DNC protests devolve into farce
CHICAGO — They said tens of thousands of protesters would be here. They claimed they would “shut down the DNC for Gaza.” Like the Chicago riots during the 1968 Democratic convention, their demonstrations would snarl the city, shake the party and doom the candidacy of “Genocide Joe.”
Then came Kamala Harris — and the protest fizzled.
Organizers anticipated there would be 30,000 to 40,000 protesters on hand for Monday’s kickoff. But only a few thousand showed up; police estimated 3,500.
“There were more reporters than protesters,” observed Bennett Weiss. He was there selling Gaza-related buttons, including one that, he said, describes himself: “Self-Ambivalent Jew Against Zionism.”
As the smaller-than-expected group assembled in Union Park near the United Center, hundreds of signs reading “Victory to the Palestinian Resistance” were left stacked and unused. (They were the work of the “Freedom Road Socialist Organization.”) The protesters had their street puppets and their giant bloody hands. They denounced “Killer Kamala” along with Genocide Joe. I heard nary a mention of Oct. 7 or Hamas’s hostages, but clarion calls for the destruction of Israel: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever.”
Still, the first question from a reporter at a news conference by the organizers was about whether the loss of Biden as their foil had “changed the crowd size.” An organizer said “we won’t know that for a couple more hours.”
A few hours later, we knew. Only 100 people attended a protest march on the DNC by the “Poor People’s Army,” and that was after they delayed the start by 90 minutes. With Green Party candidate Jill Stein in attendance, their announced intention was to make “citizen’s arrests” of Democrats attending the convention and to charge them with “crimes against humanity.”
A similarly incompetent demonstration unfolded in the arena while Biden spoke Monday night. A few demonstrators toward the back raised their telltale “Jill” signs — for Stein — and a banner announcing “Stop Arming Israel” in Palestinian colors. Those in front of them blocked the banner with their “We Love Joe” bollard signs until it was removed.
Outside, a few dozen demonstrators broke off from the main group and, a couple of blocks from the arena, threw water bottles at police while taking down a few sections of the outer perimeter fence. Police quickly seized control without using tear gas, nobody was seriously injured, and police reported a grand total of 13 arrests for the day.
The people in the streets of Chicago this week bear little resemblance to the mass movement of students in the spring that shut down universities. Rather, these are the usual suspects, the sort of far-left groups that have been protesting at Democratic conventions for years on an ever-shifting list of grievances. They were never going to vote Democratic, if they vote at all.
And there just aren’t that many of them. “To be quite frank, I expected more significant protests. I haven’t seen much,” said Jill Zipin, a Pennsylvania delegate and a Democratic Jewish activist distributing campaign buttons that said “Don’t Kvetch, Vote!”
Like others I spoke to, Zipin believes that Harris’s candidacy has taken the air out of the Gaza protest movement by unifying Democrats. “With her at the top of the ticket, Democrats are like, ‘We’re gonna win this and no one’s gonna stop us.’”
Heck, even Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave a speech at the DNC hailing Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.”
The 1968 riots brought 15,000 demonstrators and hundreds of arrests amid police brutality and tear gas. The trial of the organizers — the Chicago Seven — became the stuff of legend. But, walking all around the United Center security perimeter on Tuesday, I couldn’t find a single protester, much less a Chicago seven.
Instead, in Union Park, epicenter of the week’s protests, I found a dog fetching a ball and 18 cops lounging on benches in the shade, their bikes parked in a line. I asked how the protests were going.
“Just the birds and the bees,” remarked one.
After my fruitless search for a protester, I visited a gathering of about 150 counterprotesters — a makeshift “Hostage Square” in a parking lot a mile from the arena organized by the Israeli American Council. Israeli flags flew, and exhibits and artwork honored the hostages taken by Hamas. Elan Carr denounced as “fringe crazies” the “haters you see out there, the people who burn American and Israeli flags.”
On cue, the fringe crazies came out at dusk, holding a protest outside the Israeli consulate. They hadn’t come to disrupt the DNC — the Democrats were holding their ceremonial roll call, unmolested, almost two miles away — but rather to get themselves arrested, and, if they were lucky, to get roughed up by the cops.
The organizers of this one openly celebrated their violent aspirations. They had said they wanted to “make it great like ’68” and to “make bruises from Chicago police batons the 2024 back-to-school fall fashion.” They wear gas masks and helmets and balaclavas over their faces.
But their numbers were comically small, in the dozens — easily outnumbered by journalists and positively dwarfed by the hundreds of police on bicycles, in riot gear and hovering in a helicopter above.
As if performing a parody of a protest, they shouted a quote from Mao about imperialists. They proclaimed “long live the intifada” and “globalize the intifada” and celebrated Hamas’s rockets. They shouted into a bullhorn: “F— Kamala!”; “Shut down the f—ing DNC.” To further draw sympathy for their cause, they burned the U.S. and Israeli flags.
Eventually, the police encircled them to clear them from the street, gradually leading them off in handcuffs as they resisted. As this happened, they shouted the slogan made famous by the protesters of ’68: “The whole world is watching!”
If the whole world was watching, they were seeing a once-powerful protest movement devolve into buffoonery.