Just consider, to begin with, one issue from Sanders’ political career, highlighted by the historian Ronald Radosh in The Daily Beast. When Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his minions seized dozens of American hostages in 1979 and held 52 of them for 444 days, Americans across the spectrum were united in outrage and in seeking their safe return. Sanders, at the time, was a backer of an obscure Marxist-Leninist political party that pledged support for the Iranian theocracy and defended the hostage-taking. In line with Iranian propaganda, the party alleged that the captured diplomats and other U.S. Embassy workers were likely CIA agents…

Consider Cuba. Cuba’s Marxist-Leninist revolution has been another one of Sanders’ pet causes. In 1989, he issued a public statement piling praise on Castro’s regime.

“For better or for worse, the Cuban revolution is a very profound and very deep revolution. Much deeper than I had understood,” Sanders wrote. “More interesting than their providing their people with free health care, free education, free housing … is that they are in fact creating a very different value system than the one we are familiar with.”