Right-Wing Journalist Claims That Jewish Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders Is A Nazi
Apparently, avowed Socialist and surging Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has ruffled enough feathers in his campaign for the White House that prominent conservative publications are already deciding to go the gutter route against him. In a piece was published this month in the print edition of National Review and was posted online Monday evening, renowned asshole and conservative provocateur Kevin D. Williamson claimed that Sanders is “leading a national-socialist movement” while acknowledging that Sanders is Jewish and much of his family was killed in the Holocaust.
The article was obviously meant to portray Sanders and his growing band of followers as crackpots and simplistic ideologues who want to turn the United States into a ghetto-like socialistic nightmare. Besides painting many of the voters who turn up at Sanders events in an unflattering color, Williamson also stated that since Sanders is utilizing a nationalistic approach to the economy and trade he is essentially the equivalent of a Nazi in that he is pushing a national-socialist agenda.
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. 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.
He used the term national-socialist a few more times in the piece, obviously trying to hammer home his blatant equation of the independent Senator’s politics to Nazism. Later on in the article, he made a more direct comparison to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, perhaps as a way to soft-peddle the Nazi angle. (Also, to conservatives, Chavez is prime example #1 of the evils of socialism.)
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.
Other reporters and journalists took Williamson to task for the article, rightfully calling him out for essentially calling Sanders a Nazi.
I’ll say, this “national socialist” business is like the time Kevin strenuously denied he called a black kid a monkey http://t.co/ErrlYKVpSJ
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) July 21, 2015
That time National Review called Bernie Sanders a Nazi… http://t.co/5LaJNDiSMa pic.twitter.com/ZShGekBGM7
— Matt! (@mattyglesias) July 21, 2015
Kevin Williamson of the National Review doesn’t seem like a smart person. http://t.co/qtGKJ4o17f
— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) July 21, 2015
If Kevin Williamson were less trite, he could have gone the Pol Pot route.
— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) July 21, 2015
Wait wait who had the dumber Nazi comparison today: Kevin Williamson (re: Bernie Sanders) or Tommy Craggs (re: Nick Denton)?
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 21, 2015
Of course, Williamson being Williamson, he responded to the criticism, specifically to Vox’s Matt Iglesias.
Of course the intellectually dishonest @mattyglesias uses a word I’ve never used to describe Sanders: “Nazi.”
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) July 21, 2015
If @mattyglesias knew his intellectual history better, he’d know that there were lots of “national socialist” parties in the the past.
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) July 21, 2015
But the fact is that @mattyglesias is dishonest.
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) July 21, 2015
Which led to the following replies from Iglesias:
“when I called him a national socialist and then immediately brought up the Holocaust, I didn’t mean a Nazi” — The World’s Dumbest Man
— Matt! (@mattyglesias) July 21, 2015
“When I called him a Stalinist, I just meant he does a lot of work with steel”
— Matt! (@mattyglesias) July 21, 2015
“This analogy makes me queasy, is inaccurate, and I’ll pretend I didn’t make it when people call me on it, but I’ll make it anyway”
— Matt! (@mattyglesias) July 21, 2015
Yep, the “intellectually dishonest” one here is Williamson. He knows he specifically wanted to call Sanders a Nazi but didn’t want to actually use the word. So he went the national-socialist route as an end around. When called out on it, he hedges and claims he was making a much larger point that dumber people just aren’t getting. But, he wasn’t. And he knows it.
Image via CNN
That a conservative made a moronic comparison is not surprising, nor is that conservative lacking the intgegrity to won what they said.
Actually, sadly, with today’s GOP, there is absolutely NOTHING surprising about Williamson’s idiocy and vile slander. That whole party needs to just stop. Shut their mouths, close their offices, don’t run in any elections, because they are everything America is NOT.