Could a white supremacist terrorist also be a Bernie Sanders supporter?

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On Friday, The Washington Post ran a story about an assassination plot against Joe Biden by a lone white supremacist terrorist. It began:

As it was becoming clear in March that Joe Biden would be the Democratic presidential nominee, Alexander Hillel Treisman started to map out his plot to assassinate the former vice president, federal authorities say.

The Daily Beast also picked it up:

According to court documents obtained by The Daily Beast,Treisman’s arrest spurred a shocking investigation that uncovered his affinity for mass shootings, racist ideologies, and interest in killing the Democratic presidential nominee. Treisman quickly became the target of a Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) investigation which included agents from multiple field offices around the country.

This plot had gone well beyond the talking stage. Originally from Seattle, Alexander Hillel Treisman had traveled “to a Wendy’s mere miles from the former vice president’s home,” and in his van the police “found a trove of weapons, including an AR-15 style rifle behind the driver’s seat, a canister of Tannerite, an explosive material, and more than $500,000,” when he was arrested in Kannapolis, North Carolina.

Before he turned his aim towards Biden, he posted on iFunny, a Russian owned social media platform that has become a hub for white nationalists as they have been banned from other platforms, “using racial slurs and talking about killing Black Americans.”

If you're like me, about now you're thinking—another rabid racist Trump supporter. I too was surprised to find that Treisman appears rather to be a fan of Bernie Sanders.  The Charlotte Observer reports:

Treisman also appeared to have been a fan of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. In fact, his musings about Biden took place after Sanders left the race on April 8.

“My hatred is for the complacent American people who will turn u in for their own satisfaction,” Treisman posted that same day. “But aside from former goals, my eyes are on the future. If anything I have to save bernie while I can.”

What Bernie Sanders got wrong

On Thursday, 22 Oct. 2020, Chris Hayes asked Bernie Sanders about some polling Trump is promoting that has a majority saying that they are better off today than four years ago. Sanders, with two signs behind him “Fight for a Green New Deal” and “People Power,” responded:

I'm not hearing that people think that they are better off today than they were four years ago. You can debate how people felt before the pandemic, but right now, the facts are quite clear. We have lost tens of millions of jobs. Millions of people have lost their healthcare. I mean, you just saw a million and a half people in New York City alone, one city, are having a hard time feeding their kids. So, I do not believe that most people today, after the pandemic, consider themselves better off than they were four years ago. But clearly, in my view, what Biden has got to do in the last 2 weeks, what we have got to do with a Democratic Congress, is make sure we do not go back to business as usual.

I'm going to fight for a 100 day agenda which speaks to the needs, and the pain, of working families today. We're going to raise that minimum wage to a living wage. We're going to create millions of good paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, transforming our energy system. We're going to expand healthcare. I want to see us move forward with Medicare for All single payer system at least the 1st year that lowers the eligibility age of 65 down to 55. Got to deal with criminal justice, immigration reform—right now! If there was ever a moment in American history where the Democratic Party has gotta be strong, bold, and stand up to the powerful special interests, this is that moment.

What I didn't hear in that recitation is anything that spoke to the pain caused by racism, anything that spoke to me as an African American. Nothing that referenced the racial inequities exposed by the pandemic. Nothing that spoke to the rise of white supremacist viewpoints and policies in the past four years that surpass anything I have witnessed in this country since I stood on the Mall in Washington, DC to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak about his dream on 28 August 1963.

Nor, did I hear anything a white supremacist would necessarily disagree with, nothing that was specifically anti-racist. 

Black Lives Matter march in Pasadena on Friday

Sure, “criminal justice, immigration reform” may be taken by some as alluding to those concerns. I rather suspect Sanders thinks so, by the way his voice emphasized that phrase, but they don't. In fact, there is something mildly racist in implying that they do. Most African Americans aren't under the supervisor of the criminal justice system, even though all suffer under the heel of police brutality. Just as most Latinx, and Asians, aren't immigrants. 

Sanders subsumes police brutality under criminal justice reform, but both are more in the US where they are also used as instruments of racist social control, and that must be addressed directly. Also, the phrase “Got to deal with criminal justice, immigration reform - right now!” has no specific content at all, both racists and anti-racists use those terms. They just differ on what the reforms look like.

While he is big on championing the class struggle of all workers with demands like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and the $15/hr. minimum wage, “Sanders seldom trained that same impassioned rhetoric on the problems that so many black voters wanted addressed: police brutality, white supremacy, and the ways in which economic inequality is inextricable from race,” complained Terrell Jermaine Starr in 2016. Not much changed for his 2020 run.

Black Lives Matter march in Los Angeles on Saturday

Bernie Sanders was cheered when first introduced at the “She the People” event, a candidate forum focused on women of color, 15 August 2019, but he was booed my the time he left, because when ask what he would do about the rise of white supremacist violence, he first related how he too was on the Mall with Dr. King, and then moved on to give his standard economic stump speech about ending “all forms of  discrimination,” Medicare for All, etc. He was actually given three chances to address this question, but he never did to the audience's satisfaction. Tulsi Gabbard was the only other candidate booed. In her case, it was because of her position on Syria.

Sanders never did a good job of addressing racism, or the rise of white supremacist violence, when prompted by an audience of color. When he wasn't addressing people of color, he didn't even go there. He never understood that that was the single most important question, not just for people of color, but for all Americans, in the 2020 election.

He acted as though his big wins in white primary states would propel him to victory in South Carolina, and beyond. He scrapped plans for a speech on racial justice, canceled a planned visit to a civil rights museum in Mississippi, and  skipped a commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” in Alabama, answering criticisms, by snapping that he was drawing big crowds in California.

"I think if the Bernie Sanders campaign could do it all over again, they might have gone to Selma," @JoyAnnReid says, referencing Sen. Sanders' absence at the 55th anniv. of the Bloody Sunday march for civil rights in Selma, Alabama. pic.twitter.com/Kt5uKWFxna

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 4, 2020

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said she didn't think Sander's understands that racism is as “central and key to our condition as the economic issues. Sometimes I feel like he doesn’t see that.” Noting that “Bernie has not publicly expressed that he even thinks that he needs black voters,” she concluded “There's a blind spot as it relates to race.”

Sanders never delivered a comprehensive speech to clarify his views on the relationship between race and class. The one time he was slated to do so, in Flint, MI, he scraped the speech when the audience he expected to be mostly black people turned out to be mostly white. Apparently, that wasn't a message he wanted to deliver to that crowd.

While African Americans understand the importance of class difference better than most, including class differences within the black community, we also understand that like the Jews under Hitler's reign, we share a common fate, if the white supremacists should consolidate their power under Trump. 

This has made the defeat of Trump the most important consideration with regards to the selection of a Democratic candidate to go up against him in 2020. This also made support for a third-party candidate, with no real chance of winning, out of scope for most African American voters.

The problem for Sanders was not an inability to win African American voters to his progressive ideas. For example, 74% back his Medicare for All. The problem is we don't think the 44% support for that notion among white voters is enough to make him a winner in November.

Bernie Sanders knows the importance of addressing those questions—when he is addressing an African American audience, and wooing black voters—but for the most part his focus is pretty much a call for economic justice. Like most in the white Left, he acts as though the struggle for socialism will subsume, and resolve, the racial issues in due course. 

His campaign never spent much time and money on winning support among African Americans, and when it did, “It was always a dog-and-pony show when it came to black outreach,” was the way one former staffer put it.

Trump is a white supremacist, a racist. He can't be beaten by another angry white man just because he isn't a racist. He can only be beaten by a candidate that is actively anti-racist. This ain't Bernie, so African American voters quickly came to the conclusion that he wasn't the candidate that could beat Trump. This flowed from two reasons: 1) His refusal to address the problems of the racism that daily harms African Americans, meant that he would never be able to mobilize the turnout in our community sufficient to defeat Trump, and 2) His refusal to draw a “line in the sand” with regards to Trump's racism with white voters, meant that he would never win over enough white voters to make the difference. That's why he lost the nomination.

The week before the South Carolina primary, Steve Phillips warned in The Nation “If Progressives Want to Win, They’ll Have to Talk About White Supremacy.” In an article under that title he said:

[T]he most progressive candidates in this race have spent far more time critiquing other, more moderate candidates and supposedly race-neutral aspects of Trump’s time in office, such as his tax cuts for the rich, than they have fighting white nationalism. (Ironically, moderate Joe Biden may be the only one who has directly refuted Trump on this point: One of his early campaign ads challenged the president’s 2017 defense of the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.)

What's more, that anti-racist ad was directed at all voters. Joe Biden, in spite of all his past misdeeds, including on the question of race, ran an anti-racist campaign from the very beginning. He even said that Trump's infamous Charlottesville comments, “very fine people, on both sides,” was the thing that prompted him to run in the first place.

Nevertheless, Sanders had a healthy lead through the first three primaries in overwhelmingly white states, while Biden's was on life support. Most expected him to drop out soon, and progressives thought they were finally within striking distance of getting a progressive Democratic candidate that expressed their views.

Then the African American voters of South Carolina had their say, voting 84% for Biden. That changed everything. That was on Saturday, 29 February 2020.  The following Super Tuesday, Biden handed Sanders his hat on the strength of the black vote, defeating Sanders in eight states with large African American populations.

Many credited his victory to the endorsement of SC Representative James Clyburn. They viewed the black voters as sheep, blindly following the leadership of an old party hack. But Biden was already leading among black voters in South Carolina before the endorsement. He had a regular presence in black churches, and the endorsement of a hundred black preachers before Clyburn's very late endorsement. While the endorsement certainly helped, it is probably more accurate to say Clyburn was “leading” from behind, endorsing the candidate he already knew was going to win the African American vote in SC.     

After than, some “Bernie Bros” really showed their racist asses. One tweeted  “People won't say it but the truth is that many voters in SC are low information voters. Which is a nice way to put it.”

And what would be the less nice way to put it?

The truth is that most African American see Donald Trump, and the rise of the white terror he represents, as an existential threat to our existence. They see defeating him as the number one priority in this election. It's not that they don't support programs like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, or the $15/hr. minimum wage. They do. They just doubt that a candidate championing that progressive agenda can win over enough white voters while a majority of those voters are still so backwards as to support Trump. 

Trump is trying hard to paint Biden as a socialist because he thinks that association will make him unelectable at this time. That it is still a tight race against the moderate Biden, even after Trump has so badly fumbled the pandemic response, and crashed the economy, would seem to bear that out.

Why would a white supremacist support Sanders?

But, all that aside, there may be no better proof that Bernie Sanders has failed to run an anti-racist campaign than the fact that a rabid racist like Alexander Treisman would still support him. To understand that, we will have to look at Treisman's political philosophy.

Treisman proclaimed his support for the Christchurch mosque shooter, Brenton Harrison Tarrant. This is a new breed of white supremacist that claims to be anti-globalist, anti-capitalist, and pro-green—what he described as an “eco-fascist” position, proclaiming “Globalized capitalist markets are the enemy of racial autonomists.”

In his “The Great Replacement” manifesto, he claims to be for “increasing the rights of workers,” as long as they are white workers, “overthrowing the global power structure”, “taxation should be considered theft", “Green nationalism is the only true nationalism”, “there is no nationalism without environmentalism", “pushing increases to the minimum wage;  furthering the unionization of workers; increasing the native birthrate and thereby reducing the need for the importation of labour; increasing the rights of workers” all in the name of ending immigration. “[T]he need for increasing profit margins of capital owners needs to be fought against and broken.”

When asked if he is a socialist, he responded “Depending on the definition. Worker ownership of the means of production? It depends on who those workers are, their intents, who currently owns the means of production, their intents and who currently owns the state, and its intents,” because they import cheap labor to replace white workers. Many of his slogans sound very “progressive,” but they are only meant to apply to white people.

This man, propelled by these ideas, massacred 50 Muslims in New Zealand Mosques on 15 March, 2019.

Patrick Crusius is the El Paso shooter who killed 20 people, and wounded dozens more, at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, 3 August 2019. Like Treisman, he said he was a supporter of “the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” In his manifesto, he said his attack was  “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” 

He opposed “The takeover of the United States government by unchecked corporations.” Claimed to favor “a basic universal income to prevent widespread poverty and civil unrest”, “ambitions social projects like universal healthcare,” but only for whites. He complains that “Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources.” and “Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations,” and opposes “imperialistic wars.” Saying “The government is unwilling to tackle these issues beyond empty promises since they are owned by corporations. Corporations that also like immigration because more people means a bigger market for their products.” But also “I am against race mixing because it destroys genetic diversity and creates identity problems.” His goal is to carve a white ethnostate out of the US.

As you can see, this newest iteration of fascism and white supremacy has adopted many of the slogans and catch phrases of left-wing progressives in a effort to gain a following among white workers. If you remember that “Nazi” was just English shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers Party, you will know this is not a particularly new trick.

Given this outlook, the problem isn't understanding why someone like Treisman might be attracted to Sander's agenda of a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, or a $15/hr minimum wage. The problem is that he hasn't seen anything like an anti-racist side to the Sanders' program that would repel him. 

Vote Trump Out Now!

Clay Claiborne