GOP senator: Jewish candidate Bernie Sanders promises 'same thing' as Nazis

During a Monday appearance on Fox News, Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) accused fellow Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, of promoting a Nazi agenda. Sanders, who is Jewish, has said that his father’s family was among the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

Host Steve Doocey said Sanders is promising “free preschool, free health care, free tuition, and of course legalized pot.”

Perdue responded by linking Sanders’ promises to Nazi Germany.

“Well, if you look at what he’s promising, it’s the same thing the Soviets did in Russia, the Germans did in ’33, the Cubans did in ’59, and even Venezuela today,” Perdue said. “It’s a lie.”

The video was flagged by Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief for the Intercept.

Perdue is not telling the truth. Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist, and his views are antithetical to the views of German Nazis.

“The Nazis opposed all traditional socialism, wanting to substitute something they called ‘German socialism’ or ‘Aryan socialism,'” Barbara Miller Lane, a Bryn Mawr College professor and expert on Nazi Germany, told Politifact in 2015.

The Nazi agenda included anti-immigrant racism and the threat of genocide. Sanders is running on a decidedly pro-immigrant platform.

When Donald Trump, Jr. compared the Democratic platform to Nazi Germany in 2018, Politifact rated the claim so absurd that it received the lowest rating, “Pants on Fire.”

“There is nothing in the Democratic Platform that resembles the central point of the Nazi movement — that ‘no Jew may be a member of the nation,'” Peter Hayes, a Northwestern University history professor, told Politifact.

On Monday night, Sanders told a CNN town hall that his father’s family was “wiped out by Hitler.”

Sanders added that he grew up in a neighborhood where “people had tattoos on their arms from having been in concentration camps,” adding that he “learned at a very early age what, if you like, white nationalism — which is what Nazism is in the extreme — is about.”

Sanders said that it is “absolutely imperative — not just me — that all of us do everything we can to stop racism and white nationalism.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.