PHILADELPHIA—Portia Boulger’s voice began to crack as she described the outrage visited on former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, the black Bernie Sanders surrogate who says that the DNC refused to let her deliver a planned speech Tuesday nominating Sanders for president. “They’re cracking the whip!” says Boulger, who runs the Women for Bernie Twitter account. “They might as well have taken Nina Turner and tied her to a damn post and whipped her back.” (Boulger is white.)
For the rump of Bernie die-hards who are having trouble reconciling themselves to Hillary Clinton’s nomination, Turner has become a martyr. The details of her mistreatment are still hazy, but it’s becoming a synecdoche for broader Sandernista complaints about disrespect from the DNC. Alongside their Bernie flair, some Sanders supporters are now wearing stickers saying, “I’m With Nina.”
On Wednesday afternoon, a quartet of movie stars—Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover, Shailene Woodley, and Rosario Dawson—joined Boulger and members of the pro-Sanders National Nurses United at a press conference protesting Turner’s treatment. It was a slow afternoon inside the convention proper, and a crush of journalists swarmed around them. “We’re here to say this is upsetting to us,” Sarandon said. “It seems as if there’s been a lot of difficulties executing the will of Bernie Sanders people and surrogates. We just want to say that this has not gone by lightly, that we’re upset, as she was.”
At this point, that seems to be what the hardcore Bernie people want most—a chance to express how upset they are. “We want you to feel welcome here,” one Missouri delegate said in a saccharine voice, mocking mainstream Democrats. “Well why in the hell shouldn’t we feel welcome? We’re Democrats. It’s our convention too. They are the ones drawing the dividing lines.” She spoke heatedly for a moment about how Israel denies citizenship to the Palestinians to keep them from political and economic power, which is true but also sort of irrelevant, since most Palestinians don’t want to be Israelis—they want their own state.
After the press conference, Turner appeared and gave an exclusive interview to Mother Jones. She said that no one gave her a reason why she wasn’t allowed to speak, and that she hadn’t submitted text in advance. “I am still trying to figure out all that happened,” she said. Some here already know all they need to.