The problem with Vermont independent socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders being the Democratic presidential front-runner is that the media and his opponents are doing collective vetting on him now that they should have done back in 2016.

Back then, all they thought they needed to say about him was: “I mean, like, look at him. He’s a rumpled socialist.”

That was enough, even though he came closer to beating Hillary Clinton in the primaries than anyone thought he would.

However, the general consensus in the 2020 election was that Sanders had his coterie of supporters — about 16 to 20 percent — and that was both his floor and his ceiling.

Because of this, he was always considered a nice story: a Clarence Darrow cosplayer who could rally the kids and who had made socialism acceptable and senescence cool. Keep living your truth, Bernie. Back to you, Andrew.

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On Saturday, he won 47 percent of the vote in the Nevada caucuses after finishing a close second in Iowa and winning in New Hampshire.

Furthermore, the national polls indicate this isn’t going to be three flukes.

New polls show him within striking distance in South Carolina, where Joe Biden’s lead — once thought to be unshakable — now may, unbelievably, rest in the hands of undecided voters.

In the RealClearPolitics national polling average, as of Wednesday, Sanders’ lead stood at more than 10 points.

Do you think Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee? Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use You're logged in to Facebook. Click here to log out. 39% (480 Votes) 61% (762 Votes)

In short, just calling him a socialist and giving him a degrading head pat wasn’t going to fly anymore.

That’s why his opponents — in this case, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign — is willing to do vetting the media refused to do. That includes bringing up Sanders’ old, inchoate, incoherent writings that included strange references to, among other things, naked toddlers touching each other.

That’s what Tim O’Brien, a senior adviser to Bloomberg’s campaign, did Tuesday morning on CNN.

During a segment with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, O’Brien broached a topic that her employer hadn’t deemed important enough to bring up.

“Bernie has a very trippy record, to say the least,” O’Brien said.

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“Bernie has all of this loopy stuff in his background, saying things like women get cancer from having too many orgasms or toddlers should run around naked and touch each other’s genitals to insulate themselves from porn.”

Camerota — a node in the wider network of media organs that’s intended to serve as a backstop for democracy by vetting candidates as aggressively as they did with, say, Donald Trump — reacted almost as if she were Shaggy and/or Scooby when they’d seen a gh-h-h-ost!

“Sorry, what? What?” Camerota exclaimed, as if O’Brien was making some sort of outlandish lie of a claim.

WARNING: Some of the following writings contain explicit content that some readers may find disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.

“Why has this stuff not been more surfaced?” O’Brien continued. “He’s written about women’s rape fantasies, that hasn’t been surfaced.”

Well, zoinks, Scoobs, it turns out that he’s actually telling the truth and that this was known information that no one really bothered to spend that much time on back in 2016 even though it was out there.

Let’s take the first part — women getting cancer from too many orgasms.

O’Brien actually had it backward: Sanders wrote in 1969 about a single study where women who were supposedly sexually inhibited had a higher rate of cancer and quoted heavily from a book which was “very definite about the link between emotional and sexual health, and cancer.”

As Mother Jones pointed out, that book was written by psychologist Wilhelm Reich, a favorite of leftist student demonstrator whose “most famous invention was a product called the ‘Orgone Box,’ a sort of hyperbaric oxygen chamber for orgasms. The device was supposed to expose users to ‘orgastic’ energy circulating in the air. Such exposure, Reich theorized, could cure various maladies, including cancer.”

I haven’t quite kept up with the development of the Orgone Box, but I haven’t heard any news over the intervening half-century about it doing away with malignancy.

Next, the naked infants thing.

That really happened, too. Sanders, again in 1969: “In Vermont, at a state beach, a mother is reprimanded by Authority for allowing her 6 month old daughter to go about without her diapers on. Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing! If we [raise] children up like this it will probably ruin the whole pornography business, not to mention the large segment of the general economy which makes its money by playing on peoples sexual frustrations.”

Right.

As you might guess, the rape fantasy thing is as real and as problematic as you expect.

That essay was written in 1972 and is NSFW enough that we’re just going to link it over at NPR.

This one actually generated a mild controversy when it resurfaced in 2015; Sanders passed it off as “piece of fiction” about gendered attitudes regarding control in the bedroom when questioned on the controversy in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

It was ”something like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” he said.

You decide what’s more disturbing: Sanders reading “Fifty Shades of Grey” or the fact that we’ve mostly forgotten about all of this.

But then, this is what’s going to resurface — and probably more — from Sanders’ past as a post-collegiate radical.

Remember, he’s the front-runner now. The arguments from the candidates and their surrogates aren’t just going to be those befuddled not-quite-barbs in which candidates smile, shrug and dismiss Bernie by saying, “But how will we pay for it all?”

They’re not going to smile and they’re not going to shrug when dealing with the cost of Sanders’ plans to economically remake America, for one.

Now they’re going to have to talk a lot more critically about Sanders, particularly when it comes to the weird stuff like this.

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