One of the biggest high rollers who has bankrolled the campaigns of multiple Democrat candidates is balking at the idea that Bernie Sanders as a presidential contender.
While Haim Saban is not a household name, the big Hollywood power broker and the man who hit the jackpot with the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise is a big-time player and any 2020 candidate would have a hard time without his backing.
Saban – who plowed millions into Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 campaign – won’t be writing any checks to the raving, race-baiting crank and has called a spade a spade by blasting Comrade Bernie as a communist.
The billionaire entertainment mogul made his provocative comments in an interview for the entertainment magazine The Hollywood Reporter for their philanthropy issue.
THR's Philanthropy Issue: Haim and Cheryl Saban talk donating $420 million, Israel and 2020 presidential race https://t.co/7RsDbglvy1 pic.twitter.com/P99P14BIci
— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) July 10, 2019
With an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion, which includes a major stake in Spanish-language media giant Univision, where he serves as chairman, the Sabans have given more than 13 percent of their wealth to charity, a figure that does not include tens of millions of dollars in political donations. In addition to being two of Hollywood’s most active and visible philanthropists, the couple also is one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party, which is why all eyes are on who they will back in the 2020 presidential election. After the first debates, they remained undecided.
“We love all 23 candidates,” Haim says, then pauses. “No, minus one. I profoundly dislike Bernie Sanders, and you can write it. I don’t give a hoot. He’s a communist under the cover of being a socialist.
He thinks that every billionaire is a crook. He calls us ‘the billionaire class.’ And he attacks us indiscriminately. ‘It’s the billionaire class, the bad guys.’ This is how communists think. So, 22 are great. One is a disaster zone.”
Saban is even less thrilled by Bernie’s lack of support for Israel – the old goat has cultivated anti-Semites like the Justice Democrats and AOC – and unloaded:
In a sign of the shifting tides within the Democratic Party, all of the major presidential candidates skipped the most recent AIPAC summit (the annual D.C conference of the pro-Israel lobbying group). Haim blames Sanders for that phenomenon.
“I can’t deny the impact that Bernie has had on the Democratic Party,” he adds. “I love it when Bernie says, ‘I recognize Israel’s right to exist.’ That’s how he expresses his support of Israel. Well, thank you so very much. Are you out of your freaking mind? Oh, I’m allowed to live. Hallelujah, praise the lord.”
He also has little tolerance for Bernie’s protege, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has used her huge social media presence to trivialize The Holocaurst:
Haim acknowledges that his mission has become more difficult in the current climate. “There is a certain tension [now], but is that tension something that was always there but not expressed? I don’t know. There’s a famous saying that anti-Semitism is a light sleeper, and it doesn’t take much to wake it,” he says.
Haim places some of the blame on Israel itself for “not doing a good job at clarifying to the American people the importance to the United States of that relationship.” But he takes particular umbrage with rising Democratic congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“AOC made a statement: ‘There’s a massacre in Gaza,’ ” he says. “She was asked a question related to what’s going on between Israel and the Palestinians, and she said, ‘Well, I’m going to have to study this.’ So, here she made a statement that is pretty scary and pretty compelling but misinformed. Why don’t you go study and then make a statement?”
It didn’t take long for Bernie himself to counterattack one of those billionaires that the disheveled ersatz Lenin so loves to demonize.
Haim Saban is used to buying elections for his candidates. He and other billionaires oppose our campaign because they know they can't buy us. We don't want their money. pic.twitter.com/IMV2RwJOxj
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 10, 2019
Comrade Bernie is already having to face the new reality that this isn’t 2016 and that the entire Democratic party has moved towards socialism.
Sanders also may scoff at taking money from the likes of Haim Saban but the idea that he can rely on the largess of semi-employed bong pounding stone rangers and barely literate low wage fast food workers is on a collision course with reality.
