Bernie’s policies were terrible, but he had an enthusiastic following. Biden generated all the voter enthusiasm of spoiled tuna, but his selling point was that he wasn’t going to do all the crazy Bernie stuff. Now the Biden campaign is trying to unite the party by adopting some of the Bernie policies so that the Democrats are going to be stuck with all the unelectable socialist ideas and a boring candidate.

The worst of both worlds.

Biden is such a terrible candidate that he vanished from the media landscape until a sexual assault allegation against him went mainstream. And that’s in a media environment where the major news networks were so desperate that they had begun touting George W. Bush as a model of leadership.

When even the most biased media since Pravda can’t even try to make you look good, it’s bad.

Voters like Bernie Sanders until it’s slowly explained to them that he wants to take away their Medicare and let the Boston Bomber vote from prison. And those are just the policy outcomes he’ll admit to. Half a dozen 2020 Democrats threw themselves on the socialist hand grenade and endorsed Biden to stop Bernie. But from the looks of things, they might have just as well let Bernie grab the nomination.

The joint unity task forces of the Biden-Sanders campaign will have Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez co-chairing the unity climate change task force. That means putting the radical brat whose Green New Deal called for "the phasing out of American air travel" in charge of advising the Biden campaign.

Varshini Prakash, whose Sunrise Movement helped draft the Green New Deal, is also on the task force. The Sunrise Movement’s demand for net zero emissions by 2030 would wipe out most manufacturing and energy production in this country. That means people freezing to death in their own homes.

And then there’s the criminal justice task force.

The Bernie Sanders campaign had foundered when the radical socialist endorsed having the Boston Bomber vote from prison. Bernie's pick for the criminal justice panel, Chiraag Bains, is an Obama DOJ guy from the Ferguson era, and a Soros Open Society Foundations fellow.

When Buttigieg dismissed Sanders' call to have the Boston Bomber vote from prison, Chiraag Bains ranted that, "Felony disenfranchisement has its roots in racist attempts to sap black political power."

Bains has tweeted that he supports, “voting for the incarcerated.”

The Boston Bomber voting just went right back on the table.

If you think that's as bad as it can get, Bernie's picks for the economy task force include Stephanie Kelton, a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory.

MMT simply states that the government should just print as much money as it can.

Kelton, the author of The Deficit Myth, says things like, “There’s so much pressure on candidates to pay for everything. I don’t see anyone—I mean, I’ll just be honest, I don’t really see any Presidential candidates putting forward ambitious agendas and saying, ‘We’re not going to try to pay for any of this.’”

In case you doubt that the radical economist really means it, Kelton breezily answers her own questions. “Q: Can we afford a #GreenNewDeal? A: Yes. The federal government can afford to buy whatever is for sale in its own currency.” And, the classic, “Q: Are you saying the government can just "print the money" to pay for new spending? A: Is there any other way?”

Another Bernie pick for the economy task force is Darrick Hamilton, who had co-authored a call for a federal job guarantee in a piece which argued that by, “eliminating the threat of unemployment once and for all, a federal job guarantee would bring power back to the workers.”

How would we pay for it? Just print more money.

The Biden-Sanders immigration task force includes Javier Valdes, an executive director of Make the Road. The open borders group supports abolishing ICE and letting illegal aliens vote in state elections.

Marisa Franco, another Bernie figure on the task force, formerly ran Not1More Deportation, which called for a complete end to deportations, and now wants to abolish ICE.

"We need a goal, and dismantling ICE is a long-term goal that can happen in stages," she said.

The Biden-Sanders task force may not get Biden to adopt all of Bernie’s most radical policies, but even a compromise with people who want to just print infinite money, let terrorists vote from prison, wipe out manufacturing, provide guaranteed jobs for all, and abolish immigration enforcement would be bad.

A mediocre candidate, Biden needs all the help generating enthusiasm that he can. And the only people generating any enthusiasm among Democrats are the coterie of professional radical leftist activists. The hypocritical fact that Bernie Sanders, who denounces billionaires, yet has brought in radicals backed by Soros, like Bains and Valdes, to create the next just policies of the Democrats, goes unnoticed.

But that’s what it amounts to.

Biden outsources his policies to Bernie who outsources them to Soros. That’s what the Democrats are. First the DNC disenfranchised all the Democrats who voted for anyone other than Biden. Then they disenfranchised Biden voters, leaving the party a hollow finger puppet for a Hungarian Bond villain.

Vote for Biden and you get Bernie. Vote for Bernie and you get Soros.

The Democrats claim that they aren’t radical. Yet their unity task force consists of people who literally believe in just printing money, having the federal government employ everyone, and letting serial killers vote. Even Communist dictatorships would question two out of three of these lunatic proposals.

It really says something that the Democrats are going places that even the USSR wouldn’t have gone.

The Democrats have embraced the worst of both worlds, Biden’s charisma and Bernie’s politics, and even in the aftermath of a pandemic, voters will be confronted with a party that wants to take away their health care, make their savings worthless, and make their vote equal to that of a child molester.

And the Democrats may be overestimating how popular any of these terrible ideas will be.

There are two reasons why people can’t open their mouths or breathe, as in the joke with the Soviet dentist, literal and figurative. In a year when mouths are being shut with masks and censorship, the literal and the figurative things that people are afraid of have come together.

2020 is one long Soviet anecdote in which the only people allowed to disregard social distancing by gathering to protest in the thousands and tens of thousands do so to complain about their oppression. It’s a mock dystopia in which corporate CEOs berate their employees about their privilege and fire anyone who won’t confess their privilege, and government officials and agencies lecture the people they rule at length about the terrible evils of systemic racism.

Speech is violence and violence is speech. Throwing firebombs is in the First Amendment, but saying All Lives Matter is literally killing people. The only people who don’t have privilege are the ones who have special privileges. Criminals have a right to be safe from the police, but people don’t have a right to be safe from criminals. Public safety is now about keeping criminals safe from the police by defunding the police so that no one except the criminals can be safe.

Everyone has to wear masks, except the government officials telling them to do it. The only people who don’t have to worry about being able to breathe are the ones mandating the masks. Democrat governors like Cuomo and Murphy who killed tens of thousands are the heroes of the pandemic, while the villains are the Republican governors whose red states have few deaths.

The Communists called the newspaper in which they printed all their lies, Pravda or Truth. Soviet anecdotes hinged on the central irony that everything was a lie, everyone knew it, and no one could say it. The joke wasn’t in what was said, but in the mutual recognition of the unsaid.

Or, “I’m afraid to open my mouth.”

We live in the world of the unsaid, of the human shadowlands where people who go around with their mouths closed and faces covered, and in that world we know what is said is meaningless.

That which can be said is, by definition, a lie, and that which can’t be said, becomes the truth.

The real news is what’s read between the lines of the lies. What people say is the opposite of the truth. At struggle sessions, academics and executives confess that they’re racist to prove that they’re not racist. The only people who can safely claim not to have privilege, have that privilege. No one at work will admit to voting for President Trump, but someone must have.

The more speech is banned, the more worthless is the speech that is still allowed.

Polls become useless when people are too afraid to tell partisan pollsters the truth. Democrats and their media demand censorship of social media to protect the integrity of democracy from the speech of the demos, and then are caught by surprise when they suddenly lose elections.

Censorship creates a culture of lies. The more restrictive the censorship, the worse the lies. In a totalitarian system, no one believes anything, and no one trusts anything that they hear. And that culture of mistrust leads to a deep rot that corrupts everything and everyone it touches.

People retreat behind masks, literal and figurative, to protect themselves against a masked system which lies to them and spies on them. And the system thinks that it’s in control because it hears its own lies repeated back to it, not realizing that it’s the one now being lied to.

The irony of the Soviet anecdote was that it was a joke that could only be told by not telling it.

To breathe, to open your mouth and fill your lungs with air, requires a sense of freedom. American tourists visiting the USSR noticed the tension, the invisible weight, the closed faces of the people they met. To the Russians, Americans seemed an open and free people. Freedom was not just a legal condition, a matter of elections and constitutions which on paper the Russians had. Being truly free meant not even being able to imagine the loss of freedom.

Now it’s Americans who walk the streets, when they dare, their faces closed off, invisible weights bowing them down, wary that anything they say might end their careers and lives. Hundreds of millions of people have been cut off from their families and thrust into a national conversation mediated by giant monopolies set up to enable the informants of cancel culture.

The perfect panopticon that the KGB could have only dreamed of is here and we’re living in it. There is no telling when someone might be watching you, taping you, provoking a confrontation that will be posted on social media, made to go viral, and lead to permanent unemployment.

Not to mention possible arrest and prosecution, or even violent assault and murder.

It’s safer for millions to put on their masks and not say things. And if there seem to be few Biden yard signs and little enthusiasm for the political program of the ruling class, that’s also unsaid.

And it is in the realms of the unsaid where the movements that really matter take place.

Everyone, from top athletes to corporate executives, knows that they have to kneel and mouth the words. And the little people holding down jobs at some Fortune 500 company that assigns Robin DeAngelo as mandatory reading know it better than anyone else. They wear their masks.

Free people breathe. Unfree people hold their breaths. They put on masks and close their mouths. They push the fear and the anger behind their eyes. They repeat the lies until the entire world around them seems made of lies that they believe and don’t believe at the same time.

A nation has put on its masks. And it’s waiting for November to find out if it can take a breath.