed restrictions on the property rights of landlords, set price controls, and raised local property taxes in order to fund communal land trusts. Further, he named Burlington’s city softball team the “People’s Republic of Burlington,” and its minor league baseball team the “Vermont Reds.” Local business owners, meanwhile, distributed fliers asserting that Sanders “does not believe in free enterprise.”
According to an Accuracy In Media report, Sanders during the 1980s “collaborated with Soviet and East German ‘peace committees’” whose aim was “to stop President Reagan’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe.” Indeed, he “openly joined the Soviets’ ‘nuclear freeze’ campaign to undercut Reagan’s military build-up.”
Nicaragua:
In 1985 Sanders traveled to Managua, Nicaragua to speak at the sixth anniversary celebration of the revolution by which the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas had taken power from an American-backed leader, Anastasio Somoza, and had instituted a revolutionary socialist government. (The “Sandinista Creed” read as follows: “I believe in the doctrines and struggles of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Che, the great teachers and guides of the working class, which is the productive and true driving force of the class struggle which will bury forever the dehumanized, anti-Christian exploiting class. I believe in the building of the Marxist-Leninist socialist society.”)
In the course of his 1985 speech, Sanders said: “[I]n the last 30 years, the United States has overthrown governments in Guatemala, [the] Dominican Republic, they murdered Salvador Allende in Chile, they’ve overthrown the government of Grenada, they attempted to overthrow the government of Cuba, they overthrew a government in Brazil, and now they are attempting to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.” He also denounced the U.S. for “dominating weak nations and poor nations.”
In a letter which he addressed to the people of Nicaragua, Sanders denounced the anti-Communist activities of the Reagan administration, which he said was under the control of corporate interests. Assuring the Nicaraguans that Americans were “fair minded people” who had more to offer “than the bombs and economic sabotage” promoted by President Reagan, he declared: “In the long run, I am certain that you will win, and that your heroic revolution against the Somoza dictatorship will be maintained and strengthened.”
Following his trip to Nicaragua, Sanders penned a letter to the White House indicating that Sandinista President Daniel Ortega would be willing to meet with Reagan to negotiate a resolution to the conflict. The mayor also sought to enlist the help of former president Jimmy Carter, telling him that the people of Nicaragua were very fond of him (Carter). Sanders even invited Ortega to visit Burlington, though the Nicaraguan president declined.
Also following his trip to Nicaragua, Sanders reported that he had been “treated in a special way” by his Nicaraguan hosts. He praised the living conditions under that country’s Communist regime:
  • “Many of the things that we saw were impressive. There’s a tremendous sense of energy.
  • “I was impressed by their intelligence and by their sincerity. These are not political hacks.”
  • “No one denies that they are building health clinics. Health care in Nicaragua is now free…. Infant mortality has been greatly reduced.”
  • “[The Nicaraguan government is] giving, for the first time in their lives, real land to farmers, so that they can have something that they grow. Nobody denies that they are making significant progress.”
  • “Sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country [like Nicaragua] is because people are lining up for food [e.g., bread lines]. That’s a good thing. In other countries, people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food, and the poor starve to death.”
Praising the Nicaraguan government’s seizure of private farms and businesses, Sanders said: “In terms of land reform, giving, for the first time in their lives, real land to farmers. And people of Nicaragua, the poor people, respect that. Rich people, needless to say, are used to having a good life there, are not terribly happy.”
In an August 8, 1985 television interview, Sanders also stated that he “was impressed” with Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a Catholic priest whom Pope John Paul II had barred from celebrating Mass because Brockmann had defied a church rule forbidding priests from holding government jobs. “If this guy is the foreign minister of a ‘terrorist nation,’ then they should get another foreign minister, because he is a very gentle, very loving man,” said Sanders.
Moreover, Sanders characterized Daniel Ortega as “an impressive guy” while criticizing then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan. “The Sandinista government, in my view, has more support among the Nicaraguan people, substantially more support, than Ronald Reagan has among the American people,” said Sanders. “If President Reagan thinks that any time a government comes along, which in its wisdom, rightly or wrongly, is doing the best for its people, he has the right to overthrow that government, you’re going to be at war not only with all of Latin America, but with the entire Third World.”
Notably, Sanders did not mention the fact that by 1985, watchdog organizations had exposed the Sandinistas as perpetrators of enormous human-rights violations, including mass executions, the persecution of indigenous peoples, and the unexplained disappearance of hundreds of citizens each month.
Accusing the American media and the Reagan administration of deliberately covering up the good news of a successful socialist society, Sanders said: “Many of us get depressed about what’s [supposedly] going on in Nicaragua today, the absolute lies that are coming out of the White House. In fact, we have a right to be very exhilarated.” He praised the Sandinistas for “talking about a transformation of society, giving power to the poor people, to the working people.”
Lauding “the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America,” Sanders responded to critics of the Sandinistas by saying: “Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of the corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.”
Sanders had no problem with the Sandinistas’ war against La Prensa, a daily newspaper renowned for its criticism of the Daniel Ortega dictatorship. When asked to comment on the Sandinistas’ heavy-handed censorship of Nicaraguan media outlets, Sanders stated that undemocratic measures were sometimes necessary in times of war. “If we look at our own history,” he expanded, “I would ask American citizens to go back to World War II. Does anyone seriously think that President Roosevelt or the United States government [would have] allowed the American Nazi Party the right to demonstrate, or to get on radio and to say this is the way you should go about killing American citizens?” (It should be noted that La Prensa never printed any document with instructions on how to kill Nicaraguans.)
Through the Mayor’s Council on the Arts, Sanders funded a Vermont-based cable-access station that showed films from Cuba and television programs from Nicaragua.
In 1987 Sanders hosted Sandinista politician Nora Astorga in Burlington. Astorga was a woman who, as the publication The Daily Beast puts it, was “notorious for a Mata Hari-like guerrilla operation that successfully lured Gen. Reynaldo Perez-Vega, a high-ranking figure in the Somoza dictatorship, to her apartment with promises of sex. Perez-Vega’s body was later recovered wrapped in a Sandinista flag, his throat slit by his kidnappers.” When Astorga died of cancer in 1988, Sanders publicly praised her as “a very, very beautiful woman” and a “very vital and beautiful woman.” He also speculated that her illness may have been brought about by the stress she felt as a result of American policies toward Nicaragua. “I have my own feelings about what causes cancer, and the psychosomatic aspects of cancer,” said Sanders. “One wonders if the war didn’t claim another victim; a person who couldn’t deal with the tremendous grief and suffering in her own country.”
At one point in the Eighties, Sanders asked a group of University of Vermont students to consider how “we [the United States] deal with Nicaragua, which is in many ways Vietnam, except it’s worse. It’s more gross.” To help offset the effects of America’s many alleged transgressions against Nicaragua, Sanders sought to raise money and material support for the Sandinista revolution; he also established a sister city program in Nicaragua, like he did in the Soviet Union and attempted (without success) to do in Cuba.
In 1991 a sympathetic biographer wrote that Sanders “probably has done more than any other elected politician in the country to actively support the Sandinistas and their revolution.”
Cuba:
Sanders also visited Communist Cuba in the 1980s, in hopes of meeting with Fidel Castro, but he was only able to secure an audience with the mayor of Havana. “I remember for some reason or other, being very excited when Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba,” said Sanders in a 1985 interview. “I was a kid, and I remember reading about it. It just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against the ugly rich people.”
“In 1961,” stated Sanders, “[America] invaded Cuba, and everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world, that all the Cuban people were going to rise up in rebellion against Fidel Castro. They forgot that he educated the kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society. You know, not to say Fidel Castro and Cuba are perfect — they are certainly not — but just because Ronald Reagan dislikes these people does not mean to say that the people in their own nations feel the same way.”
In 1989 Sanders traveled to Cuba on a trip organized by the Center for Cuban Studies, a pro-Castro organization based in New York, in hopes of gaining a “balanced” perspective on the island nation’s communist dictatorship. “I think there is tremendous ignorance in this country as to what is going on in Cuba,” he told The Burlington Free Press just before embarking on the trip, and he marveled at the “enormous progress” which Cuba had made in “improving the lives of poor people and working people.” When he returned to Vermont following his trip, Sanders reported that Cuba had “solved some very important problems” with which America, by contrast, was struggling mightily. “I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless people,” he told the Free Press. “Cuba today not only has free healthcare but very high quality healthcare.” “The people we met had an almost religious affection for [Castro],” added Sanders. “The revolution there is far deep and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values.”
In a February 2020 interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes, host Anderson Cooper said while narrating a segment: “Back in the 1980s, Sanders had some positive things to say about the former Soviet Union and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Here he is explaining why the Cuban people didn’t rise up and help the U.S. overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro: ‘…he educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society, you know?’” In response to Cooper’s remarks, Sanders said: “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Following Sanders’ comments, Politifact.com pointed out that the Castro literacy program which Sanders had praised was in fact a massive Communist propaganda campaign:
“A 1984 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report found that in 1959, 23.6% of the population above the age of 10 were illiterate. By 1961, the number had fallen to 3.9%…. Bringing literacy to Cuba’s peasants was a long-standing policy in Castro’s broader agenda. In his 1957 manifesto, he included: ‘Immediate initiation of an intensive campaign against illiteracy, and civic education emphasizing the duties and rights of each citizen to his society and fatherland.’
“In 1961, about a quarter of a million teachers fanned out across the island nation. Their ranks included formally trained teachers and members of such groups as the National Federation of Sugar Workers, the Rebel Youth Association and the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. They identified nearly 1 million illiterate people, and by the end of the year over 700,000 passed a basic literacy test.
“The teaching materials came with a blunt political message. They were built on 15 lessons with titles that included ‘Fidel is Our Leader,’ ‘The Land is Ours,’ ‘Racial Discrimination’ and ‘Housing.’ The final literacy exam was based on the lesson ‘The Cuban Fishermen.’”
Moreover, the Foundation for Economic Education notes that the rise in Cuban literacy under Castro was hardly remarkable or unusual:
“Castro did not give Cubans literacy. Cuba already had one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America by 1950, nearly a decade before Castro took power, according to United Nations data (statistics from UNESCO). In 2016, the Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler debunked a politician’s claim that Castro’s rule significantly improved Cuban healthcare and education.
“In today’s Cuba, children are taught by poorly paid teachers in dilapidated schools. Cuba has made less educational progress than most Latin American countries over the last 60 years.
“According to UNESCO, Cuba had about the same literacy rate as Costa Rica and Chile in 1950 (close to 80 percent). And it has almost the same literacy rate as [those countries] do today (close to 100 percent).
“Meanwhile, Latin American countries that were largely illiterate in 1950—such as Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic—are largely literate today, closing much of the gap with Cuba. El Salvador had a less than 40 percent literacy rate in 1950, but has an 88 percent literacy rate today. Brazil and Peru had a less than 50 percent literacy rate in 1950, but today, Peru has a 94.5 percent literacy rate, and Brazil a 92.6 percent literacy rate. The Dominican Republic’s rate rose from a little over 40 percent to 91.8 percent. While Cuba made substantial progress in reducing illiteracy in Castro’s first years in power, its educational system has stagnated since, even as much of Latin America improved.”
China:
In August 2019, Sanders stated that Communist China had made “more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization.”

Failed Runs for Governor (1986) and Congress (1988)

In 1986 Sanders ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Vermont.
Two years later, he placed second in an election to fill former Republican Congressman Jim Jeffords’ vacated seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In his campaign, Sanders was supported by the Communist author and journalist I.F. Stone, who wrote a letter stating that Sanders “has proved that a socialist, running as an Independent … can be successful by speaking out for working people, the elderly and the poor,” and by advancing “a pragmatic socialism to deal with the grave problems of our economic system.”

Honeymoon in Soviet Russia

After Sanders married his second wife, Jane, on May 28, 1988, the couple honeymooned in Yaroslavl, Russia. In an interview with that city’s mayor, Alexander Riabkov, Sanders acknowledged that housing and health care were “significantly better” in the U.S. than in the Soviet Union, but added that “the cost of both services is much, much, higher in the United States.” After returning to the U.S., Sanders told reporters that he had been “extremely impressed with their [the Soviet] transportation system.” He continued: “The stations themselves were absolutely beautiful…. It was a very, very effective system. Also, I was impressed by the youth programs that they have. Their palaces of culture for the young people, a whole variety of programs for young people. And cultural programs which go far beyond what we do in this country.” At the same press conference, Jane Sanders said: “The city [Moscow] was beautiful. We were astounded with the openness, the optimism, the enthusiasm in the nation…. I think the things that struck me the most were the way that they dealt with children and with the cultural life of their community…. They put the money into public facilities, and they have palaces of culture which are paid for strictly by trade union dues. And those places have movies and dances and a lot of artistic outlets for people…. The thing that struck me is, instead of compartmentalizing their lives into a job and hobbies, it’s all interrelated and it’s all under the banner of community involvement.”
In November 1989 Sanders addressed the national conference of the U.S. Peace Council, a Communist Party USA front whose members were committed to advancing “the triumph of Soviet power in the U.S.” The event focused on how to “end the Cold War” and “fund human needs.” Other speakers included such notables as Leslie CaganJohn Conyers, and Manning Marable.

College Lecturer

Sanders spent 1989-90 working as a lecturer at Hamilton College in upstate New York and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

From Mayor to Congressman

In 1990 Sanders was a leading member of Jesse Jackson‘s National Rainbow Coalition.
That same year, he ran successfully for Congress as a socialist, representing Vermont’s single at-large congressional district.
In 1991, Sanders founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus along with fellow House members Tom AndrewsPeter DeFazio, Ron Dellums, Lane Evans, and Maxine Waters.

Socialist Scholars Conferences

During the 1990s, Sanders participated multiple times in the Socialist Scholars Conferences that were held annually in New York City.

Advocating a Diminution of National-Security Capacity

During each year of the Bill Clinton administration—starting in 1993, shortly after the first al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center—Sanders introduced legislation to cut the U.S. intelligence budget sight unseen. He justified this approach by noting that “the Soviet Union no longer exists,” and that such concerns as “massive unemployment,” “low wages,” “homelessness,” “hungry children,” and “the collapse of our educational system” represented “maybe a stronger danger [than foreign terrorists] for our national security.”
Sanders was a vocal critic of the Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism bill passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as an assault on civil liberties.
In 1995 Sanders co-sponsored Rep. Ron Dellums’s “Living Wage, Jobs For All Act,” which stated, among other things, that: (a) “every adult American able and willing to earn a living through paid work has the right to a free choice among opportunities for useful and productive part- or full-time paid employment at decent real wages or for self-employment,” and (b) “every adult American unable to work for pay or find employment has the right to an adequate standard of living that rises with increases in the wealth and productivity of the society.” Other co-sponsors of the bill included Corrine BrownJohn ConyersLane EvansChaka FattahBob FilnerAlcee HastingsMaurice HincheyJesse Jackson Jr.Marcy KapturJim McDermottCynthia McKinneyJerrold NadlerEleanor Holmes NortonMajor OwensNancy PelosiCharles RangelNydia VelazquezMaxine Waters, and Lynn Woolsey.

“The Progressive Challenge”

Sanders was a guest speaker at a January 9, 1997 event titled “The Progressive Challenge: Capitol Hill Forum,” sponsored by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Democratic Socialists of America, and numerous other left-wing organizations. The primary objective of this event was to “identify the unifying values shared by progressives at this point in U.S. history, to help define core elements of a forward-looking progressive agenda, and to pinpoint ways to connect that agenda with the concerns of millions of disillusioned people who lack voices in present politics and policy-making.” Other speakers included Noam ChomskyBarbara EhrenreichPatricia IrelandJesse Jackson, and Richard Trumka.

Job Creation & Infrastructure Restoration Act

In 1997 Sanders co-sponsored Congressman Matthew Martinez’s Job Creation and Infrastructure Restoration Act, which proposed to use $250 billion in federal funds for the establishment of union-wage jobs rebuilding infrastructure (e.g., schools, hospitals, libraries, public transportation, highways, and parks). Martinez had previously introduced this bill in 1995 at the the request of the Los Angeles Labor Coalition for Public Works Jobs, whose leaders were all supporters or members of the Communist Party USA.

Sanders Supports Venezuela’s Marxist Dictator Hugo Chavez

In 1999, Sanders expressed his strong support for  Hugo Chavez, the authoritarian Marxist who had recently been elected as president of Venezuela. Specifically, Sanders endorsed — and posted to his official website — an op-ed that said “the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina … Who’s the banana republic now?” Ultimately, Chavez’s presidency became best known for completely destroying the economy of Venezuela, formerly the most prosperous country in all of South America.
Sanders signed a letter of support for Chavez in January 2003. That same month, a Reuters news report described what was happening in the country at that time:
“Venezuelan troops fired tear gas on Sunday to drive back tens of thousands of anti-government protesters as President Hugo Chavez ordered a crackdown against a six-week-old opposition strike that is bleeding the economy…. He condemned his opponents as ‘fascists and coup mongers’ and described them as desperate. ‘They don’t know what to do next,’ said Chavez, who survived a brief coup in April. He himself attempted a botched coup bid in 1992.
“Chavez, who has already sacked 2,000 striking state oil employees, repeated threats to send troops to take over private factories and warehouses if they hoarded food supplies. He also threatened to revoke the broadcasting licenses of private TV stations that criticize his rule, describing their hostile programming as ‘worse than an atomic bomb.’”

Participation in Conferences Held by the Campaign for America’s Future

From 2005-07, Sanders participated in the Campaign For America’s Future‘s (CAF) annual “Take Back America” (TBA) conferences, whose goal was to help leftist political candidates win their respective races. Sanders has also been a supporter of CAF’s sister organization, the Institute For America’s Future. In 2011 he addressed the “Take Back the American Dream” conference—the new name for TBA—hosted by CAF and the Institute for Policy Studies.

Co-Sponsoring an Impeachment Resolution

In 2006 Sanders co-sponsored a resolution by Rep. John Conyers to impeach President Bush on grounds that he had led the United States into an illegal and immoral war in Iraq.

Elected to the Senate As a “Democratic Socialist”

In November 2006 Sanders ran successfully for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Then-Senator Barack Obama, whom Sanders described as “one of the great leaders” of that legislative body, campaigned enthusiastically on Sanders’ behalf. When a Washington Post reporter asked Sanders just prior to the election: “Are you now or have you ever been a Socialist?” Sanders replied, “Yeah. I wouldn’t deny it. Not for one second. I’m a democratic Socialist.”

Calling for Strict Regulations on Media

In 2007 Senator Sanders and Rep. Maurice Hinchey together introduced the Media Ownership Reform Act, which was designed to tightly restrict the number of radio stations that any firm could own. It also sought to resurrect the so-called “Fairness Doctrine”—a measure that, if passed, would greatly diminish the influence of conservative talk radio.

Global Warming Alarmism

Sanders has long maintained that “global warming/climate change” not only threatens “the fate of the entire planet,” but is caused chiefly by human industrial activity and must be curbed by means of legislation strictly limiting carbon emissions. In 2007 Sanders and Senator Barbara Boxer proposed the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, which, according to an MIT study, would have imposed on U.S. taxpayers a yearly financial burden of more than $4,500 per family, purportedly to check climate change.
In February 2010 Sanders likened climate-change skeptics to people who had disregarded the Nazi threat prior to WWII: “During that period of Nazism and fascism’s growth … there were people in this country and in the British parliament who said, ‘Don’t worry! Hitler’s not real! It’ll disappear!’”
Accusing “big business” of being “willing to destroy the planet for short-term profits,” Sanders in 2013 said that “global warming is a far more serious problem than al Qaeda.”
Stating unequivocally that “the scientific community is unanimous” in its belief that “the planet is warming up,” Sanders in 2014 declared that the “debate is over” and emphasized the importance of “transform[ing] our energy systems away from fossil fuels.”

Favoring Socialism & Wealth Redistribution Over Free-Market Capitalism

In an August 2011 op-ed decrying income inequality in America, Sanders wrote: “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?”
In September 2011, Sanders hailed the work of the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement as “extremely important,” lauding its activists for focusing a “spotlight” on the need for “real Wall Street reform.”
In March 2013, Sanders and fellow Senator Tom Harkin together introduced a bill to tax Wall Street speculators. “Both the economic crisis and the deficit crisis are a direct result of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street,” said Sanders.

Presidential Run of 2015-16

On April 29, 2015, Sanders announced that he was running for the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination, citing economic inequality, climate change, and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision as issues of particular concern to him.

Favoring Income Taxes As High as 90 Percent

In May 2015, Sanders told CNBC interviewer John Harwood that he was in favor of dramatically raising the marginal tax rate on America’s highest earners. “[When] radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president,” Sanders said sarcastically, “I think the highest marginal tax rate was something like 90 percent.” When Harwood asked whether Sanders thought that was too high, the senator replied: “No. What I think is obscene, and what frightens me is, again, when you have the top one-tenth of one percent owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 [percent]. Does anybody think that is the kind of economy this country should have?” Notably, in 2014 Sanders paid $27,653 in federal income taxes — an effective federal tax rate of 13.5 percent.

Sanders’ 2016 Campaign Positions on Taxes, Minimum Wage, Healthcare, Free Tuition, Universal Pre-K, Climate Change, Infrastructure, & Fracking

In his first public speech as a presidential candidate in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders in May 2015 broadly laid out the major planks of his campaign’s agenda:
  • He declared that financial inequality “is immoral, it is bad economics, it is unsustainable.”
  • Vowing to send “a message to the billionaire class,” he said: “[Y]ou can’t have huge tax breaks [for the rich] while children in this country go hungry … while there are massive unmet needs on every corner…. Your greed has got to end…. You cannot take advantage of all the benefits of America if you refuse to accept your responsibilities.”
  • He pledged to enact “a tax system that is fair and progressive, which tells the wealthiest individuals and the largest corporations that they are going to begin to pay their fair share.”
  • Claiming that “the current federal [hourly] minimum wage of $7.25 is a starvation wage and must be raised … to $15.00 an hour.” (Yet Sanders himself was only paying his office interns $12 per hour.)
  • He described the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) as a “modest” step in the direction of rightfully forcing the U.S. to “join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all as a right.”  “And we must do it through a Medicare-for-all, single payer health plan,” he explained.
  • He called for “pay equity for women workers,” and “paid sick leave and guaranteed vacation time for every worker in this country.”
  • Describing the rising costs of a college education as “insane,” he vowed to “fight to make tuition in public colleges and universities free, as well as substantially lower interest rates on student loans.”
  • He pledged to “expand Social Security benefits” and mandate “a universal pre-K system for all the children of this country.”
  • Asserting that “there is nothing more important” than fighting global warming, he said: “The debate is over. The scientific community has spoken in a virtually unanimous voice. Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating problems in our country and throughout the world.” He elaborated that in the absence of government intervention, America would inevitably see “more drought, more famine, more rising sea level, more floods, more ocean acidification, [and] more extreme weather disturbances,” he elaborated, in the absence of government intervention.
  • He called for the government to use taxpayer dollars to rebuild America’s “crumbling infrastructure” by repairing “our roads, our bridges, our water systems, our rail and airports.” Sanders added he would begin this process by working to advance, in the Senate, a five-year, $1 trillion bill that he himself had proposed, claiming that it “would create and maintain 13 million good paying jobs.”
In a September 18, 2015 appearance on CBS This Morning, Sanders discussed his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy; to provide free public college tuition for all Americans; to provide 12 weeks of paid family leave and paid vacation time for all workers; to “create universal health care for every man, woman and child”; to put private health insurance companies “out of business”; and to require “the wealthiest people in this country who are doing phenomenally well” — along with “large corporations that are making billions of dollars in profits” — to “start paying their fair share of taxes.” Following are some highlights of his exchange with co-hosts Norah O’Donnell and Vinita Nair:
  • O’Donnell asked, “Would that mean taxing the wealthiest Americans at 90 percent, as you’ve suggested in the past?” Sanders replied, “No, I don’t think you have to go up to 90%, but you can remember that under people like Dwight David Eisenhower [under whom the top tax rate was approximately 90 percent], we had a tax system that was far more progressive than it was today…. But we will come up with some very specific ideas.”
  • O’Donnell asked how Sanders proposed to pay for “free health care for everybody, college for everybody, [and] paid leave.” Sanders replied: “This is what we would do. If you want tuition-free public colleges and universities, which I believe we will have a tax on Wall Street speculation, which will more than pay for that. We will end the fact that profitable corporations, in some cases, in America today, pay zero in federal taxes because they stash their money in the Cayman Islands and in Bermuda.”
  • Nair pointed out that The Wall Street Journal had estimated that all of Sanders’ proposed programs would cost $18 trillion to implement. Sanders replied: “But what The Wall Street Journal said, and we responded to, it is that that included 15 billion dollars for [a] national health care program. What they forgot to say is that you would not be paying, and businesses would not be paying, for private health insurance. So, in other words, right now if you’re paying $12,000 a year for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, you would not be paying that. In fact, every study indicates that we pay more per capita for healthcare than any nation on earth. We would lower that cost.”
  • O’Donnell said, “You’re calling for a single payer health care system but your home state of Vermont tried that in 2011 and the Democratic governor has said we can’t afford it and rolled it back. Your own state can’t even carry it through. How is America going to do it?: Sanders replied, “Because every other country in the world, in one way or another, does it.” O’Donnell then asked, “Then why couldn’t Vermont figure it out?” Sanders responded: “Well, you’ll have to ask the Governor for that. I’m not the Governor of the state of Vermont, but you can ask the conservative prime minister of Canada how they have a single-payer health care system. You can ask every other major country on Earth how they guarantee health care to all of their people with far less cost per capita than we do in the United States.”
  • Sanders said: “Thirty million people [in America] today have zero health insurance, and millions more are underinsured. No one debates that fact. What the story is, how can you create universal health care for every man, woman and child and do it in a cost effective way? Other countries do it. The United States of America can do it. Now, I know the private insurance companies don’t like this idea. We’re going to put them out of business. And the drug companies that are ripping off the American people and charging us the highest prices in the world don’t like the idea. Tough luck.”
In a June 2016 press conference in California, Sanders stated unequivocally that he would ban fracking if he were elected president: “I hope very much that Monterey County will continue the momentum that makes it clear that fracking is not safe, is not what we want for our kids. If elected president, we will not need state-by-state, county-by-county action, because we are going to ban fracking in 50 states in this country…. I would hope the Democratic Party makes it clear that it has the guts to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and tell them that their short-term profits are not more important than the health of our children or the future of our planet.”

Support From Bill Ayers

In September 2015, Sanders’ presidential campaign received the support of the former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, who wrote: “I believe that among the Sanders supporters there are thousands who are dissatisfied, who are disgruntled, but who do not have a coherent left analysis, who therefore are open to our ideas as they weren’t before they got involved in the Sanders surge…. So, why don’t we joi[n] a Sanders local campaign or go to a mass rally?… We could have lists of places and projects where anarchists and others are working with people in projects that are using anarchist and community participatory ideas and vision. Places where Bernie supporters might get involved once they knew about them.”

Supporting the Iran Nuclear Deal

In 2015 as well, Sanders enthusiastically supported the nuclear deal that the Obama administration negotiated with Iran—an agreement allowing the terrorist regime in Tehran to inspect its own Parchin nuclear weapons research site, conduct uranium enrichment, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and have a near-zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. Notwithstanding these undeniable realities, Sanders saw the deal as “the best way forward if we are to accomplish what we all want to accomplish — that is making certain that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon.”

Views on Racism in the U.S.

In a September 14, 2015 campaign appearance at Liberty University, Sanders was asked: “If you were elected president, what would you do to bring healing and resolution to the issue of racism in our country?” His reply made it clear that he viewed racism as a trait found chiefly in white people:
“… I would hope and I believe that every person in this room today understands that it is unacceptable to judge people, to discriminate against people, based on the color of their skin. And I would also say that as a nation, the truth is, that a nation which in many ways was created—and I’m sorry to have to say this—from way back on racist principles. That’s a fact. We have come a long way as a nation. Now I know, my guess is probably not everybody here is an admirer or a voter for Barack Obama. But the point is, that in 2008, this country took a huge step forward … in voting for a candidate based on his ideas and not the color of his skin…. We all know to what degree racism remains alive in this country. [Sanders then cited a recent incident where a white South Carolina man had shot and killed nine black members of a church.] And I cannot understand, for the life of me, how there can be hundreds of groups in this country, whose sole reason for existence is to promote hatred [against] African Americans or gays or Jews or immigrants or anybody that is different from us…. [L]et us be clear, that when you have unarmed African Americans shot by police officers — something which has been going on for years — That is also institutional racism and cries out for reform.”
During a presidential primary debate on February 7, 2020, Sanders said: “We have a racist society from top to bottom impacting health care, housing, criminal justice, education — you name it.”

Drawing a Comparison Between Climate Change and Islamic Terrorism

During a Democratic presidential debate on November 14, 2015 — in the aftermath of the horrific ISIS terror attacks that had killed well over 100 people in Paris the day before — Sanders was asked if he still thought (as he had indicated on numerous prior occasions) that climate change was the biggest threat facing the world. He replied: “Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism and if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re going to see countries all over the world … struggling over limited amounts of water and land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of conflict.” On CBS’ Face the Nation the following day, Dickerson asked Sanders to expand on his statement that “climate change in fact is related to terrorism.” The senator replied: “If we are going to see an increase in drought and flooding and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that peoples all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources. If there is not enough water, if there is not enough land to grow your crops, then you’re going to see migrations of people fighting over land that will sustain them. And that will lead to international conflicts…. [W]hat happens say, in Syria, for example … is that when you have drought, when people can’t grow their crops, they’re going to migrate into cities. And when people migrate into cities and they don’t have jobs, there’s going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment, and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that al Qaeda and ISIS are using right now. So, where you have discontent, where you have instability, that’s where problems arise, and certainly, without a doubt, climate change will lead to that.”
In a November 15, 2015 interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sanders doubled down on his claim, saying: “If we are going to see an increase in drought and flood and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that peoples all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources. If there is not enough water, if there is not enough land to grow your crops, then you’re going to see migrants of people fighting over land that will sustain them, and that will lead to international conflict.”

The Sanders Campaign Hires an Anti-Semite

In early April 2016, Sanders’ presidential campaign hired a young woman named Simone Zimmerman as its national Jewish outreach coordinator. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “During the 2014 Gaza war, Zimmerman was one of the leaders of a group of young Jews that held regular protest vigils outside the offices of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, reading the names of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the conflict. She opposes Israel’s occupation, wants Hillel to allow participation by groups that support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement against Israel, is against Jewish federation funding for Israeli projects in the West Bank, and wrote favorably of the efforts of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-BDS group, to get ‘international corporations to stop profiting off human rights abuses.’” “We’re paying attention to what’s happening in Israel — and we are angry,” Zimmerman wrote in a February 2016 column about her fellow millennials. “The hypocrisy of expecting feel-good social justice projects to offset millennials’ deep outrage at the grave injustices committed by the Jewish state is almost too much to bear. No public relations trick can save Israel’s image. The problem isn’t with the hasbara. The problem is nearly 50 years of occupation. The problem is rampant racism in Israeli society. The problem is attacks on human rights defenders by extremists and by the state. The problem is a Jewish establishment that ignores or justifies all of this.”
On April 13, 2016, the Sanders campaign suspended Zimmerman from her position after the Washington Free Beacon reported that on March 3, 2015, she had written an expletive-laden Facebook post denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a mass-murderer: “Bibi Netanyahu is an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative asshole…. Fuck you, Bibi … you sanctioned the murder of over 2,000 people this summer.” At a later date, Zimmerman edited the Facebook post, replacing “asshole” with “politician” and “Fuck you” with “shame on you.”

Advocating a Presidential Pardon for FALN Terrorist

During a May 2016 town hall meeting in Puerto Rico, Sanders stated that he wanted President Obama to pardon the 73-year-old convicted Puerto Rican terrorist Oscar López Rivera, who was a founder of the Marxist-Leninist organization FALN (Fuerza Armadas de Liberacion Nacional), which waged a violent campaign for Puerto Rican independence. He had been imprisoned in the U.S. since 1981, when he was arrested and convicted of trying to overthrow the U.S. government, seditious conspiracy to destroy federal property, armed robbery, weapons violations, and interstate transportation of stolen property. Said Sanders: “Oscar López Rivera is one of the longest-serving political prisoners in history — 34 years, longer than Nelson Mandela. We are talking about a Vietnam War veteran who was awarded a Bronze Star. I say to President Obama — let him out!” Moreover, Sanders promised that “I will pardon him” if elected president.

Sanders’ Radical Guest at the 2016 Democratic National Convention

Sanders invited Paul Bustinduy, the Secretary of International Relations of the Spanish far-left political party Podemos — which belongs to a leftist coalition called United We Can (UWC) — as his guest at the July 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Historian Ronald Radosh notes that UWC: (a) “models itself on the Marxist Greek party Syiriza which brought the Greek economy to near total collapse,” and (b) is “composed of old Communists, Trotskyists, independent revolutionaries, Basque and Catalan nationalists, leftist urban intellectuals and former supporters of the Socialist Party annoyed at what they perceive as its continuing compromises.” Describing Podemos, meanwhile, as “blatantly anti-Semitic,” Radosh writes:
“In Madrid the [Podemos] Party’s affiliate is called Ahora Madrid. The head of Madrid’s department of culture, Guiller Zapata, who is a [Podemos] member, tweeted: ‘How do you fit five million Jews in a SEAT 600? [a version of the Fiat car of the same name] Answer: In an ashtray.’ … Podemos is so anti-Israel, that it defends publication of a notorious anti-Semitic Spanish magazine, El Jueves [which once published a cartoon] about Israel, using the symbols of Hitler’s SS to indicate that Israel is composed of Nazis.”
As further evidence of its anti-Semitism, Podemos supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that aims to use various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

2016 Presidential Campaign Ends in Defeat

The Democratic presidential primary race ended on July 26, 2016, when Hillary Clinton officially won the Party’s nomination over Sanders.

From Independent to Democrat, Back to Independent

In February 2016, while Sanders — who had long identified as an Independent rather than as a Democrat — was still in the thick of a hard-fought battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, he told a New Hampshire town hall meeting: “Of course I am a Democrat and running for the Democratic nomination.” In an interview two months later on Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect, host Mark Halperin asked Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver if the senator planned to stay in the Democratic Party even if he failed to become its nominee. Weaver replied: “Well, he is a Democrat, he said he’s a Democrat and he’s gonna be supporting the Democratic nominee, whoever that is.” “But he’s a member of the Democratic Party now for life?” Halperin pressed. “Yes, he is,” said Weaver. But when Sanders was asked whether he still identified as a Democrat in an April 2017 interview on MSNBC, the senator replied: “No, I’m an Independent.”

Sanders’ Wealth

In August 2016, Sanders purchased a seasonal waterfront home on Lake Champlain in Vermont, for $575,000. He already owned a row house on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and a home in Burlington, Vermont. Notwithstanding the fact that he owns three homes, Sanders has consistently articulated his belief that the luxuries of wealthy people should be limited — or at least taxed at a very high rate. In April 2017, for instance, the senator tweeted: “How many yachts do billionaires need? How many cars do they need? Give us a break. You can’t have it all.”
All told, Sanders earned more than $1 million in 2016. That total included: (a) his $174,000 Senate salary; (b) a $795,000 advance for his book, Our Revolution; (c) another $63,750 for his forthcoming book, Bernie Sanders’ Guide to Political Revolution; and $6,735 in royalties for his 1997 memoir, Outsider in the House.
In 2017, Sanders earned $1.06 million. Defending his high income, he told a crowd at a community meeting in Gary, Indiana: “I didn’t know that it was a crime to write a good book which turns out to be a bestseller. My view has always been that we need a progressive tax system which demands that the wealthiest people in this country finally start paying their fair share of taxes. If I make a lot of money, you make a lot of money, that is what I believe. So again, I don’t apologize for writing a book that was number three on the New York Times bestseller, translated into five or six languages and that’s that.”

Condemning America’s Healthcare System

During the January 2017 Senate confirmation hearing for Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price, who was President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Sanders and Price had the following exchange:
Sanders: “The United States of America is the only major country on earth that does not guarantee healthcare to all people as a right. Canada does it. Every major country in Europe does it. Do you believe healthcare is a right for all Americans whether they’re rich or they’re poor? Should people, because they are Americans, be able to go to the doctor when they need to go into a hospital because they are Americans?”
Price: “Yes we are a compassionate society –”
Sanders (interrupting): “No, we are not a compassionate society in terms of poor and working people. Our record is worse than virtually any other country on earth, and half of our senior workers have nothing set aside for retirement, so I don’t think compared to other countries we are particularly compassionate. But my question is in Canada all people have the right to get healthcare. Do you believe we should move in that direction?”
Price: “If you want to talk about other countries’ healthcare systems there are consequences to the decisions they made just as there are consequences to the decisions that we’ve made. I believe, and I look forward to working with you, that every single American has access to the highest quality care and coverage that is possible.”
Sanders: “’Has access to’ does not mean they are guaranteed healthcare. I can have access to buying a 10 million dollar home but I don’t have the money to do that.”

Sanders Says America Does Not Care for Its Poor

On March 18, 2017, Sanders posted a Twitter message denouncing America for its alleged indifference to the needs of poor people: “We are living in a nation which worships wealth rather than caring for the poor. I don’t think that is the nation we should be living in.”

Anti-Israel Positions

In a March 2017 letter, Sanders asked David Friedman, whom President Donald Trump had nominated for the post of U.S. Ambassador to Israel, whether he would support the idea of diverting “a portion” of the $38 billion which the United States had earmarked as aid to Israel over the ensuing ten years, and sending it instead to the Hamas-led government of the Gaza Strip — to “facilitate a much greater flow of humanitarian and reconstruction materials” to that region. Israel Nation News, however, pointed out that historically, “Hamas has taken most of the aid monies it receives to strengthen its fighting capability.” Also in his letter to Friedman, Sanders asked the ambassador whether he thought that the tax-exempt status of groups raising funds for Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria should be revoked, so as to help “end the flow of donations to illegal settlements.”
In a speech he delivered at a February 2017 conference hosted by J Street, Sanders called for an end to Israel’s “50-year occupation” of “Palestinian territories,” suggesting that “its daily restrictions on the political and civil liberties of the Palestinian people runs contrary to fundamental American values.” In addition, Sanders likened the Palestinians who had fled their homes shortly before Israel’s establishment in 1948, to Native Americans. “Like our own country, the founding of Israel involved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people already living there, the Palestinian people,” he said. “Over 700,000 people were made refugees.”

Financial Scandal Involving Sanders’ Wife

In 2017, Senator Sanders’ wife, Jane Sanders, became the subject of an FBI investigation. The probe centered around a 2010 deal in which Mrs. Sanders, who at the time was the president of Burlington College, secured a $6.7 million loan from People’s United Bank and used the money to purchase a 33-acre lakefront campus for the school. But as the news website VT Digger explains, the deal was illegitimate:
“Jane Sanders … overstated donation amounts in a bank application for [the loan]…. She told People’s United Bank in 2010 that the college had $2.6 million in pledged donations [from 31 people] to support the purchase of the … property. The college, however, received only $676,000 in actual donations from 2010 through 2014, according to figures provided by Burlington College. Two people whose pledges are listed as confirmed in the loan agreement told VTDigger that their personal financial records show their pledges were overstated. Neither was aware the pledges were used [by Mrs. Sanders] to secure the loan.”
For example, a separate VT Digger report says that Mrs. Sanders “appears to have counted [Corinne Bove] Maietta’s bequest as a cash gift that was available as collateral to finance the land deal. The 2010 loan agreement says ‘CBM’ pledged $1 million to the school over five years in increments of $150,000, with a final payment of $100,000 in year six.” Maietta told reporters that she was incredulous that Burlington College would try to use her bequest to secure a bank loan. “You can’t borrow money on the future,” she said. “That doesn’t exist.”
Burlington College closed in 2016, citing the “crushing weight of debt” which had resulted from Mrs. Sanders’ financial activities.
When Senator Sanders was asked in June 2017 about the allegations against his wife, he replied: “My wife is about the most honest person I know. When she came to that college [Burlington], it was failing financially and academically. When she left it, it was in better shape than it had ever been…. All that I will tell you now … it is a sad state of affairs in America, not only when we have politicians being destroyed … but when you go after … people’s wives. That is pretty pathetic….”
In November 2018, a spokesman for Jane Sanders announced that the U.S. Attorney in Vermont had closed its investigation of Mrs. Sanders’ land deal and had decided not to bring any criminal charges against her.

Sanders Suggests That a Religious Christian Is Unfit to Hold Public Office

In June 2017, Sanders had a contentious exchange with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be Deputy Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. As National Review noted, Sanders was “imposing a religious test for public office, in direct violation of Article VI of the United States Constitution.” Below is a transcript of the Sanders-Vought exchange:
Sanders: Let me get to this issue that has bothered me and bothered many other people. And that is in the piece that I referred to that you wrote for the publication called Resurgent. You wrote, “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, His Son, and they stand condemned.” Do you believe that that statement is Islamophobic?
Vought: Absolutely not, Senator. I’m a Christian, and I believe in a Christian set of principles based on my faith. That post, as I stated in the questionnaire to this committee, was to defend my alma mater, Wheaton College, a Christian school that has a statement of faith that includes the centrality of Jesus Christ for salvation, and . . .
Sanders: I apologize. Forgive me, we just don’t have a lot of time. Do you believe people in the Muslim religion stand condemned? Is that your view?
Vought: Again, Senator, I’m a Christian, and I wrote that piece in accordance with the statement of faith at Wheaton College.
Sanders: I understand that. I don’t know how many Muslims there are in America. Maybe a couple million. Are you suggesting that all those people stand condemned? What about Jews? Do they stand condemned too?
Vought: Senator, I’m a Christian . . .
Sanders (shouting): I understand you are a Christian, but this country are made of people who are not just — I understand that Christianity is the majority religion, but there are other people of different religions in this country and around the world. In your judgment, do you think that people who are not Christians are going to be condemned?
Vought: Thank you for probing on that question. As a Christian, I believe that all individuals are made in the image of God and are worthy of dignity and respect regardless of their religious beliefs. I believe that as a Christian that’s how I should treat all individuals . . .
Sanders: You think your statement that you put into that publication, they do not know God because they rejected Jesus Christ, His Son, and they stand condemned, do you think that’s respectful of other religions?
Vought: Senator, I wrote a post based on being a Christian and attending a Christian school that has a statement of faith that speaks clearly in regard to the centrality of Jesus Christ in salvation.
Sanders: I would simply say, Mr. Chairman, that this nominee is really not someone who this country is supposed to be about.

Effort to Punish a Conservative Broadcasting Group

In April 2018, Sanders was one of 12 U.S. senators who sought to punish the Sinclair Broadcast Group – widely perceived as a conservative media company – which (a) consisted of 193 television stations and 614 channels in 89 markets nationwide, and (b) had recently announced plans to acquire the Tribune Media Company’s 42 TV stations in 33 markets, a merger that, if completed, would extend Sinclair’s reach to 72% of all American households. The twelve senators included Sanders and 11 Democrats: Tammy BaldwinRichard BlumenthalCory Booker, Maria Cantwell, Edward Markey, Jeff Merkley, Patty Murray, Tina Smith, Tom UdallElizabeth Warren, and Ron Wyden.
In a letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai, these senators expressed concern over the fact that Sinclair had recently aired an ad showing its various local anchors reading from a corporate script extolling the virtue of “balanced journalism”; stating that “truth is neither politically ‘left or right’”; emphasizing the importance of a “commitment” to reporting that “seek[s] the truth and strive[s] to be fair, balanced and factual”; criticizing “some members of the media” for “us[ing] their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’”; and condemning “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”
Viewing the Sinclair ad as an implicit defense of President Donald Trump, who had long been under withering attack by media outlets nationwide, the senators wrote in their letter: “We are concerned that Sinclair is engaged in a systematic news distortion operation that seeks to undermine freedom of the press and the robust localism and diversity of viewpoint that is the foundation of our national broadcasting laws.” “We have strong concerns,” they added, “that Sinclair has violated the public interest obligation inherent in holding broadcast licenses. Sinclair may have violated the FCC’s longstanding policy against broadcast licensees deliberately distorting news by staging, slanting, or falsifying information.” The senators also demanded that the FCC put on hold its review of Sinclair’s potential merger with Tribune.
In his response, Pai said he “must respectfully decline” the senators’ request “in light of my commitment to protecting the First Amendment and freedom of the press.” “I understand that you disliked or disagreed with the content of particular broadcasts,” he added, “but I can hardly think of an action more chilling of free speech than the federal government investigating a broadcast station because of disagreement with its news coverage or promotion of that coverage.”

Frequent Use of Private Jets

In November 2018, Sanders was re-elected to a third term in the U.S. Senate. During his campaign that year, he emphasized anthropogenic climate change — allegedly caused by excessive carbon emissions from human activity — as an issue of enormous import and urgency. For example, he wrote in an October 10 tweet: “Climate change is a planetary crisis. Our task is clear. We must take on the fossil fuel industry that’s largely responsible for global emissions and accelerate our transition toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy sources.” A week later, he tweeted: “Climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet…. we must show up at the polls coast to coast and stand with candidates who are willing and ready to accelerate our transition to clean energy, and finally put people before the profits of polluters.” But during that same campaign, Sanders spent nearly $300,000 on private jet services just in the month of October 2018.
This was reminiscent of Sanders’ 2016 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, when his campaign paid more than $1.6 million going to the Air Charter Team just in the month of March. The following month, Sanders took 50 staffers and reporters on a chartered Delta 767 for a trip to the Vatican where he briefly met Pope Francis.
In 2019, Politico reported a number of additional details of Sanders’ frequent use of private jets. Some excerpts:
  • “[I]n the final months of the 2016 campaign, Sanders repeatedly requested and received the use of a carbon-spewing private jet for himself and his traveling staff when he served as a surrogate campaigner for Hillary Clinton.”
  • “In 2016, after Sanders endorsed Clinton and agreed to campaign on her behalf, the Sanders campaign’s preferred mode of travel quickly emerged as a point of tension, according to six former Clinton campaign staffers and another source familiar with the travel. ‘I’m not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush D.C. office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe,’ said Zac Petkanas, who was the director of rapid response for the Clinton campaign.”
  • “Sanders’ flights — usually on a Gulfstream plane — cost the Clinton-Kaine campaign at least $100,000 in total, according to three people familiar with the cost of the air travel. ‘We would try to fight it as much as possible because of cost and availability of planes, but they [Sanders and his associates] would request [a jet] every time,’ one of those sources said. ‘We would always try to push for commercial…. At the campaign, you’re constantly trying to save like 25 cents.’”
  • “In the two years following the [2016] presidential election, Sanders continued his frequent private jet travel, spending at least $342,000 on the flights.”

Another Presidential Run

On February 20, 2019, Sanders announced that he would seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for the 2020 presidential election.

Sanders’ 2020 Presidential Platform: On the Issues

Below is an overview of Sanders’ positions on a wide range of key issues as of early 2020, as laid out by Sanders and his presidential campaign:
A Welcoming & Safe America for All
  • Institute a moratorium on deportations until a thorough audit of past practices and policies is complete.
  • Reinstate and expand DACA and develop a humane policy for those seeking asylum.
  • Completely reshape and reform our immigration enforcement system, including breaking up ICE and CBP and redistributing their functions to their proper authorities.
  • Dismantle cruel and inhumane deportation programs and detention centers and reunite families who have been separated.
  • Live up to our ideals as a nation and welcome refugees and those seeking asylum, including those displaced by climate change.
Mediacre for All
  • Create a Medicare for All, single-payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone in America with comprehensive health care coverage, free at the point of service.
  • Medicare coverage will be expanded and improved to include: include dental, hearing, vision, and home- and community-based long-term care, in-patient and out-patient services, mental health and substance abuse treatment, reproductive and maternity care, prescription drugs, and more.
  • Stop the pharmaceutical industry from ripping off the American people by making sure that no one in America pays over $200 a year for the medicine they need by capping what Americans pay for prescription drugs under Medicare for All.
Green New Deal
  • Transform our energy system to 100 percent renewable energy and create 20 million jobs needed to solve the climate crisis.
  • Ensure a just transition for communities and workers, including fossil fuel workers.
  • Ensure justice for frontline communities, especially under-resourced groups, communities of color, Native Americans, people with disabilities, children and the elderly.
  • Save American families money with investments in weatherization, public transportation, modern infrastructure and high-speed broadband.
  • Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and reasserting the United States’ leadership in the global fight against climate change.
  • End the greed of the fossil fuel industry and hold them accountable.
College For All
  • Guarantee tuition and debt-free public colleges, universities, HBCUs, Minority Serving Institutions and trade-schools to all.
  • Cancel all student loan debt for the some 45 million Americans who owe about $1.6 trillion and place a cap on student loan interest rates going forward at 1.88 percent.
  • Invest $1.3 billion every year in private, non-profit historically black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions
  • End equity gaps in higher education attainment. And ensure students are able to cover non-tuition costs of attending school by: expanding Pell Grants to cover non-tuition and fee costs, tripling funding for the Work-Study Program, and more.
Workplace Democracy
  • Double union membership within Bernie’s first term.
  • Deny federal contracts to companies that pay poverty wages, outsource jobs overseas, engage in union busting, deny good benefits, and pay CEOs outrageous compensation packages
  • Eliminate “Right to Work for Less” laws and guarantee the right to unionize for workers historically excluded from labor protections, like farm workers and domestic workers.
Housing for All
  • End the housing crisis by investing $2.5 trillion to build nearly 10 million permanently affordable housing units.
  • Protect tenants by implementing a national rent control standard, a “just-cause” requirement for evictions, and ensuring the right to counsel in housing disputes.
  • Make rent affordable by making Section 8 vouchers available to all eligible families without a wait-list and strengthening the Fair Housing Act.
  • Combat gentrification, exclusionary zoning, segregation, and speculation.
  • End homelessness and ensure fair housing for all
  • Revitalize public housing by investing $70 billion to repair, decarbonize, and build new public housing.
Expand Social Security
  • Expand Social Security benefits for all recipients and protect pensions.
  • Protect our most vulnerable seniors by quadrupling funding for the Older Americans Act and expanding other programs seniors rely on.
Justice & Safety for All
  • End for-profit greed in our criminal justice system, top to bottom by: banning for-profit prisons and detention centers, ending cash bail, and making prison and jail communications, re-entry, diversion and treatment programs fee-free.
  • Ensure due process and right to counsel by vastly increasing funding for public defenders and creating a federal formula to ensure populations have a minimum number of public defenders to meet their needs.
  • Cut the national prison population in half and end mass incarceration by abolishing the death penalty, three strikes laws, and mandatory minimum sentences, as well as expanding the use of alternatives to detention
  • Transform the way we police communities by ending the War on Drugs by legalizing marijuana and expunging past convictions, treating children who interact with the justice system as children, reversing the criminalization of addiction, and ending the reliance on police forces to handle mental health emergencies, homelessness, maintenance violations, and other low-level situations.
  • Reform our decrepit prison system, guarantee a “Prisoners Bill of Rights,” and ensure a just transition for incarcerated individuals upon their release.
  • Reverse the criminalization of communities, end cycles of violence, provide support to survivors of crime, and invest in our communities.
  • Ensure law enforcement accountability and robust oversight, including banning the use of facial recognition software for policing.
Eliminating Medical Debt
  • Eliminate all of the $81 billion in past-due medical debt held by 79 million Americans —one in every six Americans.
Reinvest in Public Education
  • Combat racial discrimination and school segregation
  • End the unaccountable profit-motive of charter schools
  • Provide equitable funding for public schools
  • Give teachers a much-deserved raise by setting a starting salary for teachers at no less than $60,000, expanding collective bargaining rights and teacher tenure, and funding out-of-pocket expenses for classroom materials.
  • Strengthens the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) by ensuring that the federal government provides at least 50 percent of the funding for special education and giving special education teachers the support they need.
  • Provide year-round, free universal school meals, and incentivize locally sourced food.
Tax on Extreme Wealth
  • Establish an annual tax on the extreme wealth of the top 0.1 percent of U.S. households.
  • Ensure that the wealthy are not able to evade the tax by implementing strong enforcement policies.
Racial Justice
  • Address the five central types of violence waged against black, brown and indigenous Americans: physical, political, legal, economic and environmental.
  • Address a broken criminal justice system, massive disparities in the availability of financial services, health disparities, environmental disparities, and educational disparities.
High-Speed Internet for All
  • Provide $150 billion through the Green New Deal in infrastructure grants and technical assistance for municipalities and/or states to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.
  • Require that all internet service providers offer a Basic Internet Plan that provides quality broadband speeds at an affordable price.
  • Break up internet service provider and cable monopolies, bar service providers from providing content, and unwind anticompetitive mergers.
  • Ensure broadband infrastructure is resilient to the effects of climate change.
Free & Fair Elections
  • Restore the Voting Rights Act and overturn Citizens United.
  • End racist voter suppression [e.g., Voter ID requirements, restrictions against same-day registration] and partisan gerrymandering.
  • Make Election Day a national holiday, secure automatic voter registration, and guarantee the right to vote for every American over 18, including those Americans currently incarcerated and those disenfranchised by a felony conviction.
  • Abolish super PACs and replace corporate funding with publicly funded elections that amplify small-doner donations.
Income Inequality Tax Plan
  • Companies with large gaps between their CEO and median worker pay would see progressively higher corporate tax rates.
  • Apply to all private and publicly held corporations with annual revenue of more than $100 million.
Women’s Rights
  • Adopt Equal Pay for Equal Work through the Paycheck Fairness Act.
  • Guarantee health care through Medicare for All, repeal the Hyde Amendment and fully fund Planned Parenthood, Title X, and other initiatives that protect women’s health, access to contraception, and the availability of a safe and legal abortion.
  • Oppose all efforts to undermine or overturn Roe v. Wade, and appoint federal judges who will uphold women’s most fundamental rights.
Get Corporate Money out of Politics
  • Abolish the now-worthless FEC and replace it with the Federal Election Administration, a true law enforcement agency originally proposed by former Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold.
  • Enacting mandatory public financing laws for all federal elections.
  • Updating and strengthen the Federal Election Campaign Act to return to a system of mandatory public funding for National Party Conventions.
  • Passing a Constitutional Amendment that makes clear that money is not speech and corporations are not people.
LGBTQ+ Equality
  • Ensure LGBTQ+ people have comprehensive health insurance without discrimination from providers.
Tax Increases for the Rich
  • Pass the “For the 99.8 Percent” Act to establish a progressive estate tax on multi-millionaire and billionaire inheritances.
  • End special tax breaks on capital gains and dividends for the top 1%.
  • Tax Wall Street speculators through the Inclusive Prosperity Act Financial Transaction Tax.
Legalizing Marijuana
  • Legalize marijuana in the first 100 days [of taking office as president] with executive action
  • Vacate and expunge all past marijuana-related convictions
  • Ensure that revenue from legal marijuana is reinvested in communities hit hardest by the War on Drugs
Gun Safety
  • Take on the NRA and its corrupting effect on Washington.
  • Expand background checks.
  • End the gun show loophole. All gun purchases should be subject to the same background check standards.
  • Ban the sale and distribution of assault weapons. Assault weapons are designed and sold as tools of war. There is absolutely no reason why these firearms should be sold to civilians.
  • Prohibit high-capacity ammunition magazines.
  • Implement a buyback program to get assault weapons off the streets.
  • Regulate assault weapons in the same way that we currently regulate fully automatic weapons — a system that essentially makes them unlawful to own.
Empowering Tribal nations
  • Stand with Native Americans in the struggle to protect their treaty and sovereign rights, advance traditional ways of life, and improve the quality of life for Native Americans by upholding the trust responsibility.
  • Honor Native American tribal treaty rights and sovereignty, moving away from a relationship of paternalism and control toward one of deference and support.
  • Reauthorize and expand the Violence Against Women Act to provide critical resources to women in Indian country and allow all tribes to prosecute non-Native criminals.
Real Wall Street Reform
  • Break up too-big-to-fail banks and end the too-big-to-jail doctrine.
  • Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act.
  • Restrict rapid-fire financial speculation with a financial transactions tax.
Jobs For All
  • Enact a federal jobs guarantee, to ensure that everyone is guaranteed a stable job that pays a living wage.
  • Create 20 million jobs as part of the Green New Deal, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and creating a 100% sustainable energy system.
  • Create millions of healthcare jobs to support our seniors and people with disabilities in their homes and communities.
  • Create new jobs in early childhood education.
Fair Trade
  • Fundamentally rewrite all of our trade deals to deals to prevent the outsourcing of American jobs and raise wages.
  • Ensure that strong and binding labor, environmental, and human rights standards are written into the core text of all trade agreements.
  • Eliminate the incentives baked into our current trade and tax agreements that make it easier for multinational corporations to ship jobs overseas.
  • Sign an executive order ending federal contracts to corporations that outsource American jobs
Corporate accountability
  • Fundamentally shift the wealth of the economy back into the hands of the workers who create it.
  • Give workers an ownership stake in the companies they work for.
  • Finally make corporations pay their fair share of taxes by reversing Trump’s corporate tax breaks and closing corporate tax loopholes to raise up to $3 trillion over 10-years.

The Cost of Sanders’s Agenda: $97.5 Trillion

In an October 2019 piece in City Journal, Manhattan Institute economic policy expert Brian Riedl laid bare exactly how much it would cost to implement Sanders’s various agenda items. Below are numerous key excerpts from Riedl’s important article:
  • “All told, Sanders’s current plans would cost as much as $97.5 trillion over the next decade.”
  • “[T]otal government spending at all levels would surge to as high as 70 percent of gross domestic product.”
  • “Approximately half of the American workforce would be employed by the government.”
  • “The ten-year budget deficit would approach $90 trillion, with average annual deficits exceeding 30 percent of GDP.”
  • “The $97.5 trillion price tag is made up mostly of the costs of Sanders’s three most ambitious proposals. Sanders concedes that his Medicare For All plan would increase federal spending by “somewhere between $30 and $40 trillion over a 10-year period.” He pledges to spend $16.3 trillion on his climate plan. And his proposal to guarantee all Americans a full-time government job paying $15 an hour, with full benefits, is estimated to cost $30.1 trillion. The final $11.1 trillion includes $3 trillion to forgive all student loans and guarantee free public-college tuition—plus $1.8 trillion to expand Social Security, $2.5 trillion on housing, $1.6 trillion on paid family leave, $1 trillion on infrastructure, $800 billion on general K-12 education spending, and an additional $400 billion on higher public school teacher salaries.”
  • “Sanders proposes a top federal income-tax rate of 52 percent. Capital gains and dividends would be taxed as ordinary income, plus a 10 percent net investment-income surtax for the wealthy. The resulting 62 percent top tax bracket for investments would be so far beyond the revenue-maximizing rate that it would produce little actual revenue.”
  • “Overall, upper-income taxpayers would face a marginal tax rate as high as 80 percent from their federal income, state income, and payroll taxes. They would also be assessed a 62 percent investment tax rate, an annual wealth tax of up to 8 percent, and a 77 percent estate tax.”

Sanders Hires Illegal Alien for His Presidential Campaign

On March 1, 2019, Sanders hired 25-year-old Arizona activist Belén Sisa, an illegal alien describing herself as an immigrant without legal status, as a deputy press secretary. Former President Obama’s “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) program protected Sisa from deportation.

Deriding Capitalism & Exalting Socialism, Which Is About “Transforming American Society”

In a 2019 interview, Sanders said: “You have more and more growth producing products that we do not necessarily need. I mean you know, at the end of the day, you don’t necessarily need the choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or 18 different pairs of sneakers, when children are hungry in this country.”
On another occasion, Sanders stated candidly: “My vision is not just making modest changes around the edge. It is transforming American society. So when I use the word ‘socialist,’ and I know some people are uncomfortable about it, I say that it is imperative that we create a political revolution, and I hope you will be part of that movement, because if you are, we can in fact transform this country.”

Falsely Claiming That Scandinavian Countries, Upon Which He Wishes to Model the American Economy, Are Socialist

When extolling the virtues of “democratic socialism,” Sanders typically distances his model from those of the old Soviet Union or present-day China. Rather, he cites the Scandinavian economies of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway as the ideal for which he is aiming. But those countries do not in fact have socialist economies. Rather, they have free-market economies coupled with very high taxation rates on all working people, to pay for a very generous social-welfare system. As Jeffrey Dorfman explains in Forbes magazine:
“As the American left embraces a platform that continues to look more and more like a socialist’s dream, it is common for those on the right to counter with the example of Venezuela as the nightmare of socialism in reality. A common response from the left is that socialism (or democratic socialism) works just fine in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It is certainly true that Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark are notable economic successes. What is false is that these countries are particularly socialist.
“The myth of Nordic socialism is partially created by a confusion between socialism, meaning government exerting control or ownership of businesses, and the welfare state in the form of government-provided social safety net programs. However, the left’s embrace of socialism is not merely a case of redefining a word. Simply look at the long-running affinity of leftists with socialist dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for proof many on the left long for real socialism.
“To the extent that the left wants to point to an example of successful socialism, not just generous welfare states, the Nordic countries are actually a poor case to cite. Regardless of the perception, in reality the Nordic countries practice mostly free market economics paired with high taxes exchanged for generous government entitlement programs.
“First, it is worth noting that the Nordic counties were economic successes before they built their welfare states. Those productive economies, generating good incomes for their workers, allowed the governments to raise the tax revenue needed to pay for the social benefits. It was not the government benefits that created wealth, but wealth that allowed the luxury of such generous government programs.
“Second, as evidence of the lack of government interference in business affairs, there is the fact that none of these countries have minimum wage laws. Unions are reasonably powerful in many industries and negotiate contracts, but the government does nothing to ensure any particular outcome from those negotiations. Workers are paid what they are worth, not based on government’s perception of what is fair.
“A third example of Nordic commitment to free markets can be found in Sweden which has complete school choice. The government provides families with vouchers for each child. These vouchers can be used to attend regular public schools, government-run charter schools, or private, for-profit schools. Clearly, the use of government funds to pay for private, for-profit schools is the opposite of socialism.
“We can also confirm these isolated facts by looking at a comprehensive measure of capitalism relative to socialism. The Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based, pro-free market, think tank, compiles a worldwide ranking of countries called the economic freedom index. Its website explains that its ranking ‘is an effort to identify how closely the institutions and policies of a country correspond with a limited government ideal, where the government protects property rights and arranges for the provision of a limited set of public goods such as national defense and access to money of sound value, but little beyond these core functions.’ Clearly, a socialist country should perform poorly in any ranking based on these principles.
“What we find, however, is the Nordic countries rank quite high on this index of economic freedom. In fact, while Hong Kong and Singapore top the list and the U.S. ranks 12th, we can find the Nordic countries in quite respectable rankings. Denmark ranks 15, Finland 17, Norway 25, and Sweden 27. In terms of numerical scores, Sweden is only 5% lower than the U.S. For further comparison, South Korea and Japan, both considered fairly pro-free market, rank 32 and 39, respectively.
“Socialism can take the form of government controlling or interfering with free markets, nationalizing industries, and subsidizing favored ones (green energy, anyone?). The Nordic countries don’t actually do much of those things. Yes, they offer government-paid healthcare, in some cases tuition-free university educations, and rather generous social safety nets, all financed with high taxes. However, it is possible to do these things without interfering in the private sector more than required. It is allowing businesses to be productive that produces the high corporate and personal incomes that support the tax collections making the government benefits feasible. The Nordic countries are smart enough not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
“If the left insists on naming a system of generous government benefits combined with a free market democratic socialism, I cannot stop them. That seems unnecessarily confusing since the government is actually running no industries other than education (and meddling somewhat in healthcare). It certainly isn’t socialism. In fact, the only reason most such countries can afford those benefits is that their market economies are so productive they can cover the expense of the government’s generosity. Perhaps a better name for what the Nordic countries practice would be compassionate capitalism.”

Sanders Campaign Workers Call for Violence

On January 14, 2019, Project Veritas published an undercover video showing one of the top Iowa field organizers in Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign stating that Soviet gulags were a positive phenomenon, and suggesting that some similar program of detention and torture might be able to effectively reshape the values and worldview of Trump supporters and wealthy people. The video began with a Project Veritas journalist asking Sanders organizer Kyle Jurek, who was a paid worker for the campaign, if “MAGA people” — a reference to the acronym for Trump’s 2016 “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan — could be re-educated to think differently if Sanders were to be elected president. “We gotta try,” Jurek replied. “In Nazi Germany, after the fall of the Nazi Party, there was a shit-ton of the populace that was fucking Nazified. Germany had to spend billions of dollars re-educating their fucking people to not be Nazis. We’re probably going to have to do the same fucking thing here. That’s kind of what all Bernie’s whole fucking like, ‘hey, free education for everybody’ because we’re going to have to teach you to not be a fucking Nazi.”
Elsewhere in the video, Jurek said that that the CIA had been excessively critical of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s use of gulags: “People were actually paid a living wage in the gulags. They have conjugal visits in gulags. Gulags were meant for re-education.” The most effective way to re-educate the billionaire class, Jurek added, would be to force them to do hard, purposeless physical labor: “[The] greatest way to break a fucking billionaire of their privilege and their idea that they’re superior, go and break rocks for 12 hours a day. You’re now a working class person, and you’re going to fucking learn what the means, right?”
The video also showed Jurek warning that Milwaukee, where the 2020 Democratic National Convention was scheduled to be held, would go up in flames — followed by additional cities — if Sanders failed to win the party’s nomination. “If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC convention, fucking Milwaukee will burn,” said the organizer. “It’ll start in Milwaukee and then when the police push back on that, other sites will fucking [explode].” “Be ready to be in Milwaukee for the DNC convention,” he added. “We’re going to make [the riots that occurred during the 1968 Democratic National Convention] look like a fucking girl’s scout fucking cookout,” Jurek warned. “The cops are going to be the ones fucking beaten in Milwaukee.”
Later in January 2020, Project Veritas released undercover video footage of Martin Weissgerber, a field organizer for Sanders in South Carolina, proclaiming his desire to see the United States to undergo a “revolution” and stating also:
  • “I’m ready to start tearing [things] up and start fighting. I’m no cap bro. I’ll straight up get armed, I want to learn how to shoot, and go train.”
  • “Guillotine the rich.”
  • “What will help is when we send all the Republicans to the re-education camps. Can you imagine Mitch McConnell? Lindsey Graham?”
  • “The gulags were founded as re-education camps. People came from America to work on the Belomorkanal, the Soviet project, for the communist project. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Sanders Supports the New Way Forward Act on Immigration

Sanders supported the New Way Forward Act which was introduced in December 2019 by Democratic Illinois Rep. Jesús García and was subsequently co-sponsored by more than 40 additional House Democrats. The Daily Caller summarized some key provisions of the bill:
“Under the auspices of the bill, minimum prison sentences that require deportation would rise from one year to five years. This could mean that illegal aliens who are convicted of crimes such as car theft, weapons offenses and fraud — all crimes that carry average sentences of less than five years, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics — would not be required to be removed from the country.
“Additionally, the legislation calls for the widespread return of criminal illegal aliens who have been previously deported from the country. Any illegal aliens deported since April 1996 — if they would have otherwise been considered undeportable under the terms of this bill — would be allowed to come back to the U.S.”
Kris Kobach, a candidate for a United States Senate seat representing Kansas, added additional context:
“Any crime where the minimum sentence is less than five years, you can’t kick that person out of the country.… so we’re talking about auto theft, gun offenses, child abuse, rape, manslaughter, and a host of other crimes, and then here’s where it gets really crazy. It invites back into the United States any deported criminal who has committed those offenses in the last 24 years.
“Alien criminals get to come back and skip the line. So we’re talking about rapists, drug dealers, people convicted of manslaughter in the last 24 years that the United States has spent billions of dollars in apprehending, detaining, prosecuting, removing. They get to come back, and you and I get to pay for it.
“The taxpayer will give all of these deported criminals free flights back into the United States.… You don’t have to spend a penny if you come back if we deported you for your crimes here in the last 24 years…. In the part of the bill that says the criminal alien gets to come home for free, that’s the word, ‘home.’ It says the alien has a ‘right to come home.’ That’s the title of that section of that bill. Never mind that the alien was never a citizen of the United States and has been back in his country of origin for up to 24 years.… They wrote this bill insisting that the United States is his true home and so that’s why we have to fly him ‘home.’”

Sanders Preparing Dozens of Executive Orders for His First Day As President

In late January 2020, the Washington Post reported that the Sanders campaign had outlined dozens of possible executive orders that Sanders might enact upon taking office as president. “As we continue discussing the early work of your presidency and the progress we can make, below for review is a brief overview of executive actions you could take early in your administration,” read one document reviewed by the Post. “We cannot accept delays from Congress on some of the most pressing issues, especially those like immigration where Trump has governed with racism and for his own corrupt benefit.” According to the Post, some of the executive orders would reverse President Trump’s policies on immigration, including an immediate halt of border wall construction, the removal of limits on refugees accepted for asylum, and the reinstatement of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Other orders would ban the exportation of crude oil and the termination of any federal contracts with companies that paid employees less than $15 per hour.

Sanders’ History of Using Campaign Funds to Pay for Media-Buying Services from Consulting Company Founded & Operated by His Wife and Her Children

In a February 2020 video presentation, Peter Schweizer, author of the book Profiles in Corruptionstated:
“When Bernie was first elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he appointed his then girlfriend Jane Driscoll to a position in his administration. Though the position was originally unpaid, Bernie eventually put her on the payroll over the objections of the city council. And Jane’s income would continue to be tied to Bernie’s public service.
“Once Bernie and Jane were married, Jane received a big raise. And when Bernie won election to Congress, Jane’s business ties to her husband went to a new level.
“By 2000, Bernie was in Washington D.C, serving in Congress. Jane and her children formed a new LLC called Sanders and Driscoll. The new firm was a for-profit consulting company, and was run by Jane, daughter Carina, and son David. The family ran this new business out of the Sanders family home. Because of the way it was structured, it’s impossible to know just how much money Bernie’s wife and children made from his congressional campaign. But critics would claim that Sanders doled out more than $150,000 to his family through the new company.
“Jane would even set up a media buying company, meaning that she would get paid every time candidate Bernie Sanders bought television advertising for his Congressional campaigns.
“Then, during his 2016 presidential run, the Sanders campaign would funnel $82 million through a mysterious media buying company run by Jane’s former colleagues. That company, known as Olde Towne Media, was located in private home in a cul de sac in Virginia. When a Vermont reporter called to ask Jane about her possible ties to Old Town Media, she said, ‘I have no idea what Old Towne Media is’ and hung up the phone.”

Russia Seeks to Help Sanders Presidential Campaign

In February 2020, federal officials notified Sanders as well as lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Russia was trying to boost his campaign for U.S. President. According to The Washington Post: “Some analysts believe that the Kremlin’s goal is to cause the maximum disruption within the United States, and it throws the support of its hackers and trolls behind candidates based on that goal, not any particular affinity for the persons running.”

Sanders Says That U.S. Criminal Justice System Is Racist & Less Fair Than China’s System

During a February 2020 campaign rally in Texas, Sanders said: “This is the United States of America. We should not be having more people in jail than any other country on earth including Communist China [which is] four times our size.” Lamenting America’s “racist and broken criminal justice system,” he stated: “The people in jail, as everybody here knows, are disproportionately African American, Latino, and Native Americans.” Sanders also  pledged that, as president, he would invest money in more education for young people instead of “more jail and incarceration,” and that he would end the cash bail system.

Sanders Campaign Allies with Dream Defenders, a Committed Enemy of Israel & Jews

On March 1, 2020, the Daily Caller reported:
“Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign website touts an endorsement from the radical group, Dream Defenders, and the group’s co-director, Phillip Agnew, is a top Sanders surrogate. The group’s political arm, Dream Defenders PAC, has been holding twice-weekly phone banking events in support of Sanders…. Dream Defenders … has declared its support for the anti-Israel boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) movement, which has its own ties to designated terrorist organizations. [Dream Defenders] has also has repeatedly promoted the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has been a U.S.-designated terrorist organization since 1997.”

Sanders’ Voting Record

For an overview of Sanders’ voting record on an array of key issues, click here.

Miscellaneous

Over the years, Bernie Sanders’ political campaigns have received strong support from such organizations as the AFL-CIO, the American Association for Justice, the Backbone Campaign, the Council for a Livable World, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Peace Action.
During part of Sanders’ tenure in the House of Representatives, his official spokesman was David Sirota of the Center for American Progress.
Sanders is a strong supporter of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of environmentalists and big labor that wants the federal government to take over America’s energy industry.
Sanders has been a contributor to the left-wing magazine, The Progressive.
Among the notables who have contributed money to Sanders’ political campaigns over the years are Aris AnagnosEd Asner’s wife Cindy, Brent BlackwelderOssie DavisRob ReinerSusan SarandonJan SchakowskyPete SeegerBarbra Streisand, and Margery Tabankin.

Additional Information

For additional information on Bernie Sanders, click here.

GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA ASK NEW YORK TO RED FLAG SENATOR CHUCK SCHUMER FOR HIS THREATS TO SUPREME COURT JUSTICES

GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA ASK NEW YORK TO RED FLAG SENATOR CHUCK SCHUMER FOR HIS THREATS TO SUPREME COURT JUSTICES 
BY JOHN CRUMP
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research 
purposes:

Albany, New York –-(Ammoland.com)- New York State has one of the most robust “red flag” laws in the country. It allows a petitioner to seek an extreme risk protection order (ERPO) if there is a threat of violence against others.
At a pro-abortion rally, Senator Chuck Schumer publicly threatened that Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch “would pay the price” if they ruled in favor of a Louisiana's law that requires abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital. Schumer is an advocate of abortion and sees any restrictions on the practice as unconstitutional.
At the same time, Schumer thinks that restrictions on the Second Amendment are perfectly Constitutional. A lot of Gun owners see this contraction as hypocritical similar to their views on Bloomberg’s opinion that he is more deserving of security than the average American.
The Senator's full statement was this: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
The comment drew criticism from Republicans in the Senate, House of Representatives, President Trump, and even a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. They called Schumer's statement a clear threat to the Justices.
Roberts's statement reads: “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All members of the court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”

Now Gun Owners of America (GOA) is asking New York State to issue an ERPO against Chuck Schumer.

In the letter to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, GOA's Senior Vice, Erich Pratt, highlights that the gun-rights group opposed the New York red flag law. It also lays out how they are concerned that the courts disproportionately execute red flag laws in minority and poor neighborhoods. The group further states that the organization believes that the rich and powerful might get a pass when it comes to the law.
The letter also shares the story of Gary J. Willis, age 61, of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Willis was shot and killed by police when they were serving an ERPO against him. His sister filed the order against him because of a dispute about his mother’s care. Maryland also executes the majority of ERPO in minority areas.
GOA Letter to NY Gov and AG Re Schumer March 6, 2020
Pratt asks the Governor to enforce the law fairly by issuing an ERPO against Senator Schumer. GOA will use this request as a test to see if its concern is legitimate. Schumer was a big supporter of the New York Red Flag law and pushed for the adoption of a similar law nationwide. Both Senator Schumer and Governor Cuomo are both members of the New York Democratic party.
The letter also highlights that Schumer also appears to have violated 40 U.S.C. section 6134 since the pro-abortion rally took place on the steps of the Supreme Court Building.

The code states: “It is unlawful to … make a harangue or oration, or utter loud, threatening, or abusive language in the Supreme Court Building or grounds.”

Pratts says that the GOA and the American people are waiting to see if the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia will apply the law equally between average American citizens and the ruling class. If the U.S. Attorney does decide to prosecute Schumer, then he would face “a fine or imprisonment of not more than 60 days, or both.”
Pratt asserts that if New York decides not to enforce their red flag law against the Senator, then it would show that New York's gun laws are applied harshly to the general public while leaving the rich and powerful immune from such enforcement. It would verify the average gun owner's fear that there is a double standard in how laws are enforced.
Pratt also included a draft application for a Temporary Extreme Risk Protection Order for Senator Chuck Schumer.
NY Chuck Schumer Temporary Extreme Risk Protection Order Application
About John Crump
John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. He is the former CEO of Veritas Firearms, LLC and is the co-host of The Patriot News Podcast which can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/patriotnews. John has written extensively on the patriot movement including 3%'ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias. In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and is currently working on a book on leftist deplatforming methods and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, on Facebook at realjohncrump, or at www.crumpy.com.