Bernie's Three Houses: Media Spin vs Reality

Progressives have claimed that POLITICO’s latest hit piece on Bernie Sanders and his net worth could be considered anti-Semitic and it’s hard to disagree with the evidence shown.

Sanders recently released his tax returns which showed that his net worth could be up to $1.9M, and many anti-Bernie Democrats and cable news hosts - *cough ERIN BURNETT cough* - suggested that this would make Sanders a hypocrite, given how often you’ll hear Bernie railing against the 1%. Instead, what would make Sanders a hypocrite was if he suddenly changed his tune on rich people paying their fair share in taxes, but, spoiler alert, he hasn’t changed his message. This also makes him much more credible given the fact that his tax proposals would now actually affect his own pocket.

POLITICO recently ran a story attempting to delve into how much money the supposed ‘Champion of the Poor’ has. However, the trope of Jews secretly hiding their illicit wealth was extremely prominent during the Nazi era, which led to outrage from progressives and POLITICO to repost the story roughly eighty seven times in an attempt to keep the original tone of attacking Sanders and losing the clearly anti-Semitic wording, but they ended up making it even worse. Here’s what they chose to go with..

LOOK! THE JEW HAS A MONEY TREE!

There’s also another few glaring issues with this narrative, Sanders had been a Representative of Vermont from 1991-2007 with a yearly salary of $174,000 and has been the Senator of Vermont since 2007, with the same salary, so prior to yearly expenses Sanders would have earned $4.2M in the 28 years that he’s been in politics. 

This narrative gets even more ridiculous knowing the fact that since Sanders 2016 run for President, he has become a household name in US politics and is now the most popular politician in America, which led to Sanders writing three extremely popular and bestselling books. (Our Revolution, Where We Go From Here, Bernie Sanders Guide To Political Revolution). 

Oh, you see those houses in the first picture above? Yeah, Sanders houses look nothing like that, at all. It should also be noted that every politician, as far as I know, has their own personal home in the state that they represent and another when they have to travel to Washington to attend the Senate.

Lastly, it should also be noted that Sanders is one of the poorest members of the Senate. OpenSecrets, an organisation which tracks politicians income and their large corporate donors, ranked Sanders 77th out of 100 Senators in terms of net worth. 

If you’d like to see a much better take down of this story I’d recommend this Question Time video: