Democrat socialists are a funny lot. On one hand, they mouth a good game claiming that the world would be better off with capitalism scuttled on the rocks of time. On the other hand, they have no moral qualms about grabbing capitalism and wringing it for every penny they can get.

Former bartender and current firebrand socialist and doom-predictor, AOC doesn’t take the train from New York to her pad in DC; she drives a Tesla.  She justified by saying it was the “only EV that could get me from New York to Washington on like one, or one-and-a-half charges.” Like, totally AOC, like I get it. Like, you’re important.

America’s reigning high priest of socialist dogma and abject hypocrisy is Bernie Sanders. Bernie was so bad at understanding how any society or community works that he managed to get himself booted from a commune. Bernie didn’t do the work, but he was perfectly willing to take the benefits.

When Bernie was 46 and mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he and his wife took their honeymoon to the well-known socialist paradise of the Soviet Union. They took their trip barely three years before the entire Soviet paradise collapsed like a black hole, and two years after Chornobyl collapsed into a pile of radioactive rubble. But Bernie was impressed with the commies and their socialist institutions. Citizens paid just five percent of their income for housing. Bernie didn’t visit the 600 sq foot apartments housing the families in the Soviet socialist paradise.

During his visit, he and his wife Jane were honored guests at a banquet. Bernie criticized American “imperialism.” Strangely, Hungary and Czechoslovakia weren’t mentioned, nor was the fact that the whole house of socialist cards was about to implode.

Bernie returned to America and continued his criticism of capitalism and capitalist institutions while at the same time taking full advantage of capitalism. Bernie flies on private jets and owns three homes. He doesn’t spread his excessive wealth around like a card-carrying socialist should. Well, at least not to the vast “unwashed masses” – his money, and principally a lot of campaign money, went to his wife’s “non-profit” where her son is the director. The think tank doesn’t do much more than pay salaries. By all appearances, like the Clinton Global Initiative, paying salaries seems to be its primary function.

The think tank called the Sanders Institute opened its doors in 2017, did very little, then shut down in 2019 only to reopen to collect money from donors. FEC records report that in April 2021, Sanders’s presidential campaign cut a check to the Sanders Institute for $350,000. The Sanders “donation” and one other donation accounted for 84 percent of the $716,000 pulled in, in 2021. Then in 2023, apparently short of cash, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Presidential Campaign “donated” another $200,000 to the Sanders Institute — again titled “charity donations” on disclosure forms.

According to Fox News:

The tax documents indicate that the progressive lawmaker’s stepson is the big winner of the operation. In 2021, the institute raised $716,618 and drove $257,000 into wages, including $152,653 in salary and other compensation to Driscoll.

Sanders’ stepson David Driscoll is the executive director (and also the Creative Director) at the Sanders Institute and appears to do little creative and a lot collecting a salary. What does the Institute really do besides pay Driscoll’s salary and other salaries at the “Institute”? One example is the below video. It objectively has the content and production value of a middle school blogger with a bedroom “studio.” In the video, Jayapal claims there is a “wage gap” for women and that we must fight for “gender equity.” It’s a single-take video that cost hardly anything to produce and nothing to post. The institute might argue that the production value might be low, but the content reaches the masses. As of this writing, it had 38 views in five months. Total.

Most of the institute’s content is several years old. The Institute reported no grants for 2021. But it did pay Driscoll’s salary, and it produced a couple of videos.

Bernie Sanders seems to be the bagman for this family, and Driscoll is a willing beneficiary. To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

American socialism at its finest.