On Tuesday, Vermont Democrat Socialist Bernie Sanders announced he was running for president in 2020.
He’ll join Sens. Warren, Harris, Booker, Gillibrand, Rep. Gabbard, and a few others who have already declared.
If Dems decide to make Bernie their nominee to go against President Trump, they’ll have to deal with the fact that he was once kicked off a hippie commune for being too lazy to work.
From Free Beacon:
Bernie Sanders was asked to leave a hippie commune in 1971 for “sitting around and talking” about politics instead of working, according to a forthcoming book.
We Are As Gods by Kate Daloz, scheduled for release April 26, chronicles the rise and fall of the Myrtle Hill Farm in northeast Vermont. Daloz, a Brooklyn writer, was in a special position to write a history of Myrtle Hill: she was raised near the commune in a geodesic dome residence with an outhouse called the Richard M. Nixon Memorial Hall. Her parents were close acquaintances of the commune residents, who offered them tips about wilderness living.
In the summer of 1971, Myrtle Hill received a visitor: Bernie Sanders, age 30, at the cusp of his political career with the socialist Liberty Union Party.
Continued:
Sanders came to the farm while researching an article on natural childbirth for the Liberty Union’s party organ, Movement. Interest in alternative medicine was strong among members of the counterculture as part of their wider suspicion of modern science, which was associated with the sterility of hospitals and the destruction of war. “Many elements of Western medicine came under suspicion during this period, but none more so than modern obstetrics,” Deloz writes.
In Sanders’ article, previously digitized by Mother Jones, he criticized old methods of childrearing, where “infants were bottle fed on assembly line schedules designed by assembly line doctors in order to prepare them for assembly line society.” In Sanders’ view, natural childbirth was a step toward a more authentic society. “All of life is one and if we want to know, for example, how our nation can napalm children in Vietnam—AND NOT CARE—it is necessary to go well beyond ‘politics,’” he wrote.
Sanders’ prefatory remarks were followed by a Q&A between him and a friend, Loraine (spelled “Lorraine” in the article), who had recently given birth to a baby, Rahula (spelled “Rahoula” in the article), on the Myrtle Hill commune.
Bernie was recently sued “over claims that he used his own political clout to punish a local businessman who ran an attack ad against Sanders.”
From Daily Caller:
Rodolphe “Skip” Vallee, the CEO of St. Albans-based gasoline distributor and retailer R.L. Vallee, is alleging that Sanders and his senior press adviser, Daniel McLean, conspired against the business owner by drumming up a class-action lawsuit, according to federal court documents.
Vallee, who owns more than 45 gas stations in and around Vermont, produced an anti-Sanders television advertisement that aired locally in September 2014. The advertisement criticized Sanders for lambasting “the rich” over receiving tax breaks and golden parachutes, while his wife Jane Sanders received a $200,000 golden parachute after her involvement in a land deal helped to bankrupt Burlington College while she was president.
