“Welcome to Berniechella,” Maggie Rogers told a crowd of an estimated 36,000 people as she took to the stage at Gloria Molina Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon.
Indeed, those in L.A. who didn’t make the trek down to Coachella this weekend still had a chance at a star-studded show as Rogers, Neil Young and Joan Baez all performed at Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s L.A. stop on their Fighting Oligarchy tour, calling upon all in attendance to take on President Donald Trump and the billionaire class supporting his administration.
“We are going to make our revolution with joy,” Sanders told the crowd as he thanked the musicians who played before his speech. “We’re going to sing and dance our way to victory against hatred and divisiveness.”
Sanders’ tour has also stopped in cities like Denver and Tempe, Arizona, and they’ll hit several more markets, including Salt Lake City, Nampa, Idaho, Bakersfield, Folsom and Missoula, Montana, in the coming days.
“We are in a moment of extraordinary danger,” Sanders told the crowd, further stating that the Trump administration is “moving us into an authoritarian form of society.”
“Mr. Trump, we are not going there,” Sanders said.
Starting at 9:30 a.m., the rally also featured artists including Jeff Rosenstock, Indigo De Souza, Red Pears and David Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors. The performances were sandwiched between speeches from teachers, nurses, union heads, city council members and congress-members advocating for reforms both wide-ranging and more specific, from universal healthcare to tenant rights, to protecting immigrants to better pay for production assistants in Hollywood. The overarching theme though, as the “fighting oligarchy” title would suggest, was tackling wealth disparity in the country.
Baez took the stage just before 1 p.m., opening with the folk song “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” with the crowd erupting into cheers as she sang updated lyrics saying, “Ain’t gonna let no white supremacists turn me around” and “ain’t gonna let those lousy billionaires turn me around.” She followed with “There But For Fortune,” as well as a touching cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Baez has voiced her disdain for the Trump administration as recently as last month, when she went on John Mulaney’s Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney and said that “our democracy is going up in flames.”
Rogers performed after, keeping on the rally’s theme of change as she opened with “Different Kind of World” before playing “Light On,” her hit single off her 2019 album Heard It in a Past Life. She also played breakthrough single “Alaska,” then brought Baez back out as the duo performed Bob Dylan’s folk classic “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” In vintage folk protest fashion, they finished with a duet of “America The Beautiful,” with Baez adding one final verse for “sisterhood from sea to shining sea.”
Young got the final slot before Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders took the stage, coming out with his electric guitar and harmonica, chanting a “take America back” call and response with the crowd and punctuating the chant with power chords. Young, who’s played Sanders rallies in the past, also voiced his frustration with the Trump administration last week, writing on his website that he was worried Trump would bar him from returning to the U.S. after his upcoming European tour over his criticism of the president.
Young started with “Rainbow of Colors,” his 2019 song with Crazy Horse, where Young sings of the diversity in the U.S. and that “no one is going to whitewash those colors away.” He went back to the “take America back chant” as he played the opening chords to his protest anthem, “Rockin’ In the Free World.” Baez and Rogers came back out by the song’s second verse, singing “power to the people” in the background.
“Thank you, folks,” Young told the crowd as he introduced AOC. “Thank you for being here this weekend, next weekend and the week after that until we get things straight. Keep coming back.”
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