FACT CHECK: Did Bernie Sanders Say The US Has ‘Had Enough With White Men In Places Of Power’?
The Facebook page Statist Zombies shared a quote purportedly from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders saying, “I think this country has had enough with white men in places of power. It’s time for a change and with your help I can be that change.”
Verdict: False
Although Sanders has vowed to make his campaign – and if elected president, his cabinet – diverse, there is no evidence he ever made this statement.
Fact Check:
Sanders, who is one of more than a dozen candidates running for president in 2020, outraised all of his Democratic rivals in the first quarter of 2019 and is widely considered a front runner.
Sanders has vowed to make racial diversity more of a priority for his 2020 campaign after he was criticized for not doing enough to reach black voters in 2016.
“This time, we’re starting from a different position,” he said during an interview on The Breakfast Club radio show in March. “We were criticized for being too white, that was a correct criticism. We were criticized for being too male, that was a correct criticism. That’s going to change.”
Sanders has also promised his cabinet would “look like America” if he were elected president.
However, The Daily Caller News Foundation found no evidence that Sanders ever made the statement attributed to him in the meme. A spokesperson for his campaign told TheDCNF in an email that she was unaware of any such statement.
The meme includes the Fox News logo in the bottom-left corner, but a Fox News spokesperson told TheDCNF the meme did not originate with them.
When asked during the Breakfast Club interview whether he thought the U.S. needed another white male president, Sanders responded by saying, “Well, I think you need this one.”
He recently rejected the idea that the 2020 Democratic nominee should be chosen based on race or gender.
“We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age,” said Sanders during a February interview on Vermont Public Radio. “I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.”
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