Weekend at Bernie’s

The Left’s beloved corpse is still talking. But the words aren’t his—and the damage is very real.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was Weekend at Bernie’s. The idea that you could drag around a dead man, slap sunglasses on his face, and convince the world he was still alive? Comic genius.

I didn’t realize then that it would become a political documentary. And I certainly didn’t expect Bernie Sanders to play the starring role.

But here we are. A once-fiery conscience of the American left has become a propped-up relic—dragged out weekend after weekend, nodding along as others speak through him.

He’s not leading anymore. He’s being led. And the people holding the strings aren’t reformers. They’re radicals. People who normalize terror. Who cheer for moral collapse. Who weaponize “justice” into ideology so dense and self-righteous it can’t see the damage it causes in its own reflection.

Earlier this month, Sanders declared:

“AIPAC has aided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in waging an illegal and immoral war against the Palestinian people. NO Democrat should accept money from AIPAC.”

This wasn’t a call for reform. It was a declaration of excommunication.

And it wasn’t even original.

He was echoing Obama’s former speechwriter and self-promoted foreign policy guru Ben Rhodes, who wrote that AIPAC is part of the “constellation of forces” that has “delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.”

For context: Stephen Miller was a senior policy adviser to Trump, one of the most hardline immigration hawks in modern American politics. His politics may be divisive, but if Bernie Sanders wants to understand how people like Miller and Trump got to the White House, he doesn’t need a telescope to study constellations. He needs a mirror.

Progressives didn’t lose to Trump. They created him.

Ask any suburban voter in 2024 who pulled the lever for Trump while holding their nose. They weren’t voting for the man. They were voting against the movement. Against the pronoun police. Against the campus mobs. Against the professional outrage machine that thinks posting a flag and rewriting history makes you virtuous.

The progressives made Trump look like a sledgehammer worth swinging—because the rot in the institutions felt so complete. Even people who hated Trump’s behavior voted for him to stop what they saw as something even worse.

This is the part Sanders and his movement can’t admit. They are no longer the underdogs. They’re the orthodoxy. And the more they speak, the more the public tunes them out.

If you want to see what Sanders’ ideology has done to culture, start with Hollywood. In the past few years, Disney—once the gold standard of storytelling—has transformed into a factory for box-checking lectures. “Snow White” was reimagined into a postmodern lecture. “The Little Mermaid” lost all sense of identity in a sea of forced messaging. “Lightyear,” “Strange World,” “Elemental,” “Wish”—each more forgettable than the last. Even “Mulan” couldn’t find its footing, turning one of Disney’s strongest female leads into an empty, sterilized archetype.

When everything is about representation and nothing is about story, you get beautiful trailers and empty theaters.

Even Disney is quietly walking back its DEI initiatives. The “Reimagine Tomorrow” campaign is gone. Quotas are being re-evaluated. Because somewhere along the way, even the most liberal executives realized: when you hollow out story in the name of ideology, audiences walk away.

Sanders and his squad haven’t figured that out yet. They keep doubling down. They keep blaming AIPAC. They keep pretending that if the public doesn’t love their message, it must be the fault of a sinister lobby.

They never stop to consider the possibility that the public simply doesn’t buy what they’re selling.

And now? Sanders—an 82-year-old man who already suffered a heart attack during his last presidential run—is being wheeled out like a mascot. The ideas are no longer his. The slogans aren’t his. He’s not driving the movement. He’s being driven.

Of course, like many old men, Bernie loves ice cream. Which is convenient, because his fellow Vermont duo—Ben & Jerry, the boycott-preaching, Hamas-sympathizing sages of swirled self-righteousness— are more than happy to keep him stocked with Chunky Monkey while they repackage terrorism as “liberation.”

Imagine, just for a moment, if someone said: “If we just keep feeding him enough Cherry Garcia, maybe the next heart episode will be quicker, cleaner, and finally allow Bernie to rest permanently from this long, humiliating weekend.”

Grotesque, right? It should be. But the fact that it doesn’t sound wildly worse than what Sanders himself is now defending tells you everything about where this movement has gone.

When the corpse of a movement is propped up by those who cheer for death, it’s not just offensive. It’s dangerous.

So no, Bernie. AIPAC didn’t hand us Trump. You did. And the people holding you up—Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, the campus mobs chanting “From the river to the sea”—they’re not moral crusaders. They’re part of a broken ideology that traded empathy for performance, story for slogans, and truth for tribalism.

You want to know how populism reloads?

Keep talking.

Because the more you do, the more voters remember why they chose the hammer in the first place.

And they’ll swing it again.

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This isn’t just an article. It’s a wake-up call.

Let’s keep swinging the hammer.

— Major TruthAche : reporting for clarity.