One is a fluke. Two is a coincidence. What about four Bernie Sanders campaign organizers parroting Marxist-Leninist talking points and pushing “extreme action” and “militancy”? The people captured in this series of Project Veritas videos seem low-level, but it’s tough to ignore that it’s looking like a pattern rather than an exception.

On the other hand, at least one of them would “hope to avoid … plenty of excesses in 1917” come the Bernie Revolution. That’s progress, I guess:

Well, that could depend on what Mason Baird considers “excesses”:

“We would need a federal government and labor union movement that is working together to strip power away from capitalists and preferably directing violence toward property. At the end of the day, this kind of stuff will come out through practice, through the work and it’s hard for me to talk about it in the moment we live in cause I think China today is not what Mao envisioned, right it was through the practice of Chinese people doing the work to create the China today. So, it never – we’re never going – I think a lot of the stuff – a lot of these answers are going to come through practice – we’re going to try things – things aren’t going to work – we’re going to move on to the next thing, and we’re going to try to be as conscious and intentional about those things, but when you get into a certain level of detail, and depth, it’s like, that’s kind of my ‘cop out’, it comes through the work, you know. The answers come through the work.” “It would, it’s gonna take, you know, it’s gonna take militancy…like a militant labor movement that’s willing to…strike, and if necessary, you know, just destroy property and things like that.” “A militant labor movement is kind of our last – our last real chance before we try…other means.”

Daniel Taylor, on the other hand, says violence will be necessary even if Sanders wins the election. You can’t deliver a socialist paradise without cracking a few skulls, after all:

“We don’t want to scare people off, you first have to feel it out before you get into the crazy stuff…You know we were talking about more extreme organizations like Antifa, you were talking about, Yellow Vests, all that but we’re kinda keeping that on the back-burner for now.” “We have all this momentum, where do we go, regardless of the outcome, after it’s all over? Change won’t come easily, regardless. Even if Bernie is elected, change will not come swiftly or easily, so the connections we make now in the campaign with people, and volunteers, it’s important we retain that regardless of the outcome. It’s unfortunate that we have to make plans for extreme action but like I said, they’re not going to give it to us even if Bernie is elected.”

Again, the PV undercover reporter does her best to get these conversations going to these extremes. At one point, she tells Baird that change on the scale they want doesn’t come easily. “So how do you jungle up?” she asks, at which point Baird gets reluctant to talk. “I just never want to kill anybody, you know?” he says at one point. “That scares me a lot,” Baird continues, but not enough to write it off as a possibility. Baird’s a lot more into violence against property as “extreme action,” and let it “snowball” from there.

Socialism is nothing if not a structured system for wishful thinking at best, but this argument from Baird is downright delusional. He tells the undercover reporter that mobilizing the people into a violent movement will force everyone else to retreat out of fear:

Right, but like these people are motivated by fear, and if we mobilize and make a show of force and show that we’re very strong and we’ve put in work and we’re very powerful now, I think you’ll have a good many people back down, who are going to be so afraid that they’re gonna back down off that position.

Ahem. Not only is that incorrect in general, Baird in particular is not the kind of imposing figure who will project fear into anyone’s hearts. In fact, he seems more afraid than bold himself, and certainly afraid of what might happen if he tries to put this plan into action. As an argument for protecting the Second Amendment, however, this is just golden.

It’s probably not news that a crank like Sanders would attract cranks to his campaign, especially of Baird’s temperament. What makes this interesting is that news outlets largely ignore this about Sanders’ campaign. Imagine for just a moment if someone caught one Trump campaign organizer advocating violence in order to intimidate political opposition into silence. We’d have wall-to-wall coverage of The Impending Darkness of American Fascism on every channel, with tongues clucking about the frightful example Donald Trump sets in attracting such people to his campaign.

Why aren’t they concerned about Sanders doing the same thing? Doesn’t “democracy die in darkness,” fellas?