Bernie Fever Sweeps Brooklyn

For the first time in his presidential campaign, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders scheduled an official video check-in with campaign organizers and other intrigued parties across New York — and America — on Wednesday, July 29.

“Tonight really is a historical night, and all of us are part of making history,” Sanders said in his heavy Brooklyn accent.

At a sweaty “Feel the Bern” campaign party in Bushwick — one of more than 30 throughout Brooklyn alone — Sanders’ speech was live-streamed onto a dirty sheet pinned to a curtain rod in a live/work loft that normally hosts art and music shows.

The live-stream of Sanders was wrinkled and beige-tinted, as if forced through an Instagram filter.

“To the best of our knowledge,” Sanders said, “there has never been a political online organizing effort this early in a campaign which involved over 100,000 people in 3,500 locations in every state in the United States of America.”

At this, his Bushwick audience of 50 to 100 youngsters hooted their approval with as much enthusiasm as they could muster in the above-90-degree heat.

Temperatures in the loft were mitigated only by one small air conditioner, puttering sadly in the corner. Sweat trickled down foreheads and thighs. A girl in a tiny Bernie-print tank top and red lipstick held a cold Tecate can to her skin; another fanned her face with a Bernie poster and sopped her sweat with a Kleenex.

“I apologize for how hot it is in here,” Steve Panovich, the artist/musician/activist who hosted the event, told the crowd from behind his laptop.

“Feel the Bern!” yelled someone in reply, to another round of hoots.

On those walls of Panovich’s loft not covered in art, he had pinned up Bernie posters and patches with slogans like ”Bernie is bae” and “I [heart] Bernie” and ”Bernie or Bust.” Attendees were asked to pin up a $2 campaign donation if they took one down.

A conspiracy theory — about who was really behind a series of new pro-Bernie Facebook accounts posting racist and derogatory material — ran through the crowd. So did a half-serious plan to host Occupy-style Bernie rallies on every street corner of Manhattan. At one point, a young black woman gave an emotionally charged speech in the middle of the 1,000-square-foot loft about life for colored people in America.

Sanders has been a big supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, and specifically mentioned Sandra Bland in his July 29 video address.

”We are tired of seeing a black woman yanked out of a car, thrown to the ground... and then sent to jail and died three days later, in the case of Sandra Bland. For what crime? She didn’t signal and made a left turn. And we’re seeing that all over this country. Enough is enough. We have got to combat institutional racism in the United States.”

“When you see a guy like Bernie, you think, ’Wow, nobody talks like that anymore.’ You don’t feel with Bernie that there are any special interests talking through him,” Jack Deming, a 26-year-old Greenpoint resident originally from Vermont, told Patch at the party.

“When I look at Hillary, I feel like she’s frozen in ice,” he said. ”She’s been in politics for so long that it seems so routine to her, whereas Bernie always has that freshness and that eccentricity.”

Other Bernie parties in Brooklyn were held in bars, backyards, apartments and warehouses.

According to Yahoo News, Bernie events in New York “included a ’teach in’ co-hosted by Carlen Altman, an actress who has appeared in the Web show ’High Maintenance,’ and singer Tennessee Thomas, at her shop and event space Deep End Club.”

Tracy Ejerekhile, an Ohio native and Windsor Terrace resident who had come with a friend to the Bushwick party, wasn’t 100 percent settled on Sanders as her candidate of choice — but said she liked what she saw.

As a woman, she said, “I wanted to be there for [Clinton] initially. But over time, there were some positions she took that I felt were insensitive to a lot of people. She seems a bit untrustworthy.”

Ejerekhile looked thrilled to learn Sanders was from Brooklyn. ”No way!” she said. “What part?”