When Bernie Sanders first announced that he would be running for the presidency, little did anyone realize at the time the kind of revolution he would build.
While there have been plenty of times over the last several election years when candidates have made similar promises pitching revolutionary platforms, the energy behind Bernie Sanders’ campaign for this election year would be the first time that America showed it was ready for one.
It’s been widely reported that the Democratic Party has accepted 80 percent of Bernie Sanders’ platform, even before the convention in Philadelphia, and perhaps even more during the fallout of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) email leaks right before the event.
Even though Bernie Sanders has publicly endorsed Clinton and conceded to her, many of his supporters have held on to their anger to lash back at the nominee.
According to Dallas News, a Bernie Sanders campaign supporter named Russell Lytle apologized last week for what he said during a Tuesday morning breakfast meeting at the airport Marriott, saying that he misspoke.
As the video by The Texas Tribune shows, Texas Democratic Party delegates met in a Philadelphia hotel. The idea was that Bernie’s supporters were to stand before the room and talk about how passionate they are about their candidate before they too would concede to Hillary Clinton.
Russell Lytle, standing with other supporters around him and clearly holding the attention of the room, sends the meeting into chaos with one statement.
“We are currently condemning our current presumptive nominee.”
Clearly the chair for Texas Democrats Gilberto Hinojosa was not amused and he forces Lytle to get down from the podium.
One report by the Denton Record-Chronicle ,which represents the North Texas college town Lytle is from, refers to a Clinton superdelegate, also a state representative, who said that there were previous tense moments during the Democratic convention back in 2008 between “never Obama” delegates from the Hillary camp.
A commenter on the video had something to say about the “Berniebros,” a way to refer to aggressive Sanders supporters who are also considered misogynistic.
“That was truly dumb to ‘condemn’ her. What a moron. Typical Berniebro that throws a little mantrum when he doesn’t get his way. It’s not politically smart to ‘condemn’ someone. Idiot Berniebros.”
The Dallas News report also refers to Clinton’s authorized agents Jacob Limon and Garry Mauro, who felt that they could embrace the energy of Bernie’s supporters with the agreement that they would fall in line and support Clinton.
As mentioned in an article by Raw Story,Limon is involved with starting an organizationcalled Revolution Texas, with intentions to position Bernie Sander’s platform throughout the state.
Throughout the week the Democratic National Convention was taking place, Democracy Now! — a progressive news program — featured debates with leftists, liberal thinkers and pundits who see the Bernie and Clinton platform as optimistic, but also showed just how far some are willing to go to angrily protest Hillary Clinton’s nomination.
One of them is Norman Solomon, who was not only on the program, but also at the DNC convention. He has frustrated many party advocates, who were initially considered the liberal extreme before Bernie Sanders came into the political arena and being far more aggressive, by saying the party’s choice of nominee was simply not progressive enough.
#DemsInPhilly A new group has formed in #Texas to continue @BernieSanders ‘ political revolution. Next @CBSDFW 5pm pic.twitter.com/j8c5oLgotM
— Jack Fink (@cbs11jack) July 27, 2016
Jill Stein, who represents the Green Party, has been gaining in popularity through the Bernie movement, and with her, the voter who believes that electing Donald Trump would throw the U.S. into neo-fascism, electing Hillary would secure the White House under neo-liberalism and create more opportunity for a someone like Ted Cruz to seize the White House in the future.
It’s rather early to tell whether the most extreme of Bernie’s supporters will eventually find some common ground with the most progressive platform the party Dems could agree to.
However, what is certainly clear is that Bernie Sanders himself has found some opportunity to extend his movement past this election year.
[Photo by Tamir Kalifa/AP Photo]