Over the weekend Phillip Agnew appeared on MSNBC to talk about the Bernie Sanders campaign, for which he is a surrogate. “This is a campaign that is not about one person,” he said. “It’s about all of us. And that is the true fear of a billionaire.” He emphasized that when Sanders enters the White House, social movements do, too — and that movement, in Agnew’s view, is far more diverse and more fired up than mainstream media outlets like MSNBC give it credit for.

Agnew is an activist with the Movement for Black Lives and cofounder of the Dream Defenders, an organization dedicated to dismantling the prison system. Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Agnew about the recent history of social movements, Bernie Sanders’s criminal justice platform, why the mainstream media is intent on erasing his enthusiastic support among young women and people of color, and how important it is that Bernie sets democratic socialism as his North Star.