National Review, ostensibly one of the leading media outlets in U.S. conservatism, published this piece from Kevin Williiamson about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) presidential campaign.
In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics.

Is that so. When describing the Vermont senator’s liberal approach to politics, Williiamson and National Review are effectively powerless – they must reference national socialism. There is, the author assures us, “no other way.”

Remember, unlike Pat Roberts, Williiamson isn’t just throwing the phrase around unknowingly. This is deliberate – the conservative is connecting the liberal candidate to the phrase most commonly associated with the Nazi’s political system.

That members of Sanders’ family were murdered during the Holocaust apparently didn’t stop Williiamson – or his editors, or the fact-checkers, or the publishers – from making the connection anyway.

It wasn’t long ago that the Republican establishment and conservative media were content to ignore Sanders and his ideas. If his name came up at all, it was used as a punch-line – Sanders was a liberal caricature, not to be taken seriously.

That’s obviously changed. As Sanders’ crowds grow and his poll standing improves, the Vermonter has positioned himself as worthy of National Review condemnation. To be sure, it’s unpersuasive, needlessly provocative condemnation, but it’s also evidence of a prominent national figure whom the right is no longer inclined to discount as irrelevant.

There is something very unnerving, to say the least, about calling a Jewish politician who lost family members in the Holocaust a Nazi. But this is exactly what Kevin Williamson did while writing in the conservative journal “The National Review.” Yes, he called Bernie Sanders a National Socialist.
Williamson wrote about the Senator from Vermont and the current Presidential candidate in a piece titled “Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism.”

“In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics.”

OK, so he qualified these comments by comparing Sanders’ anti-free trade rhetoric with that made in Europe in the lead up to World War II. And yes he did acknowledge that it was unseemly to make such a statement about a Jew?

But that does not excuse this.

Any comparison of Jews to Nazis is inherently anti-semitic. It is the type of propaganda that the real Nazis of the world engage in order to wipe out the memory of the Holocaust.