Issues & Insights

Campaign Staffer Reveals Life Under President Bernie: Riots, Gulags, Reeducation

An Iowa field organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign believes he knows what the Vermont socialist is thinking and has been willing to share it. The staffer’s taste for violence, and his eagerness to punish those who’d rather not be forced into the commune, are almost exactly as we would have expected.

Apparently believing that he was speaking to a friendly journalist from the mainstream media over the course of several months, Kyle Jurek, described by Sanders’ Iowa field director as a “top-tier organizer,” went off on a tirade that sounded like Politburo talking points. When asked if “MAGA people could be reeducated,” for instance, Jurek chuckled and said, “we got to try.”

Jurek was actually talking to a Project Veritas operative, who was secretly recording their conversations.

Project Veritas’ hidden camera caught Jurek saying that “after the fall of the Nazi party … Germany had to spend billions of dollars reeducating their f**king people to not be Nazis.”

“We’re probably going to have to do the same thing here.”

The reeducation won’t be held in concentration camps, though. It will be done through our universities.

“That’s kind of what all Bernie’s whole f**king like, ‘hey, free education for everybody’ because we’re going to have to teach you not to be a f**king Nazi.”

And those Soviet labor camps? They weren’t so bad.

“There’s a reason Josef Stalin had gulags,” Jurek said. “Gulags were actually meant for, like, reeducation,” and were quite efficient at stripping the wealthy’s “privilege,” because the rich were going to learn what it meant to be working class. Exercising free speech might also be rewarded by a trip to the gulag in Jurek’s world. Anyone who says things the ruling class doesn’t like should expect a “violent reaction,” and deserves to be beaten.

And then there’s the showcase of the inherent violence of the political left when it doesn’t get its way.

“If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC convention, f**king Milwaukee will burn. It’ll start in Milwaukee and then when … the police push back on that, other cities will just f**king” explode, Jurek promises, later predicting police officers “are going to be the ones getting f**king beaten in Milwaukee.”

Project Veritas, which released the video on Tuesday, says more alarming revelations are forthcoming through its Expose 2020 project. In the video, we hear Jurek, who makes it clear he’s on board with Sanders’ policies, say that “the only thing fascists understand is violence, so the only way you can confront them is with violence.” He says cities “will burn” if President Donald Trump is reelected, and threatens a “reign of terror,” which just might start with shooting those who resist.

Sanders, as well as his supporters, including the media, will no doubt say Jurek’s comments don’t reflect the campaign’s core tenets, that he’s just a low-level operative speaking his own mind. Don’t buy into it.

First, violence, both real and implied, is required to implement socialism. There’s no way around this because it is a system based on compulsion.

Second, if Sanders attracted one staffer who holds those noxious views, it’s likely he’s attracted others. Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe legitimately wonders if Jurek is “the true but hidden face of the Sanders’ campaign.” It’s not an unreasonable premise, given that Sanders’ rhetoric and record are gold-plated invitations for radicals.

Remember, it is Sanders who:

  • Traveled to the Soviet Union for 10 days in 1988 for a “strange honeymoon” – his words – and came away saying there are things America could learn from the communist regime, which had its “strengths.”
  • Visited Nicaragua in 1985 and “hailed the revolution led by Daniel Ortega,” the Washington Post reported. Ortega, of course, was a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who wrecked that country with Cuban-style communism. Perhaps most damning to Sanders, as we wrote last year, is the fact that “he sat idly by while Ortega ranted about American terrorism, and a crowd of reportedly a half-million chanted ‘here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.'”
  • Toured Cuba, and returned “glowing with admiration for Fidel Castro, saying he had ‘solved some very important problems’ in that country.” The regime, Sanders said, had made “enormous progress” in “improving the lives of poor people and working people.”
  • Promised to prosecute fossil fuel executives, which some believe “starkly reveals Bernie as a Leninist-Stalinist communist, ready and willing to impose his order by brute force; and that means prosecutions for economic crimes, ex post facto prosecutions, prisons, gulags and regimentation.” 

Lest we forget, it was Sanders’ ally, New York Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently said the U.S. is “evolving” into fascism, an invitation if there ever was one to treat those who disagree as fascists in need of reeducation, and maybe even a beating, since that’s the “anti-fascist” way.

We don’t expect a replay of Soviet tyranny in the U.S. if Sanders were elected president. It’s unlikely he would act as radically as Jurek would want him do. Yet the reality that someone who believes violence is a political act, and quite clearly yearns for forced reeducation camps to straighten out dissenters, could be a high-level field organizer for Sanders should shake voters out of their stuporous support for the doddering socialist. Moreover, it’s worth mulling the fact that Bernie is the candidate in which someone this odious has placed his full faith and dedication.

Sanders owns Jurek, as does his entire campaign. Voters can’t be allowed to forget it.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board


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The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.

12 comments

  • In the early 1970’s, Bernie Sanders lived for several months at an Israeli kibbutz, Yad Hana. That collective farm had the distinction of being the one and only Israeli kibbutz that was tied to the Maki, the Israeli Communist Party, a minor party, shunned and regarded as a Soviet tool by the other Israeli political parties but one treated with deference by the Soviet Union, just as the USSR treated the minuscule American Communist Party as if it too were a major player. Both Maki and Yad Hana were funded directly by Soviet sources from Tel Aviv and Prague. One wonders why, with scores of other Israeli collective farms, ranging in ideology from completely secular to atheist to moderately to ultra-religious, Bernie Sanders chose to spend time and live on the one and only Kibbutz tied directly to the Communist Party. Just asking, since the mainstream media won’t.

  • Gun up, folks. It could get wild and armed ones would need to be America’s protectors. I’m about to start soon myself.

    • I’ll see the Bernie Bros’ gulags threat, and raise them 2A sponsored trip to the morgue of their choice.

  • To anyone watching ANTIFA , the push for so called gun control and others this comes as no surprise. No matter who wins the election, this country will never come together again., Imo

  • Au Contraire — “We don’t expect a replay of Soviet tyranny in the U.S. if Sanders were elected president. It’s unlikely he would act as radically as Jurek would want him do.”

    It would be worse. Sanders is a lifelong Commie BABY who gets into tantrums when opposed. And the opposition would be ferocious,
    Stalin’s Terror. PolPot & Cambodia. China’s “Cultural Revolution” would all pale in comparison when Americans “light up” BABY-Bernie’s STASI

  • I see your gulag, and raise you a justifiable homicide under the aegis of the Second Amendment, Junior. Show me how committed you are to your goose-stepping fantasy.

  • ‘Sanders, as well as his supporters, including the media, will no doubt say Jurek’s comments don’t reflect the campaign’s core tenets, that he’s just a low-level operative speaking his own mind. Don’t buy into it.’
    I have not heard any response from the Sanders campaign or the media. They prefer to ignore Project Veritas.

  • Jurek sure seems like a peace-loving person. I deliberately did not use the word he would have used.

    “[T]he only thing fascists understand is violence,” said he who was predicting violence by his side of the issue.

    This is a classic case of projection – blaming the other side for what he’s planning on doing.

  • Well, when people tell you who they are, believe them. These nitwits seem to forget that Americans have the means and wherewithal to violently resist. How kind of them to self identify so that they can be the first recipients of retrib ution.

  • I have no doubt that this is what old Bernnie really wants he is a communist and this is what they do .A lot of people will die .Look what happened when Castro took over in Cuba no one really knows how many people he killed how many did Stalin knock off and China they are still killing them there.This is not a nice guy.

  • Well Kyle (and like-minded leftists), I don’t see that happening.
    You see, WE have the guns. And this is precisely why the Founding Fathers saw fit to enshrine into the constitution the Second Amendment. To prevent Tyranny against the Citizens, and the denial of their Rights. No, we will not accept this. MOLON LABE!

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