Today’s hyper-partisan political environment has a lot of closed doors, representing voters who will not even consider opinions, ideas and initiatives from the opposing political party. In the hollowed-out heart of America’s coal country, where the ghosts of labor wars haunt the hills and the present is a monument to corporate plunder, a political anomaly unfolded this weekend.
Senator Bernie Sanders went to ruby red Mingo County, West Virginia’s second-most Republican county in 2024, to hold a séance for the corpse of American democracy, and the spirits were angry.
The scene was a town hall in Lenore, a town so neglected its population could fit inside a single city block.
Yet, over 400 people—a third of the town’s population—packed into a venue to hear a democratic socialist from Vermont voice the truths their own elected representatives refuse to hear. Their testimony wasn’t just a list of grievances; it was a damning indictment of the oligarchic capture of American life and a stark warning of the fury simmering in the forgotten corners of this country.
The event, a stop on Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, was less a political rally and more a public hearing on a century of economic murder. One by one, West Virginians took the mic and dismantled the myth of conservative governance, revealing it for what it is: a cruel con job sold by grifters who serve their billionaire donors while their constituents die.
Joshua Copley, a recent high school graduate, laid bare the brutal reality of healthcare austerity.
“We don’t even have a hospital,” said Copley, his voice cutting through the room as he described a dystopia where an ambulance can take 55 minutes to reach a dying person. “We shouldn’t have someone on the floor on the verge of dying and the hospital not even being able to reach them.”
Sheila Rose, paralyzed by a chronic illness, detailed the six-month waits for specialists and the two-hour trips for basic care.
“There is no way to stay healthy in Mingo County,” she declared, a verdict on a system that values profit over human life.
The most damning moments, however, were reserved for the absent villains: West Virginia’s own congressional delegation. One woman, her voice trembling with a potent mix of rage and powerlessness, revealed the utter contempt with which they treat their own people.
“West Virginia currently has four members of Congress… Not one of them is willing to come here and do what you’re doing,” she said, directly addressing Sanders. “I have called every single office… and they’re not willing to come here… I’ve never felt more powerless in my entire life.”
This is the core of Sanders’ message, and it’s one that resonates with terrifying accuracy here.
The state’s representatives, like Senators Shelley Moore Capito and Governor Jim Justice (a billionaire coal baron himself), are missing in action, too busy cozying up to Mar-a-Lago and the “boss” to listen to the people whose lives are being destroyed by the policies they enact.
And what are those policies? Sanders didn’t mince words.
He called the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Trump and rubber-stamped by every West Virginia Republican “the worst and most dangerous piece of legislation passed in the modern history of America.”
He detailed its brutal arithmetic: a trillion dollars in Medicaid and nutrition program cuts—literally taking food from the mouths of children and shuttering rural hospitals—to fund a $1 trillion tax break for the top 1%.
“It is absolutely disgraceful,” Sanders thundered. “There is no shame… at a time when working-class people are struggling, you don’t take away their lifelines… in order to give tax breaks to billionaires who have never had it so good.”
The testimony from the crowd painted a picture of an internal colony, its resources extracted and its people left to rot.
One man erupted with a complex tale of corporate exploitation, accusing energy companies of “flaring” methane stolen from the people, selling it for carbon credits, and poisoning the water in the process. It was a snapshot of 21st-century oligarchy: a byzantine scheme of environmental destruction and financialized greed, all enabled by a corrupt political class.
Sanders’ answer to this systemic rot was not a milquetoast call for bipartisanship. It was a call for class war.
“You need a political revolution in this country,” Sanders told the crowd. “We need to start electing people who are accountable and from the working class rather than people who are busy running raising money from billionaires.”
His advice for dealing with indifferent representatives was blunt: “Invite your congressperson and say, ‘By the way, if you don’t show up, we’re going to be nominating somebody to run against you.’”
This is the blueprint Sanders offers: a defiant return to the class politics that built the American labor movement. He invoked the history of Mingo County and the Battle of Blair Mountain, where miners in red bandanas fought and died against corporate-controlled militias. That struggle, though initially lost, eventually forced the New Deal.
The message is clear: the fight is not left versus right, but the many versus the money. It is a fight against the “extraordinary greed” of a billionaire class that would “make money off the air you breathe, the water you drink, everything.”
It is a fight against the demagogues who, as Sanders noted, gain power by dividing people by race and nationality so they won’t unite by class and focus on “the bloody billionaires whose greed is destroying America.”
In a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, the roaring applause for Sanders’ unapologetic socialism is a warning to both parties. The people here aren’t ideologues; they are hostages. They are tired of being ignored, laughed at, and sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. They are ready to listen to anyone—even an 84-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont—who acknowledges their pain and names their oppressors.
The oligarchy has had its way with West Virginia for 150 years. Bernie Sanders came to town to see if the embers of rebellion, once thought extinguished, are still hot enough to start a fire. Judging by the raw, unfiltered anger in that room, the answer is a resounding yes. The question is no longer if the people will rise, but who they will take down with them when they do.
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