34,000 Showed Up for Bernie and AOC in Denver — Here’s What Happens If We Waste That Energy
The rallies are breaking records, and the Democrats are sleepwalking through a realignment. We need a cattle call to flood the zone with 1,000 new and different candidates — not a coronation of 10.
34,000 people showed up in Denver to see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their Fight the Oligarchy tour. It was the biggest rally Denver’s seen since Obama in 2008, and Bernie’s largest ever, until LA topped it a few days later with 36,000.
And it’s not just puffy-jacket ski bums showing up. They pulled 11,000 in Greeley, Colorado — a cowboy-coded town that smells faintly of meat year-round. 12,000 in Idaho, deep in Ruby Ridge territory. 20,000 in Utah, land of Mormon modesty. Not exactly the drum circle scene. And no offense to any of that — I’m writing this from West Virginia.
But the real story isn’t the size. It’s who is showing up.
Half the people in Denver weren’t even on Bernie’s list. They’re new. And that’s the case at stop after stop on the Fight the Oligarchy tour.
This ain’t a traveling band of Grateful Dead-style superfans. These crowds are full of people from every walk of life — left, right, and confused — showing up to try something different as familiar things crumble around us.
The ground is shifting
I travel the country with More Perfect Union reporting on our political fault lines, and I’m telling you — the tectonic plates are moving.
Everywhere I go, people are whispering the same things, even if they don’t know each other. Working-class Trump voters. Urban liberals with fancy coffee. Corporate middle manager types. It’s not uncommon for very normie people to lean in and share their understanding of the reaction to Luigi Mangione. They’ve all seen the same horror show: health care denials, price-gouged groceries, broken systems rigged for billionaires. They know the big boys are making out like bandits. And they’re looking for someone who will name it and fight it.
We are living through a political realignment. The right already had theirs — it brought us Trump. Now the tectonic energy is hitting the Democratic Party.
In moments like this, parties adapt or die. And we’re about to watch the Democrats make their choice.
Ten progressives ain’t enough
At the Denver rally, you could feel the symbolic torch pass from Bernie to AOC. And maybe to the remaining Squad members and new-age progressives who haven’t been taken out by AIPAC’s bazooka of corporate money.
But here’s the risk: we bottle all this protest and rally energy and hand it to 10 or so known progressives. That’s not a movement. That’s a hit list. There’s a great chance that right-wing PACs will label, lie, divide, and crush them. It’s what the money machine was built for.
What we need now is a cattle call.
1,000 completely new and different candidates, called up from pockets of the country where they’re living through this mess. For Congress. For statehouse. For the thousand down-ballot seats Democrats lost during the Obama years. Take a lesson from the right’s political takeover and flood the zone. Force the billionaires to play defense in 1,000 places at once.
A decentralized, working-class wave is harder to squash than 10 polished progressives that everyone already knows.
Run the Ambers
Amber is a nurse I interviewed at the Denver rally. She’s working two jobs and raising autistic twins. Shortly after introducing herself, she cut right to the point.
“Fuck all the oligarchs trying to run this country. You’re not it. You’re not the country. We are.”
No polish, no focus groups — just crystal-clear rage and the moral authority that comes from living inside a broken system.
She sees the profit motives behind health care denials. She works through hospital staffing shortages driven by union busting. She’s fed up with a ridiculous system where we feed our lives into a machine that only prints money for a handful of robotic, creepy Batman villains.
And she’s the kind of person who belongs on the ballot.
There are thousands more like her — in unions, in crowd lines, in church basements and break rooms across the country. The most talented people you’ve never heard of are sinking their time into jobs that increasingly benefit oligarchs.
They don’t need a consultant. They need a challenge, some support, and a shot at running things. That’s the whole idea behind this country. On paper, anyway.
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And because of that, we’re allowed to say that 400 of the richest people in history are running humanity into the ground to preserve levels of private wealth that make the United States defense budget look like a piss ant. Try saying that on CNN.
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Meanwhile, the MAGA machine is on the move
While the non-right is figuring things out, Trump and his dipshit ghouls are sprinting.
It’s impossible to concisely list the depravities of Donald Trump and any of his administrations, but the first 100 days of this one have seen:
ICE teaming up with the IRS to weaponize tax information for immigration roundups.
A flood of constitution-shredding attacks on free speech, due process, and press freedom.
A proposed budget extending tax breaks for billionaires by making drastic cuts to public services like an $880 billion slash to Medicaid, and eliminating the Department of Education. (BTW, spending is higher after all these cuts, and billionaires continue to pay lower true tax rates than working families.)
A bipartisan continuation of support for the internationally-wanted Netanyahu government and their slaughter of Gazans, of course, but also this heinous AI-video suggesting a Trump casino be built on the rubble.
All while Trump and Melania hawk meme coins to his followers and set up a likely rug-pull to walk off with the cash. This is the president. This is his family. This is our government being auctioned off in public.
He’s got cronies like Elon Musk writing million-dollar cartoon checks in state Supreme Court races, and freaks like Seb Gorka fantasizing about using the surveillance state against political enemies.
They’re not hiding it. They’re building the infrastructure of a billionaire-run autocracy — and we’re only three months in.
The old world is dying. The new one is fighting to get born.
Wave goodbye to the status quo. It’s dead either way.
Climate change has guaranteed a future of massive disruption. At this point, we’re locked in for at least 1.5 degrees of warming – the worst case scenario of the past is the best case scenario right now. The smart money on Wall Street is already planning for 3 degrees. That’s collapse territory. That’s nothing-looks-like-it-used-to territory.
If we don’t act, we get unimaginable disruption.
Action to hold warming where it is now would, in itself, be a massive disruption.
And if we did that, the warming already baked in from what we’ve dumped into the sky would, you guessed it, massively disrupt things.
Either way, big changes are coming down the pike.
The only question left is: who benefits? Who’s in control when the dust settles?
The billionaires are building their plan. Private bunker companies are thriving. AI robo-cop dogs are hitting the streets. They’re listening to Curtis Yarvin who envisions American Monarchy where metropolitan areas are governed by CEO kings.
It’s not red vs. blue, it’s billionaires vs. you. We need to build our plan, and fast.
This is the moment Bernie has been calling for.
Bernie’s been laying the groundwork for his entire career. AOC has brought it into a new generation.
Now they need to go all in. The call for candidates to run any way that wins, including as independents, was a start. Now we need the call that matches the moment.
We don’t need a coronation of 10 known progressives. We need the 10 known progressives AND 1,000 new torch-bearers carrying the working people’s agenda in their own words:
National healthcare
Guaranteed social security that’s not a starvation ration
Living wages and unions for all
Tax away the kingdom of billionaires
Bust the monopolies and unleash small community businesses
Excellent public schools, roads, internet, and water systems
Public ownership of AI and automation
An economy and government of, by, and for all of us
That’s the platform for the moment. Now we need the call.
Bernie. AOC. Say it. Put out the challenge. Call up the Ambers. Run them as independents where the party is dead. Run them in primaries where the brand is alive. Build the political machine around them. America will meet you there. Or it won’t, but now’s the moment to try.
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And for dessert…
So You Want To Be A Radical: Don't define yourself by what you hate, define yourself by what you do about it
Monopoly Round-Up Monopolies and Fascism: Centralization of economic power facilitates centralization of political power. That was once a hard-won lesson, and it's a lesson we must relearn. Plus, the end of big box tyranny.
Also writing from West Virginia. Bernie made the call today to his massive email list, asking everyone, literally everyone, to run for an office. And offering connections to guidance as to how. It has long since been time for everyone to step up their game, wherever and whenever possible.
I've been dramatizing the needed revolution nonstop, most recently on Earth Day, via what could be with AOC and the closely related in power:
https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/most-revolutionary-earth-day-excerpt
Bernie today:
Today, I am writing to ask you to go outside your comfort zone.
I am writing to ask you to run for office.
Yes, you.
We need people in every state, county and town in this country to raise their hand and say they are prepared to run for city council, school board, mayor, state legislature, Congress and more. We need to elect progressives at every level in this country who are prepared to side with the working class in America and fight for an economy and government that works for all of us, not just the few.
All you have to do is tell us that you are interested, and we will connect you with an organization that will provide you the tools, the training and the information you need to get the process started and to be successful.
That's the first step. I am asking you to take it now.
We need more of this. Power to the people.