Certain Strong Political Pejoratives Are Thrown Around Viciously, Irresponsibly, and With No Relation to Their Meaning.

Responsible people recoil when politically pejorative terms are hurled around. The Left, for example, now calls opponents “Racist!” without any basis. The Southern Poverty Law Center, once an address for identifying true prejudice, now has lost all claim to seriousness by defaming even morally decent, mainstream legal-defense groups like Alliance Defending Freedom as bigots — even as their own conduct has been rife with sexual abuse creating a hostile work environment. On campuses across the country, some professors who cannot be fired, because their academic tenure protects them even when they spout irresponsible and even insane notions, hurl the term “Racist!” at any conservative who comes their way. People who believe in the truth of religious scripture are denounced as homophobes — and, sure, may as well call them “Racist!” too. People who believe that public bathrooms should be individuated by gender are called haters and homophobes — and of course “Racist!” People who condemn Islamic terror are tagged as Islamophobes. Oh, yeah — and “Racist!”

The word “Racist!” has no meaning anymore. During the Wasted Obama Decade, Holy War rampages by Arab Muslims on Jihad were called “workplace violence,” but opponents of Obamacare were called “Racist!” When one compares a contemplative reasoned federal judge who is pro-life with David Duke and Adolf Hitler — well, “Racist!” means nothing. Maybe that is the reason that the true racists —Al Sharpton, Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, etc. — never are called “Racist!” but instead hurl the epithet at others who simply agree with the economic principles of Milton Friedman or the founding principles of the Constitution.

There is no end to the outrageous defamation and hyperbolic character assassination. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is tagged as “racist” by Buttigieg, a squirt from South Bend, who quickly has emerged as strangely obsessed with a perception that Israel is one of the world’s greatest problems. President Trump now regularly is tagged as “Racist!” — a term never used against him through the decades upon decades that he was in public life among the New York glitterati, left and right, Democrat and Republican, Clinton and Bush, and even hosted a wildly popular weekly television program on Leftist NBC. He was the darling of late-night talk shows. Jesse Jackson associated with him, Don King, Jim Brown. Suddenly, as he entered a Presidential race and emphasized the need to gain control over the national emergency at our southern border, he was coronated “Racist!” When he saw the chaos and violence and murder at Charlottesville, he forcefully condemned neo-Nazis and White Supremacist extremists, but he also observed that Antifa fascists on the Left also were in the mix and also are despicable, and he correctly distinguished that others among the demonstrators that day were decent people who simply wanted to protect historic monuments to great fallen Civil War heroes like Gen. Robert E. Lee. To this day, the Charlottesville “Racist!” hoax that has been leveled against the President is despicably employed whenever the Left and their media wing have an opportunity.

Indeed, in the early days of the Trump Presidential campaign, a similar concerted lie was propagated, tagging him as “anti-Semitic.” As insane as the charge was when leveled against a father of an Orthodox Jewish daughter whom he continues to cherish, a grandfather of Orthodox Jewish grandchildren he loves, a defender and supporter of Israel, and a lifelong friend of Jewish colleagues and employees, nothing seemed capable of stopping that defamation. CNN, MSNBC, all the Left media vehicles on air and in print, just kept pouring it on: “Racist!” “Anti-Semite!” “Homophobe!” “Islamophobe!” All lies, big lies. Damned Lies. And yet more Damned Lies. Such Left Media epithet-hurling now is part of the modern diction and practice of chilling speech and stifling honest debate. Irresponsible name-calling and lying.

When Laura Ingraham warmly waved to an audience at the 2016 Republican Presidential nominating convention, the photograph of her outstretched arm was circulated with lies that she was offering a Nazi salute. The Left Media tagged Sean Hannity as an “anti-Semite” for a while. And yet, to paraphrase that infamous Lloyd Bentsen debate moment, I know anti-Semites. I have lived among anti-Semites. And, no, those wonderful people — the Trumps, Ingrahams, and Hannitys — could not be more decent to Jews. If you want to find anti-Semites, look for Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan. But CNN and MSNBC will not speak that truth. Nor will the New York Times or Washington Post. And, again, keep your eyes on Buttigieg as he gets increasingly desperate; this squirt is revealing a serious Jewish Problem, and his fixation against Israel is starting to take hold.

The vicious name calling. When Vice President Mike Pence defended his Christian faith and his wife’s teaching at a Christian school, the Pences were blasted as haters and homophobes. Any time any honest comment is made about the prevalence of violence and terror in Arab regimes, or the Islamic undercurrent behind a terror attack, the Linda Sarsours try diverting focus by leading the charge of “Islamophobe!” and “Racist!” When the same Pence explained that he does not go on dinner meetings with women unless accompanied by his wife, the shrill screams of “mysoginist!” filled the air.

When a Vermont Screwball Advocates Communism, It Is Fair to Call Him a Communist — Even If He Prefers to be Called “Socialist.”

In a world now sullied and tarred by vicious name-calling in politics, a responsible conservative is duty-bound to pause before calling a Left-extremist a “Communist.” That term has been abused and misapplied, often in terrible ways, so should be employed but gingerly. Nevertheless, the time has come. Basically, Bernie Sanders is a Communist.

The fact that Sanders has not shot people at midnight nor put people in a Gulag prison chain nor forced normative Orthodox Jews like me to be concentrated in a Reeducation Camp means nothing. He never has had the power to do so. But what does he really stand for? What would he do if he had the power that he realistically never will have?

We know he would give the Boston Marathon bomber the right to vote, that he would extend that franchise to all American terrorists. Thus, if John Hinckley misses Reagan the first time, he still gets to vote against Reagan. Or those two crazy women in northern California — Squeaky Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore — who made history by each trying to be the first female American Presidential assassin, each trying to assassinate the same President, seventeen days apart, and each missing. Sanders would let them each vote against Ford afterward, assuming they did not miss the ballot chad hole. But that alone does not make him a Communist, just a lunatic. Or, as they say in Democrat Presidential Clown Car: “Yes, that is a conversation we should be having.”

How to know whether Sanders merely is a Vermont socialist, a redistributionist from the state of Ben & Jerry’s and maple syrup, who wants to seize other people’s hard-earned assets and then redistribute them to the socially favored — or a true dyed-in-the-red Communist?

A first indicator has got to come from his having opted to honeymoon in the most repressive, criminally evil empire of its time: the former Soviet Union. What kind of American would honeymoon in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Of all the places to choose — Hawaii, the Caribbean, Costa Rica, London, Paris (of yore), Rome, Athens… heck, even the Dominican Republic — he goes to Communist Russia? To the place and government system that gave the world the Ukrainian Golodomor Holocaust, Babi Yar, the Stalin show trials, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, the Gulag Archipelago? A Purgatory in which Christians were begging the world to take note of their plight, and from which Jews throughout the world were fleeing by the hundreds of thousands to Israel and America, this Communist went to the Soviet Union and partied?

Nor was he jolted or stunned into reality by what he saw. Rather, he stood by his praises of Communist bread lines: “That’s a good thing!” Praised the beautiful train stations. Yes, and Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Likewise he praised Castro’s Communist Cuba. He attended the Communist Sandinista celebrations in Nicaragua and praised them. He described the Sandinistas as heroic, encouraging them to keep fighting to victory.

In 1974, running unsuccessfully in Vermont for the Senate, Sanders advocated the “public takeover of all privately owned electric companies in Vermont.” That is how it works in Communism. The Government takes over private sectors, one at a time, for the “common good.” Then, for the common good, the Government assures that everything will be free. Higher education — college tuition — will be free; it is a basic human right, like breathing. Medical care will be free. All people, regardless of whether they work, will be guaranteed a weekly or monthly paycheck from the Government to assure a good living wage. As Mark Levin has noted, the entire Bernie Sanders agenda is a page taken straight out of Josef Stalin’s Bill of Rights. Truly — The Bernie Sanders “Bill of Rights” nearly identically parallels Articles 118-122 from Stalin’s 1936 Constitution.

Where will the money come from to support Bernie’s Stalinism? He answers: “The People will be delighted to pay higher taxes for it.” It is good for the social weal, so it is called “Socialism.” That sounds nice. “Socialism,” as in “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Or another nice lyric: Adolf Hitler’s “National Socialism.”

In the end, it never works for long before tyranny sets in. It has been tried so many times these past two centuries that it no longer is a political theory. For example, the Left likes to talk about “Climate Change Deniers,” a term they heap on Climate Realists. Well, on the subject of “Socialism,” the political science has been settled, and it never works when Government takes other people’s money in the name of spending it more wisely, effectively, and efficiently than can the people who actually work for it, earn it, and know what they actually need and want. In time, everyone cheats the system, each in his or her own way. Conservatives may deeply despise Bezos of Amazon and Zuckerberg of Facebook, among others in that Left bubble, but fair-minded conservatives will recognize that those guys earned their gazillions. They created entities that impacted the world. Yet, under true socialism, they would have to settle for the same measly stipend that the lazy and driftless get paid. Sure, they now pay lip service to such “justice” because it is good for their businesses — but they immediately would be the first ones to find ways to cheat a communist system. Indeed, they already outflank even the free-market system. In 2016, Amazon earned $5.6 billion but paid essentially no federal taxes. That is how it works.

It always happens that way. They move money offshore and overseas. Some stash cash in floor tiles. Others get paid “off the books.” Some create a black market economy. Others trade in-kind services to avoid cash transactions. And they shmear the public officials, the constables, the cops, the politicians, directly or otherwise. In the worst case, they move their assets to Switzerland or the Caymans, and then they leave the country the next day.

The ones who get away with it become wealthy expatriates and even buy sports teams. The ones who stay behind do well, as do all the highest-ranking Socialist political leaders, who receive special dispensations, special housing, special clothing allowances, special housing, special everything. And then, one day, the Bezos or Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett inadvertently lands on the wrong side of the politician then in power, and that night he is taken out of bed in the middle of the night by a cadre of NKVD police, brought to a clandestine location where he is put on trial for “Crimes Against the People,” is found guilty, is allowed an appeal before a learned tribunal five minutes later, is found guilty, may appeal to a highest tribunal and is found guilty five minutes later, then is shot to death in a small room with a floor drain in the middle of the room, so that the blood quickly can be shpritzed away, leaving behind no evidence that he ever existed. His name is removed from all books. The People seize all his assets. His family is sent to a life of hard labor, while his closest relatives and associates next are arrested and likewise drained away.

That is how it works. That is how it always works.

Bernie Sanders is just crazy enough, just old enough, just irrelevant enough so that, for all the static he generates, he never will be elected anything of consequence outside Vermont. He could gain currency outside Vermont only in a race against someone as hated as Hillary, where the result of the nomination process was assured in advance anyway, where the fix was in, so he was allowed to play with the children outside. They let him rant and ramble because, unknown to him and his army of The Sophomoric undergrads, Hillary was assured the nomination. The DNC will let him play in the sandbox again this season. He will get his applause, and he will raise his millions. He will never get elected President. Obama’s handpicked CIA chief, John Brennan, never got to see Gus Hall, the Communist for whom he voted, become our president. Nor will Crazy Bernie become our first Communist President.

But we must be ever so vigilant to assure that no one else for whom Gus Hall and Bernie Sanders have broken ice ever becomes that either.