Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist from Vermont who has literally never held a private sector job in his life, has spent the past few months crisscrossing the United States, rallying against what he calls an “oligarchy” threatening American democracy. This is an obvious exercise in projection.
From Omaha, Nebraska, to Iowa City, Iowa, and now targeting Republican-held congressional districts in Wisconsin ahead of a pivotal state Supreme Court election in April 2025, Sanders has positioned himself as the torchbearer of a “progressive resistance.” His “Fighting Oligarchy” tour has drawn significant attention from the rudderless far-Left, with viewership often reaching six figures and a recent video amassing nearly 3 million views.
Sanders’ neo-Marxist message resonates with a segment of the far- and radical-Left emboldened by former President Joe Biden’s farewell address, in which he warned of “an oligarchy taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence” that endangers democracy itself.
Yet, beneath the propagandistic fervor and viral optics lies a deeply flawed ideology—Democratic Socialism—as championed by Sanders.
His campaign against “oligarchy,” his critiques of the Trump administration’s billionaire-heavy roster, and his attacks on policies like the 2017 tax cuts and the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts reveal not a coherent vision for America, but a patchwork of economic fallacies, political opportunism, and moral posturing. Sanders’ rhetoric and ideology, along with Democratic Socialism as a whole, are not only impractical but also disingenuous, relying on exaggerated class warfare narratives that fail to withstand scrutiny.
Sanders’ self-identification as a Democratic Socialist invites immediate skepticism when one examines the term’s historical and practical implications. Democratic Socialism, in theory, seeks to blend socialist economic principles—centralized control of production, wealth redistribution, and the abolition of private profit motives—with democratic governance. Yet, Sanders’ version of this ideology often veers into a muddled hybrid, neither fully socialist nor pragmatically democratic, raising questions about its intellectual coherence.
Historically, socialism has been associated with state ownership of the means of production, as seen in the Soviet Union or Maoist China, where economic centralization led to inefficiency, stagnation, and authoritarianism. Sanders distances himself from these examples, pointing instead to Scandinavian countries like Denmark or Sweden as models.
However, these nations are not socialist in the traditional sense—they are market economies with robust welfare states, high taxes, and private enterprise thriving alongside significant government intervention. Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen famously rebuked Sanders in 2015, stating, “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” Sanders’ insistence on the “Democratic Socialist” label thus appears more as a branding exercise than a precise ideological commitment.
This mislabeling matters because it obfuscates the policy debate.
Sanders rails against “oligarchy” and billionaires like Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, and Linda McMahon, who populate the Trump administration, yet his solutions—massive government expansion, wealth taxes, and nationalized industries like healthcare—do not align with the flexible, market-driven systems he claims to admire in Scandinavia. Instead, they echo the top-down control of traditional socialism, which has consistently failed to deliver prosperity without sacrificing individual liberty. His critique of the Trump administration’s billionaire class, while emotionally compelling, lacks a clear alternative that avoids the pitfalls of centralized power—ironically, the very thing he accuses oligarchs of wielding.
Sanders’ central thesis—that America is sliding into an oligarchy—gained traction when Biden echoed it in his farewell address. The image of Trump flanked by billionaires at his inauguration, coupled with Musk’s DOGE-led cuts to federal agencies like the intensely corrupt and ideologically agendized USAID, fuels Sanders’ claim that a handful of ultra-wealthy elites are seizing control of democracy.
Talking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper in February 2025, Sanders called Musk’s USAID cuts “unconstitutional,” arguing they bypass Congress’ authority over appropriations. His “Fighting Oligarchy” tour amplifies this narrative, spotlighting affected individuals like former park rangers laid off due to National Park Service reductions.
As an aside, Sanders is also dead wrong about the DOGE effort sidestepping congressional appropriations. DOGE is a repurposing of the congressionally funded United States Digital Service (USDS), an agency created under the Obama administration in 2014. The US Constitution allows a President to manage the Executive Branch as he sees fit, including rebranding and repurposing without the need for congressional input or approval. But then, a constitutionally illiterate Democratic Socialist probably would know that.
But is America truly an oligarchy? The term implies a small, unelected elite governing without accountability—a description more fitting for Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and Maduro’s Venezuela than a constitutional republic with regular elections, checks and balances, and—to the extent that it is—a free press. Sanders points to wealth concentration as evidence, noting that Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg collectively hold more wealth than the bottom half of Americans. This disparity is real (Forbes estimated their combined net worth at $911.7 billion in early 2025) but wholly irrelevant. Wealth alone does not equate to political domination.
Consider the 2024 election: Kamala Harris outspent Trump by a wide margin, raising over $1 billion with support from progressive billionaires like George Soros and Reid Hoffman, yet she lost decisively. Musk’s $270 million in campaign spending, while significant, was dwarfed by the Left’s war chest. If money guaranteed power, Harris would be president, not Trump.
This suggests that electoral outcomes hinge more on voter sentiment than billionaire checkbooks—a reality Sanders conveniently glosses over. His portrayal of Musk as a puppet master, pulling strings via DOGE, ignores the broader democratic process that installed Trump and his administration, however imperfect some my consider it to be.
Moreover, Sanders’ focus on “oligarchy” cherry-picks data to fit his narrative. The US economy remains dynamic, with entrepreneurship and upward mobility still possible, as evidenced by Musk himself—a South African immigrant who built his fortune through innovation. Wealth inequality is a challenge, but labeling it an oligarchy oversimplifies a complex system where power is distributed across elected officials, corporations, and citizens—not just a cabal of billionaires.
A chief propagandistic cornerstone of Sanders’ critique is the Trump administration’s plan to lock in the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act (TCJA), which he portrays as a giveaway to the rich at the expense of the working class. In Iowa City, he argued that these cuts exacerbate inequality, funneling benefits to billionaires while slashing funds for Medicaid, education, and housing. This rhetoric plays well to his tunnel-visioned, radically Leftist base, but the economic reality is more nuanced—and Sanders’ alternative is much less viable than he admits.
The TCJA reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and lowered individual rates across income brackets. Critics like Sanders highlight that the top 1% reaped disproportionate gains—an estimated 20% of the total tax relief, according to the Tax Policy Center. Yet, the cuts also boosted economic growth, with GDP rising 2.9% in 2018 compared to 2.3% in 2016, and unemployment falling to a 50-year low of 3.5% by 2019. Wage growth for low- and middle-income workers outpaced that of the top earners in 2018-2019, per Census Bureau data, contradicting the narrative of exclusive elite enrichment.
Sanders’ solution—reversing these cuts and imposing steep wealth taxes—ignores the trade-offs.
Higher corporate taxes could deter investment, as seen in pre-2017 America when companies hoarded cash overseas to avoid the 35% rate. His proposed wealth tax, modeled on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plan, would face practical hurdles: capital flight, valuation disputes, and constitutional challenges under the 16th Amendment. France’s wealth tax, abandoned in 2017 after driving 60,000 millionaires abroad, serves as a cautionary tale. Sanders’ economic vision promises fairness but would deliver stagnation—a lesson history teaches but he refuses to learn.
Sanders’ outrage over Musk’s DOGE cuts, particularly to USAID and the National Park Service, exemplifies his tendency to prioritize pseudo-moral indignation over pragmatic governance. In Omaha, he stood alongside former park rangers, decrying their layoffs as evidence of billionaire indifference. On CNN, he labeled the USAID cuts unconstitutional, citing the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which forbids the executive from withholding Congressionally appropriated funds without legislative approval.
Legally, Sanders has a point—US District Judge Loren L. AliKhan’s February 2025 ruling suggested the administration’s funding freeze “potentially run[s] roughshod over a ‘bulwark of the Constitution.’” Yet, his broader critique falters when the understanding that DOGE actions are not aimed at ending funding, but weeding out waste, corruption, and outright fraud, are considered.
DOGE aims to slash federal spending by $2 trillion, targeting inefficiencies in a $6.8 trillion budget. USAID, with a $50 billion annual allocation, has faced criticism for waste, ineffectiveness, and now agendized fraud, all of which have now been exposed. Government Accountability Office reports have flagged mismanagement in its aid programs. National Park Service layoffs, while emotionally charged, reflect a broader push to streamline a bureaucracy that employs over 12,000 with a $3 billion budget, yet struggles with maintenance backlogs.
Sanders frames these cuts as an assault on the vulnerable, but he offers no serious plan to address the federal deficit, now at $36 trillion, or the inefficiencies DOGE targets. His alternative—expanding government programs like Medicare for All, costing an estimated $32 trillion over a decade per the Urban Institute—relies on fantastical revenue projections and dismisses the fiscal reality that entitlement spending already consumes 70% of the budget. Democratic Socialism, as Sanders envisions it, demands endless expenditure without a credible funding mechanism beyond “tax the rich,” a mantra that collapses under scrutiny when applied to a globalized economy.
Sanders’ latest move—touring Wisconsin’s Republican-held districts ahead of an April 2025 state Supreme Court election—underscores his propensity for opportunistic political theater.
Wisconsin, a battleground state, will decide whether conservatives retain control of its top court, a decision with implications for free speech, cultural Marxism (wokeness), voting rights, and redistricting. Sanders’ involvement, ostensibly to combat “oligarchy,” reeks of ideological and political opportunism. He’s not just fighting billionaires; he’s rallying far-Left Democrats—and targeting college students—in a state where his 2016 and 2020 primary wins showcased his appeal, conveniently aligning his “movement” with partisan electoral goals.
This pattern repeats across his tour. In Omaha and Iowa City, he targeted districts flipped by Republicans in 2024, urging audiences to pressure Reps. Don Bacon and Mariannette Miller-Meeks to oppose tax cuts. His grassroots veneer masks a calculated strategy: energize the far-Left while sidestepping the national stage, where his ideas face sterner tests and exposure to their inabilities to work.
Sanders’ nearly 3 million video views reflect his media savvy, but popularity does not equal viability. His CNN appearances and viral clips amplify his message, yet they rarely grapple with the hard questions of implementation or cost—hallmarks of a propagandistic populist more interested in preaching and being seen as important and relevant more than governing.
Sanders’ crusade against billionaires like Musk, Lutnick, and McMahon drips with irony. He decries their wealth and influence, yet his own career—spanning four decades in Congress—has made him a millionaire, with a net worth estimated at $3 million by 2025, per public disclosures, and all on a six-figure salary (think about that). His three homes, including a $600,000 lakefront property, belie the asceticly Bolshevik image he cultivates. While not in Musk’s league, Sanders’ personal success within the system he critiques undermines his moral authority. If wealth concentration is the problem, why does he exempt himself from the reckoning?
Moreover, Sanders’ selective outrage ignores far-Left Democrat billionaires—Soros, Hoffman, Tom Steyer—who pour millions into progressive causes, including NGOs that we now know purposely interfere in elections in transgression of the 501c3 statuses. In 2024, they dwarfed Musk’s contributions, yet Sanders rarely calls them out, exposing a partisan double standard. His “oligarchy” label applies only to those in the Center and on the Right, suggesting his fight is less about principle and more about political tribalism.
The real peril of Sanders’ Democratic Socialism—as well as that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Greg Casar—lies not in its immediate feasibility, or infeasibility, as it were (his policies face long odds in a divided Congress), but in its long-term implications and the destruction it would cause to the lower- and middle-classes. By demonizing wealth creators like Musk, whose innovations in electric vehicles, space travel, and communications have tangible societal benefits—including employment and all the trappings that come with it, Sanders risks stifling the entrepreneurial spirit that drives American prosperity. His obsession with wealth redistribution overlooks the role of private capital in funding breakthroughs that government alone cannot replicate—SpaceX’s reusable rockets, for instance, outpace NASA’s efforts at a fraction of the cost, and don’t get me started on Starlink.
Furthermore, Sanders’ expansionist government vision directly threatens individual liberty.
Medicare for All, free college, and Green New Deal proposals centralize power in Washington, reducing choice and accountability. Historical attempts at such scale—think Britain’s National Health Service—yield mixed results at best: universal access but long wait times and rationing. Sanders’ faith in bureaucratic competence defies evidence of federal mismanagement, from the VA scandals to the Social Security Administration’s $23 billion in improper payments in 2023. Ask yourself, besides the US military—and this is only focusing on their performance on the battlefields—what does the federal government (or the state governments, for that matter) do better than the private sector? The honest answer is nothing.
Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, with its manufactured, propagandistic impassioned speeches and bought-and-paid-for viral reach, taps into genuine frustrations over inequality and political dysfunction. His warnings about billionaires in the Trump administration and cuts like those to USAID resonate with a public wary of unchecked power; unchecked power fueled for the most part by Democrat administrations and Democrat spendthrift opportunists in Congress. Yet, his Democratic Socialism offers not a solution, but a mirage—economically untenable, ideologically inconsistent, and politically opportunistic; an unattainable utopia tantamount to the false euphoria promised through a heroin addiction.
Sanders casts himself as a modern-day Lincoln, battling for a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” But Lincoln faced slavery, a clear moral evil; Sanders faces a messy, imperfect capitalism that, for all its flaws, has lifted more people out of poverty than any system in history. His crusade against “oligarchy” disingenuously substitutes class warfare for serious debate, ignoring the trade-offs of his own policies.
As he tours Wisconsin and beyond, Sanders remains a compelling voice—but one whose vision, if realized, would trade one set of elites for another with a far more totalitarian and authoritative cast of characters, leaving America poorer and less free in the process.
Sanders' vision for American government is this: The Biden years only four-times more inept, invasive, and oppressive.
Then, when we return, our segment on America’s Third Watch, broadcast nationally from our flagship station WGUL AM930 & FM93.7 in Tampa, Florida.
Frank Salvato's analysis has been entered into the congressional record through the US House Foreign Relations Committee and recognized by the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His writing has been published by The American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Times, Accuracy in Media, and Human Events, as well as syndicated internationally.
Conflating Support For Ukrainians & Zelenskyy
Before I go, I wanted to address what appears to be an irrational position being taken by a great many people on social media. That is their refusal to distinguish between the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government.
Vlodomyr Zelenskyy is the leader of the Ukrainian government. He represents the leaders of that country who—through his words, as expressed in his disrespectful Oval Office performance—will not agree to a ceasefire and will not negotiate peace with Vladimir Putin. These are his words, not mine or anyone else's.
Common sense (and I know that’s in short supply these days) mandates—mandates—that two people who exist in conflict with each other resolve their differences for there to be a cessation of hostilities. That’s just a fact and anyone not accepting that basic premise is an ignoramus.
One way to resolve conflict is for one adversary to overcome the other. In the case of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, any resolution would have to see one country winning the war against the other. As it stands—recognizing this conflict as now one of attrition—Ukraine cannot win. Let’s do the math.
At the start of the war in 2022, Ukraine’s population stood at approximately 41 million people. Russia’s population was approximately 146 million people. Russia had between 18 to 20 million people of “fighting age.” Ukraine’s fighting age population stood at 7 to 9 million. In a war of attrition considering math alone, Ukraine would lose by a ratio of a little more than 2-to-1.
Yes, weaponry makes a difference, but occupation is the name of the game in war and it takes bodies to occupy land. Then you must consider that North Korea has engaged its troops on Russia’s behalf. Unless the West (read: NATO or Europe’s newly considered “coalition of the willing”---which hasn’t been formed yet) gets involved with boots on the ground, there is no way Ukraine can defeat Russia in the conflict to reach that avenue of conflict resolution.
The other avenue of conflict resolution is negotiated peace. That requires the two parties in conflict to enter into negotiations with the goal of ceasing hostilities (read: stopping the killing and aggression). Zelenskyy has stated full-throatedly that he is uninterested in a ceasefire or negotiating with his adversary. So, Zelenskyy—not Putin, not Trump; not Russia and not the West—has eliminated this avenue for peace from the choices.
Again, for the hard of hearing, a negotiated peace cannot be achieved when one of the parties in conflict refuses to negotiate with the other.
That left a cunningly crafted third way, devised by the Trump team: The Rare Earth minerals deal. This would have formally introduced the American private sector into land management in Ukraine; it would have created US assets in the regions. Thus, an attack on those assets would have been a direct attack on the United States and an act of war on Russia’s behalf.
As I stated in an earlier podcast:
“Putin may be ruthless, but he’s not foolish. He understands that the United States and its aligned European powers have identified his military’s vulnerabilities through their actions against the Ukrainian Army, and he recognizes that in the face of a US-led (or even NATO-led) military coalition, he would lose unequivocally.”
So, the impediment to peace is Zelenskyy’s egotistical need to win the war when there is no possibility of winning the war without a global conflict ensuing. Zelenskyy’s goal, it appears, is not peace; it is not to stop the killing. It is to win an unwinnable war.
Which brings me to my point. Only the heartless don’t feel for the people—the people—of Ukraine. We all want them to live freely under their own sovereign rule. But conflating support for Ukraine’s leader with feeling for the Ukrainian people is just as inane as saying all Germans were devout supporters of Hitler during World War II.
You can feel for the innocents in Ukraine without supporting the unwinnable war effort of the Ukrainian government. The posting of the “I stand with Ukraine” memes and statements only feeds the Ukrainian war machine’s propaganda campaigns; it only serves their goal that insists on more military aid only to see the sharpening of the blades of the meat grinder for its warfighters and citizens.
To wit, when did all the people who want peace so badly, become blind followers of the unwinnable war? Only the uninformed, the naive, the half-witted, and the ghoulish support the unwinnable war.
Please people, I beg you: Do your homework before you just repost stuff on social media. When you do that—and you don’t know what you’re posting, or what it means to post what you’re posting—you are feeding the propaganda machine that keeps getting people killed in an unwinnable war.
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