American right-leaning activist group Project Veritas released footage on Tuesday of Martin Weissgerber, a supporter of Democratic party Senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, who was one of his South Carolina field organizers, claiming that he is a “communist” and eager to “start fighting.”
Martin Weissgerber, a Bernie Sanders field organizer, is now the 2nd staffer to be caught praising the excesses of Communist totalitarianism. He says he wants to kill people in a violent revolution & put counter-revolutionaries in prison. pic.twitter.com/1Vm7YzrUx0
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) January 21, 2020
“I want to learn how to shoot and go train,” he said, “Guillotine the rich.”
When discussing how to combat the climate crisis, he is recorded as discussing the option of dissolving the Senate and the court system and have a group of people, among them Sanders, assuming tyrannical powers to allegedly take action against the deterioration of the ecosystem.
He further claimed that Republicans will be sent to “re-education camps” while making air quotation marks indicting these would actually be death camps.
Weissgerber is the second alleged Sanders supporter to be exposed by the group, following Kyle Jurek, who was reported as saying that "cities will burn" unless Sanders is elected.
The organizer further goes on to argue that the first Gulag in the USSR was the White Sea Baltic Canal [Belomorkanal] and that it was a “beautiful thing.”
It is estimated that between 12,000 to 25,000 prisoners died in the construction of the canal, which opened in 1933. Presented as a means to redeem inmates via labor, it was the first soviet five-year plan, and is not widely used today.
He then goes on to claim that the US has more people in prison today than the USSR had in the Gulag system, when they were working at full capacity.
In 1950, the USSR kept 2,525,146 people in the Gulags, the US Department of the Interior reported in a fact sheet. According to prisonstudies.org, the US currently has 2,121,600 people in prison, falsifying his claim.
The Project Veritas activist can be heard encouraging Weissgerber as he is making these false claims with “preach!” as well as similar expressions goading him into making even wilder claims.
“No,” the activist says, “the Soviet Union was not horrible” which leads Weissgerber to say that “for women’s rights, the Soviet Union [was] the most progressive place to date in the world.”
This argument is also false, since the USSR was not shy about handing out the Mother Heroine medal to Soviet women who had ten children or more.
Some historians argue that the award, founded in 1944, was meant to encourage women to give birth to more children since so many Russian citizens perished during the Second World War. In 1935, Anarchist Emma Goldman claimed that “there is no Communism in Russia.”
Weissgerber also expressed admiration for the AK-47, a gun designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1946, calling it “the destroyer of imperialism and colonization.”
The USSR had attempted to control Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War [1979-1989] and crushed Czechoslovakia in 1968 when that country attempted to present reforms to its system.
Political discourse in the US has become extreme in recent years, with alt-right activist Richard B. Spencer saluting Trump’s victory in 2016 with ‘Hail Trump! Hail our people!’ A Craig Zobel film titled The Hunt, in which characters shoot “deplorables,” or conservative Americans, was made but never released.