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GREENFIELD: How Bernie Sqnders Sold His Soul to the Left
The Sultan Knish blog ^ | Thursday, April 07, 2016 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on 04/08/2016 7:00:21 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell

Thursday, April 07, 2016

How Bernie Sanders Sold His Soul to the Left

Posted by Daniel Greenfield

Win or lose, the Sanders campaign has its story. Bernie Sanders is the authentic candidate; the unapologetic progressive who pushes the left’s agenda without worrying about offending anyone.

Bernie doesn’t pander. Just look at him glaring into the camera, angrily delivering the same “smash capitalism” stump speech and then waiting for the local college students to take selfies with him. You may disagree with him. But he’s authentic, a curmudgeon who says whatever he really thinks.

And if you believe that, there’s a bridge in Bernie’s old Brooklyn neighborhood you can buy.

The left is not an authentic political movement. It values dogma, not passion. What it sells is the appearance of passion and the hollow illusion of self-expression while pushing a rigid agenda.

The real story of the Bernie Sanders campaign is not that voters reward authenticity, but the illusion of it. Obama beat Hillary because he seemed more authentic. But he was just better at pandering to the left while appearing to be natural and rehearsed in a way that you have to rehearse a lot to achieve.

Bernie Sanders has thrived by abandoning whatever made him authentic and becoming a robot reciting dogma in a voice borrowed from Larry David. Hillary Clinton never had a soul, but Bernie Sanders sold his in the hopes of beating her. And he got a bad deal on his soul because he can’t even seem to do that.

Originally Bernie Sanders was an independent who held unconventional views on some issues and wasn’t tied down to the Democratic Party and its widely loathed identity politics. Instead he could just do his old time Wall Street Socialist shtick and score populist points with angry voters without having to pander to every group and cause in the progressive politically correct spectrum of stupidity.

This was the Bernie Sanders who told Ezra Klein that he opposed open borders because it “says essentially there is no United States” and “would make everybody in America poorer.”

“You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?” Bernie barked.

Liberal heads exploded. Bernie tried to defend his views and then surrendered. A few months later, he was calling for amnesty for everyone, even illegal immigrants who had already been deported, without securing the borders, and attacking Hillary Clinton for being too hard on illegal aliens.

Currently Bernie Sanders is calling for putting “a stop to the notion that the border must be secured before legalization can happen,” abandoning “boondoggle walls” and dismantling deportation and detention, and letting illegal aliens buy ObamaCare. That last one may be more of a punishment.

It took only a few months for Bernie Sanders to go from blasting open borders as a right-wing Wall Street conspiracy to becoming an open borders candidate. Which, by his own definition, would make him a right-wing Wall Street tool of the capitalist conspiracy.

That’s how “authentic” Bernie really is.

The Bernie Sanders who attacked open borders at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce was authentic. He’s gone. In his place is Bernie Sanders 2.0, an authentic robot spewing authentic progressive talking points about illegal immigration. That’s what an authentic sellout Bernie is.

What happened to Bernie Sanders on immigration also happened to him on a range of issues where he formerly deviated from the political orthodoxy of the Democrats. The deviations have been smoothed away. Hillary Clinton has been mocked for adopting Bernie Sanders’ positions, but Bernie adopted more of her positions than she did of his. He sold his soul to try and win.

When Hillary Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders from the left on gun control, he reinvented his views. When Clinton’s political allies sent #BlackLivesMatter activists to harass him, he hemmed and hawed and then endorsed the worst of his new party’s identity politics pandering. When he as attacked for refusing to endorse reparations, he decided to endorse an apology and reparations.

Every time Hillary Clinton hit him on a position where he was out of step with political dogma, he scampered to adjust his views.

And it wasn’t just Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders was constantly adjusting his views to atone for past violations of party dogma. Any authentically unconventional views in the past had to be denounced and disassociated from.

Bernie Sanders delivered an anti-Israel speech in Utah while refusing to come to the AIPAC convention. In Arizona, his campaign placed a member of the anti-Semitic hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine, behind him while he talked.

Bernie was telling the left that he was disavowing the Jewish State. The authentic candidate was desperately pandering to left-wing donors to keep funding his failed campaign. He was lashing out at Jews for “disportionately” fighting the Islamic terrorists who were killing their children. He was appealing to the left-wing bigots who might have believed NPR’s Diane Rehm when she accused him of having dual citizenship in Israel. It was an authentically disgusting moment.

But his anti-Israel Utah speech was more than a shift, it was an apology. One of his more infuriating moments for the left had been his attack on Hamas supporters at a town hall in Vermont. His Utah speech obsessively attacked Israel for having bombed Hamas terrorists in Gaza several years ago. It’s 2016 and Gaza isn’t a current issue. Even Obama and Kerry don’t dwell on it anymore.

Why did Bernie Sanders suddenly feel the need to unload on Israel over its last war with Hamas?

Why focus on Gaza rather than any more current issues and controversies? Bernie was disavowing his past half-hearted defense of Israel. He wasn’t just pandering, he was trying to retroactively rewrite his views as if they had never existed. His increasingly strident anti-Israel rhetoric escalated when he accused Israel of killing 10,000 innocent people in Gaza. By emphasizing Gaza, Bernie was trying to make the left forget about his past sins of defending Israel's campaign against Hamas.

We have always been at war with Eastasia. Bernie had always been on the right side of the left when it came to Israel or immigration or gun control… or anything else.

Israel may be the last piece of Bernie’s tattered soul that he has to sell to the left for more money to keep going until Hillary’s superdelegates finally crush his miserable campaign. The Jewish State is the last shred of his “authenticity” that he has to give up to become an authentic left-wing hack.

But it’s not as if Bernie Sanders hasn’t done it before.

Back when Bernie Sanders was with the Liberty Union Party, he was militantly anti-Israel. Then when he went mainstream, he softened his views. Bernie was anti-Israel before he was pro-Israel before he was anti-Israel. The “authentic” candidate has spent his political life pandering to someone.

There was never really an authentic Bernie Sanders. Bernie was always a politician who reshaped his views when he needed to. Bernie’s supporters like to claim that he isn’t for sale. But Bernie Sanders sold his soul long ago. Now he’s auctioning off the used pieces of it a second and a third time for a few bucks.

The left’s greatest lie is that it is a movement for rebels, non-conformists and independent thinkers. It’s impossible to be authentic and left-wing. The left values conformity above all else and harshly punishes even mild forms of dissent. On the left, speaking freely is impossible. Even thinking freely is dangerous.

Bernie Sanders is selling the same illusion as Obama, that it’s possible to be left-wing without sounding like an ideological robot. That you can be progressive without being Hillary Clinton. And that’s a myth.

Hillary Clinton is too clumsy to mask the rigid process by which leftists adopt the party line. Obama and Bernie Sanders obscure the same creepy process with personality and style. But they are no different. They can’t be. There’s no room for dissent, independence and authenticity on the left.

Bernie Sanders sold his soul to be an authentic leftist. Souls are the price of membership in the left.


TOPICS: Government; History; Politics; Religion
KEYWORDS: bernie; flipflops; greenfield; sultanknish
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Front Page mag - A Project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Daniel Greenfield Ping List Notification of new articles.

I am posting Greenfield's articles from FrontPage and the Sultan Knish blog. FReepmail or drop me a comment to get on or off the Greenfield ping list.

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FrontPage is a basic resource for conservative thought. Lou

1 posted on 04/08/2016 7:00:21 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell
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To: Louis Foxwell; daisy mae for the usa; AdvisorB; wizardoz; free-in-nyc; Vendome; Georgia Girl 2; ...

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

To get on or off the Greenfield ping list please reply to this post.

2 posted on 04/08/2016 7:01:12 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (Stop Islam and save the world.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

This is an election, and a war, for the soul of America.


3 posted on 04/08/2016 7:07:08 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (Stop Islam and save the world.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

How could he sell his soul to the left? He already resided there.


4 posted on 04/08/2016 7:07:15 PM PDT by CARTOUCHE
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To: CARTOUCHE

Read the article. It is explained.


5 posted on 04/08/2016 7:08:05 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (Stop Islam and save the world.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

Bernie has never accomplished anything that is real or supported any policy that was decent. He is the evil part of Hillary without the greed. He only wants to rule over suffering.


6 posted on 04/08/2016 7:09:59 PM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

“Originally Bernie Sanders was an independent who held unconventional views on some issues”

No, he wasn’t.

L


7 posted on 04/08/2016 7:10:02 PM PDT by Lurker (Violence is rarely the answer. But when it is it is the only answer.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

Bernie has been an ultra left piece of ##### from VERY early on.

If one reads his history that is obvious.

His soul was wasted and corrupted long ago.

Blathering hatred of America from 15 till 40, when he started writing sick garbage for 50 bucks a pop.


8 posted on 04/08/2016 7:17:40 PM PDT by dp0622 (The only thing an upper crust conservative hates more than a liberal is a middle class conservative)
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To: Louis Foxwell

Bernie Sanders, a Josef Stalin with Alzheimer’s disease, always sounded like a Commie robot to me.


9 posted on 04/08/2016 7:25:26 PM PDT by Stepan12
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To: Louis Foxwell

I do have a question...

Not knowing Bernie from any other communist shill, has he ever been involved in any sort of shady deal to enrich himself or his spouse like Killery?

He’s plain batsh!t crazy, that is without question, but I’ve never heard any accusation about Bernie enriching himself at the expense of the taxpayers or anyone else. No, I’ll grant that I haven’t looked very hard, but Killery’s history of criminality is legendary and well documented.

Bernie?


10 posted on 04/08/2016 7:28:30 PM PDT by Ouderkirk (To the left, everything must evidence that this or that strand of leftist theory is true)
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To: Louis Foxwell
Bernie Sanders: Socialist bum.


11 posted on 04/08/2016 7:33:28 PM PDT by Travis McGee (www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com)
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To: Ouderkirk

No, I think Bernie is anti accomplishment. He was a failure in all of his business dealings until he went into politics around age 40. He has lived off the .gov teat since without any accomplishments except naming a post office. He hates those who are successful and wishes to bring them down. That would obviously bring down the country, but Bernie is too stupid to see it over the utopian/evil things he believes.


12 posted on 04/08/2016 7:41:20 PM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

What soul?


13 posted on 04/08/2016 7:44:08 PM PDT by beethovenfan (Islam is a cancer on civilization.)
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To: MtnClimber
Bernie... is the evil part of Hillary without the greed. He only wants to rule over suffering.

Very well said.

14 posted on 04/08/2016 7:50:48 PM PDT by Talisker (One who commands, must obey.)
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To: Talisker

And then there was his essay about fantasies of abusing women that he wrote for some leftist rag. How in the world is it that they haven’t used this against him? Here’s the synopsis from People mag:

http://www.people.com/article/bernie-sanders-rape-fantasy-essay-late-night-seth-meyers


15 posted on 04/08/2016 8:09:22 PM PDT by The Continental Op
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To: Louis Foxwell

Thanks, I read his articles too.

I remember hearing Bernie saying that we shouldn’t let illegals in to take our young people’s jobs at the beginning of his campaign,and thought at leSt he’s a sort of realistic socialist. Then Hillary and the democrats demonized him for that so now he’s promising everything to illegals.


16 posted on 04/08/2016 8:20:28 PM PDT by Rusty0604
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To: Louis Foxwell; flaglady47; Maine Mariner; JulieRNR21; seekthetruth; pax_et_bonum
The enemedia knows every scar, scab and blemish on Trump's body and soul since he was in the womb....yet NO ONE knows a single thing about Sanders' history at all.

Trump's blemishes are repeated ad infinitum on TV, the print-press and the media's internet blogs and forums.

Yet Bernie and his socialism, his radical past and his lack of any kind of economic experience at anything get no scrutiny whatsoever.

Why, you'd think that just the photo above of the creepy radical young nerd would be a juicy delight for the media to put out in circulation just to grab attention, but, nope, I doubt if anyone other than Greenfield's readers plus freepers here will EVER see it.

He is being protected just as much as Hillary is being protected.

Very informative article, Louis, thanks for posting.

Leni

17 posted on 04/08/2016 8:21:57 PM PDT by MinuteGal (GO TRUMP GO !!!)
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To: Ouderkirk

Actually he left that to his wife and her corrupt real estate deal tied to the VT university system. No link right now, it’s to late in the evening for me to look it up.


18 posted on 04/08/2016 9:07:06 PM PDT by VTenigma (The Democratic party is the party of the mathematically challenged)
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To: Louis Foxwell

Bernie Sqnders is q dick, qlwqys wqs q dick, qnd qlwqys will bw q dick.


19 posted on 04/08/2016 9:09:28 PM PDT by going hot (Happiness is a Momma Deuce)
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To: going hot

bw = be, lol


20 posted on 04/08/2016 9:10:21 PM PDT by going hot (Happiness is a Momma Deuce)
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