Kyle Jurek, an Iowa field organizer for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has been caught on camera promising violence against police officers and destruction in general if Trump gets reelected or even if Sanders fails to secure the Democratic nomination.
He also mused about throwing Trump supporters in “gulags”—forced labor camps—for “re-education” and opined that Sanders’ “free education” plans are a part of such a “re-education” effort.
Some opponents of his revolution, which he said he was eager to start, would be outright executed, he said.
‘Cities Burn’
If Trump gets reelected, “cities [will] burn,” Jurek told an undercover reporter from Project Veritas Action, an investigative journalism nonprofit.Violence may erupt as early as during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) scheduled on July 13–16 in Milwaukee—in the case where Sanders doesn’t win the nomination.
“If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC convention, [expletive] Milwaukee will burn,” Jurek said, saying at one point that the senator’s supporters like him have “nothing else left to lose” if “they [expletive] take Bernie from us.”
Some Sanders supporters believe the superdelegates would snub Sanders and pick a more pro-establishment candidate, such as former Vice President Joe Biden.
In Jurek’s view, sidelining Sanders would lead to violence not just in Milwaukee.
“It will start in Milwaukee and ... when the police push back on that, other cities will just [expletive]—” he said, making an explosion sound and gesture.
Jurek likened his prediction to the 1968 protests during the DNC convention in Chicago. Organized by the anarcho-communist Youth International Party, the protests led to clashes with police, with several hundred police officers and protesters suffering mostly minor injuries.
“We’re going to make 1978 look like a [expletive] girl’s scout [expletive] cookout,” Jurek said, getting the decade wrong.
“The cops are going to be the ones that are getting [expletive] beaten in Milwaukee,” he added.
Violent Revolution
Jurek also laid out a Soviet-style plan to deal with opponents of his policy preferences.“What are we going to do with the people that resist the change. Because that’s a big deal,” the reporter asked.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, in Cuba, what did they do to reactionaries?” Jurek said.
“They shot them on the beach,” the reporter said.
Gulags
Another option would be “re-education.”“There’s a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags, right?” he said in a conversation on whether some Trump supporters could be “re-educated.”
He likened it to the efforts in post-World War II Germany to counter Nazi propaganda among the populace.
“That’s kind of what all Bernie’s whole [expletive] like ‘hey, free education for everybody’—because we’re going to have to teach you not to be a [expletive] Nazi,” he said.
Gulags were some of the most savage methods Soviet communists used to eliminate their political opponents or anybody the regime found inconvenient. Torture and killings were common in the camps. So was starving to death.
Jurek made clear that many influential people and entities on the left wouldn’t be safe from the violence either.
“The billionaire class. The [expletive] media, the pundits. Walk into that MSNBC studios, drag those [expletive] out by their hair, and light them on fire in the streets,” he said.
“[Liberal] guys like that. What are we going to do with them?” the reporter asked at one point.
Antifa
Jurek said that Trump supporters “are scared [expletive] senseless by anti-fascists,” referring to the “Antifa” group closely tied to the communist and quasi-Marxist movements. According to the Homeland Security Department, Antifa is engaged in “domestic terroristic violence.”Placing himself in the Antifa ranks, Jurek defended the group’s violence, saying that “free speech has consequences.”
“If your speech is calling for the elimination of people based on race or gender or religious, like, for whatever reason, things that people can’t change, then you should expect a violent reaction, and you deserve a violent reaction,” he said.
In views commonly expressed by Antifa adherents, statements like “there are only two genders” are de facto calls for the elimination of people because, in their view, such statements deny the experiences of people who consider themselves neither male nor female.
‘Save ... Human Civilization’
Jurek appears to have been motivated, at least in part, by concerns that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide will imminently lead to catastrophic global warming and the demise of human civilization.“We don’t have a lot of time left. We have to save [expletive] human civilization,” he said. “And obviously Trump don’t give two [expletive] about making sure the world doesn’t burn.”
