The leftists at New York magazine are marveling at Bernie Sanders's success at building a media empire.  He's getting millions of viewers to his verbally delivered screeds extolling socialism on social media, with no concern for offending advertisers.  It's nonsense.  What we are seeing is taxpayer-subsidized propaganda to...spread socialism.

Here's how New York reported it:

The Vermont senator, who's been comparing corporate television programming to drugs and accusing it of creating a "nation of morons" since at least 1979 – and musing to friends about creating an alternative news outlet for at least as long – has spent the last year and a half building something close to a small network out of his office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

Sanders described it to New York magazine like this:

"My point of view is a very, very different one.  My point of view is the corporate media, by definition, is owned by large multinational corporations: their bottom line is to make as much money as they can.  They are part of the Establishment.  There are issues, there are conflicts of interest in terms of fossil fuel advertising – how they have been very, very weak, in terms of climate change."  Needless to say, the content he produces is not sponsored by advertisers.

Now, on the surface, that gushy portrait of Bernie's supposed media wizardry is nothing new.  In the past, washed up politicians often would start new careers after a big electoral defeat by taking to the airwaves, sometimes doing better in the press than in politics.  Sarah Palin is one such example; Mike Huckabee is another; and there have likely been some Democrats, too.

But none of those people did it at the same time he retained office in politics, and none of them used public funds to do it.  Sanders is doing both.

And what he's spreading is socialist propaganda, presumably to eager Millennials and other naïfs, whipping them up, getting press time when in the past, his socialist ideas would not have gotten press beyond the Daily Worker.

His claims about not having any concern for advertisers and corporate concerns rings hollow, given that he's not doing his work on zero dollars, only on public dollars, meaning, yours.  Like that?  It's astonishing that he could be advocating any socialist ideas using public resources, while other political leaders go unheard, but it certainly does express a socialist mentality.  Is it any wonder Millennials think Sanders is the cat's meow when all they hear is social media propaganda that spreads socialism?

Why haven't the Senate rule-makers put a stop to this?