With the music pumpin’, the drums and bass bottom thumpin’, Senator Bernie Sanders strode onto the stage like a rock’n roll show in Wheeling’s historic and iconic country music venue, the Capitol Theater.

And the West Virginia progressive crowd went wild like the last time Johnny Cash played the Capitol.

Though the event was planned as a rally, it played like a town hall. Every time the Senator shouted a rhetorical question, the crowd roared the response.

As you might say of a concert of Tyler Childers or Molly Tuttle, the hall was electric.

Our fantastic activist Danielle Walker and Democratic leader and Senate candidate Zachary Shrewsbury and grassroots folks brought the crowd to its feet with passion and compassion, and Bernie took the podium, calling and naming the sins causing our common miseries and their corporate sponsors: punishing poverty, opioid crisis caused by Morrisey industry, the stealing of resources while exploiting our people, the insanity of MAGA.

Then he thundered the starting place for an agenda that serves the working class:

■ – National healthcare for all

■ – Paid family and medical leave

■ – Raise the minimum wage to at least $17 an hour

■ – Free daycare

■ – Free trade school and college education

■ – Huge housing investment

■ – Full, unabridged right for workers to freely organize unions,
work collectively and bargain collectively

It was Friday evening, Aug. 8, at the beginning of the Bernie Sanders “Fighting Oligarchy” Tour over two days.

As soon as the first rally was over but before the cheering stopped, my partner and I got our car quickly as possible to head for the next event four hours away in Mingo County and the town of Lenore.

We drove a couple hours and stopped at a place along the highway for the night. We ate Wendy’s in our room before crashing after the adrenaline, excitement and fervor finally wore down.

Sunday morning, Aug. 9 we were headed soon as we could to Lenore. We got turned around on the long way there and I had to back out over 100 yards out of a one way tunnel through a mountain.

But Lenore was worth it all.

The new Democratic County Executive Chairman is a young, brilliant political activist named Johnny Nick Hager. He told all the truths about Mingo County, southern West Virginia, deprivation of life in the coal fields and poverty in families who’ve never known enough.

No wonder Johnny Nick and his folks could turn out four or five hundred people.

Bernie really wanted to listen to folks, so it was town hall. It all involved Bernie listening. He would ask a question. And someone would answer. Then someone from the crowd would ask about some horror story about no clean water or leaking gas wells or no healthcare and Bernie would outline national solutions.

Like good West Virginia neighbors, the folks in Lenore offered a free barbecue dinner with baked beans and other fixings. They are very proud of their young, local boy made great leader, Hager.

As soon as the town hall ended, we hustled hard to Charleston’s Civic Center where a huge overflow room crowd of 3,000-plus standing room only closed by the fire marshal was already rocking to ground up, grassroots speakers.

Once again Shrewsbury introduced Senator Sanders who demonstrated his physical stamina along with his compassion for us regular folks and his passion for economic and political democracy with a speech that was still given with his serious powerful energy.

Those of us who followed Bernie and Shrewsbury over those two days know how hard they both worked and the energy they expended.

All 6,000-plus of us who attended any part of the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour saw our future in politics: energetic young folks and all ages, union folks, clergy and people of faith, civil rights and political and human rights activists, women and feminists, American patriots who still stand for democracy and freedom for all.

In the wake of Bernie’s tour, it is important in West Virginia and other rural red states to keep pushing against MAGA, resistance to Trump cultism and fascism.

We need to roll into 2026 and the midterms riding a social/political movement of human values that translate into democratic politics and bury the MAGA politics of division, injustice, hate, prejudice, white supremacy and racism.

We have security and a future to win for our children, our grandkids, our people, our state and our country.

…

BETWEEN THE RIVERS: A Bernie Sanders Mountain State Tour

was originally published in The Spirit of Jefferson Newspaper