Trouble ahead at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention

June 12, 2024 • 10:15 am

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) will be held in Chicago from August 19-22, and fortunately I’ll be out of town then.  It may be even more violent than the infamous 1968 DNC, since this time we’ll have domestic protestors, including the vocal pro-Palestinian ones, along with sundry other protesters and, as CNN reports, there seem to be credible threats that outside terrorist groups may try to incite lone-wolf violence:

Federal and local authorities have been closely following the threat stream from both domestic and foreign extremist groups. A recent joint intelligence bulletin from the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned that groups, including al Qaeda and ISIS, continue to generate propaganda urging followers to conduct “lone wolf” attacks on US soil using basic methods such as gunfire in crowded places or vehicles in ramming attacks. The bulletin cites an al Qaeda online propaganda article that highlighted the “increased division between the American people, between the right and the left, and between the Republicans and their supporters, and the Democrats and their supporters,” which could increase the impact of any attack.

“I think everyone has a sense that the threats are real. This is not an academic exercise that we’re running through. We are planning for real-world possibilities,” said Jeff Burnside, the Secret Service coordinator for the Democratic convention.

Oy! Or perhaps I shouldn’t say that, as it marks me for a Zionist, and a lot of the rancor seems to be directed at them (see tweets and article below).

The only certainty now is that there will be protests, and that the convention will nominate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris no matter what.

At any rate, two reporters for the Free Press have published a new article in which they embedded themselves among activists, and what they found wasn’t pretty.   In the FP’s daily newsletter, however, Bari Weiss adds that the protesters have a goal beyond supporting Palestine and Hamas:

Are we going to become a country in which journalists are regularly surrounded and threatened for doing their jobs? Are we going to become a place in which marauding bands of masked young people harass Jews visiting a memorial for the 364 Israelis murdered at a music festival? Because that happened yesterday too. Are we going to become a place where it is normal for people to get on the subway and declare: “Raise your hands if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out.” Yes, also yesterday. Or where police and security guards are regularly assaulted in the course of doing their jobs? (See this from UCLA last night.)

My point here is that anyone trying to convince you that this is about a faraway war, or that the anger in our streets is mostly because Benjamin Netanyahu is the current Israeli prime minister—anyone who insists this is a Jewish issue—is deluding you and themselves. So are those who comfort themselves by insisting that this will pass by like some idiot wind. It will not.

This is about a choice we face. A choice about what kind of country we want to be—and what kind of country we are at risk of becoming. The only way to understand that is to listen to what these protesters say they want. And what they are shouting for—what they openly desire—is not peace, but terror.

I added some of Weiss’s introduction because recently we’ve discussed the notion that some protesters, unwittingly or not, are trying to dismantle “Western values”—the values of an Enlightenment-informed liberal democracy—in favor of authoritarianism. But I also added those three paragraphs because they link to the tweets I’ve put below.

Click below to read (or find the article archived here).

Excerpts from Reingold and Lake’s piece are indented:

In 1968, the Democratic Convention in Chicago was a bloodbath, with 600 arrests in one street battle that was broadcast all over the world. And the group that met here last Saturday, in the local headquarters of the Teamsters Union, wants to repeat history when Joe Biden is named the presidential nominee at the DNC this August. They oppose the president they call “Genocide Joe” for backing Israel in its war against Hamas.

“If we don’t get a permit, are we still going to march?” Iosbaker asked the crowd, who responded with a chorus of “Yeah!”

“Are we still gonna march within sight and sound? Are we gonna let Genocide Joe come here and not hear us and see us? No! From Chicago to Palestine, protesting is not a crime.”

Well, yes, protesting is sometimes a crime, as the “Marshal Training Guide” below admits. It’s a crime when it incites predictable and imminent violence, or when it violates the “time, place, and manner” restrictions that the city will impose on demonstrators (the venue for the DNC is the United Center, Chicago’s big indoor arena where the local hockey and basketball teams play).

Here’s the meeting that Reingold and Lake attended:

Over a single day, the “March on DNC 2024” conference gathered 75 organizations to discuss how they plan to disrupt the convention. Speakers told the crowd how to flood the streets without getting arrested, how to spot members of the Secret Service, and how to say “Death to America” in Farsi. At one point, when news of Iran’s attack on Israel spread throughout the room, the crowd erupted in cheers.

. . . The event attracted some unsavory characters. Four speakers have had their homes raided by the FBI for their alleged ties to terrorist groups, and one attendee, Jesse Nevel, was federally charged for “working on behalf of the Russian government.” One “anarchist” distributed his homemade magazine that included drawings of machetes and the essay “In Defense of Looting.”

You can see Olivia Reingold talking about the meeting in this interview, which has some video of the speakers.

The FP article has a photo of the machetes, which does worry me a tad, but it’s just one guy. What worries me more, as it worries the local politicians and Democrats, is that the city isn’t prepared for the protests, and you know how unruly and, worse, unlawful some pro-Palestinian protestors can get. Remember the encampments?

The prospect that the convention could devolve into the kind of anarchy actively being plotted at this conference has Chicago Democrats worried, several party insiders told The Free Press. Four politicians said they fear the city—and especially the administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson—aren’t prepared for the protests.

I’m pretty sure that’s true. On the local NBC News last night, a reporter said that the cops were going to take it easy on the demonstrators, and intervene only if there was violence, even if there was unlawful protesting. But I’m not sure whether the local cops are even trained to deal with violence, or how to avoid getting provoked into becoming violent. As I’ve reported, they simply refused to intervene in taking down the University of Chicago’s encampment, leaving the job to the campus cops (who, fortunately, did a good job, and nobody got hurt). But Mayor Brandon Johnson seems out of his depth.

A bit more on the conference:

Back at the conference, about a hundred activists are passing around a clipboard with a sign-up “to supervise and protect organized disruption that’s happening on the streets.” These “marshals,” as they are called by the activists, provide medical care, scurry up and down a procession to deliver information, and lure police into confrontations, said Sief Salameh, a member of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. (On October 7, the network published a press release describing the terrorist attacks by Hamas as “self-defense operations.”)

Salameh says he aims to have one marshal for every five hundred protesters, who will help the crowd take over the street. A private link to a “Marshal Training Guide” was given to the group, offering techniques for blocking traffic during an “unpermitted march,” including forming a “line between cops and marchers” and bringing “vocal attention to violent, harassing cops (i.e., shout ‘shame, shame’ while pointing at cops).”

I’m glad that the “Marshal training guide” doesn’t encourage violence, but it does seem to promote “unpermitted marches”, like blocking traffic. Well, if that’s the worst that could happen, it’s not terrible. But I’m expecting more than simply blocking traffic: I’m expecting violence and property damage.  The article does give a photo of a group of protesters planning the August action, Of course they’re all wearing masks, and that’s not a sign of covid protection, but a sign of cowardice:

(from the FP) A group of activists at the “March on DNC 2024” conference pose for a photo while chanting “education is a right, not just for the rich and white.” (Photo by Olivia Reingold)

This doesn’t bode well, and you can bet that none of these activists will be barefaced in August.

Below are two tweets mentioned by Weiss in her introduction and one I found on Reingold’s Twitter site:

First, here’s reporter Reingold (a “Zionist,” no doubt) getting harassed and “kiffiyehed” at a protest in New York City. Surrounding opponents with kiffiyehs and flags also happened on our campus during the Encampment. It’s almost certainly illegal, as it’s restricting movement and threatening, but if there were cops there, they didn’t do squat,  Reingold has guts, and the protesters are unhinged, probably desperately looking to dispel their anger by harassing other people, including a reporter who wasn’t the least threatening. (She was there to interview the protesters.)

Another tweet by Reingold about how she was identified as a “Zionist”, marking herself as a target:

This one may cross the boundary into non-protected speech, as it seems to be a threat that could incite imminent violence. But no “Zionists” got out, and since “Zionists” has become the polite synonym for “Jew”, and this is in New York, you can bet that there were Jews on the car who didn’t raise their hand. Surely they feared getting beat up. One constitutional scholar I hard of said that this is not protected speech because a reasonable person would feel threatened and coerced by the words about Zionists, and that kind of speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

I’m just glad I’ll be out of town.

40 thoughts on “Trouble ahead at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention”

  1. Such protests will significantly increase the chances of Orange Drump being elected in November. The 1968 protests hurt Hubert Humphrey at the polls and history will repeat itself.

    1. My first thought, too. This’ll be tough to navigate. I was 18 in 1968. I recall people (young, uneducated in certain aspects of reality) that a Nixon election would hasten The Revolution. In the meantime, Nixon, with his Secret Plan to bring the war to a close, well, that was funny business.

      1. Similar age here. I’d not heard then that Nixon’s election would “hasten The Revolution.” This seems plausible as an accelerationist idea, but can you point to a reference? (I’ll try Google.)

  2. I saw the disgusting videos from New York, and I anticipate much worse in Chicago, as there will be much more press coverage. When they tell us that they want to “globalize the intifada,” we should believe them and beware.

  3. Once again the word “bloodbath” used very loosely. Amritsar was a bloodbath; Chicago ’68 was not. That said, though, the DNC in Chicago is likely, once again, to get out of hand, if the City ties the hands of the police. Although, the guide does not advocate violence, we’ve seen that the modern breed of protestor is find with throw objects at cops and shoving umbrellas in their faces, as well as making shields. They literally invite a physical response.

    In related news, the RNC has been asking that the security cordon at the Republican convention be expanded in anticipation of protests, and has, thus far, been rebuffed.

    1. “They literally invite a physical response.” – “the action is in the reaction” (Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals”)

    2. Even minor scalp wounds from, say, a swipe from a police baton bleed profusely and often stream down the face in rivulets making for dramatic photos even in black and white, especially if the skin is a vividly contrasting white. A handful of these (as in Chicago 1968) and you have what the media can portray as a bloodbath, desperate as they are to have leads that bleed.

      For a real bloodbath you need sturdier weapons with sharp edges. Like machetes. Even one can do a lot of damage quickly unless the wielder can be shot at once, during his first backswing. If you’ve got people in Chicago willing to use machetes and the police unwilling to mix it up, you’ve got Trouble with a capital M. I’m glad Jerry’s going to be out of town.

  4. One lesson for politicians to learn here is to never appease extremists. From what I can tell, Joe Biden has tried hard to step on Israel’s brake on the behalf of Hamas, and what does he get for his trouble? The monicker of “Genocide Joe”.

  5. I think we’ll see the same thing we saw with the BLM protests: people taking advantage of the situation to loot and do other criminal acts. It may not be the actual protesters doing it, it is just opportunistic behavior. It is easy to loot when the streets are full of protesters and the police are standing back.

  6. The mostly historically illiterate American public would do well
    to read the history of what happened in Germany in the first
    half of the 20th century. I see a number of parallels.

    1. I am reading Hitler And Stalin by Alan Bullock. The machinations of Stalin were very helpful to Hitler’s rise to power. Just like the left is helping Trump. And as we were helpful to Nixon in 1968. I was also 18 at the time and thought like Situation Normal said that Nixon would hasten the revolution. I am 73 now, reading about history I didn’t know then. And when I rail about these ignorant kids I do think of my own past blindnesses.

  7. As very non-partisan (as much as one can be, I suppose, we’re all human), I find it interesting to see how this is not seen as a “threat to democracy” yet if large groups of right wing zealots were meeting and attacking Jews, it would be front page news as proof of how the right is racist.

    Richard mentions appeasement – I think it’s more than that. I think that because the Democrats are in the same political direction, they are targets. In cancel culture situations, it’s often people within the same tribe who disagree who face the greatest wrath rather than those outside the tribe. Haidt and Lukianoff addressed this in The Coddling of the American Mind.

    It’s interesting to me to see in the comments how people who may object to name calling against Jews or who think that Trump is bad because of his belittling of people will use “Drump” or “tRump” when talking about him. I get that this is also some sort of “look at me, I’m cool” (though I sure would like to have an explanation of why these particular terms are used because I can’t for the life me understand the significance), and is signaling that the user is part of the in-group, but in my simple mind I don’t understand how that separates the users of those monikers from Mr. Trump’s own usage of stupid nicknames. I’m not trying to belittle, I honestly don’t understand the cognitive dissonance.

    1. Politics is like sex. Those caught up in the moment have no idea how ridiculous they sound to others who are not similarly aroused. And, frankly, they don’t care!

      As I age, I have come to appreciate the admonition of my grandparents’ generation: No discussion of sex, politics, or religion in polite company. All three can warp the brain in similar ways.

    2. I don’t like hearing Trump, or hearing about Trump. But using a different spelling for his name may for some people mitigate or alleviate their deep dislike or disgust of him.

      I had an avowed apolitical friend who was pained whenever I mentioned Trump or linked to an article or video about him. Personally, I’ve always thought that Trump’s name was kind of stupid-sounding just by itself.

      • • • 

      My former friend’s increasing and almost militant apolitical stance is the reason we parted ways after 30 years of friendship. In my last email to him a couple years ago I asked him — a cultural Jew and fellow atheist — “What would you have done in 1930s Germany?”

      In his (last) email response, he unleashed an impassioned diatribe against me and summarized his position with this simple-minded statement: “I don’t care about politics!”

      We haven’t seen each other or talked since. Following October 7 I’ve often figuratively bitten my tongue trying not to contact him and ask, “How’s that apolitical stance now?”

      1. He doesn’t care about politics.

        But politics cares about him. Especially since Oct 7.

    3. “Sticks and stones will.break my bones, etc. but names can never hurt me”
      I use tRump as a piss take and for levity in reference to a crass and nassstic individual.
      Words don’t hurt him, loss of power, status do.

  8. Last I saw that yellow flag in public was in Beirut.
    Our retarded kids on campus LARPing terrorism should take a trip to Beirut.
    Maybe they’d learn something about their shiny new ideology?
    Start them in the south of the city, the only place on earth I’ve been really quite afraid.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. Hezbollah flag I believe? I’m appalled that our young protesters are carrying it.

  9. Joe Iosbaker? That is a name I’ve not heard in a long time, starting in the fall of 1977 when he and I were students at the University of Iowa. Joe was a member of the Revolutionary Student Brigade back then and he went to Kent State that fall to protest the building of a long-planned gymnasium on the site of the infamous massacre there. Joe claimed he was tear gassed and trampled by horses during that protest but there’s no documentation of that happening in the archives, so take that with a grain or two of salt.

    Joe went on to be a habitual protestor and obviously still is at it while working at the University of Illinois as a staffer there. So it’s no surprise to me that the roots of the current Gaza protests go back to the 1980s. Campus radicalism has never gone away and continues to inform leftist causes and actions.

    1. I attended Kent State from 1979-83. I had a roommate who was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade. I tried to be nice to him and his friends, I really did. I prolly ran across this Joe Iosbaker person. Not that i remember any of his friends’ names.

      Just to clarify, the new gym was not being built on the site of the shootings in 1970, it was being built NEAR the sight of the shootings, which made the protests even more ridiculous.

      And my Honors English professor my Freshman year was the ONLY professor to jump the fence at the construction site the previous year. He was arrested, and the court in Ravenna ordered him to write an essay about why he did it. Which he gleefully read to us in class. He was also constantly preaching Left Wing politics to us. And he had a special dislike for me. Why? Because I had long Hippy hair, and in his mind, that should have made me a Leftist just like him. Which I wasn’t.

      And a week before the Spring Semester ended, he sexually assaulted me. What a great guy he was !!!

  10. I think there might be a core difference between the 1968 protests and those we could see this year, one that suggests less likelihood of street brawls and widespread violence. The Palestinian protests this year, as many have noted, seemed disproportionately female. Contrast this to the active male involvement of those who wanted not only the Vietnam war to end but, primarily, wanted the draft to end. Of course, we could see anarchists and miscellaneous political troublemakers show up. And, as someone has already suggested, Chicago is full of young men who don’t care about your cause but will willingly take advantage of it for their own criminal ends. In that case, we might tune in for “Mostly Peaceful Protests, Part 2.”

    And, yes, if rednecks and frat boys were agitating in advance of any convention, it would be nonstop news about the threat to the Republic. That’s what demagogues and their Agitprop branches do. We can loop back to Darryl at comment #7 and ask again why so many partisans remain blind to the abuses of their own side.

      1. I dunno. Have you seen those guys?
        The tubby white guys being recruited from gender-studies programs on the college campuses will have to get in line behind the muscular beefcake bad boys being kept out of sight and (literally) under wraps until the punching and rock-throwing starts.

  11. They could just, y’know, not hold it in Chicago, right?

    These events are increasingly pointless as is, a relic of a bygone era when important stuff actually happened at the Conventions. This one just sounds like a no-win situation for the Dems for me. Better to downscale & relocate to a less activist-infested, less-urbanized location in a swing state where Democrats could actually do some useful work persuading swing voters. The Republicans don’t hold their Conventional in rural Arkansas. They’ve already got those votes.

  12. I’m struck by the iteration of the “you’re free to leave/get out/stay out” mantra as a replacement for the more direct “Get out or we’ll force you!” It seems part of the role-playing as Kindergarten Teacher Politely But Firmly Sticking Up For the Underdog which so many of the rank-and-file protesters seem to be enacting. “Look, we’re giving you a free choice. We’re not the bully — you are.”

    “Am I free to stay?” “You’re not welcome here.”

    Again, they don’t see it as bullying if they use words like “welcome” and “safe space.” They’re just nicely asking if anyone is a Zionist.

    1. Seems directly related to, “I didn’t kill them, you did, by not giving me what I asked for.”

  13. That woman in the pink top who was harassing Olivia Reingold was showing enough mammary substance to get her arrested in most Islamic countries.

  14. To me, nothing has made the deep ideological rotted roots of “hate crime” concept more explicit than the failure to condemn, arrest the hamasniks in clear violation of 1st amendment.

    (BTW, I am a very diverse person, as we now say……hispanic, non-english speaking parents, gay.)

    Oh, a mini-prelude to Kritallnacht, anyone? Ici nous sommes:

    https://x.com/DamonLinker/status/1800865924809171446

    1. Wow. That is brutal and blatant. Either the perpetrators studied NO history or, or what? Yikes.

  15. The video on the subway is chilling. Imagine those same people wearing brown shirts.
    I’m sure the hitler youth thought they were cool and provocative too.
    I’m thankful that neither one of our presidential front runners endorse this behavior or we could really be in for problems as these people are much closer to 30’s Germany than I could have imagined would be possible in this day and age.

  16. Tentifada chaos by the hot-dog Left around the Dem. Party convention this summer will of course help to elect Trump, a repetition of history going back long before 1968. Back in the Weimar Republic, the Kommunisten’s fierce rejection of the Social Democrats no doubt helped the eventual accession of Hitler to the Chancellorship. The relationship between the hot-dog Left’s performances and practical victories by the Right seems like a fact of nature, endlessly replicated like a counterpart to Newton’s Third Law.

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