The Bernie Sanders socialist wing is now ascendent inside the Democratic Party.
That means Sanders and his fellow socialists can now dictate the terms of engagement on the left.
And Bernie Sanders threw down one gauntlet that forced Democrats into this impossible choice.
Sanders-backed Abdul El-Sayed became the latest socialist to notch a primary win when he defeated Chuck Schumer’s chosen candidate to claim the Senate nomination in Michigan.
El-Sayed supports defunding the police and banning private health insurance.
But El-Sayed’s most controversial move was palling around with communist streamer Hasan Piker, who said in the past that America “deserved” the 9/11 terror attacks.
On primary night, CNN’s left-wing host Abby Phillip pressed Sanders on El-Sayed’s association with someone who thinks 3,000 innocent Americans deserved to die.
“[L]ast night, the popular but very controversial streamer, Hasan Piker, was at one of El-Sayed’s final events. The two did a stream together, a fairly lengthy stream. I know that you’ve spoken to Hasan Piker in the past, but are you comfortable with El-Sayed having a close association with him, given some of his past statements? To give you an example, one of the more controversial ones is that Piker has said America deserved 9/11. Are you comfortable with that association?” Phillip wondered.
Sanders called Piker’s comments “dumb” and showed chutzpa in claiming Democrats should reject cancel culture and welcome Piker into the party as if this was a fight over the left trying to banish Piker because he didn’t think biological men could pretend to be women.
“No, I am not. And I think that’s a dumb statement. On the other hand, he has a whole lot of followers, and there are a lot of things that he’s saying that are making sense to a lot of people. I think we have to get above cancel culture. When you’re doing radio, whatever they do, podcasts three hours a day, you say dumb things. I suspect if you go back over your career, there may be one or two things that you’ve said that you may have regretted. But I think what we have got to do is look at the totality of where people are coming from and go forward,” Sanders stated.
Phillip then asked Sanders about comments by Democrat strategist James Carville, who threatened to leave the party unless it exiled Piker.
Sanders, feeling full of himself as his candidate won yet another primary, told Carville to hit the bricks and form his own party if he didn’t want to associate with a 9/11 terror attack apologist.
“Well, that’s not much of a choice. If Mr. Carville doesn’t want to be in my party, the party that I belong to, that Piker, that El-Sayed belongs to, he can start his own party. But, look, what we are doing now is, you can turn the tables around and say, do you really want to be in a party where your leadership is taking huge amounts of money from AIPAC, which is supporting an extremist Netanyahu government that many of us believe has committed genocide? Do you want to be in a party with people who do that? Do you want to be in a party which has not stood up to the AI industry, because they got a lot of money from AI or from crypto? So you could pick whatever you want to pick. But I think we need a big tent. And I think people like Piker should be welcome into that, certainly,” Sanders concluded.
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