Senator Bernie Sanders (S-VT)^[1]Technically, Mr Sanders is listed as an Independent, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, but I believe that S, for ‘Socialist,’ is far more accurate. is many unsavory things, but he does, on occasion, tell the truth. From USA Today:

Bernie Sanders told the truth about Kamala Harris trying to fool voters. Believe him.

Harris is tiptoeing around the positions on issues that won her elections in California and cautiously testing what voters will grab onto and what they will reject.

by Nicole Russell | Tuesday, September 10, 2024 | 5:11 AM EDT | Updated: Thursday, September 12, 2024 | 2:35 PM EDT

You may have heard Maya Angelou’s powerful saying, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Sometimes, when other people tell you who a person is, you should believe them, too. Especially if the person in question doesn’t want to tell you who they really are.

That is the case with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive independent from Vermont, said something about the Democratic presidential nominee that she isn’t willing to admit to voters.

NBC News host Kristen Welker asked: “She has previously supported Medicare for All, now she does not. She’s previously supported a ban on fracking, now she does not. These, Senator, are ideas that you have campaigned on. Do you think that she is abandoning her progressive ideals?”

Sanders: “No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she is trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

You have to give the seasoned senator kudos for saying it like it is, especially because Harris has yet to describe her own campaign with such clarity.

There’s more at the original. If you get stopped by a paywall, you can also read the original here.

Opinion author Nicole Russell stopped short of writing the unvarnished truth, but I will not: what the Distinguished Gentleman from Vermont was saying is that he believes that Kamala Harris Emhoff — just because the Vice President hasn’t shown enough respect for her husband to have taken his last name does not mean that I shall show him similar disrespect — has been lying to us! Mr Sanders told us, in effect, that he understands that the hard left policies that he has long advocated are not popular enough nationwide to win elections, and that he thinks that the Democratic presidential nominee knows the same thing.

Did Mrs Emhoff tell Mr Sanders thus? Was there a quiet conversation in which she whispered, “Don’t worry, Bernie, I can be my authentic self after the election?,” or is it simply something that the Bolshevik from Burlington believes to be the case? We don’t know the answer to that, but one thing has been pretty clear: a lot of the Vice President’s supporters believe just what Mr Sanders stated.

As it happens, I certainly believe that she would move harder to the left were Americans foolish enough to elect her.

Many voters also got caught up in all the laughter and joy. But when they started to look around to see what the frenzy was about, they found a record of flip-flopping on really progressive policies, running mate Tim Walz’s fabulism and a bunch of vague promises.

Sanders is right, of course. Harris’ pattern of flip-flopping on policies − like favoring a ban on fracking for oil and gas before opposing it now, or supporting mandatory gun buybacks in 2019 but opposing them now − isn’t about her growth as a leader or the evolution of her thinking.

It’s really about her campaign’s recognition that far-left ideas that played well in California won’t sell in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

At least her policy proposals didn’t play well enough, among Democrats, for her to make any headway in her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and she dropped out in December of 2019, before the first contest in Iowa. It didn’t help her that then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI) demolished her in a previous debate.

Gaslighting is not just bad form; it’s bad news for voters because it violates the principle of informed consent. Politicians have long tried to fool voters into believing they stand for one thing while they quietly support something else − as Sanders says Harris is doing now − but they deserve to be called on it as well.

The Democrats believe that as well, as they continually try to link former President Donald Trump to the so-called Project 2025, even though Mr Trump had nothing to do with writing or approving it, and has politically distanced himself from it.

At a certain point, it becomes laughable. Comedian (?) Kathy Griffin whined that if Mr Trump is re-elected, he’ll throw comedians like her in jail, even though he never tried to do so during his first term, despite the fact she posted a photo of her holding a Trump mask dripping with fake blood, as though he had been beheaded. The Philadelphia Inquirer and columnist Will Bunch in particular keep telling us that if Mr Trump wins, democracy is finished, while Salon writer Amanda Marcotte has gone just bat guano insane with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.

If Mrs Emhoff really knows what she wants to do if elected, and that’s a very big “if,” she’s keeping it down to vague, broad-stroke proposals, trying not to offend anyone, but, in doing that, she’s concomitantly telling us that it will be the bureaucrats and functionaries who will be doing the governing. That’s not really a surprise, because that’s what happens in every modern administration, with the President setting a policy, and then the ‘experts’ trying to figure out how to make it work.

And that’s the real danger of a victory for the Vice President: the people she would bring into office with her will be uniformly hard-left, and they would be the ones who would destroy our society and economy, with proposals written in ways the voters would never approve. Mr Sanders knows this, and knows that the candidate has to temper what she says, but he strongly believes that he would get most, if not all, of what he would want were he the President.

I suspect that a lot of the further left people in the United States believe the same thing.