Still don’t know what will happen in Philly. My current view is that Bernie was a regular person who saw that no one else would stand up, and decided to stand up. He showed what happens when you’ve got integrity, genuine compassion and morals… and then try to run for President in this country. Here’s what I saw and what I’m taking away from this.

What we experienced was the global elite exercising their political and media power to crush him and us. The GOP and Democratic party both serve this group of people, and will ostracize a candidate that won’t help their bottom line. They do it every time, but we never made them work like this- never made them expose their weapons and weaknesses like this. When Howard Dean was running on a pretty genuine human-first progressive platform, they decided his scream was the one to bring him down. And it worked like a charm! (It worked so well, that now he’s a lobbyist for Big Pharma.) For us… they tried everything.

I remember asking in December what kind of dirt we’d have to deal with. I know we already faced the media blackout, with Bernie receiving 8 minutes of air time to Trump and Hillary’s several hours, despite drawing unprecedented crowds, donations, and volunteerism for a primary.

They cut debates from 18 to 6, to limit exposure to candidates other than the well-known über politician.

In August of 2015 the Democratic party and Hillary’s campaign used a combination of laws to perform money laundering to her campaign. Instead of $2700, the financial elite were now allowed to contribute up to $1.2Million. In this process, the allegiance of around 450 super delegates was purchased, and the media used this in an unprecedented way: use super delegates to manufacture an early lead before voting starts. We are people and we like to feel like winners. It’s the same reason Seahawks and Golden State has so many fans. We jump on bandwagons, so if you go into an election… in a country so politically apathetic and give them someone with an “insurmountable lead” before a single vote is cast… then yeah, throw on that Steph Curry jersey, ’cause we’re getting on that bandwagon. The media pounded into our heads, for a year, “there’s no way anyone overcomes this lead,” and people do trust the media.

When they realized he would gain some traction, in order to discredit Bernie, they brought up a college essay from the 60s or so, called him a socialist in every instance, (especially during debates), pinned him as sexist (though he was once named an “honorary woman” by Hillary surrogate Gloria Steinem), pinned him as racist, too old, he might die. (Oh, and by “they” I mean the media wing of Hillary’s campaign- you see, MSNBC, CNN, and the big papers are all some of Hillary’s top donors.)

These were swift boat attacks: attack your opponent by discrediting his greatest strengths, and hope people do not look into it. In one article on the Washington Post, a writer had the headline- some lie about Bernie, but the body of the article was the complete opposite. I asked the author why he did that, and he said “it’s not my fault if readers don’t read the article.” I then found a Washington Post study they’d done on how people read, and 75% of people only read the headline. They know what they’re doing.

This type of attack went on all year, and we persisted. One paper ran 16 negative articles about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours.

In December, NGP VAN, the data security firm in charge of handling a voter database performed a “security patch” in the middle of a workday (very unusual in IT) and it exposed database items to members of all Democratic campaigns. A Bernie employee was made to be the fall guy for the data security firm’s mistake. The data shown was not downloadable, and it was open to all campaigns. The Democratic party froze Bernie’s campaign out of the database and froze their fundraising. Bernie sued on Friday, case was dropped by Monday. The media labeled Sanders employees as “saboteurs” and “thieves.” Libel.

Further- the guy who took the fall was hired on recommendation from democratic party, and NGP VAN is owned by Hillary’s 2008 campaign Technology Director. This is how it all works together.

Hillary’s political favors were all called in. This is why you had all these former-activists-now-for-profit individuals publicly disparaging Bernie Sanders. For instance, John Lewis’ “I never saw him there!” response to us sharing the fact that Bernie participated in sit-ins, and other non-violent civil rights activities of the 60s.

When they weren’t trying to discredit Bernie, they turned on the supporters. In fact, one of Hillary’s dirtiest players, David Brock, created a Super PAC called “Correct The Record.” Since Bernie’s strength with digital organizing and social media is astounding, they invested a million bucks into hiring trolls to attack Bernie supporters online. That’s fact. I got tons of these attacks usually from people with 20k tweets and zero followers.

In 2008 Hillary ran “Obama Boys” attack against Obama’s supporters and labeled them sexist. They created “Bernie Bros” this year, explicitly stating that all Bernie supporters are early 20’s white males from the suburb. Preposterous and completely unfounded- it stemmed from a woman trolling another woman online, in a thread about Bernie, but that was all the Hillary campaign needed to get this lie circulated. See… when you have control over the media, it doesn’t matter if an idea has legs, you just force it out.

Of course, Bernie bros were sexist, racist, do-nothing, entitled kids who, this is according to Hillary herself, are naive and don’t know anything about policy. (Just a note: A study showed that we read more political articles per week than any other support base.)

The first Nevada Caucus was a nightmare. It culminated when Dolores Huerta, civil rights activist, accused Bernie supporters of shouting “English only!” at her. Never happened. What did happen, in video provided mere minutes after her accusation on twitter, was a caucus organizer shouted “Neutral party!” They wanted a neutral party up there translating, as Huerta is a national surrogate for Hillary Clinton.

Of course the media ran with the slander on us. America Ferrera tweeted out the slander and perpetuated it.

Then the “violence” in Nevada where a “chair was thrown,” right? Never happened. Didn’t stop the media from saying it did, and then the Democratic National Committee Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz went on TV and perpetuated the lie, while blasting Bernie and supporters for being so violent. But it never happened. And there were no retractions.

Beside campaign attacks, we saw voter suppression tactics like Voter ID, closing polling locations, the voter purge of 250K registered voters in NYC (and purges elsewhere) that cause placebo provisional ballots to be cast, and even electioneering by a former president. My point to people claiming voter suppression is conspiratorial- we already accept they rig the economy and bribe Congress, we already accept that many companies with government contracts built empires on human death and suffering (drug companies, weapons manufacturers, and more,) so, no, a little election fraud is well within the realm of probability. “But this would hurt Hillary, too.” Not when considering the fact that she won early-voting sometimes 4–1. “But some of those election laws were made by GOP.” GOP and Democrats work for same financial elite. Hillary and Jeb! share the same top donors.

So… you see with us, they really DID try everything, but everything they did only galvanized the reasons many of us got into this. And we’re still standing. Do you think anything Bernie is/was fighting for would be accomplished in his lifetime? That all of a sudden everyone would be college grads in 4 years from now, or that we’d kick our fossil fuel habit in 3 years? I saw him run the gauntlet, and we ran parts of it with him to see what it’s really like. He’s not a fool, he knew what he was getting into- it’s the REASON he got into it! He showed us how they work, he exposed their plans, he shined a light on the filth and said, “is this acceptable to you?” It’s not.

And that’s what I see. He set us up for something spectacular and has trained us on what to expect and how to overcome. This was the first time many of us have been involved and we are so much more prepared for the next battle. Whatever happens this year, I hope for the best, but I know what that man endured for us and with us was incredible and selfless. So don’t worry, Bernie, we got this.

Edit: took out “don’t know what will happen on Thursday.”