Sanders: ‘These are the scariest times in my life’

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5190322-berniesanders-elonmusk-threats/?tbref=hp

33 comments

  2. This is a man who fought against segregationists at a time when people who fought against segregationists were getting beat, jailed, and killed.

    And he’s right. These times are scarier.

  3. Yesterday, we witnessed yet another low point. The fake social conservatism and the death rattle of the United States were painfully evident when the president was forced to buy a car in cash on the White House driveway, quickly dismissed the major stock market crash, labeled attacks on the same car manufacturer’s properties as acts of terrorism, and was praised by drunken Russians on social media—all within a few hours.

  4. Yeah; I feel that.

    Also; can’t help but feel like Democrats should be bombarding congress right now with so many hearings, censures and impeachment articles that Republicans don’t have the time to destroy the country.

    Keep being disruptive, make them have to take the time to censure every single member of the Democrat Party repeatedly.

    Shit… Do something… Anything…

  6. The U.S. has truly lost its collective mind.

    How on earth does someone like Trump make it all the way to the White House, not once but twice?!?

    Rightwing media and their “alt-facts” are literally destroying the country.

  7. I would guess he could never have imagined that the USA would join an Axis of Evil

  9. Sanders has been around for a long time, so this means a lot more coming from him based on that principle alone.

    We’d be wise to listen to him if we haven’t done so already.

  10. We tried to get you in there, Bernie. None of this shit would be happening right now had we succeeded.

  11. Nobody chooses where they are born. Bernie was born in a country with rampant racism, segregation and discrimination. Unlike many others, he tried to make this shithole of a country a better place. Throughout his life he tried sharing his vision and dream with others, to finally turn the US into a place to be proud of. 

    But the people chose differently. Twice. Don’t get me started on “oh no many of us didn’t vote for this”. I don’t care. Too many people are okay with the way things are going now. Trump got massive amounts of votes three times in a row. That is no country anyone should want to live in.

  12. I’m grateful for the few politicians like Bernie Sanders

  14. If you want to make a difference without doing a whole lot: SUPPORT SMALL LOCAL BUSINESS. Forget about Walmart, target, Amazon, all of em. Your power of your wallet is much more powerful than u think, especially if we do it as a collective!

  16. We all need to start boycotting everything Trump is making money off of. Hit him where it hurts. Remember when they shut down the government his last term? The only thing that made him stop was when the airlines stopped. He is stoppable, we just gotta hit his weak spot…his wallet

  17. >“You combine that with the power of the oligarchy in general, you combine that with Mr. Musk owning Twitter and able to send out his messages to hundreds of millions of people,” Sanders said, ticking off what he sees as the biggest threats to progressivism and economic justice in the United States.

    The threat was obvious when he was mounting his bid. We don’t talk enough about how the decision to sell Twitter was even at that time an obvious betrayal of the country.

  18. When a presidential candidate runs on the promise to rule as a dictator after his coup attempt fails, and fewer than 1 in 3 eligible voters turns out to try to stop America from becoming a dictatorship, rational people will be scared.

    In some ways I am jealous of the people who think that the American experiment to build a democracy isn’t dead. Ignorance can be bliss.

  20. This is from a man who was attacked with water canons by police for protesting segregation.

    Him saying this holds a lot of weight.

  21. I’m not sure how anyone could possibly be looking at the current actions and not think Trump is intentionally driving us towards WWIII. Isolationism is actually kind of America’s thing, but intense isolationism across history is always a precursor for a planned war.

    He’s already given you his list of targets. He wants to militarily take over Panema & portions of mexico, and he wants to economically crush Canada and as a stretch goal, Greenland.

    It’s also why he’s making a point to ramp up domestic development of military resources like Steel.

  22. I’m not sure how I was able to sleep last night .

    I’m familiar with the bad actors like Heritage Foundation + Peter Thiel + Doug Coe (Prayer Breakfast), but I had no idea about this guy :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

    He watched the election results at Thiels place . And was a special guest at Trump’s inauguration

  23. I’m 75. All I wanted to do was live my life out in peace and quiet.

  24. There’s a French nuclear submarine currently in Canada for a show of force.

    Let that sink in.

    edited : Canada is NOT getting nuclear weapons, at least not yet.

  25. Fox News and right-wing media have poisoned the minds of millions of people in this country.

  26. It’s really hard for me to care about the “here’s what Dems need to do” comments, because Trump did EVERYTHING wrong.

    It wasn’t that Trump did nothing and Biden/Harris made missteps. Their missteps were nothing compared to a million dead Americans due to incompetence and lies, a flailing economy, poor international leadership, being an open racist and misogynist and ableist and hating veterans, talking about Palmer’s dick and Hannibal Lecter, swaying to Ave Maria, boasting about being a dictator and illegally killing departments and hurting our allies, saying people are eating cats and dogs, being an actual rapist and stealing classified documents…the list goes on.

    Dems absolutely have flaws and you can call them corporate boot-lickers for not elevating AOC or cowards and unorganized for not doing more at the SoU but seriously, all of that pales in comparison to how stupid and inefficient and worthless Donald Trump is as a leader.

    *There is something deeply and maybe irrevocably wrong with Americans.*

    His lowest election count was 2016. Before he truly went off the rails. And every election since as he becomes more unhinged he’s picked up more and more votes.

    *There is something wrong with us.*

    Feels more and more like a sick prophecy foretelling our collapse is coming true.

  27. I am terrified right now. To put my fear into perspective, I deployed three times to Iraq. In the middle of those deployments, I was part of a multi-national peacekeeping mission that oversaw the transfer of Gaza from Hezbollah to Hamas.

    I know what happens to people who resist authoritarian governments or the U.S. military. I have never been scared like this.

  28. I’m imagining the world where the DNC didn’t interfere and officials spoke up sooner and louder about Russian interference.

    In that world, we got President Sanders from 2016 to 2024, with Trump receding into distant memory.

  29. I am 84 and I totally agree with Bernie. “The scariest times in my life!”

    I have lived through 15 US Presidents and I thought I had seen it all! But I guess that Germans thought the same thing in 1935.

    It’s thoroughly depressing to me to see all the great progress we as a country have made being disappeared with a wave of a pen. All that hard work and energy and money and time and determination — for nothing, apparently.

    I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, went to segregated schools (including college) and never met an educated black person until I left Alabama. To say nothing of a black person in a managerial role in a company.

    When I was married, it was impossible for me to get a credit card in my name. Everything EVERYTHING was in my husband’s name. And working was something I did to “bring in a little extra” – as long as he approved.

    Women in managerial positions were scarce, too, and usually only if some family member owned the company.

    Civil rights of all types were non-existent.

    So this is what the current Administration is taking us to: 1955. No help for poor people; no women in important roles (except for the bimbos who supported Trump) – women to go back to the kitchen and shut up. People of color have not only had their history torn away from the public eye but their suffering denied and it’s forbidden to even teach about their history. And the DOD would probably like to return them to being cooks and heavy labor.

    I could list all the changes that have come about in the last two months – but that would be way too many words!

    Now, I am determined to not only do what I can about this situation but to live at least another four years to see everything change!

  30. Think about what it takes for a man whose initial notariety came from his participation in the civil rights movement, in which multiple assassinations and rampant police violence were the top of every news cycle… to say that *these* are the scariest times of his life.

    I know, the people who want to defend Trumpism are going to say, “but no one has been killed and the police aren’t beating up crowds of people,” and that’s mostly true. Deaths are currently not a major issue. Yes, there is some incompetent handling of disease and Federal aid to disaster victims is being prioritized based on political alignment, but basically Trump isn’t sending people out to kill anyone.

    So why are these the scariest times since the Civil War (perhaps ever) in the US?

    Because everything we rely on for a stable and prosperous life is predicated on a tiny document that, even with the modifications over the years, clocks in smaller than most popular fan fiction. It’s a tiny document that has always tread the line of unenforceability. That’s why we’ve spent the past 200 years worrying about constitutional crises. And Trump just sauntered into office and initiated a blitzkrieg constitutional crisis on about 20 different levels. He’s seizing Congressional authority left and right (mostly over the power of the purse, but in several other areas as well) and at the same time largely ignoring the courts’ attempts to rein him in.

    Without the Constitution, the US has nothing to protect its citizens, and so individual actions such as killings, oppression, etc. are not as terrifying as the loss of the foundational protections that prevent those things in the first place. Even if Trump were a really nice guy who just tore down the Constitution because he wanted to do more good in the world, it wouldn’t matter. If he isn’t going to take advantage of the power vacuum he’s creating (and he absolutely will) someone else would. He would have set the groundwork for a truly terrifying period in American politics.

    At this point, I’m with Bernie: these are truly the scariest times in US politics.

  31. Damn. This is a pretty exceptional statement coming from Bernie because this man has seen some **shit.** For example:

    * Born during World War 2 (to Polish-Jewish immigrants; most of his father’s family was murdered in the Holocaust)
    * Lived through the height of Cold War paranoia as a kid/teen
    * Was 21 years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest we’ve ever come to total nuclear annihilation
    * Was 22 years old when JFK was assassinated
    * Was 27 years old when MLK was assassinated
    * Was 29 years old when the National Guard literally shot and killed college students at Kent State for protesting the Vietnam war
    * Witnessed the Watergate scandal/Nixon’s resignation
    * Was a sitting US congressman on 9/11
    * Visited the Soviet Union on a diplomatic trip right before the collapse of the USSR
    * Witnessed the 2008 Financial Crisis (and warned of it coming)
    * Lived through the COVID pandemic
    * And the insurrection

    If he’s saying that these are the **scariest times of his life,** we **all** need to be paying attention. This man doesn’t scare easily.

  32. This motherfucker was on the streets in the late 50’s and 60’s getting hosed down by cops and chased by dogs while protesting for civil rights. When he says these are the scariest times in his life, that’s pretty fucking poignant.

  33. I mean I think we can trace the downfall of our society to the commodification and sensationalism of 24hr news and news networks.

    As time passes more things pass for news: opinion pieces, absolute surface level understanding and misreporting of surface level science, giving platforms to the highest bidders while simultaneously furthering a national culture of individualism and “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” and that you should respect that.

    These and many more cultural factors including the gamification of politics where people pick their favorite team and then take absolute pleasure in the failings of the other as if it was football is another massive piece. Except instead of rubbing it in to your pal about their team fumbling the ball, you’re fostering hate and animosity through symbolic threat.

    I’m an optimist and I see myself as a person who stands for what America is supposed to be, not what it is revealing itself to be.

    The people in charge right now are in charge because people generally are not as smart as they think, and they assume that people in power will do what’s right for them, or that “nothing matters anyway, so fuck it” and that the things they claimed they would do were just another dumb politician’s lie that is now coming back to beat then senseless.

    America is full of loud, angry, obnoxious, bigoted, xenophobic psychopaths, but it is also full of quiet, wholesome, caring, accepting and lovely people who reestablish your faith in humanity. But news networks and social media drive engagement and the latter isn’t engaging.

    Stay strong, hold onto your loved ones and your values, and never let anyone compromise who you are. We are, I’ll be nice as Americans, better than this, and I remain hopeful that one day we will be better than this monstrous bullshit. I weep for the relationships we have damaged through the weakness of our leadership and our foisted on foreign nationalist psychos, but I remain undeterred that one day things will be better.

    Love to all from one who isn’t crazy.

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