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Bernie the Builder of Nothing Lectures the People Who Actually BuildBernie Sanders just posted that the 2026 midterms are not about Republicans versus Democrats. “It’s about Musk and other oligarchs buying our government, undermining democracy and making themselves even richer with Trump’s anti-worker policies.” He then listed the top ten individual contributors, nine of them Republicans, led by Elon Musk at $369 million, and closed by demanding an end to Citizens United, the outlawing of super PACs, and a shift to public funding of elections.This is the same man who has spent more than four decades in elected office without founding a company, creating a product, or employing anyone outside the public payroll. He has never had to meet a payroll, satisfy a customer, or risk his own capital. His entire career has been spent arguing that other people’s success is a problem that needs to be constrained by the same government that has employed him for most of his adult life.The people he labels oligarchs built the companies that employ tens of thousands, ship goods, launch satellites, and generate the tax revenue that funds the Senate. Musk’s companies did not appear because a committee approved them. They exist because he and his teams solved engineering problems at scale. The same is true of the others on the list who put private money behind candidates who support lower taxes, lighter regulation, and growth. Sanders treats that as corruption. He treats his own long record of voting for higher taxes and more spending as virtue.He includes George Soros at $102 million as the sole Democrat in the top ten, which undercuts the claim that this is uniquely a Republican problem. Large donors exist on both sides. What has changed is that one set of donors now supports the party that is currently in power and the policies that have produced stronger energy production, tighter borders, and slower regulatory expansion. Sanders’s response is not to compete for those dollars with better ideas. It is to change the rules so that private citizens cannot spend as much of their own money on speech.Public funding of elections does not eliminate money in politics. It simply moves the funding decision from voluntary contributors to the same government apparatus that already writes the tax code, the regulatory code, and the rules for who may run. That is a concentration of power, not a reduction of it. Citizens United recognized that independent expenditures are speech. Sanders wants that speech limited when it is directed against the policies he favors.The senator who has never built a private enterprise continues to argue that the people who have built them should be barred from supporting the politicians who let them keep more of what they earn. That is not a defense of democracy. It is a defense of the permanent political class against the people who generate the wealth it spends.