At What Point Do We Stop Tolerating Bernie Sanders?

The old line has it that you get what you tolerate.

It’s a good life lesson which isn’t all that often applied to politics — at least, not in polite circles of our politics. We’ve had tolerance preached to us nonstop since we were children, or at least those of us who are Generation X and younger have, and so the idea that you get what you tolerate isn’t supposed to apply.

Somehow, it’s a racist or bigoted idea that you can refuse to tolerate the things you don’t want imposed on you. When, for most of us, it’s really just a question of standards.

And you should have standards in your life. Standards are important. Upholding them almost always results in things being better.

For example, it’s a standard that you shouldn’t have trash lying around in your yard. Or that you wouldn’t put up with crime in your neighborhood. Or that you wouldn’t share a house with a junkie or a child molester. Upholding those kinds of standards is a stance which immediately and consequentially improves your living conditions — or, better yet, keeps them from declining.

But we’re told that tolerance is a societal virtue. And perhaps it is, in the right context.

For example, a society should be tolerant of people from different ethnicities and demographics; that part is simple neighborliness.

Different cultures? Perhaps less so. Experience has shown us that some cultures will meet high standards for cooperation, productivity, and moral rectitude — and others perhaps don’t.

Tolerance isn’t a suicide pact, after all.

And what experience has also taught us is that tolerance of certain ideologies isn’t a good idea at all.

For example, there is an ideology based on the most indefensible of the seven deadly sins — envy, which St. Augustine called “the diabolical sin”; “From envy,” he wrote, “are born hatred, detraction, calumny, joy caused by the misfortune of a neighbor, and displeasure caused by prosperity.”

Socrates called envy the ulcer of the soul.

The great investor Charlie Munger noted that envy is the worst of the seven deadly sins because, unlike the others, it’s no fun at all. Envy is pure pain with no pleasure.

And the pain is considerable. Envy, according to St. John Chrysostom, “is the mother of murder… Through this Cain slew Abel… through this the devil [brought death to] all mankind.”

Envy is also the mother of Marxism.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were both the sons of well-to-do German capitalists; people who did quite well, giving value for value in a free market of commercial exchange. And both took the spoils of their family achievements and micturated all over them, dedicating their lives to attacking the very commercial system that had lifted their people out of crushing poverty in the Middle Ages. (RELATED: New York’s Envy Tax)

When Marxism came along, the world was beginning to emerge out of a system in which virtually all wealth was concentrated in the hands of kings and nobles, people whose prosperity depended on the power to take property and services from others — or at least, the connections to others with such power. The power to pillage had undergirded human societal structure from time immemorial, and as a result, there was very little wealth to be had. Until the beginning of the 19th century, before the flowering of capitalism and, just a little later, the industrial revolution that it sparked, less than five percent of the world’s population could escape poverty.

Now, of course, the vast majority of humanity lives well above the true poverty line. Capitalism taught us that it is better to structure a society around the trade of value for value. Villagers are better building blocks than pillagers, it turns out.

You want diversity? Build a society where virtually any set of skills can translate into riches. Dribbling a basketball, singing soprano, writing computer code, keeping hyper-accurate books, speaking well in public, taking beautiful pictures, even looking good in a pair of jeans — people can translate almost any desirable traits into productive, happy, prosperous lives when free to do so.

You have to be an utterly joyless scold not to appreciate such a society for its liberty and variety, even though it’s only natural to note that some fortunes are a bit less meritorious than others. But that’s the price you pay for a free society.

So, how much tolerance should we have for people who come along and demand that we accept less?

This inevitably brings us to Bernie Sanders. Who is decrepit and a political has-been, I know. But though Sanders’ dreams of seizing political power at the ballot box may have faded away, he hasn’t disappeared. Here was Sanders on Monday…

NEW: Sen. Bernie Sanders blasts Democrats while campaigning for far-left candidates, saying voters don’t respect them:

“People are looking for an alternative, people want a vision as to where we go as a nation.”

“Status quo politics is not good enough.” pic.twitter.com/dbU4iTOgcn

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 4, 2026

On one level, he isn’t wrong — voters don’t respect the Democrat Party. For all the talk about the midterms, which are half a year away, and it’s utterly absurd for anyone to be making predictions about how they’ll go, what’s certainly true is that public approval numbers for Democrats are scandalously low.

Except that Democrats have fallen into their current woes, in which most members of Congress (122 out of 212) representing that party represent racially-gerrymandered, majority-minority districts, the politics of which are wildly off-track with modern America, because of people like Bernie Sanders. (RELATED: The Democrats May Not Survive Callais Ruling)

He isn’t offering anybody an alternative to the Democrat Party. He IS the Democrat Party.

And yet Sanders isn’t even a Democrat. He only registers as one when he’s running for president under that party’s banner.

Which is such a perfect analog for Sanders’ role in American politics, isn’t it?

This is a man who styles himself a revolutionary. He went around the country touting the need for a “political revolution in this country” in 2016. Then one of his supporters brought a rifle to the Congressional Republican baseball team’s practice seeking to kick off that revolution, and damned near killed Steve Scalise before getting his lights turned out. After that, Sanders said he “abhorred” political violence; anybody who believes that is welcome to explain why the more influence Bernie Sanders has had on Democrat politics, the more violent the Democrat base has become. (RELATED: Now We Know What ‘Maximum Warfare, Everywhere, All the Time’ Means)

And yet Sanders refuses to build a revolutionary movement. He’s willing to co-opt somebody else’s movement for his own purposes.

Parasitical, one might say.

Sanders’ supporters whined about how the Democrats screwed him out of their nomination in 2012 and 2016. I’ve always been amazed at the cowardice of the Democrats in not pushing back against that narrative. Why wouldn’t they have screwed Sanders over? Why wouldn’t they rig their primaries to freeze him out? What’s he done for them other than drag their party into the pit of communism?

Sanders should have been repudiated by Democrats years ago. He’s utterly poisoned their party. They played footsie with him and mainstreamed his communist politics, when any respectable student of history knows communism had a larger body count, and a more extensive resume of human misery and utter evil, than fascism and Nazism ever could have dreamed of.

Not that there is any difference in user experience between the two. They’re both left-wing philosophies, and they’re largely indistinguishable in practice. The Italian fascists would look at communist China and say, “Ciao! It’s what we were going for!”

And Sanders likes communist China fine, too. So does the party he’s intermittently imposed himself on — and he’s doing it again, as the video above demonstrates.

But the Democrats are a lost cause. They’ve already succumbed to Bernie Sanders.

What about the rest of us?

Why isn’t Bernie Sanders treated as a cancer on our body politic? Why won’t we declare communism unacceptable?

Why isn’t a Republican Senate doing everything it can to make him persona non grata?

Bernie Sanders is the Ranking Member on the HELP — Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions — Committee in the Senate. He’s not even a Democrat. He caucuses with them, sure, but he’s not a member of the party. And yet John Thune allows a communist to be the second man on that committee?

Sanders is also on the Finance Committee, the Budget Committee, the Environment and Public Works Committee, and the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. In the Senate Finance Committee, he’s the Ranking Member of the Social Security, Pensions, and Family Policy Subcommittee.

Why does he have any committee assignments? What role should communists have in the governance of a free country?

Why wasn’t he censured for calling for a political revolution in America? Why wasn’t he censured for the predictable outcome of that call — which was James Hodgkinson’s attempted mass murder of Republican elected officials on that baseball field?

Why are we tolerating communist politicians when we know what happens when communists take political power? They don’t tolerate anybody else’s ideology — they force their critics to dig a ditch and then shoot them into it.

I’m not suggesting we do that to Bernie Sanders. I’m sure as hell suggesting he shouldn’t be the ranking member of any committees, and he absolutely shouldn’t be in control of the politics of the Democrat Party, of which he isn’t even a member.

And I’m certainly not trying to save the Democrats. They deserve their fate. I would like to save America, though. And I don’t think it’s too late to repudiate this fossilized Bolshevik bastard and banish him to the fringes where he belongs.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: The Supreme Court Is a Rake. ‘Temu Obama’ Just Stepped On It.

The Left Is Melting Down Over Callais

Now We Know What ‘Maximum Warfare, Everywhere, All the Time’ Means

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