Some people are more equal than others it seems according to the Senate’s most prominent avowed socialist.
Sorry for using an overused “Animal Farm” reference, but in this case it was too on point to pass up.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been widely and rightly mocked for his hilariously hypocritical response to Fox News’ Bret Baier on Wednesday night.
Baier asked Sanders why he chartered private jets to travel the country on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with fellow socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-NY.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, Sanders spent $221,000 on chartered private jets in the first quarter of 2025.
Sanders refused to apologize for the lavish—and not incidentally, carbon-spewing—travel, snapping back at Baier, “You think I’m gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United … while 30,000 people are waiting?”
Sanders pointed out that President Donald Trump flies in private jets, but since when did Trump call himself a democratic socialist?
This revealing moment shouldn’t be a surprise. Sanders has moved his targets in the past to conform to his own personal circumstances. He used to rail against the “millionaires and the billionaires,” but it’s mostly just billionaires these days now that he’s a millionaire himself.
Being a socialist politician who has never held a real job sure pays off, right?
Yes, the “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies are drawing good-sized crowds. But besides the rank hypocrisy, there is something more deeply fraudulent about Sanders’ tour with AOC.
It’s all a sham.
I don’t doubt Sanders is a true-believing socialist. He spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union after all.
What’s a sham is the idea that Democrats are suddenly going to go all in for economic leveling or become the party of the “working man.”
That version of the Democratic Party fully died in the age of Obama. The New Deal coalition is dead. What Democrats represent now are elite institutions, Ivy League schools, law firms, government bureaucracies, and powerful NGOs. What animates their party is cultural issues, LGBTQ, DEI, open borders, and the intolerant cult of “tolerance.” That and resistance to all things Trump.
It couldn’t be clearer to me that this was the direction of the Left when I attended a socialism conference back in 2019. Yes, they went through the rote message of economic leveling that they’ve always been at least nominally for. But all the fire and passion was for transgenderism and the breakdown of “oppressive” family structures.
Sanders may try to portray himself as an outsider, an independent, but he’s always ultimately been a party man. Years ago, believe it or not, he said that open borders was a right-wing idea. That version of Bernie Sanders is long gone. Now, he toes the line.
Whatever sideshow Sanders puts on to rally the masses, it has nothing to do with the direction of the Democratic Party or the broader Left.
Despite the fact that Democrats have hit their lowest poll numbers since polling on party popularity began, they’ve shown few signs of willingness to change on substance at all. Some cleverer Democrat politicians have rhetorically tacked Right or to the center. Others have tried to recapture their disintegrating working-class base with socialist rhetoric. But it’s all a mirage.
The party is just as woke as ever. They are simply adjusting to a world in which their immense institutional advantage is crumbling, and they actually have to make their case to an American people who’ve become fatigued by the post 2020 insanity.
And when traditional power structures within the party are truly threatened, they use their old DEI tricks to gatekeep.
Just look at what happened to activist David Hogg when Democrats gave him a vice chair position at the DNC to signal that the party was welcoming to young men, a demographic they have almost entirely lost.
As soon as Hogg suggested that he would challenge old Democrat incumbents he was hit by a complaint from a party member that his DNC chair position “discriminated against three women of color candidates.” It was a perfect representation of how institutions controlled by the Left operate and why young men are fleeing the party in droves.
Railing against the billionaires and pretending to fight the “oligarchy” rings false when they are the ones who represent the billionaire class, the cultural elites.
Just look at this recent New Yorker profile of the movers and shakers of New York, most of whom are notable left-wingers. This would include Alex Soros, the son of billionaire liberal donor George Soros and one of the most prolific Democratic Party donors himself.
They aren’t fighting oligarchy. They are the oligarchy.
Trump and entrepreneur Elon Musk may be very wealthy. Vice President JD Vance may have gone to Yale Law School. But it couldn’t be any clearer that they are loathed by the ruling elite. To borrow an old phrase used against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they are “traitors to their class.”
And so when Trump, the billionaire, makes his pitch to the American people—to the working and middle classes—it strikes voters as more genuine. He really seems to like and understand them. He stands as their champion against institutions that failed them in the last decade.
When Sanders flies around in his private jet to fight the oligarchy, it just seems like a shallow attempt to sucker voters into thinking that Democrats really care about the people now.
Maybe Sanders’ message could be a winning one for Democrats, but it doesn’t pass the smell test.
