I kinda think this is a joke, but if it isn’t, I’ve gotta start watching CNN…

The lovely and talented Susan Sarandon was on Chris Hayes the other night, talking about the election and campaigning for Sanders. Sarandon has the internets in an uproar because she has stated that she will not vote for Hillary should Hillary win the DNC nomination.

“I just can’t bring myself to … vote for that” (the conversation starts around 3:57). She then goes on to state that she might vote for Donald Trump. Hayes was dumfounded. “People think that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately”, stated Sarandon. 

Hayes replies “Oh, you’re saying the Leninist model…” (for the record, Lenin was against aiding the Russian poor during the numerous famines preceding the 1917 Revolution, believing that the poor would not rise up against the leader class if they didn’t have empty bellies and hungry children. It was a bone of contention between Lenin and Leo Tolstoy). 

Ummm… yeah. That’s what she means, I think. 

The reality is that whoever is chosen for the presidency in 2016, the people in charge want incremental change. That’s why the plutocrats are frightened of Trump–he’s not really a product of the kind of slow-and-steady grinding away at the Middle Class that has been so successful for them over the last two decades. It’s why the GOP is looking for ways to sabotage Trump. The people in charge don’t want a loose cannon like Trump actually implementing faux-populist measures against immigrants or Chinese exports, because that’s a revolution they can’t control. It’s also why the DNC wants to sabotage Bernie Sanders. The people in charge don’t want Bernie to keep reminding people that the ‘radical’ proposals he’s making about healthcare and free (or low-cost) university educations are old news in Europe. 

And the Sanders/Trump candidacies are two sides of the same coin of discontent in wide circulation in the US.The plutocrat class has so far played its favorite card–distrust between the disenchanted white working class and the shifting of the blame for their travails from the people in charge to the people who should be their allies. The Trump followers include a large contingent of firearms owners. Bernie’s acolytes include a disproportionate slice of community organizer types who can figure out how to gum up the works should they find common ground with the Trump followers. There’s a Sanders rally going on right now in the Bronx, and there were 5,000 people in the OVERFLOW AREA a few hours ago. Here’s a photo from Twitter of the line to get in…

from Nomiki Konst ‏@NomikiKonst –the line to get into the Sanders rally stretched for over a mile.

UPDATE: Per this post from the folks at ACT.TV, the turnout for this rally was about 15,000.

One more thing–Sanders’ followers aren’t going to roll over if there’s chicanery about voting in the primaries. Neither will Trump followers. For the GOP and RNC to be willing to engage in vote suppression is one more reason voters want nothing to do with ‘establishment’ candidates. To game the vote in order to stop the candidates for the discontented isn’t just tempting fate–it’s giving fate a lap-dance. I’m just sayin…