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How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college

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In its early months, Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign suffered from the impression that it was a protest candidacy more about discussing issues than about electing a president. More recently, it has looked more like a genuine effort to deny Hillary Clinton the nomination — an effort that seems likely to fail. But judged by that earlier standard, Sanders has been highly successful. I'll use myself as an example: Thanks to Sanders — and specifically thanks to his campaign — I've come around to the idea that the correct tuition for qualified students at public colleges and universities is $0.

If the government is going to be in the business of encouraging people to go to college and spending money on making it affordable, the right way to do that is to make it free.

Donald Trump's kids should get public services too

The traditional case against free college, both in the United States and in other countries where this is discussed, is that it's a waste of money to offer publicly subsidized higher education to the children of affluent parents. Hillary Clinton has made this especially pointed by saying she doesn't want the public paying for Donald Trump's kids to go to college.

It's a decent laugh line, and it does make the underlying policy point correctly. But it also reminded me of the few times in my life that I met Trump's daughter Ivanka. At the time, I was attending an expensive private high school and Ivanka was attending a different expensive private high school, and we had a mutual friend who attended yet another expensive private high school and would sometimes throw parties when his parents were out of town (think Gossip Girl , but with real-life awkward teens instead of gorgeous actors).

None of us was attending school at public expense, but we all could have been as a matter of right and public policy. Which is to say we don't charge tuition at public high schools and then provide grants and loans to make it affordable to families in need. We make it free, and to the extent that we need to consider families' differential ability to pay we do that through the tax code.

One reason is that even though in a narrow fiscal sense it benefits cities that so many of their affluent families send their kids to private school, paying taxes without using the service, in a more holistic sense it's quite bad for public education in the city.

Wealthy elites have formal and informal means of influence wherever you look. When they are invested in actually using public services, the odds that the services will actually be decent go way up. Trying to save money by keeping rich kids out of public school or refusing to build libraries in affluent neighborhoods or having police departments charge a finder's fee when they investigate crimes committed against rich people would be penny wise and pound foolish.

We should also consider the possibility that a public commitment to subsidizing college without mandating that it be free actually encourages excessive spending on the part of administrators. In static terms, creating a free public service obviously requires more money than a partially subsidized one. But with a firm "this needs to be free" rule in place, administrators are now limited to the amount of money that's actually been appropriated, and if they want more funds for some new initiative they need to explicitly make the case that it's valuable.

People actually understand free college

The most decisive reason to like Sanders's goal of free college, however, didn't become clear until the campaign itself began. The great thing about free college is that people know what it means and some people are excited about it.

Clinton's college affordability plan, a much more complicated compact aimed at the goal of allowing students to graduate debt-free, utterly fails on this score. It is true that her plan is more fiscally progressive — delivering more help to poor students and less to non-poor ones. It is also true that I have never met a person who is excited about this plan, even among people who are excited about Clinton in general.

Sanders's plan, by contrast, is a huge applause line at his rallies and something that Sanders's supporters frequently cite as a key reason they are backing him.

I'm not sold on the implementation details of Sanders's plan, and most people feeling the Bern seem to have no idea what those details are. If Sanders were to actually become president, the idea would need a lot more work. But Clinton's plan seems like it was written by higher education wonks for an audience of higher education wonks. Some of my best friends are higher education wonks, and obviously you need some wonks to seal the deal on any kind of workable legislation. But it's useful to start with some kind of clear big-picture goal that means something to normal people.

The greatest legislative success of the Obama years — the Affordable Care Act — suffers greatly in its political sustainability from the fact that people have such a poor grasp of what it encompasses, how it works, and whom it is supposed to be helping.

The contrast with a program like Social Security, which is worse targeted but much better understood, is stark and instructive. The narrow-targeting way is designed to minimize opposition to new initiatives by reducing their headline costs. But there's something to be said for taking the opposite approach and trying to maximize support by framing your objectives in a way that ensures the people to whom your policy is supposed to appeal actually understand what it is.

Free college financed by higher taxes is clean, simple, and easy to understand, and makes for a totally coherent goal to organize around over a period of years or even decades. If Democrats want to expend more public funds to make college cheaper, which it seems like they do, they ought to focus their efforts around Sanders's banner.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders pushes free college and student debt forgiveness — and finds the field crowded

SAN FRANCISCO — Sen. Bernie Sanders’s California push for his plan to provide four years of government-paid college to all Americans underscored two themes of the Democratic primary contest: how much the party has moved in his direction since his first presidential campaign, and how that move has diminished Sanders’s once-singular hold on liberal positions.

Since 2016, when Sanders campaigned on providing free college — and expanded the impact this year with a plan to forgive $1.6 trillion in existing student loans — higher education affordability has become a key topic for most of the presidential candidates as they seek to attract younger voters.

Indeed, almost all the leading candidates now agree to offer at least two years of free college, as Sanders reminded more than 1,000 people gathered Friday near San Francisco’s Civic Center.

“Four years ago, when we talked about the idea [of free college] it was perceived by the political establishment and by the business establishment to be a radical idea. . . . That idea is becoming less and less radical every day,” Sanders told the crowd. “If we are to have the best-educated workforce in the world, we need to rethink what public education is.”

The plight of students and parents saddled with rising college costs has created some fissures among presidential hopefuls, broadly dividing liberal candidates who offer far-reaching proposals from moderate Democrats who support a more limited approach. 

Even those farthest to the left — specifically Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — are divided over the details of who should qualify for the federal programs.

But as with Medicare-for-all and other proposals Sanders has long championed, the issue’s growing popularity has given rise to broader support among his competitors, effectively giving voters more options.

As a result, some of Sanders’s former supporters have left for other candidates espousing similar ideas, including Warren, Sanders’s Senate ally.

“Now that 2020 candidates have adopted those proposals, he doesn’t seem as cutting edge as he was in 2016,” said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist and former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party.

Sanders and Warren have dived most deeply into the topic and share similar plans when compared with their more moderate counterparts in the 2020 race. But Warren’s plan includes several caveats. Student debt would be forgiven up to $50,000 for every person with a household income of less than $100,000, while those with income between $100,000 and $250,000 would have only part of their debt canceled. Sanders, in contrast, would eliminate all student debt regardless of income. Both favor free four-year college at public schools.

“Bernie will always propose a plan that addresses the full scope of the problem, that has a just frame for working people and holding corporations accountable,” said Josh Orton, national policy director for the Sanders campaign. 

As the candidates sell their respective policy proposals, many claim that their solution would alleviate the racial wealth gap. But economists are split over whether a universal elimination of student debt, like Sanders’s, or a capped approach, like Warren’s, would do more to address that inequality.

Critics of Sanders’s universal plan say that eliminating all student debt will disproportionately benefit wealthier, white families. But opponents of Warren’s proposal argue that adding qualifications could dissuade some of those who could benefit from the program to take part.

“It’s important to think about where your money is going. . . . [We] also want the money to be targeted to the people who need it the most,” said Louise Seamster, a sociologist at the University of Iowa who worked with a team of researchers from around the country to develop Warren’s student debt forgiveness plan.

The two candidates also differ in how they plan to pay for their respective plans. Warren has said her $1.25 trillion program would be funded through her wealth tax of 2 cents on every dollar of net worth    above    $50   million    and 3 cents   on    every    dollar   above $1 billion. Sanders proposes a tax on Wall Street speculation to fund his estimated $2.2 trillion higher-education programs.

“There’s a lot of different pieces of calculus that fit into just creating a budget estimate. It’s actually very difficult to do for any program that is related to student loans,” said Colleen Campbell, director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

But the moderate competitors have offered more limited solutions, often with fewer specifics. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg — who has said that he and his husband owe more than $100,000 in student loan debt — supports free four-year public college for low- and middle-income families. He vows to “confront the student loan debt” but has offered no specifics. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) supports debt-free four-year college and greater refinancing options. Former vice president Joe Biden has yet to offer a plan for student loan forgiveness or four-year college affordability.

At Sanders’s Friday rally, dedicated to the topic of college affordability, the issue was an urgent one for many attendees who said they were still paying the price for the decision they had made to attend college.

Anya Wayne, 43, from Berkeley, plans to attend divinity school, but she will have to take out loans to cover her living expenses. Though Wayne does not know how much debt she will accumulate, she assumes it may mean that she will never be able to buy a house or do much international travel. She considered abandoning divinity school altogether, but her dream is to become a chaplain.

Student debt is “changing the way that people go to school . . . decisions that people make in terms of their futures, limiting opportunities,” Wayne said. “Young people are drowning.” 

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Bernie Sanders: One thing needs to change in order to make America ‘great’

In an opinion piece for Vice Impact, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) discusses what he believes America actually needs to become "great": High-quality higher education delivered to citizens for free.

What would help is "not spending tens of billions more on or providing trillions in tax breaks for the rich ," he writes. "It is having a well-educated population that can compete in the global economy, and making it possible that every American, regardless of income, has the opportunity to get the education they need to thrive."

However, he writes, "we are moving further and further away from that goal," thanks to the high cost of college.

have taken out student loans to pay for school, with their debt totaling $1.4 trillion. The for 20-year-olds is $22,135. For 30-year-olds, it's $34,033.

And while wages aren't rising much, . That could explain why the number of loan defaults .

"Our system of higher education is in a state of crisis," Sanders writes. "As tuition and fees rise and states cut funding for colleges and universities, American families are finding it difficult to afford college.

"Millions of graduates have had to take on life-long debt for the 'crime' of getting the education they need," he says. "For most, this debt will take many years to repay, which not only impacts their career choices, but also their ability to get married, have kids or buy a home."

Nearly 60 percent of borrowers don't expect to finish paying their loans , and less than 20 percent of Americans say they're living the American Dream because .

What's more, a survey of 1,000 Americans found nearly half said high costs were a factor in their decision not to pursue an education after high school. Of those who started but didn't complete a post-secondary program, 59 percent said the price was a factor.

For these reasons, Sanders wants to make college free. "In the richest country in the history of the world," he writes, "everyone who has the desire and the ability should be able to get a college education regardless of their background and ability to pay."

This is not a radical idea. Many nations around the world invest in an educated workforce that isn't burdened with enormous student debt. Bernie Sanders U.S. Senator, I-Vt. 

He adds, "This is not a radical idea. Many nations around the world invest in an educated workforce that isn't burdened with enormous student debt."

In Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, for instance, Sanders points out that public colleges and universities are free. In Germany, public colleges are free to both native and international students.

Some officials are working toward a similar system in the United States. This year, Sanders introduced the College for All Act , which aims to make colleges and universities tuition-free for families that earn $125,000 per year or less. That, he notes, covers 86 percent of the population.

The City College San Francisco has begun , and, in New York, students can now have the chance to . Similar programs have been launched in Tennessee, Oregon, Detroit and Chicago.

More jobs require advanced education, so, more than ever, a bachelor's degree needs to be in reach, he argues.

"While not all middle-class jobs in today's economy require post-secondary education, an increasing number do. By 2020," he writes, citing data from Georgetown University , "two-thirds of all jobs in the United States will require some education beyond high school."

Workers with an associate degree, over the course of their careers, will earn an average $360,000 more than those with a high school diploma, the data notes. Those with a bachelor's will earn nearly $1 million more.

But Sanders wants to change that dynamic. "It is time for every child to understand that if they study hard and take their school work seriously, they will be able to get a higher education, regardless of their family's income. It's time to reduce the outrageous burden of student debt that is weighing down the lives of millions of college graduates."

Though, while recent progress has been made on the issue, he writes, "we still have a long way to go."

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Bernie sanders on why the time is now to make college tuition free.

The debilitating price tag on college, coupled with the fact that 44 million Americans already owe more than $1.3 trillion in student loan debt, is why Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the College for All Act earlier this year.

Bernie Sanders: We Must Make Public Colleges and Universities Tuition Free

The reason why college costs so much is that states have fundamentally disinvested from their public higher education system.

"I’ll put $40 billion plus on the table if you come up with the rest."

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Democrats unveil plan for tuition-free college amid student debt crisis

By Sarah Ewall-Wice

April 22, 2021 / 6:39 AM EDT / CBS News

As President Biden weighs executive action to cancel as much as $50,000 in student loans for each borrower, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington are introducing new legislation Wednesday they say would help address the soaring cost of higher education.

If passed, the College for All Act would make community colleges and trade schools tuition-free for all students. It would also make public four-year colleges and universities as well as public nonprofit minority-serving institutions — such as historically Black colleges and universities — tuition-free for all students from families earning less than $125,000 a year.

"If we are going to have the kind of standard of living that the American people deserve, we need to have the best educated workforce in the world," said Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, in a statement. "It is absolutely unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of bright young Americans do not get a higher education each year, not because they are unqualified, but because their family does not have enough money."

The proposal comes as some Democratic lawmakers have urged the president, who had initially supported $10,000 in student loan relief, to cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt . More than 44 million Americans are burdened by student loan debt and the total debt surpassed $1.7 trillion last year. Supporters argue the move would provide relief for millions of Americans saddled with debt and spur economic growth. Critics question the fairness of the move and claim it does not address the underlying high costs of college. 

The new proposal would double the maximum federal Pell grant to $12,990, up from the current $6,495, and allow students to use the money to cover other college-related costs like housing and books. The grant amount would also be tied to inflation and expanded to eligible Dreamers, people who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children. 

Their proposal also would triple federal funding for programs that help identify and provide services for students from disadvantaged backgrounds — low income, first-generation college students or are individuals with disabilities. It would double money for Gear UP, the grant program that helps prepare low-income students for college.

To make such college tuition-free, the federal government would cover 75% of the costs for tuition and fees while states would pay the remaining 25%. The plan would also bump the federal government's share to 90% in the case of an economic downturn. 

In an effort to pay for the proposal, Sanders will also reintroduce legislation Wednesday that puts a tax on trades with stocks at .5%, bonds at .1% and derivatives at .005%. According to the senator, the plan would raise up to $2.4 trillion over 10 years. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California is set to reintroduce the tax legislation in the House.

The College for All Act has been endorsed by at least eight unions and more than two dozen national organizations including progressive organizations such as Justice Democrats and MoveOn. 

"Successful transition into adulthood is an essential measure of well-being for children and youth," said Children's Defense Fund President and CEO the Reverend Starsky Wilson, in a statement supporting the initiative. "With 6 in 10 American jobs requiring some education beyond high school, our children will not thrive without these doors being open wide."

The legislation reflects some of Mr. Biden's education platform on the campaign trail. During the election, he called for two years of community college and other trade schools to be tuition-free as well as making public colleges and universities tuition-free for families making less than $125,000. His platform also included doubling Pell grants. But the plan still faces an uphill climb in Congress, including how it will be paid for as Democrats hold a slim majority in the House and the Senate is split 50-50. 

Meanwhile on Tuesday, Senators Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, of Georgia, sent a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona urging the Education Department to remove federal student loan borrowers from default after COVID relief measures halted payments and interest amid the pandemic.

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Bernie Sanders' 1972 Essay on Rape

Bernie sanders' presidential campaign tried to distance him from a 1972 essay in which he wrote that a woman "fantasizes being raped by three men simultaneously.", published sept. 22, 2015.

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In 1972, the alternative newspaper Vermont Freeman published an essay by Bernie Sanders entitled "Man — and Woman" in which the future U.S. senator included a reference to a woman fantasizing about rape. After Sanders gained political prominence as a presidential candidate in 2015, that essay was brought to wider attention in a profile of Sanders published by Mother Jones on 26 May 2015:

What Sanders did share with the young radicals and hippies flocking to Vermont was a smoldering idealism forged during his college years as a civil rights activist — he coordinated a sit-in against segregated housing and attended the 1963 March on Washington — but only a fuzzy sense of how to act on it. Sanders bounced back and forth between Vermont and New York City, where he worked at a psychiatric hospital. After his marriage broke up in the late 1960s, he moved to an A-frame farmhouse outside the Vermont town of Stannard, a tiny hamlet with no paved roads in the buckle of the commune belt. He dabbled in carpentry and tried to get by as a freelance journalist for alternative newspapers and regional publications, contributing interviews, political screeds, and, one time, a stream-of-consciousness essay on the nature of male-female sexual dynamics:

That essay sparked a debate about Sanders and his views on women, and conservative outlets such as Young Cons , reproduced a portion of the essay in an attempt to illustrate how it was hypocritical for liberals to demonize Republicans for waging a "War on Women" when Sanders had written about a rape fantasy in a 1972 essay:

According to liberals with IQs smaller than their sock size, conservative presidential candidates absolutely LOATHE women, hate them with a passion even. Those mean, old, white guys — which is a hilarious stereotype given there's latinos, blacks, and women in the top spots for the GOP — want nothing more than to destroy women's health care by defunding the ghoulish Planned Parenthood, and encourage rape culture with their antiquated views on gender roles. None of this is actually true, of course, but when have facts ever got in the way of the liberal agenda? What should really make you scratch your head is how lefties will rake conservatives over the coals for the things mentioned above, yet say absolutely nothing about this atrocious Bernie Sanders quote:

But of course, plenty of publications on both sides of the political spectrum have said a good deal about "this atrocious Bernie Sanders quote." NPR, for example, reported that:

The essay by the Vermont senator isn't long — only a page. The bit about rape comes at the very beginning, as does some not-totally-safe-for-work language: A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused. A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously. The man and woman get dressed up on Sunday — and go to Church, or maybe to their 'revolutionary' political meeting. Have you ever looked at the Stag, Man, Hero, Tough magazines on the shelf of your local bookstore? Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like 'Girl 12 raped by 14 men' sell so well? To what in us are they appealing? Sanders Sanders then goes on to explain his ideas about gender roles and eventually gets at a sharper point — that traditional gender roles help create troubling dynamics in men's and women's sex lives. "Many women seem to be walking a tightrope," he writes, as their "qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism." One way to read the essay is that Sanders was doing (in a supremely ham-handed way) what journalists do every day: draw the reader in with an attention-getting lede, then get to the meat of the article in the middle. You can draw divergent conclusions from the article itself. On the one hand, he's talking about liberating people from harmful gender norms. On the other, with his nameless hypothetical "man-and-woman" characters, he also seems to imply that men fantasize about raping women or that women fantasize about being raped.

CNN also covered the controversial essay in a piece that quoted Sanders' campaign spokesman describing it as "stupid" and a "dumb attempt at dark satire":

Michael Briggs, Sanders' campaign spokesman, said the article was a "dumb attempt at dark satire in an alternative publication" that "in no way reflects his views or record on women. It was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the '70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then."

By Dan Evon

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.

Read 21-Year-Old Bernie Sanders’ Manifesto on Sexual Freedom

The democratic presidential candidate was exactly what you’d expect in college..

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Chicago Maroon/<a href="https://berniesanders.com/">Bernie Sanders</a>

Editor’s note: Sen. Bernie Sanders jumped into the crowded 2020 race. This story was published during his first presidential bid. Click here for more Sanders stories from Mother Jones ’ archives.

When Bernie Sanders was a student activist at University of Chicago in the 1960s, he was a leader of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality and helped to organize a protest of the school’s racist housing policies. But the radical action he mounted that received nationwide attention was of a different nature: In 1963, as a junior, he waged a crusade for sexual freedom, assailing the school’s leaders for forcing their puritan views on undergraduates—and ruining their students’ sex lives.

In doing so, Sanders made national news . This crusade was emblematic of the way Sanders conducted himself in Hyde Park and throughout his political career—firm in his beliefs, fiery in his rhetoric, and unafraid of confrontation.

It began with a 2,000-word, ALL-CAPS-laced manifesto in the Maroon , the daily student newspaper, outlining the intellectual case for sexual freedom. Titled “Sex and the Single Girl—Part Two” (a nod to Helen Gurley Brown’s feminist treatise ), Sanders attacked the university’s strict student housing guidelines—which prohibited women from living off-campus and restricted visiting access for persons of the opposite sex—with the kind of fire he’d later reserve for capitalists and war hawks.

“[I]s the Administration’s decision in favor of forced chastity, and the right to punish violators of it, based on scientific and rational opinion (the only kind of opinion which students should accept), or is it simply based on a combination of the Bible and Ann Landers?” he asked.

“In my opinion, the administrators of this university are as qualified to legislate on sex as they are to mend broken bones. One can best use an old saying to describe their actions; that their ignorance of the matter is only matched by their presumptuousness. If they dislike sex, or if they think that it is ‘dirty,’ or ‘evil,’ or ‘sinful’ that is their misfortune. It is incredible, however, that they should be allowed to pass their attitudes, or neuroses, on to the student body.”

“Not only must the administrators not be allowed to forbid students who desire sexual intercourse from being able to have it, but they must also not be allowed to prevent a man and a woman from spending a night in conversation, or from simply studying together, alone,” he wrote.

“Who is to measure the value that a group of people, or two people, can receive as a result of a night’s conversation? How are the administrators so knowledgeable that they can say that on long and intimate conversation, which might extend beyond one o’clock in the morning, is not worth more to the people who participated in it than a year of academic education? What do the administrators know about education or about life?”

But, Sanders concluded, the university’s policies aimed at preventing sex among the students wouldn’t work. Students would simply have sex in places other than their dorms:

If the beauty and joy which love and sex is composed of can not be totally eliminated, then it can be severely maimed by the need to ‘catch sex’ when the University isn’t looking. If people can not have the privacy to do what they think is good, and right, they will do it without privacy. They will do it in motels, in cars, on the Midway, or behind the Chancellor’s house, but they will do it.

The manifesto was polarizing. Over the next few days, the paper’s “Gadfly” section was filled with responses praising and condemning the piece. “I wish that the administration would allow Mr. Sanders to practice sex more freely,” one student wrote, because “he might end up a parent and learn a little responsibility.” An alum—a former psychology professor who penned a syndicated column on parenting—wrote in to critique Sanders’ “illogical, or uninformed” argument, and sent the newspaper a handwritten pamphlet called, “Telling your teenagers about sex.” She asked that it be delivered to the future senator. (It was.)

By the time he unleashed his broadside against dorm visiting hours, Sanders already had a reputation as a rabble-rouser. A political science major, he was, by his own admission, “ not a good student .” Instead of studying for his classes, he preferred to spend long hours pursuing his own interests—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Reich—in the library basement, and generally raising hell.

The campus Sanders arrived on in the fall of 1961 would never be confused with Berkeley circa 1969, but it was a welcome climate for a range of liberal activists in spite of its stodgy reputation. (Weather Underground cofounder Bernardine Dohrn was a year behind Sanders, and Sanders worked on the anti-segregation campaign with Lula White , a Freedom Rider who was studying at the law school.) During his first year in Chicago, a campus scandal erupted when an interracial group of students looking for a place to rent uncovered systematic housing discrimination in university-owned apartment buildings. Apartments that were open to white students would mysteriously go off the market when black students came to inquire, and then just as quickly open up again. The university at first denied any wrongdoing, but later admitted to discriminating in specific cases; if it acquired an apartment building that was segregated, the building would remain segregated.

The campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, the national civil rights group that organized the Freedom Rides, decided to take action. And Sanders helped organize a sit-in at the office of the university’s president, aimed at making him reverse the school’s discriminatory policy. The sit-in lasted for 15 days, as CORE worked out a compromise with the administration—it would vacate the premises if the university included representatives from CORE in a new commission that would study the housing issue.

During his junior year, Sanders, by then president of the university’s CORE chapter, led a picket of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Chicago, part of a coordinated nationwide protest against the motel and restaurant chain’s racially discriminatory policies. Sanders eventually resigned his post at CORE, citing a heavy workload and took some time off from school.

But he remained active on civil rights. At the time, the University of Chicago was in the midst of a massive urban renewal campaign to remake Hyde Park, a mixed-race neighborhood on the city’s South Side. The result was the eviction of many poor black residents. Sanders, as he would throughout his career, viewed the conflict in his backyard as a piece of a much larger issue, and penned a letter to the editor of the Maroon in February of 1963:

To attempt to bring about a “stable interracial community” in Hyde Park without hitting, and hitting hard, the segregation and segregation mentality that exists throughout this city, is meaningless. Hyde Park will never solve its racial problems until these problems are solved throughout the city. Segregation (in the form of “benign quotas”), the promise to white people that Negroes will not be freely admitted into the neighborhood, cannot work on any long term basis.

In the summer of 1963, Sanders took a bus to Washington, DC, to attend the March on Washington. That same summer, he was charged with resisting arrest during a demonstration against segregation in the city’s public schools, and fined $25.

Civil rights weren’t his only passion. Sanders was also active the Young People’s Socialist League (“Yipsel”), a leftist organization which advocated for the “social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution,” but was explicitly anti-communist. (It fielded an intramural football team called the Budapest Eight, in honor of the Hungarian revolution that was suppressed by the Soviets, and enjoyed a rivalry with another squad of leftists called the Flying Bolsheviks.) When LBJ aide Sargent Shriver visited campus during Sanders’ senior year to make his pitch for the new Peace Corps, Yipsel organized a picket. In an open letter in the Maroon, the group explained why: “Mr. Shriver, those who are sincerely interested in economic and social justice will not serve as a front for your capitalist system; instead they will oppose it in any way they can.”

Sanders and his cohorts succeeded in nudging the university forward on civil rights over the course of his three years on campus. But it was a struggle. The committee to study the university’s housing practices, for instance, was a far from satisfying outcome for many of the student demonstrators, Sanders included. (When the journalist Rick Perlstein brought up the subject of the compromise in a recent interview, the Senator issued “ a weary sigh .”) And after the initial furor over Sanders’ sexual-freedom manifesto died down, life on the quads returned to normal—late-night curfews and all. In that sense, it was an appropriate lesson for a young activist who would go on to spend most of his political career as an outsider. Lasting political change doesn’t come overnight. Even if you use ALL CAPS.

Additional reporting by Alec Goodwin.

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The Bernie Sanders 'Rape Fantasy' Essay, Explained

Danielle Kurtzleben

Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) delivers remarks at a town meeting at the South Church on May 27 in Portsmouth, N.H. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) delivers remarks at a town meeting at the South Church on May 27 in Portsmouth, N.H.

Mother Jones dug up a 1972 essay that Bernie Sanders wrote for the Vermont Freeman , an alternative newspaper. The article, called, "Man-and-Woman," is a commentary on gender roles. But it's also caused a stir, as is bound to happen anytime a candidate mentions rape.

If you haven't been following the hubbub, read on for a rundown of what the controversy is all about.

So what did Bernie Sanders write and what did he say about rape? The essay by the Vermont senator, who officially kicked off his presidential campaign this week, isn't long — only a page. Warning: The bit about rape comes at the very beginning, as does some not-totally-safe-for-work language:

"A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused. "A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously. "The man and woman get dressed up on Sunday — and go to Church, or maybe to their 'revolutionary' political meeting. "Have you ever looked at the Stag , Man , Hero , Tough magazines on the shelf of your local bookstore? Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like 'Girl 12 raped by 14 men' sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?"

Sanders then goes on to explain his ideas about gender roles and eventually gets at a sharper point — that traditional gender roles help create troubling dynamics in men's and women's sex lives.

"Many women seem to be walking a tightrope," he writes, as their "qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism."

He adds that men, likewise, are confused:

"What is it they want from a woman? Are they at fault? Are they perpetrating this man-woman situation? Are they oppressors?"

One way to read the essay is that Sanders was doing (in a supremely ham-handed way) what journalists do every day: draw the reader in with an attention-getting lede, then get to the meat of the article in the middle. Though he only sticks to his larger point for three paragraphs before getting back to his fictional couple, ending the essay with an imagined conversation:

"And she said, 'You wanted me not as a woman, or a lover, or a friend, but as a submissive woman, or submissive friend, or submissive lover...' "And he said, 'You're full of ______.' "And they never again made love together (which they had each liked to do more than anything) or never saw each other one more time."

What has the Sanders campaign said? The Sanders campaign quickly tried to distance itself — and the candidate — from the 43-year-old essay. Campaign spokesman Michael Briggs called the essay a "dumb attempt at dark satire in an alternative publication" in an interview with CNN , adding that it "in no way reflects his views or record on women." He added, "It was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the '70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then."

So what does this say about Sanders' attitude toward women? You can draw divergent conclusions from the article itself. On the one hand, he's talking about liberating people from harmful gender norms. On the other, with his nameless hypothetical "man-and-woman" characters, he also seems to imply that men fantasize about raping women or that women fantasize about being raped.

The 2016 presidential field has been quiet about it, but conservative Erick Erickson jeered at Sanders supporters on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Bill Kristol and Town Hall's Katie Pavlich turned the essay on Bill Clinton, using it as an opening to mention past allegations of sexual misconduct on his part.

National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke , though, dismissed the essay as insignificant:

"Nobody honestly believes that Bernie Sanders is a sexual pervert or that he is a misogynist or that he intends to do women any harm. Nobody suspects that he harbors a secret desire to pass intrusive legislation or to cut gang rapists a break. Really, there is only one reason that anyone would make hay of this story, and that is to damage the man politically."

Rather than criticize Sanders for something he wrote long ago, Cooke added, "until I see any sign of actual wrongdoing I'd much prefer to slam Sanders for his dangerous and ridiculous politics than to delve back into his past and embarrass him with a long-forgotten opinion."

Looking at his political life, it's true that Sanders' record shows an ongoing concern for women's rights. Katie McDonough at left-leaning Salon.com compiled a list of measures Sanders has supported or sponsored to protect women from violence and sexual assault.

Are there any lessons to draw from this? Absolutely: if you're a politician — especially on the national level — everything you've ever written, said, or done can, and likely will, be dredged up for all the world to inspect and critique.

It's not the first time writings from long ago have resurfaced to be used against a candidate. Republican Bob McDonnell's 20-year-old thesis about his views on women was also used as a cudgel against him in his bid for governor of Virginia in 2009.

When Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal's name began to surface as a potential vice-presidential candidate in 2012, the political world began writing about his 1994 essay about an exorcism he says he witnessed. (See here and here .) That, by the way, is sure to come up again if he runs in 2016 or any time in the future.

Many candidates have also faced plagiarism charges, like Democratic Sen. John Walsh of Montana, who dropped out of his re-election race last year after the New York Times reported he had lifted portions of the final paper he wrote to get his master's degree.

Vice President Joe Biden admitted in 1987 to cribbing a speech from a British politician, but said it wasn't "malevolent." In 2008, the Clinton campaign accused Barack Obama of lifting lines from his friend, then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

And then there are the countless officials who have been embarrassed in the media for sexual impropriety, including the aforementioned Bill Clinton. Eliot Spitzer . Anthony Weiner . David Vitter . John Ensign . Chris Lee . Vito Fossella . Mark Foley . Dennis Hastert .

It's not just elected officials — consider the flap over past comments in which now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor described herself as a "wise Latina." It's not plagiarism or an affair, but it created a headache for her during confirmation hearings.

The scrutiny is part of why so many people want nothing to do with the white hot spotlight that comes with running for office.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Bernie Sanders — Bernie Sanders and the Controversy Surrounding His Political Views

Bernie Sanders and The Controversy Surrounding His Political Views

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Published: Feb 7, 2024

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Sanders' political views, arguments in favor of bernie sanders' position, counterarguments against bernie sanders' position, analysis of the controversy.

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Opinion Michelle Goldberg

R.F.K. Jr. Is a Spoiler. But for Which Side?

Supported by

By Michelle Goldberg

Photographs by Michael Schmelling

Opinion Columnist

• April 4, 2024

Chris Inclan, an alcohol and drug counselor from Sonoma, Calif., voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016. In 2020, he backed Andrew Yang in the Democratic primary, and then cast a ballot for Donald Trump in the general election. Joe Biden, he said, was “so ingrained in the establishment and politics as usual,” while Trump “went against the grain on a lot of issues,” including wars and government regulation. But Inclan, a big bearded 39-year-old with tattoos on his hands, doesn’t want to have to make that choice again, which is why he’s now enthusiastically supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I met Inclan at the Oakland rally where Kennedy introduced his new running mate, the 38-year-old political donor Nicole Shanahan. Held in the auditorium of the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts, it was the first political rally Inclan had ever attended.

“The system is corrupt,” he said of what he called the two-party “duopoly.” “We keep playing the same game. But I think Americans are fed up.” He’d joined Kennedy’s We the People Party, formed to help Kennedy get on the ballot in several states, and has aspirations to run for office himself someday.

Inclan’s politics are hard to understand in purely left or right terms. The more relevant dichotomy, for him as for many Kennedy voters, is insider versus outsider, which is why Kennedy’s following sometimes overlaps, in unexpected ways, with the MAGA movement.

Matt Castro, a San Francisco bus driver at the rally, described himself as “extremely left-leaning,” but didn’t vote in the last election and said that, if Kennedy isn’t on the ballot, he’d probably vote for Trump in the next one, because of his opposition to military support for Ukraine. Alex Klett, a 33-year-old Kennedy volunteer from Wisconsin who was handing out American flags, described himself as a right-leaning independent who voted for Trump in 2016 and then, in 2020, wrote in Kanye West.

Another Kennedy volunteer, Jaclyn Aldrich, a striking 43-year-old Black woman who sometimes works as a model, has never cast a presidential ballot, because she hadn’t trusted any of the candidates. “I didn’t even vote for Obama,” she said. Among her fellow volunteers, she said, are some former Bernie Sanders voters, but “it’s mostly Trump people.”

This is a paradox of the Kennedy campaign. Many Democratic and Republican insiders view Kennedy as a danger to Biden’s re-election. Timothy Mellon, the top donor to the Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., is also the top donor to the Kennedy super PAC American Values 2024, suggesting he thinks Kennedy will help Trump. The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, has recently formed a unit, including veteran Democratic operative Lis Smith, devoted to battling third-party candidates, and Kennedy is getting most of its attention.

But on the ground, I haven’t met many Kennedy-curious voters for whom Biden is a second choice. Instead, Kennedy attracts many of the same sort of alienated political eccentrics who in the past have gravitated to Trump. “They keep saying that he’s pulling from Biden, but most of our people are actually coming from the right,” said Leigh Merinoff, volunteer chair of the finance committee of American Values.

Anecdotes aren’t the same thing as data, and people who go to rallies and volunteer for campaigns aren’t necessarily representative of the electorate, which is full of people who are much more disengaged. Nevertheless, there’s a gap between both Democratic and Republican assumptions about Kennedy’s appeal and the character of his real-life movement. He’s much more of a wild card than left-wing third-party candidates like Stein and Cornel West. There’s something distinctly Trumpy in his campaign’s mix of New Age individualism, social media-fueled paranoia and intense, aching nostalgia for the optimistic America of the early 1960s, when Kennedy’s uncle John F. Kennedy was president, and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, served as attorney general. It’s not surprising that some otherwise Trump-leaning voters are picking up on it.

On the surface, Kennedy’s choice of Shanahan, a patent lawyer and former Democrat who has donated to candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Marianne Williamson, might seem as if it would draw more left-leaning voters into the campaign. In introducing Shanahan, an avid surfer who met her ex-husband, the Google founder Sergey Brin, at a yoga festival, Kennedy said, “I wanted a vice president who shared my passion for wholesome, healthy foods, chemical-free, for regenerative agriculture, for good soils,” as well as an athlete who “would help me inspire Americans to heal, to get them back in shape.”

One can imagine voters who frequent farmers markets and follow wellness influencers seeing an idealized version of themselves in her. And while large parts of the New Age and alternative health community moved right during the pandemic in response to lockdowns and vaccine mandates, it’s still a world with plenty of people who think of themselves as progressives.

Indeed, the most interesting thing about Shanahan is the way she dramatizes how Kennedy wins over voters like her. In the week after her debut as a candidate, Shanahan hasn’t made any mainstream media appearances, but she did speak at length on the podcast of Rick Rubin, the music producer and, recently, self-help author , telling the story of her conversion from lifelong Democrat to Kennedy acolyte.

Their conversation is fascinating, demonstrating how frustrations with conventional medicine and the desire for a transcendent order — for a big holistic framework that makes sense of the world’s destabilizing chaos — leads away from technocratic liberalism and toward, well, the unstable political formation that’s coalescing around Kennedy. Listening to it, you can hear a smart and sensitive woman narrating her own journey down the rabbit hole, a portal that took her to a place where she could help swing the 2024 election and thus the course of American history.

Shanahan came to Kennedy the way many desperate parents have. During the pandemic, her 18-month-old daughter was diagnosed, over Zoom, with autism, and she described how none of the interventions offered by experts helped. Another Silicon Valley mom with an autistic child urged her to listen to Kennedy, who has long asserted a false link between vaccines and autism. Though Shanahan was resistant at first — she knew about Kennedy’s reputation as a conspiracy theorist — she tuned into his podcast.

Around the same time, she got deep into the work of Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon and self-described “biohacker” who emphasizes the importance of sunlight for good health. (Kennedy and Kruse appeared together on Rubin’s podcast last year.) Kruse, said Shanahan, awakened her to the idea that autism could be “related to the way that the brain was responding to some kind of outside influence” — like vaccines — “and how to heal the brain.”

She started her daughter, Echo, on a regimen that included lots of early morning light, swimming in a saltwater pool and music frequencies that send “a signal to brain cells that they can repair.” (“Morning sunlight in particular is like chicken soup for metabolic health,” she told Rubin.) At the same time, she worked to reduce Echo’s exposure to “nonnative light sources,” and cellular and Wi-Fi signals. These interventions, she said, have all helped her daughter. “When it works, maybe we need science to catch up,” she said.

When she met Kennedy last summer, she was impressed by his record of “looking at the environmental exposures and the things that impact human health that are man-created,” she said. Shanahan lamented what she sees as widespread closed-mindedness in the face of the questions she wants to explore. “My daughter has lifted the veil for me,” she said, in an allusion to Aldous Huxley’s work on psychedelics. “If we’re talking about my support for Bobby Kennedy, that is what has brought me to this movement.”

Shanahan was never all that left-wing; she helped fund the recall campaign against San Francisco’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin. Still, her presence on the ticket has alienated some right-leaning Kennedy fans. Shortly after she was announced, one erstwhile Kennedy supporter posted a link to an online “Save R.F.K. Jr. Rally” on Kennedy’s own campaign website, demanding the firing of Kennedy’s campaign manager for promoting a “C.I.A., feminist agenda” by bringing Shanahan on board. (It was quickly taken down.) “I think the pick was meant to be more about covering his left flank, and I found that an odd calculation,” Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who has co-hosted a fund-raiser for Kennedy, said on the podcast “All-In.”

In fact, the calculation makes perfect sense: Kennedy needs Shanahan’s money. Her divorce settlement from Brin isn’t public, but she reportedly asked for more than $1 billion, about 1 percent of his net worth at the time, and she’s clearly extremely wealthy. Campaign finance law allows both presidential and vice-presidential candidates to pour unlimited funds into their own races, and the process of getting Kennedy on state ballots as a third-party candidate is going to be expensive. Shanahan has shown she’s willing to spend; she gave $4 million to American Values 2024 to fund a Kennedy ad that ran during the Super Bowl.

Introducing Shanahan in Oakland, Kennedy said, with a straight face, that there is “no American more qualified” than she to serve as vice president. But his speech also gestured at the heart of those qualifications. Shanahan, he said, would help him liberate America from the “predatory cabal” who control the campaign finance system.

It’s doubtful, however, that Shanahan will be able to help Kennedy in ways that go beyond finances, and not just because the influence of vice-presidential candidates tends to be limited, especially with third-party aspirants. (My guess is that few readers remember either Ralph Nader’s or Jill Stein’s running mates.) Shanahan appears to find negative publicity debilitating, an unusual quality in an aspiring politician and one that may limit her visibility.

Before joining the Kennedy ticket, she was probably best known for her divorce from Brin, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, was precipitated by an affair with Elon Musk. (Both she and Musk deny this.) In an essay in People magazine, she described the scrutiny that followed the Journal article as unbearable. “I was thrust into the public eye; the online images and commentary felt more like a zeitgeist than depictions of my lived experiences,” she wrote . Insisting that she’s “not a public person,” she called the Journal article and its aftermath “a disaster for my work life, my reputation and my ability to communicate the things I care most deeply about.”

This week, “Fox & Friends” promoted an appearance by Kennedy and Shanahan, but Kennedy ended up going on alone. In a post on the social media platform X, Shanahan wrote, “While Bobby’s out there spreading our message on TV right now, I’m working behind the scenes to make sure we’re on the ballot in all 50 states.” So rather than add a new note to Kennedy’s message, Shanahan’s is mostly just using her fortune to amplify what he’s already been saying. And what’s he’s been saying is often quite reactionary. (The campaign didn’t respond to my requests to interview Kennedy or Shanahan.)

The last time I saw Kennedy speak, in June in New Hampshire, he was still a Democrat, running a doomed primary challenge to Biden in a campaign managed by the quirky former Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich. Seeking to echo the famous 1963 “ Peace ” speech in which his presidential uncle called for a halt to the Cold War arms race, Kennedy warned against antagonizing Russia over Ukraine, presenting himself as an antiwar candidate.

Some of his followers still see him that way, but now they must either rationalize or overlook his zealous support for Israel’s war in Gaza. In March, weeks after the Biden administration called for a six-week cease-fire, Kennedy was skeptical of the idea, telling Reuters that previous truces have “been used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack.” Though he often rails against censorship, he cheered on the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman’s demand that Harvard do more to crack down on antisemitism, writing, “It’s time to hold college administrations responsible for the epidemic of campus antisemitism by insisting on zero-tolerance policies.”

Kucinich left the campaign in mid-October in ambiguous circumstances, though he’s hinted that disagreements with Kennedy about Gaza had something to do with his departure. (The campaign is now run by Kennedy’s daughter-in-law Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a former C.I.A. officer .) In November, Sayer Ji, an alternative medicine promoter and key anti-vaccine influencer, withdrew his endorsement of Kennedy over Gaza. Charles Eisenstein, a major intellectual figure in New Age circles, is still advising Kennedy, but has been openly critical of his stance on Israel.

While there are still some progressive figures in Kennedy’s orbit, his campaign has an increasingly right-wing vibe. Border security has become a central part of his pitch. Since January, his communications director has been Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaccine activist who doubts that climate change is caused by human activity, and who spoke at the “MAGA Freedom Rally” near the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I wish I could tell you that this pandemic really is dangerous,” Bigtree said then. “I wish I could believe that voting machines work and that people care. You’ve been sold a lie!”

The conservative talk radio host Randy Economy, one of the leaders of the campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, is Kennedy’s senior adviser for ballot access. An opening speaker at the Oakland event was Angela Stanton-King, a Black conservative QAnon promoter who served time for her role in a car-theft ring and was pardoned by Donald Trump.

Some strains of New Age wellness culture — with its distrust of mainstream expertise, moralistic view of health and weakness for quackery — have long intersected with right-wing politics. (Alex Jones, after all, made much of his fortune shilling health supplements.) The connection between alternative medicine and conservatism grew significantly stronger during the pandemic, as the center of gravity in the anti-vaccine movement moved rightward, while longtime right-wingers grew increasing mistrustful of Big Pharma, and with it, Big Food.

“The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed, and isolated — the better to control you and to milk you for as much economic value as they can, before they kill you,” a pseudonymous far-right figure who goes by Raw Egg Nationalist said on the 2022 Tucker Carlson special “The End of Men.”

Kennedy’s conservationism can sound a lot like that of Raw Egg Nationalist. His commitment to the environment is tempered by paranoia about federal government power that makes him suspicious of regulation. Climate change “is being used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls, the same way the Covid crisis was, and it’s the same people,” he said in a campaign video featuring Jordan Peterson, the anti-woke psychologist and author. Dismissing the efficacy of a “war on carbon,” Kennedy said he’d approach energy issues using “free markets and not top-down control.”

Because of his hostility to the state, Kennedy’s environmentalism often manifests as a belief in the redemptive power of healthy living and closeness to nature, which Shanahan shares. This ethos that helps explain Shanahan’s much-publicized criticism of I.V.F. “I believe I.V.F. is sold irresponsibly, and my own experience with natural childbirth has led me to understand that the fertility industry is deeply flawed,” she wrote in People. She’s interested in low-cost, organic alternatives. “I’m not sure that there has been a really thorough mitochondrial respiration study on the effects of two hours of morning sunlight on reproductive health,” she said on a panel last year. “I would love to fund something like that.” Hearing this, I couldn’t help thinking of Carlson’s promotion, on his “End of Men” special, of testicle tanning to raise testosterone levels.

Of course, even though the Kennedy camp has a lot in common with the esoteric new right, Kennedy could still siphon Democratic votes from Biden. A lot of undecided voters don’t follow politics closely, and some who are unhappy about their major-party choices may find themselves drawn to Kennedy’s mythic last name and green-seeming, anti-establishment pitch.

“Anything that splits up the anti-Trump coalition hurts Biden,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump conservative pollster who regularly asks about Kennedy in focus groups. As she sees it, the largest group of persuadable voters in 2024 are the so-called double haters, those who disapprove of both Trump and Biden. “My experience over the years in the focus groups is that when Trump is top of mind for people, people who dislike both him and Biden end up disliking Trump more,” said Longwell. Kennedy, she fears, could give people who might otherwise reluctantly vote for Biden an off-ramp from making a dispiriting decision.

Some polls back up this analysis. A recent Quinnipiac survey shows Kennedy getting 13 percent of the vote; he has support from 9 percent of Democrats, 8 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent of independents. The poll shows Biden leading Trump by three points in a head-to-head matchup, but Trump ahead by one point when third-party candidates are included. Though both numbers are within the poll’s margin of error, they suggest that Trump could benefit if the election isn’t seen as a binary choice.

Other polls , however, show Kennedy pulling more voters from Trump, and the truth is no one knows how the election will ultimately shake out. “The public polling, if you dig into it, can be really head-swiveling,” said Smith. “It’s very hard to gauge the impact, but it does seem like he pulls from both, and right now — emphasis on right now — slightly more from Biden.”

Kennedy certainly has no qualms about spoiling the election for Trump. On CNN on Monday, he argued that Biden poses a “much worse” threat to democracy than Trump because of the Biden administration’s attempts to get social media companies to remove vaccine misinformation, much of it spread by Kennedy.

“President Biden is the first candidate in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent,” he said. The primary threat to democracy, he added, “is not somebody who questions election returns,” noting that he himself believed the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry. “So I don’t think people who say that the election is stolen, we shouldn’t make pariahs of those people,” he said.

This interview was clarifying about Kennedy’s intentions. But precisely because he evidently views Trump, not Biden, as the lesser of two evils, he may prove most attractive to voters who also view the election that way. That, however, would depend on people grasping what he stands for. So it might not be a disaster for Democrats if Shanahan can help Kennedy be more widely heard.

“If anyone is listening who never considered an independent ticket, I want to extend the same invitation to you that my friend did to me last year,” said Shanahan in her Oakland speech. “Please, listen to Bobby Kennedy in his own words.” It’s sage advice.

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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

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