Linda Sarsour

The Colorado Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday night that barred Donald Trump from appearing on the primary ballot in the 2024 election, a shock move that even NBC News described as a “political gift” to the former president. In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is thus disqualified for running for office under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment contains a clause that states anyone who takes an oath “as an officer of the United States” and engages in “insurrection or rebellion” cannot hold civil or military office in the US. The section was written with the intention of barring Confederate leaders from returning to public office.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Historians of the future, if there are any, will note that though the demieducated youth of the United States shed their belief in God, they still believed in Father Christmas. Uncertain of their futures, and in no hurry to pay off their student loans, the young entrusted their faith and debt jubilee to the Santa Claus of socialism, a little man with fluffy white hair proffering gifts from a big sack of other people’s money. In Victorian England, this traditional figure was known as Jeremy Corbyn, a vegetarian who gave every worker a lump of nationalized coal and scourged the Jews because they would not recognize him as their savior.

Like Britain’s disgraced Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders panders to anti-Semites. Bernie isn’t one himself. He supports the existence of a Jewish state and has even acknowledged that anti-Zionism can overlap with anti-Semitism. He comes from a family of Holocaust survivors and spent a stint on a kibbutz in Israel. But in his presidential bid, Bernie is mainstreaming radical anti-Semitism.Last week, four Americans were murdered in an anti-Semitic shooting at a kosher market in Jersey City whose intended target may have been a Jewish school. At first, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Sanders ally, thought there might be political gains in this attack.

Just as Hollywood's racist liberals love a Magical Negro, so young socialists love a Magic Grandpa who promises to shake the money tree, annul student debt and hand out free subsidies to the kulaks. Not all socialism is the same, though, and not just because some of it is national socialism. The Chinese communists under Deng Xiaoping declared ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. America's Magic Grandpa, Bernie Sanders, is a socialist with American characteristics, a millionaire whose life was recently saved by the insertion of an ingeniously capitalist heart stent into his clogged arteries. Being rich, Bernie could, if he needed it, expect to receive a replacement kidney without it first being cut out of a tax defaulter.