National Review's 4 Zaniest Claims For Why Bernie Sanders Is Like A Nazi

[DonViejo]

In a National Review Online piece published on Monday, conservative writer Kevin D. Williamson tried to make the point that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is currently running to be the Democratic presidential nominee, is actually a national socialist.

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Here are some of the lowlights from Williamson's piece titled "Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism":

Bernie is a national socialist, like the Nazis

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In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics.

Sanders is similar to Hugo Chavez

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There are many kinds of Us-and-Them politics, and Bernie Sanders, to be sure, is not a national socialist in the mode of Alfred Rosenberg or Julius Streicher. He is a national socialist in the mode of Hugo Chávez. He isn’t driven by racial hatred; he’s driven by political hatred. And that’s bad enough.

Sanders is a xenophobe and a racist

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The incessant reliance on xenophobic (and largely untrue) tropes holding that the current economic woes of the United States are the result of scheming foreigners, especially the wicked Chinese, “stealing our jobs” and victimizing his class allies is nothing more than an updated version of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “yellow peril” rhetoric, and though the kaiser had a more poetical imagination — he said he had a vision of the Buddha riding a dragon across Europe, laying waste to all — Bernie’s take is substantially similar. He describes the normalization of trade relations with China as “catastrophic” — Sanders and Jesse Helms both voted against the Clinton-backed China-trade legislation — and heaps scorn on every other trade-liberalization pact. That economic interactions with foreigners are inherently hurtful and exploitative is central to his view of how the world works.

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Like most of these advocates of “economic patriotism” (Barack Obama’s once-favored phrase) Bernie worries a great deal about trade with brown people — Asians, Latin Americans — but has never, so far as public records show, made so much as a peep about our very large trade deficit with Sweden, which as a share of bilateral trade volume is not much different from our trade deficit with China, or about the size of our trade deficit with Canada, our largest trading partner. Sanders doesn’t rail about the Canadians and Germans stealing our jobs — his ire is reserved almost exclusively for the Chinese and the Latin Americans ...

Bernie wants to criminalize political dissent

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And criminalizing things is very much on Bernie’s agenda, beginning with the criminalization of political dissent. At every event he swears to introduce a constitutional amendment reversing Supreme Court decisions that affirmed the free-speech protections of people and organizations filming documentaries, organizing Web campaigns, and airing television commercials in the hopes of influencing elections or public attitudes toward public issues. That this would amount to a repeal of the First Amendment does not trouble Bernie at all. If the First Amendment enables Them, then the First Amendment has got to go.

full article
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/national-review-bernie-sanders-nazi



Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what the wingnuts and flying monkeys will be hurling in the coming campaign

[onehandle]

1. Karl Rove and company are salivating at the prospects. nt

[djean111]

2. I think the important part of this will be how many times the headline/meme will be repeated.

Logic and facts will be ignored no matter what.

[mmonk]

3. LOL. Yeah, saw that. Imagine the son of Jewish immigrant being attracted to the Nazis.

But what's crazier is people who would believe it or take it serious.

[DonViejo]

5. Williamson, the author of the piece, claims he never called the Senator a Nazi....

Kevin D. Williamson
@KevinNR

Of course the intellectually dishonest @mattyglesias uses a word I've never used to describe Sanders: "Nazi."

10:38 PM - 20 Jul 2015
16 16 Retweets 12 12 favorites

Kevin D. Williamson
@KevinNR

If @mattyglesias knew his intellectual history better, he'd know that there were lots of "national socialist" parties in the the past.

10:39 PM - 20 Jul 2015

19 19 Retweets 13 13 favorites

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/national-review-bernie-sanders-nazi

[mmonk]

6. It's kind of like that saying, "some people say".

[arcane1]

4. Makes me wonder what the author's DU name is n/t