Bernie Sanders took to MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” to make the case why voters who support Palestinian people and oppose the war in Gaza should still support Kamala Harris. As the 2024 campaign comes to a climax, the Biden-Harris administration’s position on the conflict has remained a contentious point on the campaign trail.
“The bottom line is there are many, many millions of Americans, including myself, who strongly disagree with Biden’s and Harris’s position on Gaza and their support of Netanyahu,” Sanders said. “I think viewers understand that what’s going on in Gaza now is horrific in terms of the loss of life, the number of people injured. And now, because Israel is blocking humanitarian aid, we’re looking at mass malnutrition of children and starvation.”
“And they’re going to make it even worse by not allowing UNWRA to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza,” the Vermont senator continued.
But that’s when he made a turn, explaining why despite his concerns with the administration’s policy, he still stands behind Harris.
“What I think is, it’s important for people to know — especially young people — that as wrong as Biden and Harris are on this issue, Trump is even worse,” Sanders argued.
In their discussion, Sanders pointed to Sheldon Adelson’s billionaire widow, Miriam Adelson, who has donated around $100 million in support of Trump.
“She is rabidly pro-Netanyahu,” Sanders said.
Their conversation follows a video released by Sanders earlier in the week making a similar argument to his followers:
“The point of my video, which kind of blew me away — it’s gotten over 15 million views by now — is that, yeah, we disagree with Harris on this issue, but we have a much better chance … of changing U.S. policy under Harris,” Sanders said.
“And I promise I will do everything that I can to move the administration to change their policies and not continue to provide financial aid or military aid or offensive aid to Netanyahu,” the senator vowed.
Sanders and Hayes also took time in their interview to take some shots at Trump’s most outspoken billionaire supporter, Elon Musk.
“It sometimes feels like Elon Musk was conjured from the mind of Bernie Sanders to embody the billionaire class,” Hayes quipped, pointing to the hundreds of millions of dollars the Tesla CEO has poured into politics in support of conservative candidates — particularly Trump — while also being “virulently anti-union.”
The senator agreed, telling Hayes that he was “absolutely right.” He pointed to three billionaires who have spent hundreds of millions to make Trump the next president, while conceding, “Democrats have their billionaires, but what we have got to deal with is the reality that we cannot allow this type of billionaire money to determine who the next president of the United States is.”
Hayes brought up the 1968 Democratic campaign and the role of the Vietnam War in that year’s race and the ultimate election of Richard Nixon.
“The ’68 campaign, people were very, very understandably and rightly enraged at Johnson and the Democratic Party over Vietnam,” Hayes said. “People forget this, but Nixon basically ran as the peace candidate in ’68 and then immediately started bombing Cambodia in secret and caused the loss of life.”
Sanders agreed, adding, “Let’s understand that Netanyahu is a right-wing racist extremist prime minister in Israel, surely wants his good friend Donald Trump to be president of the United States — two right-wing extremists working together.”
He asserted that the answer is for “millions of us to get active on this issue to change U.S. policy in Gaza.”
You can watch the full interview by Chris Hayes with Sen. Bernie Sanders in the video at the top of this story.
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