This week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sat down with podcast host Joe Rogan to discuss his anti-oligarchy movement.
As Sanders spewed his usual rhetoric about the GOP and Elon Musk, Rogan took his knees right out from under him.
Rogan called out the big money that backed Kamala Harris, making Sanders admit a hard truth.
Elon Musk was a game-changer for the GOP in 2024, and his money likely led to some very significant wins for the Republican Party in even-money races.
Overall, Musk dropped $277 million, finally giving the GOP someone who could rival the spending of George Soros during election cycles.
The bulk of the money spent by Elon was funneled through America PAC, which is Musk’s PAC. According to financials, he had donated $239 million to this PAC alone.
In addition to his PAC, Musk ran some promotional giveaways that drove people to the voting booth, all of which drove Democrats into their collective safe spaces.
On the other side of the aisle, we have George Soros, who has been dropping big money into Democrat campaigns for decades, but the media and people like Sanders don’t want to talk about that.
During the 2024 campaigns, Soros reportedly donated about $60 million, which was actually peanuts compared to what he had dropped in previous general election cycles.
Soros has a different style, however, often donating to smaller campaigns to take over the country with socialist candidates from the inside out, meaning he often looks to put people in place in city and state governments rather than spending big money on the general election.
For instance, Soros helped the campaigns of many of the progressive prosecutors around the country who have refused to prosecute crimes and backed no-cash bail.
That brings us to the most recent Rogan podcast, where he got Sanders to admit something that I never thought he would say.
After Sanders raged about Musk’s donations to the GOP, calling Musk’s $277 million “absurd,” Rogan dropped a truth bomb on him about the Harris campaign, stating, "They spent $1.5 billion just in the course of a couple months.”
Sanders finally caved, responding, "You’re not going to hear me defending [the] Democratic Party on this issue… During the election it wasn’t just Musk and the Republicans putting a lot of money into Trump, it was Democratic billionaires putting money into Kamala and other candidates as well.”
In reality, the Democrats have far more big-money donors than the GOP, and it is often what tilts these elections. I am all for removing PACs from the equation, but if we do that, I would also want to see outside money removed from local elections, meaning if you do not live or own a business in that location, you cannot donate to campaigns. It’s time we let the people most impacted by local elections decide who takes office, not the people with the biggest checks, and you do that by removing PACs and outside money.
