Photo by Gage Skidmore courtesy of Flickr under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0, image manipulation by America’s 1st Freedom.
When Michael Bloomberg put his big toe in the race for president of the United States by dispatching his aides to Alabama to file paperwork to get his name on the state’s ballot as a Democrat, he didn’t just make gun owners grimace.
Sure, in 2014 Bloomberg pledged to spend $50 million to absorb the anti-gun group Moms Demand Action into his Mayors Against Illegal Guns, forming the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety. More recently, Bloomberg said he’d spend over $50 million on a new gun-control campaign for 2020. His money has actually been behind just about every attempt to diminish Second Amendment rights for the last few decades.
And Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City for 12 years, has plenty to spend. He is worth over $50 billion, according to Forbes. The millions he has spent to convince people to vote away their hard-earned freedoms have thus far been little more than the interest earned on his fortune.
Over the last 15 or so years, Bloomberg has funded schemes, ploys and vast ad campaigns to do away with our Second Amendment freedoms. He has been nothing less than a super-villain to American freedom. If American gun owners were to cast Bloomberg in a movie, he’d be something like Ian Fleming’s antagonist in the 007 franchise, Dr. No; an aloof, out-of-touch plutocrat with a penchant for domination.
Bloomberg, after all, wants to ban everything from the peoples’ large sodas to their guns, and he wants to do this even while he enjoys flying on his private jet to his Bermuda estate—a place, like his many other properties, one surmises must have sophisticated security systems and armed guards on a scale that would inspire a writer like Fleming.
On his many estates and in his offices, Bloomberg lives behind money, power and literal walls. He earned his fortune on Wall Street, but never did spend any time on main street. From the mayor’s mansion in New York City and from behind the glass in his many office buildings in New York, London and Shanghai, he has fomented the egotistical persona of a lord from some bygone era. He feels entitled to tell others how to live—even if he exempts himself from his own smug decrees.
Still, it isn’t just the many millions of Americans who cherish their Second Amendment rights who are repelled by Bloomberg.
“For too long the people at the top of the Democratic Party have been wealthier, whiter, more male and more conservative than the base of the Democratic Party which looks a lot more like [Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, told Business Insider when asked about Bloomberg.
Many others on the left have made similar comments about 77-year-old Bloomberg.
Nevertheless, Bloomberg’s many attacks on your freedom are not seen as a downside by political commentators on the left today. If they were, the pundits, journalists and political consultants on the left would realize this is actually a problem for the entire field of Democrats now seeking to be the Democratic nominee for president.
Americans, after all, have a habit of stubbornly voting for their freedom; especially when they are well-informed—and with your help, NRA will play a vital role ensuring this.
That said, if Bloomberg does dive all the way in to the Democrat’s primaries as a candidate, it will be interesting to see how the other candidates will attack him and how he’d respond to these attacks, as Bloomberg has never been a personable, likable man of the people. He has always been what he seems, a distant, self-interested, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do tycoon.
He won the race for mayor of New York City as a Republican in a unique moment just after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. We are told he was a lifelong Democrat before running for mayor, but opted to run as a Republican—likely because those political winds were then more favorable to him. When it suited him politically, he officially changed back to being a Democrat.
Bloomberg has used his fortune, meanwhile, to fund a lot of anti-gun initiatives and the campaigns of those who back gun bans and more restrictions on our freedom. Now he is planning to fund his own campaign for president.
One thing is certain; if he ever were elected president, he would do everything in his power to disempower you. And, win, lose or whether he opts not to jump in the game, he’ll continue to use his fortune to do all he can to diminish your freedom. (Frank Miniter’s latest book is The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide to the Workplace.)
