Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders agreed with the crowd at his campaign rally labeling the Senate leader as “Moscow Mitch,” even though he honeymooned in the USSR and fundraised off Trump rally chants against Democrats.
At a rally in California on Wednesday, supporters of the independent senator from Vermont – who is vying to be the party’s nominee in the 2020 presidential election – broke out in a chant of “Moscow Mitch” when Sanders denounced fellow Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), leader of the GOP majority in that body, for not adopting Democrat proposals on gun control and election security.
The eight-second clip appears to show Sanders saying “that’s right,” twice, in response to the chant.
Critics quickly pointed to the fact that Sanders supporters accusing anyone of being a Russian agent amounts to hypocrisy, given that Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and describes himself as a “democratic socialist” today.
“Moscow Mitch” was the label MSNBC host Joe Scarborough bestowed on McConnell last month, after the Senate majority leader rejected three Democrat-proposed bills on election security, all centered around the premise of “Russian interference” in the 2016 US presidential election.
The “Moscow Mitch” frenzy has already resulted in a protest outside the senator’s Louisville, Kentucky home, with demonstrators yelling out death threats and wishes for McConnell’s demise.
President Donald Trump has been repeatedly pressured to disavow chants by his supporters, from “lock her up” – referring to Hillary Clinton – during the 2016 campaign to “send her back,” a reference to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) at a North Carolina rally last month.
Sanders actually sent out a fundraising email in the wake of the North Carolina rally, praising Omar as a “leader with strength and courage” who “won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate.”
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While he did not exactly disavow the chant – despite media claims otherwise – Trump did say he “felt a little bit badly about it” and did not start it himself. Both Trump and his supporters were repeatedly denounced as racist by Omar, the Democrats, and the media over the chant.
There has been no similar pushback against the “Moscow Mitch” chant, however. As Scarborough’s case shows, the mainstream media have been on board with the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory for years, ever since it was launched in 2016 by Hillary Clinton’s campaign as a way of discrediting Trump.
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