"Friends of Bernie Sanders" spent $200,000 on jets to fight the elusive Oligarchy

Imagine the spectacle of comrades Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, those self-styled scourges of the elite, soaring above the toiling masses in a private jet—a gleaming chariot of hypocrisy that burns through $15,000 an hour and pollutes the skies equivalent to a medium-size village. This, we are told by Fox News, was their chosen mode of transport for their so-called “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” along the West Coast. Fighting oligarchy, it seems, requires the kind of opulence that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush.

The Washington Free Beacon, digging through the financial entrails of Sanders’ campaign, reveals a princely sum of over $200,000 spent on private jets in recent months. “Friends of Bernie Sanders, which manages the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, contracted three firms that charter jets: Cirrus Aviation Services, N-Jet, and Ventura Jets,” the Beacon reports, with payments to these firms gobbling up nearly 75 percent of the campaign’s transportation budget. 

A modest $63,830 went to commercial flights—presumably for the plebs in the entourage—while $41,000 was splashed on lodging and a cool $248,245 on event production. One wonders if the irony of such extravagance ever pierced the bubble of their righteous indignation. In other words, who are the oligarchs?

The National Republican Congressional Committee’s Ben Petersen put it with deadly bluntness: “Champagne socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demand Americans surrender their pick-up trucks, air conditioning and meat from the luxe leather seats of their private jets that cost more per hour than most Americans earn in months. Their hypocrisy is staggering.” 

Staggering, indeed. This is the same Sanders who, in 2014, thundered against the fossil fuel industry, writing, “The fossil fuel industry is destroying the planet with impunity and getting rich while doing it. That must end.” Yet here he is, guzzling carbon like a robber baron at a banquet, all while preaching austerity to the proletariat.

Sanders’ rhetoric is as unrelenting as it is unreflective. “We will not accept a rigged economy where working people struggle while billionaires become richer,” he declared in his Brooklyn accent on Tuesday, taking a swipe at Elon Musk and the “billionaire class.” This from a man who, as Michael Bloomberg pointed out during the 2020 Democratic primary debate in Nevada, is “the best-known socialist in the country” and “a millionaire with three houses.” Bloomberg’s retort was a rapier thrust: “What did I miss here?” 

Nothing, Mr. Bloomberg. You missed nothing.

Sanders’ own words betray him. In that same debate, he proclaimed, “We are living in many ways in a socialist society right now,” before launching into a paean to “democratic socialism for working people, not billionaires, health care for all, educational opportunities for all.” 

Fine words Bernie, but how they ring hollow when uttered from the plush confines of a private jet. The late Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, saw through the charade. “Don’t bring up Bernie Sanders, because that’s a red flag in front of me,” he once said. “He is the enemy of every entrepreneur that’s ever going to be born in this country and has been born in the past.”

And so, the Sanders and Alexandria Obviously-Commie roadshow rolls on, a carnival of contradictions. They rail against the excesses of capitalism while indulging in its most ostentatious trappings. They decry the billionaire class while living that lifestyle. It's a performance of such breathtaking audacity that one can only marvel at the sheer gall of it all.

I call it 'The Audacity of Dope."

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