Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume accused Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Monday of peddling a “conspiracy theory” that billionaires are “running the country” and have an “exorbitant amount of power.”
On the day before the pivotal New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, Hume appeared on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom to break down the race and to also expand on previous comments he made over the weekend about Sanders.
“You said yesterday on our election special that you think the Bernie Sanders campaign is eventually sort of running on a conspiracy theory,” anchor Ed Henry asked his colleague. “The idea that there’s a conspiracy theory behind it, and you’re not sure it’s good politics.”
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Hume, a former longtime Fox News anchor, said the democratic socialist is constantly talking about how the nation’s “billionaire class” is “basically running the country, that they have this exorbitant amount of power, and so on.”
“I don’t think it’s—I think that’s, you know, questionable whether that’s really true,” Hume continued. “And I think—but considering, you know, the part of the party’s electorate to which he’s appealing, I suppose it’s not bad politics. But I think, in the long run, people won’t accept that.”
Hume’s dismissal of the argument that billionaires have outsized power in the U.S. as mere “conspiracy theory” comes at the same time a self-professed billionaire is president and two verified billionaires are spending hundreds of millions of dollars of their personal wealth to snag the Democratic nomination.
Sanders, meanwhile, isn’t just taking heat from the right over his campaign’s rhetoric about the ultra-wealthy. The independent Vermont senator has been repeatedly hit by the various MSNBC personalities, with the network’s pundits and hosts expressing indignation over a campaign adviser describing Mike Bloomberg as an “oligarch” or complaining that Sanders is “creating unnecessary class war” because billionaires unequivocally make “our lives better.”
