LIVE from Seattle’s U District: Bernie Sanders joins supporters to discuss Our Revolution

Good evening from the Uni­ver­si­ty Dis­trict, and wel­come to NPI’s live cov­er­age of the Seat­tle stop of Bernie Sanders’ Our Rev­o­lu­tion book tour. Sen­a­tor Sanders is join­ing a packed house of sup­port­ers at Uni­ver­si­ty Tem­ple Unit­ed Methodist Church to pro­mote his recent­ly-released book and talk about the direc­tion of the pro­gres­sive move­ment as Amer­i­ca enters the Trump error.

Sen­a­tor Sanders is due to be intro­duced in a few min­utes. We have a full house here, with this event hav­ing sold out sev­er­al weeks ago. Tick­et­buy­ers received a copy of Bernie’s book as part of the price of admission.

The Sen­a­tor is sched­uled to speak for around twen­ty to thir­ty min­utes and will then take ques­tions from the audi­ence. I’ll be updat­ing this post fre­quent­ly with high­lights from the remarks and Q&A. Enjoy!

UPDATE, 7:18 PM: Bernie arrived a few min­utes ago to a stand­ing ova­tion. He launched right into his remarks upon tak­ing the stage, intro­duc­ing him­self as the hus­band of Jane Sanders. He touched on the recent­ly-con­clud­ed pres­i­den­tial con­test imme­di­ate­ly, ask­ing the audi­ence to remem­ber that Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee Hillary Clin­ton is win­ning the pop­u­lar vote nationwide.

He then began a con­cise ren­di­tion of his stump speech, high­light­ing the need for bold pro­gres­sive solu­tions to address the cli­mate cri­sis, mon­ey in pol­i­tics, sys­temic racism, and income inequal­i­ty. Many of the ideas that pro­gres­sives sup­port are ideas that the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans also enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sup­port, Sanders noted.

UPDATE, 7:25 PM: Turn­ing his atten­tion to Don­ald Trump, Sanders lit into the neo­fas­cist tycoon for false­ly pro­claim­ing that he would have won the pop­u­lar vote were it not for fraud­u­lent votes. “We’re get­ting used to hav­ing gov­ern­ment by tweet,” Sanders said. “A hun­dred and forty char­ac­ters or less.”

The real pur­pose of Trump’s tweet was to encour­age Repub­li­cans all over the coun­try to pur­sue vot­er sup­pres­sion schemes that will dis­en­fran­chise Demo­c­ra­t­ic and pro­gres­sive vot­ers, Sanders added.

UPDATE, 7:30 PM: We can­not com­pro­mise with big­otry, Sanders told sup­port­ers, declar­ing that it’s up to all of us to fight to expand free­dom, even with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty out of pow­er at the fed­er­al level.

“What we say to Mr. Trump [is]: We have trav­eled too far in the fight against dis­crim­i­na­tion. We are not going back­wards,” Sanders said, as the audi­ence jumped to its feet to give him anoth­er stand­ing ovation.

UPDATE, 7:35 PM: Sanders says he thinks Don­ald Trump won by “speak­ing to the pain and anx­i­ety peo­ple today are feel­ing” and by skil­ful­ly exploit­ing Amer­i­ca’s big media (which is dis­cussed in the last chap­ter of his book Our Revolution).

UPDATE, 7:41 PM: The despair in many pock­ets in Amer­i­ca over declin­ing qual­i­ty of life has got­ten so bad that it’s dri­ven peo­ple to abuse opi­ates and alco­hol and com­mit sui­cide, Sanders says, not­ing that the big media does­n’t do a very good job of cov­er­ing these issues… but Don­ald Trump saw them and took advan­tage by prey­ing on peo­ple’s fears and anxieties.

UPDATE, 7:44 PM: “For bet­ter or worse, I’ve been made a part of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­er­ship in the Sen­ate,” Sanders said, explain­ing that he will be respon­si­ble for out­reach on behalf of the cau­cus and will need his sup­port­ers’ help.

POSTSCRIPT: See also Paul Con­stan­t’s write­up at the Seat­tle Review of Books.