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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome to ick It Happen here. I'm your host Bia Wong with me as James Stout By men. Hello, this is a podcast about things falling apart putting it back together again. For the rest of this week, we are going to be going to our live correspondence from a Democratic National Convention. We're going to be getting a bunch of episodes from from the floor. We're you're gonna be gonna be hearing all about all of.
The serve of excitement.
But for sort of day one of our DNC convention, I thought we'd do something a little bit different, and that is I want to take a look back at the convention that I think I think most people have been thinking is the most similar to this one, which is the nineteen sixty eight Democratic National Convention, which is also a convention that featured large anti war protests and the vice president of an extremely unpopular president who was
waging an unpopular war seized control of the nomination. Yeah, I mean, and you know, and the parallels. I mean, you know, there's occupations that Columbia. I mean, right down to the one that I think I've seen it. I haven't seen anyone else talk about. Is that one of the big uprisings in nineteen sixty eight is in Pakistan, and particularly in the part of Pakistan that is now Bangladesh.
We are about a week ash maybe two weeks removed from an enormous uprising of Bangladesh that just knocked out theirlitical leadership. So you know, there are lots of sort of nineteen sixty eight vibes in the air.
It's not unsimilar, but it's also not the same, as I'm sure I'm about to find out.
Yeah, yeah, I think in some sense we'll get to this war as the episode progresses. But in some sense, sixty eight parts of it are sort of an inversion of what's happening now, and parts of it are an interesting case study and having the same pieces but having them fit into totally different configurations. And because of that, the results are going to be I think, very, very
staggeraally different. Yeah, And I think maybe the primary difference is that really the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention does not start in the US at all. It starts in Vietnam on Vietnamese New Years, and it really starts with the Tet Offensive. So for people who have forgotten this from their history classes, like, so maybe some of you.
Are around for this, I don't know.
Statistically probably not, but I don't know.
Maybe there's a few old timers here.
So the Tet Offensive is this massive attack by the viet Cong A's or of North Vietnamese forces on New Years of well technically it's like Jenerary sick because the calendar dates are off. But it's this massive attack on American positions. It's an attempt really to sort of seize control of South Vieta. It doesn't really work militarily because and this is an interesting kind of display of bad judgment.
The North Vietnamese leadership bizarrely makes almost exactly the same mistake that the Americans are going to make from the invasion of Iraq, which is that they are under the assumption that you know, their attack would trigger a series of urban revolts that would like drive out the corrupt Vietnamese South Vietnamese like puppet governments, and like run the Americans out of the country. And that doesn't happen. There's
no uprisings. The viet Cong take a bunch of grounds, but unbelievable numbers of their caladurators are just wiped out by the sums of good American counterattack. But it didn't matter at all, because what the head offensive really did was instantly revealed to everyone in the US that LBJ and every previous American administration had been lying to them about the Vietnam War. In the wake of these attacks, it is instantly clear that the US is not the war.
They are not making steady progress against the Communists. They are at best locked in a granding stalemate against an enemy with a capacity to launch attacks that could again temporarily like run the US out of cities.
Right.
Yeah, And this this craters lbj's popularity. His popularity is in the thirties.
Oh damn, yeah, when incumbent, that's.
Yeah, it's it's really really bad. It's I think he's like thirty six percents he is. He is staggeringly, staggeringly unpopular. And you know, the tet offensive also in some sense validates, particularly the sort of radical wing of the anti war movements. You know, I think people remember the anti war movement today is this purely this sort of like hyper militant students for democratic society, the draft card burning stuff, and.
There was that.
But those people for the early especially the early sixties leading up to this point and even even eight are a minority, right. Most of the anti war people are sort of older, like anti nuclear activists, people who come up in the forties, people who'd you know, been through the Red Scare and are these sort of hypervigilant liberals. And these people thought that they could work with LBJ to end the war.
Right.
LBJ comes in not like quite explicitly promising to end the war, but he comes in as the candidate who's not you know, who's not literally threatening the bombs I gone, and then he turns around a bombs I gone. And so this moment the TET offensive is this moment where the radical wing of the anti woman is vindicated, Right, LBJ has been lying to them the whole time. All of the sort of negotiations that people have been doing
have been a complete failure. And in the sort of wake of this, there's a real sort of drive by a couple of different anti war factions to stage a protest at the Democratic National Convention for what you know, to protest what everyone assumes is going to be the coronation of LBJ. There are two different kind of umbrellas of groups I guess you could call it who wind up at sixty eight And this is something that we aren't gonna have now because neither of these two kinds
of things really exists anymore. The first of these groups are the politically serious hard lighters. They are organized into this unbelievably large coalition of hundreds of groups called National Mobilization Committee to end the War in Vietnam. Nobody says that because it's so long. Everyone then and now just calls it MOB or sometimes mobilization, but everyone in the writing just calls them MOBE, and MOBE is one of the groups that's been getting more radical by sixty eight.
But again, the Students for a Democratic Society, who are kind of the sixties parallel to the DSA.
If you're going to sort.
Of do these directly one to one lines, right, are a minority. And also sts basically lead is MOB to focus on other kinds of organizing. So at sds is going to be around, they're going to involved in this protest, but MOB is kind of not being ran by them. And MOB is also a very complicated endeavor because again, these are big ten groups, right, These are very very
very big tent groups. You know, these range from honestly sort of right liberal professional groups who oppose the war to like one of one of the major leaders of MOB in this period is a senior member of the SWP,
the Socialist Workers Party, who are like old school Trotskyit group, right. Yeah, And it's very very hard to get coalitions like this to work, partially because of secretariat infighting over some of it's over tactics, because a lot of there's a lot of people in MOB who do not want militant confrontation. They don't want there to be big confrontations with the police. And then also you know, these people just don't have the same ends, right the SMVP people are trying to
have a socialist revolution. There's other people in this group who are trying to not have their tax dollars pay for a war.
Not get their kids drafted into a war.
Yeah.
Yeah, but MOBE is the big anti war hub. Right with the exception of group we're gonna talk about next, almost all anti war activity in the country is running through VBE just to some extent or another, because it's a coalition of like all of these groups. We don't really have anything like this anymore. There are kind of the tattered remains of this stuff, but they don't have the kind of poll and the kind of especially they don't have the kind of organizational capacity that this stuff had.
Yeah, it's not really like that. There are a wide variety of people.
A posts to genocide and Palestine, but they're not united under any even this. There isn't like a popular front or a big tent. Yeah, that really brings them together. Even in twenty twenties, if you didn't really have like a big tent org did we like we had like BLM capital, BLM five, OHO one C three, But that wasn't really like an ORG that was that effective on the ground.
And that's a key component that's very very different about you know, at about the sixty eight convention that the one's gonna happen. You know, as as this comes out, it will be day one of that convention. The terrain of groups who are opposed to it are staggeringly different. This kind of stuff, we just don't have it anymore now. Part of what MOB is struggling to do, and this is something that some of the things they're dealing with
the things that we don't deal with now. Some of them are things that we deal with all the time.
Now.
One of the big ones is they're trying to develop what eventually is going to be called the diversity of tactics. So they're trying to have protests that you can have three hundred thousand people and most of those people could be sitting around having a picnic. And then there's also a bunch of people who are like fighting the police in the front.
Right.
We are, I think, sort of largely familiar with this kind of from twenty twenty.
Right, yeah, then the police take ASTs everyone.
Yeah, well yeah, so this comes to another very important part about this, which is that MOBE, even in the planning stages, even the radicals, are not trying to fight the cops, right, nobody wants to do it because everyone is terrified about Chicago's reaction to the Holy Week uprising. Though we talked about the Holy Week uprising in another episode, very briefly, it's a massive series of riots and uprisings
that follow the assassination of Art Luther King. There's a particularly bad one in Chicago where Mayor Daily is so pissed off that he goes on TV and gives a speech where he tells his cops to shoot and maim people they could accuse of looting good stuff. And you know, this goes over so badly that the next day he's giving statements to the media saying he never said this, but you know everyone saw him say it.
I'm live TOV.
So yeah, but people are terrified because this is a period where the cops really will shoot into crowds. So, you know, everyone into planning face of this. You know, I think most people broadly know how this turns out, which is there's a bunch of street fighting to police
attack people. But none of the planners wanted that. They were very very deliberately trying to make sure there weren't confrontations with the police, because, as it turns out, These people are staggeringly unprepared for a confrontation with the cops.
I'm going to read a quote from the very good book Chicago sixty eight, which is a politically it's a bit questionable, but it has an excruciatingly in depth account of these I mean we're talking hour to hour rundowns of the convention itself, you know, very well documented accounts of all of the meetings that produce this. So I'm going to read a quote this is about MO about their preparation for the Chicago D and C protests.
Quote.
Some even wanted to warn perspective protesters that they should bring protective clothing like helmets, bulky sweaters, and ben danafferteer gas, but it was decided that this might overly alarm would be protesters.
Great.
Now, again, this is MOBE. They are supposed to be the serious organizers here, right. The other group that we're going to talk about the Yippies. Like, compared to the Yippies, these guys look like shock troopers. And this is how unprepared they are.
Yeah, wow, Like, looking.
At this from our perspective, these people are dangerous amateurs. They have no idea what they're doing. They don't understand how to deal with police at all. One of the other things that happens is this is one of the first and early deployment of so cs tear gas, right, And they have a guy who'd been drafted into Vietnam was become a special Forces guy, who would you know, like after we got out, have become a leftist and he's telling them about this gas and he's saying, yeah, we need.
To talk to the so they were thinking.
That's going on here is you can tell how early this is into the cycle because they don't have dedicated street medics. They have basically a nurses association at doctors association that they've gotten to go get feel a better care, which is not bad, right, but no, I mean that's great, but people need to be aware of what they're getting into, and then the medical flats need to be aware of
how they can mitigate that. And the most people overrule this guy and saying no, we're not going to tell the medical people about the sort of solution thing he's talking about to neutralize this gas. Right, These people are just staggeringly unprepared for an actual police confrontation, and something you have to keep in mind about about nineteen sixty eight America, Right, is that we have a very different sort of outlook on the police and how you deal with the police than these people.
Right.
We come from basically the decade of the street fight since Occupy twenty eleven and really intensifying and ferguson in twenty fourteen. There has been a straight decade between conversations and the police. If you were out in the most intense parts of twenty twenty and statistically, if you're listening to this show, you probably at least were out there
a little bit. You have seen shit that these kids, like I call them kids, right, These people are in the twenty thirties, but you have seen shit that these people cannot even imagine.
Right.
If you're looking back from our perspective, right, you know, with the experience with the police that we have, you can look back at these people and you could instantly tell that they're going to get claubered. One of the things I trying to do is they're trying to copy some of the techniques from the Japanese student movement, which is an infamously very probably the best street fighters in the world. Yeah, and they're trying to copy their techniques
and they can't do it. And they're trying to do the snake line thing to break police lines. They're all falling over and so it's very it's very clear from our perspectives that this is going to be a fiasco. But these people think that they understand how to manage the police.
Yeah, I mean the state's capacity for violence has increased exponentially since then, Like you could kind of stand up to the cops just by staying in the streets, you know,
to a degree. I think it's probably this is the beginning of the state sort of moving towards ming itself to deny people up access to public space in that fashion, right, which we saw like if you grew up at the time I did in Genoa, in Prague and these g eight Summits, Kanku and all the different ones right at Octorada, Like I think that was the beginning maybe of like modern crowd control policing. But yeah, these yeah, this is a different world to the one we are in now.
Yeah, and they don't you know, and this is the beginning of the modern world, right, but they haven't seen it yet.
Yeah, there's any one way to really experience that.
So yeah, you have to go through it.
So we're going to take an ad break and when we come back, we are going to get to the Yippies, the other group that's protesting at this convention. All right, and we are back from the advertisements at the Yippies with have loved hijacking. So the Yippies are another group that we don't have anything really like this today because this is the year twenty two, twenty four. Everyone kind of smokes I mean not everyone, but people just kind
of smoke weed right all the time. Yeah, it's pretty normal, but in sixty eight, this is really not that we're mob are very very explicit political people, right capital P politics, you know, communists, socialists, some like sort of left liberals, progressives, et cetera, et cetera. There, and they're very clearly doing politics conventionally. The Yippies are a counterculture group. It's this mix of people who are political radicals to get caught
up in sort of this counterculture stuff. And then a lot of them are just kind of counterculture people who mostly just sort of want sex, drugs and rock and roll, but see this as the way to sort of resist the sort of death machine that they see themselves as living in.
Yeah, I think this is the time people start talking about the MARCUSI in great refusal a lot in nineteen sixty eight, right, and then kind of people going big are different directions with that.
Yeah.
Also these people are we'll get into this warness. These people are not very theoretically sophisticated. Ye right, I'm not reading her, but they are stoned out of their minds at literally all times, you know. And so yippie is a term that didn't exist before the sixty a Convention.
It was developed specifically as part of a plan to do a sort of protest things as this rallying cry of yeppee against the sort of death machine of the Democratic National Convention, which everyone thought was going to nominate LBJA to do more firebombing of Vietnam. And so their plan is, and this is something that you can still see kind of reflections of in some Ish modern movements, so that we don't do it as much anymore. But their plan was to have this sort of festival of
life to counterpose against the DNC's festival of death. They were going to have a bunch of singers and people were just going to like have public sex, and their thesis of how they're trying to do this is to hijack the sort of mass medium machine, which they see as the kind of defining element of modern society. Right it is the element a sort of totalitarian and social control, and their plan is to hijack it for for their
own purposes. This is superficially similar to something you see from the French sixty eight ters, who have sort of, by the time this is happening, have done a revolution that doesn't quite work well. We'll cover on the show
at some point. And the French sixty eight ters, both the students and the workers who very very nearly take control of France, are heavily influenced by a theorist named Guide to Board and his sort of ubiquitous book The Society a Spectacle, And superficially these are very similar things.
But the Board's.
Analysis is a technologically sort of ideologically sophisticated analysis the social relations. And again, the Yippies are, contrary to that, stone out of their minds at literally all times.
Yeah. Yeah, they're doing like t moo dot com gidable. Yeah.
Well, so I'm going to read back to back a line an average line from Guide to Board Society a spectacle. And then I'm going to give you a quote from an Abbi Hoffman, who's one of the people who invents the term yippium, to give a quote from one of his speeches at the sixty eight convention. So here is an average Guide to Board Society a spectacle line quote. The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself.
It's laudatory monologue. It is the self portrait of power in the epoch if it's totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance. The spectacular relations conceal the fact that their relations among men in classes. Second nature with its fatal law, seems to dominate our environments. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development,
seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is, on the contrary, the form which chooses its own technical content. So this is this is this is what the people and this is what the sixty eight is in France are reading. Here is Yippie founder Abbi Hoffman, this is this is in a speech. Why he would call it a rap or something, But this is in a rambling that he gives to a crowd sixty eight convention, meet the press, face the nation, issues and answers all those
bullshit shows. You know, you get a Democrat and a Republican arguing back and forward, this and that, this and yeah yeah yeah. But at the end of the show, nobody changes their fucking mind, you see. But they're trying to push Brillo. You see, that's good. You want to use Brillo. See in about every ten minutes on will come three minutes of Brillo. Brillow is a revolution, Brillow is sex, Brillo is fun. Brillo is At the end of the show, people late fucking switching from Democrat or
Republican or commis. You know, the right wingers ready of that shit. They're buying Brillo. I mean, can you imagine if they had the Beatles gain zing zing zing, all that jump and shout, you know, and all of a sudden they put an ad where this guy comes on very straight. You ought to buy Brillo because it's the rationally correct decision. Part of the American process is the right way to do things.
You know.
Fuck, they'll buy the Beatles, they won't buy Brillow. So this is a semi incomprehensible rat right, is this just goes on. And in the middle of this kind of semi in cohre intentionally semi incoherent nonsense, is this point about how the thing that changes people's minds is advertising, right, and not not the sort of business of politics as usual. It's this sort of performance spectacle that is the real
thing that like actually changes how people think. These are performance artists, right, Alan Ginsberg, sort of famous beat Poe is was one of the people who's going to be speaking there. He's writing sort of, he's writing poetry about it. The people are doing theater performances. If you've seen like the giant puppets that used to be at Big protest
that was kind of a descendant of this stuff. Oh yeah, And these performance artists are setting out to hijack the biggest stage in the world and turn it against the war. And that stage is the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Unfortunately, however, if there's one group in the US who is even less prepared for a street fight than MOBIZ, it is the Yippies. The Yippies they you know, at least the more radical members of MOBE have pretensions of street fighting.
The Yippies are not street fighters at all, and this is something that's distinct from most of the sixty eight up prices. Most of the sixty eight uprisings everywhere are characterized by people who are very, very good at this, right, and these protesters fight very well. I mean, the most famous ones We've talked about it a little bit already of the Japanese student movements, who have this sort of iconic white construction hats and these giant wooden pulls. They
used to literally fight riot police at rage. But you know, students, workers, and just like random people off the street everywhere from Italy to France to Pakistan are able to fight the police on fairly even footing. They equit themselves valiantly. The Yippies, on the other hand, every single time they come into contact with the police, they get absolutely mauled. And you know, the pre DNC Yippie protests are extremely peaceful, right, You're
not even disruptive. They have permits and the police just batter them. And this is kind of the plan, right. These attacks are generating media coverage, and the Yippies are trying to hijack this media coverage to spread their message,
and this kind of works to some extent. Part of the problem, though, is that one of the biggest newspapers in Chicago is Chicago Tribune, who are a kind of reactionary that I mean, I guess we still have them, but this is the kind of magazine that would have been right there with the economists saying that, like all of the Irish dying was good. Right, that's the kind of like when the British killed them with the famine, right, Like. This is the kind of kind of reactionary that the
Chicago Tribune is. And so some of their protest hijacking stuff doesn't really work in Chicago because you'll have these protests where just the Tribune shows up, and if your Fribune shows up, the coverage of the cops just absolutely beating the crap out of a bunch of people who were just walking on sidewalks is going to be something
like did the police defeat unruly demonstrators or something. Before we go any further, and by any further, we're gonna talk about how these years relate to each other, and oh boy, we need to go to the thing the Yippies would have been hijacking, which is these products and services. We're continuing in their noble tradition by using their money to do this episode.
We are back.
So something that I think is very interesting about these two groups. That is the final thing that you kind of have to understand about why these protests go the way they do. I've talked a bit about how sort of the more radical parts of MOB and the Yippies, who are very radical are are kind of being isolated from the more moderate elements right, and this is part of Mayor Daily's deliberate strategy. Daily is the all powerful
mayor of Chicago. He's one of the sort of the builders of America's greatest ever political machine, which is the Chicago Machine. By this point, he has single hand almost single handedly like one elections for the Democratic Party by handing them ILLINOI on a platter. He is the guy, one of the people who turns Illinois from a swing state into a say that votes for Democrats by Norla's
margins every single year. And he does this through this incredibly powerful patriotish network and corruption network, and Dalies deliver strategies to try to sort of separate He's trying to knock the moderates out of the protests by threatening that he's going to just like obliterate these people right by, and also by continuously denying them permits so that certain more water people won't show up. Yeah, and so the
plan is basically to isolate them. And part of the other reason why this works is that this whole plan is opposed by a group you wouldn't really expect to be opposing it, which is the Communists. CPUSA wants nothing
to do with this. Even the SVP Socials Workers Party, who are the Trotskyites who have very important roles in MOB they're part of a faction that doesn't want to do the DNC convention going in And this is something you see all over nineteen sixty eight because weirdly, the communist parties in sixty eight are a very conservative force. This is something that we've talked about on the show before.
In places like Chile, you have fairly moderate Christian Democratic Workers going into the streets and meanwhile the Chilean Communist Party is going, no, no hold on, we must slow the pains of reforms.
Yeah, yeah, this isn't it.
And you know that's even more mild example than what happens in France, where the French Communist Party blows its one shot of ever taking power by straight up working with the government to stamp out the May sixty eight uprisings.
There.
These old left parties are very conservative, both because you know, on an international level, because some of them are in the sort of common turn orbit right, so they're taking orders directly from Moscow, and Moscow doesn't want any disruption. And in the US a lot of the older activists don't want a confrontation because they're all still petrified of the Red Scare, and so they're terrified of anything that
could like even sort of alienate a single person. And this means that to some extent, all Mob and the Yippies really have over each other. But the problem is the Mob and the Yippies hate each other.
That's the Tennis Odust time.
Yeah, it's it's amazing.
And again this is something that like all of the mode people agree about which they agree about nothing. The only thing they agree about is they don't even they don't even agree about fully demanding an end to the Vietnam War right like a immediate They don't agree with anything except they hate the Yippies because they see the Yippies as these like deeply unseerious bourgeois degenerates who are just having sex and doing drugs that are just literally
the same culture that they're trying to resist. The yippeec mobe has sort of self righteous assholes who are locked in this death spiral of comically serious politics that are also just a reflection of the thing they're opposing. So you know, they both of these people take the same things about each other. But meanwhile, both of these groups and really everyone else in the US is going to have to ride the wildest wave of vibe shifts in
the entirety of American history. So all right, we we kind of famously had our vibe shift when Biden dropped out and everyone was like, whoa hold on? Better things are possible? Question mark, yeah, question. There's also a vibe shift in sixty eight when when LBJ drops out. It's March thirty first, But there are key differences here though, Right Biden has already won the nomination right by the time that he is forced out, and when he is
forced out, there is great rejoicing. Everyone's really happy about it. Even the old Biden stalle wards immediately fall on line behind Kamal Harris.
Right, yeah, right, that Biden's wins account changed his name.
Ya, yeah right.
Sixty eight is much much bessier than that. LBJ doesn't drop out until he almost loses a He almost think he's the new Hampshire primary to anti war candidate Eugene McCarthy, not to be confused with the other McCarthy. I was really baffled the first time I just saw people talking about McCarthy.
I was like, what, wait, hold.
On, yeah, this is this is anti war star warts Senator Eugene McCarthy. And McCarthy almost beating LBJ in a very conservative state really sort of lights this fire under LBJ. And LBJ realizes that he could win the nomination, but if he does that, he's going to lose general lussion, so he books it and drops out. When LBJ drops out, there's a competitive primary. The other reason the primary is competitive is that RFK takes this as a shining moment and goes, I am going to enter the race as
the anti war candidate. Now we now have our tragedy as farce RFK.
Gee jesus, Yeah, just to be clear, if people aren't familiar, not the same dude, no, no different, Bobby Kennedy.
Yeah, this is RFK. RFK really is seen as as a guy, and both hum and McCarthy are seen by young people who have been disillusioned by LBJ as someone who can you can sort of like take this anti war platform national right, and there is a massive vibe shift. For a moment, there is hope. And this is a real problem for the antie war fashions because this kind of thing is exactly how the US got into this mess in the first place. LBJ ran this same con
in sixty four. Yeah, exactly, and they got Leckt and immediately made the war worse. So, you know, I think there's a tendency to look back on the anti war protesters as these sort of like spoiler people who ruin the democratic nomination or whatever. But you know, they were right to a large extent to be incredibly suspicious of anti war democratic candidates.
Yeah.
But you know this also throws all of the planning for the protests and the chaos, because the center point of the protest for both MOB and the Yippies was to show an alternative to this sort of stagnant war, ubund death machine politics of LBJ. But suddenly, like if there's an anti war candidate who's a nominee, it becomes so much harder to make this case. And these people are really unbelievably depressed. The vibes everywhere else in the
country are great. Everyone believes in hope again, it's hope and change. So they have their Obama and then RFK gets assassinated. Everything goes to shit almost immediately. I mean, the vibes are so bad that famously, one of the one of the mob guys, I think he's on camera just weeping because I mean, he and Bobby Kennedy had kind of had sort of known each other through the sort of anti war networks, and he's not a Kennedy supporter.
But when Kennedy gets killed, it's basically imagine our vibe shift immediately flipped at his head and went even more rancid than it had been the feeling that you all had in the week after the failed Trump assassination. Right, yeah, And you can see this as interesting, Right, like all of the elements of ninety sixty eight are here in
twenty twenty four. Right, you have your own popular president leaving, you have a vibe shift, you have a Kennedy, you have an assassination attempt, but the pieces fit together differently because what happens is, you know, the vibe shift collapses with the RFK assassination, and suddenly, you know, anti war's back on the table. But on the other hand, McCarthy's still in the race, right, Eugie McCarthy, who's the other anti war candidate, is still.
In the race.
However, it is becoming increasingly clear that what is going to happen at the convention is that Eugene McCarthy is going to get rat fucked, and they are going to put Hubert Humphrey, who is lbj's vice president, back in the saddle under the same policies. And this too is a sort of inversion of twenty twenty four. The party elites ousting Biden and installing Kamala Harris is broadly unbelievably popular with the base. Yeah, Hubert Humphrey doesn't run in primaries.
He just wins by rankling all the delegates to vote for him. In this incredible series and sort of smoke filled backroom deals and peeling off people who've been Kennedy delegates, and it becomes clear that he's going to win. But it's terrifying because what has happened is that the Democratic elite, against the will of law of democratic voters, has just straight up stolen this election. Right they have they have stolen it. They have rat fucked Eugene McCarthy.
Yeah, this is kind of like the right has unsuccessfully tried to play this narrative again, right.
Yeah, and again. The thing about Harris is that she is seen as something different than Biden. Yeah, this is this partially has to do with the differences in Biden's weakness versus lbj's.
Right.
A huge part of Biden's weakness that everyone thinks he's completely senile, Yeah, because she is objectively senile. Yeah, yeah, because he can't fucking certain together. A sentence goes off that Trump can. No, not the Trump can either, right, but it was, but Biden's was sort of more visible, right, Yeah, because of sort of the way the media works, because of Trump's ability to sort of run away.
There's a lot of factors in this, right. Yeah.
No one on Earth thinks that LBJ is seen now, not even his worst enemies. I think that that man is senile, right. His problem is his policies and the problem with that is that his policies are being transferred directly to his successor, who is as vice president. Whereas Kamala Harris does not have the fundamental weakness of Joe Biden, which is that she successfully and she is the first major American political figure has been able to do this
in eight years. She can string together three consecutive sentences yeah.
Which yeah, it appears like a manner from heaven to the sort of politics appreciator classes, right when they have to explain to all of us why we're pure rad and juvenile of warning politics outside of politicians, while their politicians are like struggling to do a whole paragraph without talking about their corn pop or Scranton, Pennsylvania or something.
Yeah. And so this is you know, even as we're heading into the convention, things are things are going to be very different.
Than they're going to play out now.
But there's one thing that is exactly the same. If that is your your cargo police departments. No changes. The only change is they are slightly, slightly, not not significantly, they are slightly less willing to say the N word in public like a little baby.
Yeah.
And in return for that, they got approximately ten million dollars of fucking weapons. Yeah yeah, ready up to you.
These people are exactly the same as today. They are overpaid and titled asshole screaming for violence. They are screaming it. They're going to take their vengeance against what they see as a leftist conspiracy to protect criminals and hand the country to communists. They are precisely the swine who beat
us in the streets in twenty twenty. These people in sixty eight are precisely the men today who ran a black site at Home and Square to torture, to disappear, and torture suspects and the false confessions, and who boldly set out a few years ago to kill a sixteen year old with sixteen shots on a cover up. This is the exact same Chicago police department that it wasn't sixty eight, and in fact, all of the key elements of the modern police department.
This is the period. Richard M.
Daily is one of the people who gets the cops to unionize, and again we're gonna see Daily is really truly a terrible person. Daily wants the teamsters to organize the cops. That doesn't work at all. He's bid completely fails. The organized with the Fraternal Order of Police, who are just effectively a giant cartel for police murderers now and they were at the time. There are a bunch of unbelievable reaction areas, a bunch of their leaderships will do things.
Like quote Hitler.
They just can't fucking stop themselves.
No, yeah, so I.
Want to read I'm going to read sort of the modern police statements.
Quote.
The better we do our job of envoicing the law, the more we are attacked. The state of our so called objective press is sad to behold subtly. Too many so called objective news writers attempt to excuse the actions of minorities. Oh wait, that's not that's not the modern police, that's the sixty eight police saying a thing that is literally identical to every police statement today.
They not changed at all, because no one made them.
No, this is sort of the trap that the anti war people are walking into, right, they are walking into a bunch of ultra radicalized, unbelievably pissed off cops who are elevating at the attempt to sort of beat up long haired hippies. And also, there's one thing we should also make clear that's that's very different between this anti war movement and the modern one, which is that mob
and the yippies are terrifyingly white. They might be whiter than the cops at this It's it's genuinely possible, that's true. You give these love for reasons that are incomprehensible to be other than racism. Absolutely love dressing up in like indigenous costumes. Oh god, yeah, it's awful.
Yeah.
And part of what's going on is that the sort of black radical groups don't really want to be involved in this. Yeah we can, we can see why, you know, they're anti war, but they're like, this is not our problem. You can sort this out.
Yeah.
And this is also another thing, a very very key difference between that anti war sort of coalition and today's because today's anti war coalition. If you go to any of the campus occupations, right, you go to an anti war protests, it's basically a combination of two of two groups.
Right.
It's queer white people and just non white people in general, some of whom are queer, with some of whom aren't. And that's the core of sort of protest organization of the US, right, those are the core of the people.
Who show up, yeah, and then seventeen people with fucking clipboards trying to get them to sign up for their various.
Well, those are the leeches that show up to sort of prey on pray on the Yeah.
Yeah, they are the lamp prey on the on the shock of protests.
Yeah yeah.
But this plays out very differently politically because of who has been mobilized into sort of anti war things now
versus who is showing up to this convention. And this is going to be true of the people who show up to the convention this time, right, Yeah, they are very much not the same kind of sort of middle class student people who were showing up to like disconventional though not all those people, but like there are a lot of people who are workers, right, but like they're distressingly white, and that is that is simply not true
of the modern movement. It's one of the reasons why the pieces don't quite fit.
Right.
We need to go do some more ads and then we're going to sort of wrap up what actually happened at the convention and how it.
Sort of shook out politically.
We are back. So the other thing that guarantees really that this is going to descend into sort of chaos.
Is that?
I mean, even days before the events, right, neither the mode people nor the Yippies really know what they're planning to do. The planning has been terrible. Part of it is because again they can't get permits from the city, and it's really hard to plan when you can't know what you're supposed to be doing. There's also internal disagreements in the groups of what to do. There's also a truly staggering federal infiltration and not just the normal feds, right,
we're talking like military intelligence. Oh wow, the Army's intelligence office is spying on protesters. They have guys inside of McCarthy's campaign that should the legal like it doesn't matter if it's legal, it doesn't, right, it's but it's it's nuts, and you know, I mean there's an estimate that that's from sixty Chicago, that book, that one in six protesters were informants.
Oh fuck me, it's like Afterwaffin ratio they've got going up.
Yeah yeah.
And like part of this is the numbers of protests here aren't very good because people are terrified that the CPD is going to start killing everyone. So the actual number is even as peak is maybe ten thousand, which is pretty small considering that the Pentagon mob mobilization that mob had done in sixty seven was like one hundred thousand people. Well, right, they've been able to put together really massive protests, but this one is not that large.
So the Yippi's kind of do their concert thing. But the moment night hits and they're trying to be in this park, the police attack. The police are incredibly brutal. By about three days in the National Guard gets deployed. And this is something about sixty eight that's also different
from today. If the National Guard is deployed today, it's not the same thing now as as as a national Guard deployment CDA, because the national Guard deployment in sixty eight very well could mean that the army is going to kill you.
All right.
This is a period in which the National Guard, their riot control mechanism is a line of guys with bayonets.
Yeah, he's not to say that these bayonets les lethal.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's or less lethal because when they're actually going lethal, and they've done this in the past three or four years against a bunch of the sort of black cop risings have been happening. Is they just shoot people? Yeah, right, they straight up kill them. This happened in Chicago. That was more of the cops the National Guard because read Holy Week, they were sort of told to stand down. So it's not to like
literally destroy the entire country in the giant war. But you know, them showing up also really pisses off the organizers and everything that happens to the cops start beating the organizers, and this, it turns out, is a bad idea because it turns out if you beat people, they get really angry at you. And so suddenly you have all these mob guys who literally their plan going into the convention was we don't want to have a fight
because we're gonna lose. Who are suddenly like, well fuck it, they're attacking U. Anyway, We're gonna fight them.
Yeah.
And this is where everything sort of the police completely go off the rails, right, This is where you see, you know, all of the sort of famous footage of beatings outside the convention. Although, and I will put this something Robert pointed out is that like anyone who was in Portland and twenty twenty has been through stuff that's
way worse than anything anyone saw here. Like you statistically probably have seen something that was much worse than what happened to the people, Which is not saying it wasn't bad, right, I mean, these are people getting horribly beaten by guys with billy clubs.
But yeah, it just happens all the time.
Now, we are so far past this being a thing that nobody's ever seen before or whatever.
Right, Yeah, we had a moment where I could have stopped, and a lot of people fucking tried. Yeah, And as a country, we are going down the path of the cops beating people and getting away with it like that is yeah, where we're at politically.
Yeah, and in experience saxty eight, the cops, the cops are able to go even more feral than they are now, which is slightly more fail Which is to say that this storm McCarthy's campaign office and they have his campaign staffers beaten.
Oh damn, Yeah, that is that is advanced.
Yeah, I've never heard of another modern political thing where police straight up stormed a campaign office of a presidential campaign and had his staffers beaten. Right, And this has a massive impact inside of the convention itself because what's happening in the convention is not what we got with Kamala, where like the old is gone and here's the new or whatever, and you know you can you can look for some kind of break there. It is Humphrey has
been put in. Humphrey is LBJ two. Lbj's Vietnam policy is inscribed by vote into the platform of the Democratic Party for what they're going to run in sixty eight. And meanwhile, outside right, as a sort of rat fock is happening, and as the party leadership is installing Hubert Humphrey, the sort of liberal anti war wing of the part Party is recoiling in horror. A McCarthy delegate who's a senator famously is about to go on stage and endorse,
endorse super Humphrey because Humphrey's won the nomination. They have
to come together unity. But he's washing out the window as the police are just like throwing kids around and beating the shit out of them, and he instead gives this speech where he says that if McCarthy was president, the cops wouldn't be using gestapo tactics, and Chicago Bay Or Richard M. Daly gets so angry that he starts screaming from the crowd, and I quote, and I apologize for saying this, but you need to understand who the party elite is in this period. He says, quote, fuck
you, you juice, son of a bitch, You lousy motherfucker. Go home. He is the mayor of Chicago. On the floor live on TV at the Democratic National Convention. Jeez, you are watching in sixty eight. You can see in real time on TV the entire Democratic Party completely fall apart.
Yeah.
Fuck the Yeah, the mosque has come off, that hasn't it.
Yeah, everything everything's flowing apart.
You can see.
You can see the divisions. A lot of liberal anti war candidates refuse to back, like Humphrey and his people. They eventually come back together sort of as the general election approaches, but the damage is done and that's not something that we're really at risk of.
No, they seem to be a pretty much lock step right now, like both with police violence and with what was happening in Palestine. Like, there's not much like real within the party, the Democrat Party, like much descent that I can see.
Yeah, you know, and I think the other thing about about the state election, people are trying to compare it to the twenty twenty four election, is that the Democrats only lost by about one percent of the vote, or sub one percent of the vote, even even though it was a blowout. They only lost about one percent of the vote in sixty eight. And a big part of what happened also was that George Wallace, the insane segregate this guy was also running and drew a whole bunch of electoral votes.
Yeah, which we'd an't really have.
But you know, the Democrats almost succesfully rallied and beat Nixon Nixon, you know, and this is something that there's this narrative that Nixon wins by sort of unbelievable margins and that he represented the sort of silent majority, and that's only sort of true. But on the other hand, the ground in the US since then has changed, right the uprisings of the nineteen sixties, and this is from the Holy Week uprisings to the process of the d NC.
All of these protests are hideously unpopular. Everything MLK does, everyone hates it, right literally until MLK dies, right. And there's actually a very fun example of this. Bear Daily had absolutely hated MLKA when he was alive. Right, he gives speeches to college him saying he's stirring up trouble and like Astlety despised him, and in the moment he dies, he gives a speech saying everyone should follow Mlka's example
and remained peaceful and not in the state literally days after. Right, Yeah, but that's the thing. All of these, all of the these things are unbelievably unpopular. And you know, the gap between their giant uprising which was holy weak and the election was a few months whereas you know, in twenty twenty four, Right, the twenty twenty four uprising was marked by over fifty percent approval for burning a police station down. Yeah, right,
it was actually extremely popular. And even even four years later, you know, with the sort of memory of the tear gas fading, everything about American politics is operating in reverse. Increasingly, it is not the left that's seen as out of touch radicals to attempting to force their agenda on a compliant population. It's the right. The silent majority today is not composed of evangelical fanatics whose children monitor their porn consumption.
It is composed of people who think that shit is weird. And that's the thing that I want to close on which is that you know, in twenty twenty four, in a lot of ways, is sixty eight standing on its head, because everything that comes after the election is seen as the backlash to the sort of excess of sixty eight. Right, But we are already living in the backlash the last
four years, the last eight years, right. Trump Ism is the backlash of Ferguson, and then all of the sort of desant to stuff, the anti trans stuff, all of the weird grumor panic, you know, all the anti critical race theory stuff, all of the racism, all of that. That's all the backlash to twenty twenty and it sucks.
Everyone hates it. It's awful. And so we are in a period where the backlash that sort of swept in the Republicans to power for a generation, that that's going to sort of come out of the Nickson EARI that's eventually going to lead to Reagan. It's entirely possible that we are about to see basically the opposite of that, where this kind of backlash politics, this kind of sort of Trumpian fascism, this very well could be twenty twenty four could be the shore on which that wave breaks.
We can hope.
I'm hoping.
I don't know.
I am mildly hopeful. I also, you know, and this is an other thing that's sport, is this convention. It's not going to look anything like even if there is intense suppression of the protests, it's not going to play the same way politically as as sixty eight convention did.
Yeah, the history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, right, and I think there will be similarities here. But it is impossible for the way that the state interacts with protest to beat the same and for people to be as shocked by it as they were in sixty eight, right, like a good number of Democrats, Like you know, if you go on social media, okay, it's my representative example, you've seen plenty of people barking for cops to crack the heads of kids or people of any age, like
protesting against a fucking genocide. Like people don't care anymore. I guess if you're clapping for bombing babies, you're also going to clap for smashing students in the face of the club, Like I kind of go together.
I guess, yeah, And I mean that, I don't know. I think the sort of long range things about anti war movements is that the actual anti war movement almost never stops the war right in the short run. Immediately, it almost never works. But what happened with Vietnam was, in the long run, the protests and the sty eight did stop the war, right. But they stopped the war not by not by moving sort of traditional American politics.
They stop the war by being one of the catalysts that radicalized enough enough of the US army that almost by by the time the war ends, something like half of it is either on strike or openly in revolt, and that eventually is the thing that crushes it. And I think that's also a thing for this, is that like, yeah, Kamala Harris probably not going to end the genocide.
Yeah, But.
There's good reason for this, right. We're very used to looking for immediate, direct impacts of reactions, and a lot of times the impact of reactions are in things in the distant future in ways that we can't see right now. And maybe that gives you hope, maybe that doesn't, but that's sort of the way that these anti war things work, and I don't know, Hopefully we'll get a fucking better result this time and we can stop the rest of Palestine from being completely exterminated.
But yeah, that would be nice.
That's the not hopeful part of this.
Yeah, well I think it's so hopeful, But it's instructive, right, Like, if you're out there now and you're expecting some big change, if you joy attending at Chicago you're expecting some bid change, you probably won't see it. It doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't important, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep doing it.
Yeah.
Yeah, So this has been taken happen here. The rest of the week will be an account of what actually does happen at this convention. So stay tuned, enjoy, enjoy that, and go stop genocidal.
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about it happening here and here this week is Chicago. I'm Robert Evans. I'm here in town with Sophie Lichterman, who will not be on MIC for this episode but will be later this week. And Garrison Davis, Hello, with whom I've been out all day in the streets.
We are currently recording just a few blocks away from the DNC protest, the Coalition to.
March Down on the corn out in the street.
So we apologize for whatever sounds are getting picked up. Today's been very hectic. There's been protests all day that me and Robert have been at and that's mostly what we're gonna be talking with you today.
So this is day one of the DNC. We actually have not yet been inside the venue, although we will be later for the speeches. Today has basically all been protests. So at the start of the day I went to the kind of temporary headquarters out of like a rental space, and I think North Chicago. Don't don't quote me on the exact chunk of town. I'm bad at directions. But organizations called behind Enemy Lines and it's a local they
call themselves a militant activist group. That has been kind of controversial because they have made a couple of statements about something. So what was the rhyme nineteen sixty eight was.
That the slogan they've been using is make it great, like sixty eight, make it.
Great, because nineteen sixty eight was a famously bloody DNC as a result of the conflict over McGovern versus Hubert Humphrey. And this is not so far very much like sixty eight, because everyone's known who the candidates are going to be going into this thing, and the protest today, at least by the time we left, no serious violence. You know, I didn't want to talk a little bit about that group because they made some interesting statements and this is
not their march today. The march today that we were at is specifically billed as the family friendly one, whereas Behind Enemy Lines has made a couple of statements about like, you know, collect bruises from the Chicago police. It's the new fall fashion, that sort of deal. So they're really playing up the hole. There's going to be a big conflict thing. If that happens, it'll be tomorrow because that's
when their event is planned. Today was the event that everyone thought was going to be the largest march probably will be.
It's called the March on the DNC twenty twenty four. Yeah, it's put together by a coalition of a lot of local different organs in Chicago as well as some once from around the country.
So heading into this, when organizers were asked, they said they were expecting thirty to forty thousand. I saw a video by I think a CNN guy where he was like fifty thousand people could show up. That's not the numbers we've seen. I would say two to three thousand, maybe five at the most, maybe five k kind of on the outside end. One of the organizers on the mic said that they had fifteen k there. I don't
think that was fifteen thousand people. I will say there's more protesters than cops, but it is closer to parody in terms of numbers than you normally get. The Chicago police have been lining every block for several blocks around the protest lines and lines of police vans, some of them fold with riot teams, some of them clearly for potential arrestees. Every time the protests moved, they started in Union Park and moved towards what was the number of the.
Park, number five seven eight.
Five to seven eight sounds like a fucking half life two, which.
Is the park that Chicago and DC is wanting most of the protests to take place at. Protesters, at least these big coalitions have preferred to use Union Park as it's bigger. But in this very moment, we just walked over from PARC five seven eight, where people are currently lined up in front of the fence.
I would say it was a very controlled event. It's possible something's happened since we've left or will happen later, especially people try to occupy the park, But from what happened while we were there, there was a group of a protest safety team who were all wearing Hiva's vests that the entire line of march. The march itself was him done on two sides by lines of bike cops
using their bikes to make a mobile wall. Inside the line of bike cops was a line of protest safety people in Hiva's vests who when folks tried to confront the fence, there's a fence that is essentially the same fence we had in Portland lining et side of the DNC.
Some groups of people tried to confront that tried to get off of the route of march and move somewhere other than back to the park that the safety team wanted, and the safety team basically walled off the protest from doing anything but going back into the park, essentially doing like kind of what the police were doing directly next to the police, which caused some conflict and some soreness among people, But as of the time we left like nothing else had really happened.
Hello, Future Gear here cutting in from the middle of the DNC where I was just suffering through the Hillary Clinton speech, and I'm here to tell you that more in fact did happen and things actually did get a little bit more spicy. But you will hear about that a little bit later on in the episode. Anyway, back to us sitting on a random Chicago street corner. Yeah, among the five thousand people, there's a lot of like
smaller groups. You know, you will have a few hundred people from this organization, this organization, and it's a lot of regular people who are both against the genocide in Palestine. They do not believe that either political party is going to put an effort to actually achieve that, and they put most of the blame for sending bombs to Israel on Biden and now Kamala.
And I would say that's the vast majority. I did run into some people wearing like DNC Kamala shirts that my understanding was they were kind of here to get the vibe. And yeah, it was definitely a lot of hostility towards the DNC, So my guess would be not a positive reaction. There A couple of different communist organizations.
Here, including five I've never heard of before.
Yes, almost none of them. But RevCom was there, which is a fun one that's essentially a CULTL. A few other PSLs there also, kind of on the cult east side of things, I guess. Highlights. We did meet a lot of nice people out there, a lot of fans of the show. I was happy to see that they were not with the Popovacchi and crew. Everyone was very nice. I hope we weren't too kurt, which is kind of exhausted, and I've been talking to folks all day.
I was able to geolocate enemy of the podcast.
Jack Posobic. Yes, yes, he was in quote unquote Camo. He was just wearing a green shirt and a kefia around his face, trying to interview people. I ran up to him and yelled his name out repeatedly until he acknowledged that he was in fact Jack Pisobic. Then I asked him about an event from twenty seventeen where he showed up at a protest undercover as an ANTIFA with a sign that said rape Milania. BuzzFeed immediately published text messages of him essentially talking to a friend about like, yeah,
I think this would be a great idea. We need to get somebody in there with this fucked up sign. So I asked him about it. He didn't want to answer, but he eventually left. I think the only people who were willing to talk to him were communists who wanted to quote long passages of political writing at him. So I don't think it was a great content for Jack. But we'll see. Maybe this will be what causes him
to blow up. We're gonna do some ads, then we're going to come back and talk about some of our highlights, what we expect from the week ahead, and the great city of Chicago, and we're back Garrison. Are you aware because we're in Chicago, but the south side of this very city is, according to many, the baddest part of town. And if you go down, I'm just telling you, if you go to the south side of Chicago, you need
to be aware of a man called Leroy. B I knew it, bad, bad Leroy, But he's the baddest man in the whole damn town here. I knew it. I knew it batter than old King Kong. He's meaner than a junkyard dog.
I'm not looking at my fucking notes.
All right, okay, great.
As Robert was checking out this office for this other group planning a protest at the Israeli Consulates tomorrow, I got to the Union Park protest early, was able to walk around. Got a whole bunch of flyers for communists magazines that again I have never heard of, and you don't need to seek them out either, they will walk up to you and put one in yours.
I got a whole book by Caleb Mappin, who is a Lushite Communist, which is like it's like the it's like the Foiled Charizard Communist, Like you're really yeah, it's beautiful stuff.
And then we had like three hours of speeches before people eventually left and marched to the march to the DNC fence by Park five seven eight. And although most of this is about Palestine, there also is some like intersectionality with a few other things.
You know, there's a lot.
Of LGBTQ stuff, a lot of trans.
A lot of TBTQ stuff, a bottom stuff obviously a lot of abortion rights and stuff that is one of abortion rights that has become a recurring, recurring talking point that I think, I think I'll mention something a little bit closer to the end.
Yeah, because there's one of the groups of counter protesters who has kind of shown up for these people purporting to be like dims against abortion. Basically one of their chants was essentially being anti abortion is being pro trans because trans people might get aborted, which was a fascinating argument and an.
Amazing chant that's both like abortion and is able lest abortions. Transphobic abortion is racist. You know, all of all the things and what.
I'll say, so you know, obviously you and I have both expressed either of us really like it when at a protest you have a group of people basically being security who wall off other people from doing stuff. What I will say the protest safety team was effective at was every time someone like the Progressives against Abortion or whoever would show up, there was a one literal fascist lady who I was definitely unwell with like a cardboard
sign covered in racial slurs. They would just get a team to kind of wall them off with their bodies and it kept them from becoming like media were not focused around the folks coming into disrep stuff like they were at the march yesterday, we were at a march on Sunday afternoon, where as soon as those anti abortion folks showed up, every camera turned towards them, because there's this thought that like, oh, maybe this is where there will be a conflict.
No.
I think walling off groups like that makes sense.
It's a very effective way to do it. I do get very hesitant and a little bit on my toes. Yes, whenever they start people in the crowd who are actual participants, who are just doing something that people in haives vests don't like. Yes, and when you start restricting their freedom of movement, when you start walling them off and keep and pushing them towards the police await, everyone.
Else looks like they were trying to push a chunk of the crowd, you can get pretty fucked up, including the person with a YPG flag that you know, I don't know, I'm just inherently sympathetic towards, but yeah, trying to push them towards the police riot line. I did not like seeing that.
And there was some talk about this leading up to the DNC.
There was some like leaked memo I think from some PSL people and a few other orgs about plans too. If there was any like quote unquote like disruptors or whatever, to circle them off, keep them away from the march, make sure they cannot rejoin the march, and push them towards the police line. Yeah, and that is never great. That's never great to see.
No, especially when all of your chants are like fuck the DNC, Kamala's evil, but like we need to do what the police are not doing here, Like we have to be the cops.
Yeah, you're preventing people from actually marching to the DNC. And for most of this march on Monday, it was the cops who were leading the march. Yes, literallyhead of the march, in front of everybody.
They both had all of the streets walled off.
At the head it was about six to eight cops at any given time, and then a couple of dozen people with cameras, media, and then it was the actual protest.
But it's essentially the whole the whole march is being is being led by police.
And that's also one thing with.
Men surrounded whenever you're chanting like who streets are streets and all these other things, you're like, this is this.
Is basically a cop street.
This is basically a cop led protest all the cops at most points I was I was walking by a Chicago ped sergeant who was on his comms and that he was telling like everyone on the walkie talkie system or whatever, like there's there's quote nothing nefarious going on,
there's nothing to worry about. Everything's good and yeah, from their perspective, that was what most of today was like, at least until a few hours ago, when people in the actual protest organizing committee were sectioning off people that they didn't like.
From what I have seen so far, you know, there's not much that would go viral that would be big news from this protest. Certainly not much that you would say it was embarrassing to anyone now. But there's also not much that's gonna like draw any attention if you're considering that the goal of activism like this. I don't see this as like being a needle moving march.
And even if you have a martial tie dozen people, which is good when it's after three hours of speeches about communism, that's not actually doing anything to put pressure on like the Vite administration the Democrats to actually do something about Palestine.
There were several minutes today about getting the US out of Korea, and like that's going to be your issue. That's going to be your issue. But like you, if you're kind of making it about everything, it's about nothing. Yeah, it's about nothing. It was not a lot of punch today.
A ceasefire and Palestine is a very popular issue and important. But the more time that you're talking about and trying to recruit people for like the Revolution TM and fill up your sign up sheet and have speeches about about you know, Marxism, Marxism, Leninism, the immortal Science, that's not going to actually help anyone in Palestine. At this point. I'm not sure how effective these protests are are going.
That's always hard to say. But if you are actually trying to apply pressure onto the Democrats onto, like the party in charge of the executive branch, I think focusing on that would would probably be be a slightly more beneficial. Hello, this is gear cutting in again from a corridor underneath the Democratic National Convention the United Center in Chicago. Sleepy Joe Biden's about hitting the stage. Before he does, I
need to give you a special update. So right after we recorded this little street conversation between me and Robert a whole bunch of more things happened, So there was already some kind of inter conflict within the march. On the way to park five seven eight, people had differing ideas on where they wanted the march to be, like directed to whether that's just a stopping at the park or trying to break through and go further into the
actual like DNC perimeter. And eventually we had a smaller group of people kind of up by the fence line that were able to breach a small secretion of the fence and people started going into one of the many layered barricades at the d and see now, as this was happening, some of the protest marshals like organizers and stuff, tried to rally the rest of the crowd to march back to Union Park away from this breach at the DNC,
and others started pouring in. There was maybe about like fifty to seventy five people who actually broke through this line, and maybe like half of them were protesters, the other half were like press and media. A whole bunch of the guys that going through those barricades are people looking to take photos, and it was a lot of press, but police did pressure people out. I think they arrested
maybe like three people in this whole mess. But police pushed the remaining people out of the park and closed it for safety concerns. And then those people who got pushed out, and then people who were kind of already were on the move met back at Union Park where the day's protests began, and almost immediately they started setting up in campments, setting up tents, doing like logistics stuff. Now police saw this happen and did not like this very much, and they quickly moved in and gave a
dispersal order. I believe two people were arrested during this kind of second kerfuffle. Police were saying, people can stay in the park as long as you're not setting up tense as long as you're not doing like larger logistics, you know, using the sound system, all these kinds of things. And at a certain point, I think police push most people either onto the edges, onto the periphery orders out
of the area. But a whole bunch of like swat to a whole bunch of Chicago PD just surrounded this whole area and kept a pretty tight lit on things. So I know people were planning to want to do a larger encampment tonight, and Chicago p D would not let that happen. And for whatever reason, there was either wasn't enough people or there wasn't enough like logistics or dedication to really fight off the chicagopd's.
Incursion in Union Park.
So now the day is wrapping up, Joe Biden's about to head on stage, and that is the situation for the protests. The first day of the DNC back to Robert Evans is sitting on a random street corner.
So you know, the highlight to me of today Again, we met a lot of very nice fans and they all seem to be doing smart things, which I like seeing. There was an old man who had he had a big Palestinian flag and underneath it was a Bosnian flag. So we went up to him because I was just kind of curious. I had a feeling it had something to do with the genocide, but like you know, I wanted to talk. And he was a survivor of Strebernitza,
which was a massacre during the the Yugoslav breakup. That was, I mean, just one of the worst exogenocide of the twentieth century. And we talked ab it because I'd been to streb Burnitza and interviewed some survivors and stuff, and he was like very moved to be here, expressed a lot of solidarity with Gaza. Essentially said like I lived through a genocide too, so I'm going to show up and support these people, which was very moving. Was probably
the most moving part. Definitely the most moving part of the day for.
Me, among all these big like socialist, communist newspaper organizations.
People are handing out books.
Yeah, they had a lot of just peapeople who actually really care about what's going on, and this feels like to them, like the only thing that they can do. Yes, Like, especially if you're like from this area, if you're from the Midwest, You're like, what can actually do to stop what's going on here?
They are all of the leaders of the Democratic Party are here, you know.
And that is a majority of the thousands that are gathered.
Yeah, you know, I have to say again not to just be shitting on people, but it's probably a tactical mistake to prior to the event. In the days heading up to this, some of the organizers said they were expecting thirty to forty thousand people in town for protests, and you know, the crowd we got today was a solid crowd, five thousand people or so, you know, marching
three to five thousand not bad. But when you've gotten people prepped for that, then the story is going to be that, like, well, less people than expected showed up, and that can be used by folks to make the case that, like, well, this isn't really that popular an issue for the Democrats, why should they care as much about it as they would if you had gotten fifty thousand people in the street.
Anyway, So that was the the second protest at the DNC. Technically the first protest was yesterday, the day before mission actually started.
And yes, both me and Robert were there.
I showed up as early as usual, and Robert showed up late as usual.
That's right, that's right, laid and hungover, don't you forget hungover? Of course, I got drunk as hell on that plane.
It started off with maybe like five undred people slowly slowly accumulated to the two but like a thousand. This
protest was called Bodies Outside Unjust Laws. It was about Palestine liberation as a part of reproductive justice and trying to tie these issues together, so trying to like rope in like a reproductive rights feminists who are here for the DNC into looking at Gaza as a part of the reproductive rights issue with like the deaths of you know, mothers, the restriction of healthcare, and gaza deaths of babies, childrens I've bred in children from families after bobbings or evacuations
all all that kind of stuff. So initially they were all gathered in front of the Chicago Trump Tower, which unfortunately is a pretty good looking building at least in my opinion. There was also a few like big anti Trump scigns as there were today. There was a yeah, there was a woman with a sign that that just read Trump and JAD events are weird, but she also had Gaza stuff all like, she also had like Gaza pins.
And there were also there's some people who I you could tell her here for the DNC, but who showed up and like yelled in support, but also had like a Kamala shirt. Or there was one lady who had like fuck Trump went written on her arm and who clearly just kind of showed up in between her day to like go cheer a couple of times.
Then move on just up today. You know, there was there was PSL people.
Party for Socialism and Liberation, if you're curious.
There was there was this one other socialist group who was really repting Jill Stein, say Jill Stein, you know, saying she's the only candidate that is against the genocide, which technically isn't true.
The Libertarian Party candidate, she's been pro several genocides and.
Similar Today.
You know, there were some people who showed up to be like corkers, right people on bikes to help section off the march from like roads or cars, which proved to be ultimately useless because police were doing all of the core and lots of cops immediately when I when I when I was walking downtown to this protest yesterday, just the sheer number of Chicago PD was just stifling.
This is very different from the rn C almost I would say ninety five percent of the law enforcement we've seen have been Chicago and Illinois cops.
Yes, actual local police, as opposed to the R and C, where there's a majority like out of state police. Yes yesterday did not have tons of medics today did. That's not unsurprising.
Everyone was expecting today to be the biggest day, and it probably will turn out to be.
Yes, But like I said, yeah, I mean even yesterday at the very first one, they still they still had one thousand people. They were really really tying as much as they could into the reproductive rights issue.
Yeah, we saw, we saw.
Pussy hats, we saw you know, all of all that kind of stuff. And one of the funniest things from yesterday and we saw some of it today too, is that with all these different communist newspapers, they were like competing, they were competing to be the ones that have like the true path to the revolution, like like handing out flyers, handing out pamphlets, be like, no, this is we We're
the ones that haven't figured out. And you have like seven of these groups going after this say like the same person.
Yes.
I felt very good when Jack wound up stumbling into one of those guys, because I was like, Okay, he is going to bore the hell out of Jack Psobic, but he's clearly he's also like has enough talking points that they're just kind of be going to be running talking points at each other, which is good. I always get worried when some one like Jack shows up, that they're going to find either some like nice normal person who's not ready to be on camera, or you know,
somebody who's especially protests like this. She often I'm like an old guy who's an anti circumsition activist just shows up to every protest and he's like kind of harmless kook, and they get made fun of a lot. So I'm always happy to see when an asshole shows up and gets confronted by someone who is just ready to sit in there and talk for hours.
And you know, similar to today, there was a small collection quote unquote like progressive anti abortion activists that showed up. They kept mostly to the side of the crowd largely ignored them. But one thing I did like is that there was people in the crowd caring around signs about like abortion pill instructions, like how to use one word to get one, and that was that that was very
nice to see. And similar to today as well, there was a few like DNC volunteers walking through the crowd, either because they actually do agree with these issues or just because they're like just because like they're curious, who knows what I mean. Obviously they're still you know, probably more pro Haerrison, most people in the crowd, but they still might you know, nominally care about these issues.
But yesterday they got booed.
Well walking through the crowd, the crowd was was was not was not happy to have them, specifically the people from behind enemy lines.
We're giving out most of the booze.
Referring to the protest tomorrow at the Israeli Consulate at seven pm, that's Tuesday, they said that they're gonna be the group that quote unquote brings the ruckus, and that is the vibe that they have. I think that is probably that's gonna be maybe but one of the more like conflictual protests. Yes, that we're going to see this week tomorrow on that's that's too.
Loud, doubt, So yeah, we will.
We will be there on Tuesday to see what goes down there. I'm about to walk into the d n C to hear Old Sleepy Joe. We're taking bets to see if he has a stroke on stay age. One thing that people have been able to use a lot, and that is, you know, a very real and valid issue is that just last week the government, including you know, the Biden Harris administration as well as Congress proved a
twenty billion dollar arms deal to Israel. We know how they're using these weapons as many meetings that Kamon's going to take about, you know, in arms embargo. At least currently we are still sending over we're doing the opposite, which is what most people gathered here are concerned about. You know, it's great to see people talking about abortion, LGBTQ stuff. You know, all the other reasons that the
US is doing things that are bad. But you know, when it comes to like talking to like the Democrats at the DNC right that the Democrats are pro abortion. They are, they are nominally pro these things. Pressuring on the Palestinian stuff is going to be probably the biggest thing as expected in these next few days.
So we'll see how that goes. We'll be back tomorrow and the rest of the week from the DNC. This has been it could happen here, happening to you, Welcome to it could happen here? A podcast about how to pronounce the vice president and maybe future president's name, which is Kamala. See I got it, Sophie.
Yeah, but you looked at me for reassurance.
No, I looked at you to be like look at me. I'm doing it. I'm riding a bike with no training wheels. Garrison, how's uh, how's grinder going?
It's okay. I mean it's certainly better than the r n C. Yeah, but it's it's still slow picking because I mean to find better.
Have you have you run into He lives in the South side of Chicago, a guy named six Garrison. So this is day two, ladies call him treat.
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
I'm Garrison Davis.
We are here with Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans, and I guess let's pick up right where we left off yesterday, because we're recording this Tuesday morning. Yesterday we had a full day of protests. There's still some protests today that we'll get to later. But we were also able to spend a decent bit of time in the actual d and C last night. And I think me and Sophie
will have certainly much to say about that. But I'm gonna throw it to Robert Evans, because Robert Evans went back to protests after our dinner, and how was that it was?
You know, by the time I got back, the police had mostly knocked everything apart. There was a brief attempt to occupy the park after we left. So right after we left, there was a scuffle over the fence and some people managed to reach it, largely due to the fact that the kind of fences that they use that they put up outside of events like this are all
the same. It's the same tile of fence they had up in Portland, and if you remember the fighting over the fence in Portland, part of why there was days of fighting is because it was a pretty short section of fence, they were able to have it enforced very heavily. Here.
It was kind of more of a visual barrier than an actual physical barrier because they just there was two There's probably miles of cumulative fencing, and they don't have it all reinforced enough, so when a crowd got close enough, it was surprisingly easy for them to push their way in. Three people i think got arrested at the fence breach. I've heard some folks say it was partly because press crowding in made it impossible for people to get away
from the cops. Just given the way the rest of the day worked and what I've seen, I think that's pretty credible. It was one of those things where on the ground, if you were just kind of looking at tweets, I think it would it would look like it had been a larger part of what happened that day than it was, because it really was a few minutes and then things calmed down relatively quickly. But it did have an impact on the actual DNC itself, like if you're
looking at the protests outside over Gaza. As part of their goal being to disrupt the DNC, they succeeded in doing that because once there was a breach in the perimeter, the Secret Service has and I don't know what these are, but said they certainly do have like a checklist of like, these are the things we do if there is a breach, And one of the things that we know they did and after that breach is they shut down all of the other multiple entrances for media and delegates and attendees
into the event and funneled everyone through one entrance, which caused a clusterfuck for a massive bottom.
Line, I was gonna say, they sure did.
They sure did.
Me and Sophy spent quite a while trying to get into the DNC after this, because yes, all of the entrances on the northeast and west side of the convention all got shut down. Everyone was funneled into one entrance on the south side. The line to get in was just just crazy. It was so so large.
I would have to say again if you're looking at the goal of these movements as like causing embarrassment and disruption to the DNC, because fucking up entrance to the DNC fucks up for all of the influencers and media people trying to get in. I saw more anger over how fucked up getting in last night was than anything that had happened, like in terms of like formative social media anger, than anything that had actually happened in the streets.
So I would have to call that a pretty good win for the protest.
I ever heard numerous DNC goers wearing their their best their best merch complaining that it was the protester's fault.
Yeah, that the lines were so long.
Well, I mean people were also complaining about just like the level of like the DNC's like organization and.
Out because it was a mix.
It was because of this, you know, triggered by actions via protesters, but also because of how the DNC was handling everything. It was a compounding, a compounding nightmare for many people. And I mean in terms of other like other disruptions. We heard from a woman who's staying at our same hotel that she left at four pm to get to the DNC. She left on like one of the the DNC shuttles and it took her four hours
to get in now. And part of what happened was that if she left on the DNC shuttle at around four, she probably got to the area around four forty five, just because you know, there's slow it's traffic.
No no, no, no, no, no no.
And what happened next is that around four point fifty is when the is when the fence got breached, and then everyone getting off the shuttles could not what happened, they did like this like a mini security lockdown. Everyone was just told they have to stay in the shuttle. She had to stay sitting in the shuttle for an extra forty five minutes. She could not exit because they were not letting people get off the shuttles as as
the fence was breached. So like it's it's stuff like that that creates like these like compounding fractures.
And this is probably if something similar were to happen tonight, and the protests, as far as I know, are not planned to be in the same kind of locations as they were, so I don't think that's likely. I don't think it would have a severe response because a big part of what was going on Monday is that both the president and vice president were in the same building.
So everything that normally exists in terms of security at an event like this was taken up to the suitcase that ends the world was in the venue right like, so everything was on and like just escalated to the nth degree, which is why never take the fucking buses. It's long, but one of my rules.
Yeah, my take is she left a four pm. She didn't get in until about eight pm.
Not worth it. Yeah, I would rather die. I would rather die.
It sounds like a episode of Black Mirror.
Uh huh. It's terrible. So I got back to the protest a little later. My understanding sounds like between seven and nine arrests over the course of the day. There were had been like three at the fence breach. There were three or four more when people tried to briefly set up an encampment that really did not last very long.
Was very quick to take that down.
And it was the I had been kind of wondering, and I still think we might see some mace to night, but it didn't, despite like the kind of Chicago sixty eight tear gas stories that people keep talking about, that did not seem likely at all during the no.
Yeah, and I've heard from ultiple people on the ground that it's it seems like chagoped is very aware of the optics. Yes, And you know, despite being like the police they are, they are trying to not immediately bring out the truncheons on everyone's heads.
Now, they do have the truncheons on.
They've all got and they've got they have the they have the worn ass old wooden ones.
They do have them.
But they are they are trying to be as hands off physically as they can, of course, like relying on the amount of like internal peace policing from these like big or mass groups.
But the other thing that they have going for them is when they do have to get go hands on, there are so many of them that they do not need to use crowd control. Well, crowd control weapons are things police use when they are out number That's partly why Portland police are so nuts with it is because they're almost no police in Portland, like it is literally the least police city per capita in the country pretty much,
whereas you know Chicago. I think the protesters outnumbered the police yesterday, but not by a lot, Like it was not an overwhelming amount.
There is a few differences between you know this and the RNC, obviously, and one of the main ones is that most of the cops we have seen have been local. They have been Chicago PD. There's been some Illinois State troopers. Of course, there's like Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations FBI, but mostly it is just Chicago PUD even around the.
Premier CPD and Illinois State Illinois State. Yeah, based on how because I had been I had been reading updates for the last couple of weeks on how security plans were proceeding for the DNC, I think that part of what we've seen, a large part was influenced by the guy that police murdered in Milwaukee, because it was a couple of days after the RNC that I started seeing the first articles about how there would not be out of state police doing trolling around the City of Chicago.
So it does seem like, thankfully somebody over here recognized that, like, oh you if we have a bunch of fucking Ohio cops wandering around downtown Chicago like they're going to murder somebody, like they're going to freak out because these hay seed hicks have heard nothing in their entire lives as much as how dangerous Chicago is, They're just going to start blasting. Yeah, And I guess I'm just glad that hopefully nobody gets murdered by the cops this this week.
Well, do you know what we can't get murdered by?
Yes, Garrison, Wow, Yes, Yes, indeed.
Services. That's the fourth this podcast. If you enjoy them too much, you know, too much of a good thing is bad. That's what I've heard.
Yeah, I mean that's really why I'm not sure if you don't overdose on products. You meet with bad bad Lee Roy Brown, because he's got a custom continental, he's got an Alado, Sophie, I'm a trendsetter. Nobody was talking about bad Badle Roy Brown except for the one guy who very famously talked about bad bad Le Roy Brown.
Welcome back to It could happen here.
So after getting through that that clusterfuck of a security entrance means Zobe did eventually make it inside the DNC, which we'll talk about in a sec But as me and Robert we were parading around the protests on Monday, Sophie Lichterman was infiltrating dem Palooza, which is.
The wrong way. It should be Demapalooza.
It should be dema Paloza, but it's not.
The angriest let me just give you some visuals here.
First of all, you're absolutely cracked.
The name is embarrassing, and that's generally how I felt about Dempaluza.
What is dem Paluzavalusa is like a first off only the gen X people are going to remember Lollapalooza.
No chapel Roone just performed at Lollapalooza.
That doesn't seund do you? I don't some kind of horse great?
Keep going keeping somebody Jesus Christ.
Anyways, it was like half trade show, half panels by people talking about things that they think that the DNC crowd will care about, leaning in too hard on the memes, like a there was a booth.
Was it the coconut Vibes booth.
It was the I almost thought that was a bored apes thing at first.
They just they just I was like, why are we why are we acknowledging?
Fine, it's fine.
There was there was like cool Coconut Vibes here booth, and right behind it was a seated area with like probably like one hundred chairs and there were two people giving speeches on something, and there were two people.
In the crowd.
Many many such cases, such cases, and you know, there was a lot of cardboard cutouts with VP Harris's face on it.
There was like a VP. Harris as Wonder Woman section, and then there was a section with.
Shirts they're having fun, just so.
That people have an under understanding of like the level of embarrassing. There was a one booth while I was waiting in the very unorganized line to get into the Panels area of Den Paloza that had shirts for sale for twenty eight dollars, featuring one that said beware of the uptidy whities.
What does that mean?
Uptight white people? I'm guessing.
Okay, I believe, I believe so, But also why twenty eight dollars? Band dictionaries at your own pearl?
Oh god?
Okay, make stupid embarrassing again.
You get the picture.
You get it, all right, you get the picture. So what panels did you attend at Den Paluza.
The first panel I went to was a panel that was like, how to talk to your relatives about Project twenty twenty five.
A great Thanksgiving dinner talk.
Yeah, And it was very unorganized, and so I was thirty minutes late getting into it because not a single volunteer had been trained on how to get people into panels. And they had a circuit all around the building several times until I found a very nice security guard who actually worked for the building that was like, you go that way, thank you, sir, And I walk into this panel.
There are seats for maybe three hundred people.
There is one man at the front of the stage and about fifteen people listening. And I sat there for about five minutes and got up because it was basically the sum of it was, if your your relatives that you disagree with are trying to tell you something, don't yell at them.
Listen to them first, which is not terrible to look.
If your relatives want to start talking politics at the dinner table this year, this is going to be terrible handgun, drop it on the table, and then just sit down, put your legs up, stare at them. Just like the post the exact I learn everything about negotiations from the Portland Police Union.
This is interesting, though, Sovid because every night at the DNC they're going to be reading from Project twenty twenty five on the main stage. Yesterday they were reading about all of the plans within that document to basically make Trump a de facto dictator. Tonight they're going to be reading on sections about how Project twenty five will affect the economy in your pocketbook. So they have this plan to every night actually talk about and read from the
actual document, you know. Framing this says like this is basically like Trump's plan for once he gets into office, or this is like Republicans plan for Trump once he gets into office, and you know, this type of like scaremongering fear rhetoric around what Trump would do was semi successful in twenty twenty, and I think they're trying to, you know, use this similarly now.
I also think it's smart because there's two big threats here. One of them is does the election, you know, go badly for Trump, which is an open question. And then the other is if it does, he's not going to concede. Do the Republicans have shit together to actually steal the election, to do another Brooks Brothers riot, to refuse certification, to try and kick up enough uncertainty that they can take
it to the Supreme Court for a steal. And the only way, ultimately, if it's an arrow enough election that the Republicans go for that, the only real way to fight back is to get an overwhelming number of people out and angry in the streets, like enough that it frightens you know, the Supreme Court and everyone else who would be required to actually put in like sweat equity to carry off that steel. And one of the ways you do that is by making the stakes really clear.
And so I think this is a it's a good idea and responsible that they're focusing on Project twenty twenty five as much as they are, and probably what's necessary to I'm hoping that the dims don't fold. If that happens, I guess we'll fucking see. You know, it's not two thousand.
Soby what was the second panel you went to at Dempaluzo?
So I walked around and looked into a bunch of different rooms to see if panels had a big crowd or not, and it was definitely or not. And then I went to the Voices for Justice, Democrats for Palestinian Human Rights panel that was.
Packed.
It sounded like the most popular panel of the day.
Packed, no seats available, standing room and just the the energy was very respectful. Everyone in there was earnestly excited that this was happening.
But also it was.
Mentioned many times that this was a step, but obviously not the step that they wanted. And it was filled with media but also just people that were there for Dempaluza wanting to hear what people had to say. It was a very diverse group of people and the panel featured, you know, several activists, former members of the House of Representatives.
Someone from the Uncommitted Committee.
Yes, I believe they were part of organizing this panel. Although this panel was a official campaign approved panel, which was brought up many times by each person who spoke as a thing that it was a first of its kind approved campaign panel in regard to the people of Palestine.
And it's part of the dance the DNC has been trying to do where they it is such a popular issue like giving a shit about the genocide, wanting to cease fire, that they can't not signal to it. But also there's absolutely no willingness at the top to actually hold Israel accountable, so they like they hold this event, they approve it, and it becomes the most popular one
at the DNC. Biden makes a very mild line and support of life, basically saying there was a line during speech last night that like the protesters outside of a point right, which is not taking meaningful action, but it is like it gets one of the largest reactions from the crowd that night. I mean, you guys were in the room, but at least from where I was watching at the bar, it sounded like a pretty sizable response.
And that's I guess the juggling act that they're still trying to do is like can we continue not actually committing on anything while keeping some of these people happy.
And the uncommitted people are basically like this the protest group that's holding their votes, you know, hostage almost to say like if you want us to vote for you, Harris, you have to signal something, whether that be like an arms embargo, a real effort towards getting a ceasefire done, trying to lobby for change by using their vote as a bargaining chip.
Yeah, and a couple interesting things to note before I play an audio clip for the listeners here. It took almost the entire panel for them to mention Joe Biden by name. I think that only happened once. It was mostly just referring to the party itself. At one point a panel member thank to VP Harris, and she's trying we need to hold her accountable, but give her a chance, which was the general energy from the entire entire group is like, she is.
Not Joe Biden.
We're hoping for better. Yeah, she's made an inch of a step. We need more, but we want to give her a chance.
To do that.
And I mean, it's a really different vibe from a lot of the protests where you have people who are kind of more committed political radicals as opposed to the uncommitted folks. The overwhelming vibe is we would really like to get on board this, but you need to do something right.
The clip that I'm about to play for the listeners here comes from a doctor, doctor Tanya Haja San, who is a pediatric intensive care doctor who works with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, and she has spent the last decade as a medical trainer and helping people and organizations in Gaza in the West Bank. And she spoke for ten minutes, and I thought it was pretty moving.
It was a large room and I was able to get very clear audio, which kind of says a lot about the crowd, and she kind of just spoke about her experience, and yeah, I guess I'll just played that clip for everyone now.
When the Uncomitted.
Movement asked me to be here, I be texted every doctor and surgeon.
That I knew who had been to Gaza in the last ten months, and.
I asked them if they wanted to join me here in Chicago. And the overwhelming response, actually every single person said yes, let me see if I can switch out of my shift, and many.
Of them are actually here in Chicago right now.
Because we cannot unsee what we witnessed and caused every single one of us, many of us have worked in many wars before and we have never seen.
Anything so it reaches so atrocious.
And that is why many of us swapped out shifts. Had phoned a very long way to speak to politicians when we're not helps ourself.
As doctors were trained to protect and reserve.
Life, and.
This Israeli military.
Campaign that's targeting life and every thing needed to statement.
Has rendered that impossible. And that is why so many of us have.
Taken to other needs of trying to protect life. For the past ten months, we have witnessed civilian massacre after civilian.
Massacre, school massacres who internally displaced people with.
Children, the Flower massacre, massacres of people try to collect water, massacres of people are collecting eight of eight sites massacre after civilian massacre, Entire families exterminated in one single bomb, humanitarians, healthcare workers killed at and journalists killed in record numbers, pediatric amputations, amputations, and children that are heartbreaking records over seventeen thousand children.
Who have lost one or both parents.
Since October in Gaza.
We have treated so many children who have lost their entire family that it has a term has.
Been coined to describe these children who probably heard it Wounded Child on Surviving Family in WCNSF. This is a term that has been coined since October to describe as very frequent phenomenon that I personally witnessed more times than I can count while I was there.
For children.
I have held the hand of children who are taking their last guests because their entire family was killed in the same attack and couldn't be there holding their hand
and comforting them, and could not bury them thereafter. For the children who I treated who were discharged, they were and survived, they face a Russian let of a hundred ways that they will like me and pretend to die when they leave the hospital due to the service answer is incompatible with life that has been architectured vias, military assault, direct bombing, starvation, dehydration, disease. Alarming reports of the first
cases of polio and gaza right now. Polio's a potentially deadly diseased that causes paralysis, including paralysis the muscles needed to breathe, that has been eradicated for decades in that region. There's been a polio fascination campaign that essentially is eradicated the disease from the majority of the world, and now we're seeing cases.
Emerging in a.
Area of the world that cannot that has a healthier system that has been completely and entirely annihilated. I mentioned these wounded children with no surviving family. I'm going to give you two quick stories just so that you can humanize what I mean when going to say this, because I know it's really hard to hear these numbers and
think about individuals and what this means to them. I received a young boy in the emergency department during one of the mass casualties who had hating half of his face and antholwa Luckily, the organs that are lighted for breathing and blood supplied.
To the brain were preserved.
They were visible but preserved, and he was talking to us.
He couldn't see himself, so.
He didn't know what he looked like at that point in time, and he kept asking for his sister.
His sister was in the bed next to him.
The majority of her body was burned beyond recognition. He didn't recognize that.
The girl in the bed next.
In his sister, his entire family, parents, and the rest of his siblings who are killed in the same attack. That always survived. And the next day I went to see him. A very young plastic surgeon, one of the few remaining plastic surgeons in God because both the others have either been killed or have fled. To understand, Lee had removed part of his chest and created a graft
to cover those vible that organs in the net. He was lying in his bed and mung Wing's so difficult to talk, and he kept saying I felt really close to him.
And he said I envisioned and died too.
And I said what And.
He said, I think my entire family has gone to heaven or it's not. My entire comming is exact words or something effective. Everybody I loved is now in heaven.
I don't want to be here anymore. That is one of so many stories.
Well, uh, yep, that's yeah.
Here's some ads, some ads.
Yeah, all right, we are back.
We're gonna close this episode by talking about means of these experiences in the actual DNC once we finally got past that ridiculous security gate. So we got in and the biggest thing that we realized first was just how disorganized this was, at least compared to the RNC. Now, this is due to number of factors, the protests being one. There's simply just more people at the DNC, like, way way more people.
Yeah, I definitely feel like one of the right wing things to do right now is to be like there was nobody there.
Absolutely, it was packed. It was way more crowded than Monday at the Art.
It was much harder to find a place to sit inside the arena.
Honestly hard to find a place to comfortably stand inside the arena. No so unbelievably packed. Garrison and I got inside of the actual seating area trying to find a place to sit briefly as VP Harris came to greet the crowd, and it was roar y.
It was what I would describe as electric electric. People really like to see her. She played it very casual to kind of open up the convention. She didn't even have a podium. She was just basically a stand upset walking around with him.
She came out to be like hey girl.
Yeah exactly, and she was. She was opening things up very formally. People seem to really like that, and then you know, a lot of a lot of the main speakers started started to kind of roll out. Now, me and Sophie were able to somehow get special tickets to go on the actual like delegate floor area, something we never were able to do during the R and C. Dare I say big mistake, which was this was a massive error on our part.
This is why I just sat at the bar.
Because it is a nightmare down there, so much pushing, shoving, no place to go.
You really get to taste democracy.
As soon as we stepped on the floor, AOC walked on stage, everything went crazy.
It was it was.
A nightmare called for ceasfire Gaza, which apparently I did not see any of the speeches before her, but apparently that was the first time that was done at night, and the.
Crowd loved it.
She gave a great speech, I mean speech talking about working people. I think it's also important because of just how well she was received and like the kind of the spot that she had at the convention. Like she is, she used to be kind of be like an outsider to like the Democrat Party. Right at this point she is like fully within the fold of like the Democrat machine and for better or worse, I mean to probably a mix of both.
In some regards, there's a lot of talk that in eight or twelve years she's going to be running and.
Yeah, yeah, she she is preparing for a long political career. Yeah, and people seem to like her and the person that spoke immediately after AOC while while we while me and Sophie were still being shuffled around the show floor.
I don't think shuffled is the way to even describe it.
You guys have seen the Jordan Peele movie. Sorry, what's what's the one with the sky monster? Nope, nope. Yeah, it's like being it's caught. It's like you're being sharned with a bunch of other people.
My hair, my hair was caught in like a CNN camera, like you could not breathe.
It was like a mosh bit, but not fought.
No, we were we were caught inside the jean jacket. But it was it was we were being slashed around.
There's three I and we were in the center Aisle Jesus christatically like parallel to where the person who would be speaking comes up to talk.
And then Hillary Clinton took the stage and unfortunately the crowd loved it.
They went fairal for Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, baffling, just baffling.
It was.
I looked back at Garrison and I and we both with each other like death.
Wanted to die. It's it's like when you're in a foreign country and they eat some sort of like lutfisk or something some sort of like weird rotten fish dish that they just love over there.
Or okay, or when they eat like American garbage fast food and also love it.
You're like, oh no, it's a terrifying I don't know.
What I was expecting, but I just didn't think the DNC still loved Hillary the way they do.
But they went fairal she.
Was like very popular. I mean, she won the primaries. She's got a base of support. She just is. The people who hate her hate her a lot. Excuse.
She gave a very big mad speech.
She loss of arm waving.
People disagree about that, Garrison. People got angry at me for saying she seems angry. She she was a little big mad. I would I wouldn't say.
I would say she gave a standard Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, yeah, it was a pretty standard.
Yeah, she's just not very likable and charismatic.
So but she did. I do.
I do have a great picture of wins Garrison and I survived the floor. We were up in a press area and of Hillary Clinton with both her hands in the air and the crowd eating it up.
Again.
A choice, Yeah, navigating this this whole place with an area. We're never gonna go in the on the delegate floor again. Just a nightmare, thank you, being shuffled around corridors. It's it's it's terrible. There was a few other you know, a few other speakers usher I think did didn't okay speech. You know, uh, lot of stuff about abortion, a lot of videos on the big jumbo tron about about cop prosecutor Kamala taken down the and Donald Trump. As expected, they had all.
Do we want to play a clip of that? By the way, do you have the Law and Order clip? Sophie Heerson? Do I have the Law Order clip? Of course, I have the Law.
And Order and we can play twenty seconds of the Law and Order clip.
Yes. There was several different videos played throughout the night, but I would say the most memorable one was the Law and Order themed clip featuring big Bad kam Law as the prosecutor and criminal Donald Trump as the villain of the story the New York sex pest Criminal of the Week.
The criminal justice system the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups, the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. This is the story of Donald Trump his entire life. Trumps believed he's above the law, that no one would ever dare hold them accountable. For the first time in history, we have a convict felon running for president, and to take on this case, we need a president who has spent her life prosecuting perpetrators.
Like God, God damn it.
It was the choice and it was night one.
We'll see how that plays.
So Jill Biden introduced well, first introduced her daughter, and then they introduced Joe Biden. I think one interesting thing is that throughout the night, I started seeing more green Jill signs, which I thought was really confusing, like who's stuck in Jill Stein green party.
Signs into this?
And then I realized, no, the signs for Jill Biden, which I don't know if they chose green signs to be intentionally like trying to like reclaim green for Jill Biden instead of Jill Stein.
I don't know. I found it to be odd.
She led the crowd and like, we love Joe Chance And immediately as soon as everyone started changing, like we love Joe, thank you Joe. It's starting to feel like we're kind of just sending him out to pasture and that was the main vibe of the Joe Biden was very.
Emotional putting on his favorite Spotify.
Yeah, he was very emotional, came out crying after his daughter introduced him. And I would say there was like a good ten minute standing ovation for him.
Maybe maybe five, but it was. It was long.
It was I was being generous. It's his last big thing.
I don't they It's a really nice farm. You know, there's a great view of the mountains from it. Beautiful helpstrassed run through in the summer all day long, which we just run it.
We had a direct view of the teleprompter. Did a great job reading that teleprompter. He won off script, you know, a handful of times.
But his actual performance was pretty good, especially for coming out around like eleven pm. He did.
He did pretty good.
It was a strong It was a strong performance for Joe.
One of the first things he mentioned was Charlottesville, as he talked about before in his campaign for being with the Reason that he ran in twenty twenty, you know, talking about how you know, lots of rhetoric was identical from Nazis and anti Semitic vile from nineteen thirties. He had a line describing kind of the alt right movements as old ghosts in new garments. I thought that was well written by whatever speed at the White House was
putting that one together. Yeah, you know, talking about how Trump's being aligned with these like with this new version of the KKK. They just they just forgot to wear their hoods, talking about you know, very fine people on both sides. Hate has no safe harbor in America, all that kind of stuff. And you know, this was this rhetoric was a lot more common back in like, you know, twenty nineteen, you know, right after Charlotte's film, during like
the height of like the alt right movement. We don't hear this as much anymore, but I think it is important to remember that this was not that long ago. He then kind of talked about mostly the past. He
wasn't talking about kind of the future. He was talking about what the Biden administration has been able to do the past four years and trying to tie in, you know, Kamula to all of the good things that have happened, you know, talking about four years of progress, you know, making waves with a COVID, with the economy, lots of new jobs, inflation is down, at least now he gave his greatest shrinking the racial gaps. You know, health insurance
stocks are good. We finally beat big Pharma, I'm sure whatever. A lot of stuff about tying him to the unions, you know, saying that people have called him the most the most pro union president in history, and he's like, I'm proud to I'm proud to take on that Moniker.
Or something like that, chanting Union Joe.
Union Joe said he was the first president to walk the picket line, so you know, they were definitely focusing a lot of that union messaging. It is interesting considering that one union leader spoke at the RNC yeah back when the nomination for the Democrats.
Speech is yes, yes.
Yes, very brief talk about carbon emissions and pollution, but similarly, very little climate change stuff.
Almost yeah.
It's which is which has been common throughout this whole campaign. This this this, this whole election has been very little mention of climate change stuff.
You really get a feeling of what a gift it has been for the Democratic Party that the Republicans have given them all this fascism stuff to talk about, rather than actually needing to make any kind of serious statements about what they're going to do climate change.
Part of the other kind of achievements that he was you know, Lotting was saying that they finally beat the NRA passing this gun safety bill, and next they're to ban assault weapons and pass universal background safety bill.
Okay, it was one of the ones that didn't really do any Yeah. Correct.
There was a brief section about the border, saying that there's now fewer border crossings than when Trump left office, saying that, you know, Trump tried to kill our border security bill, and he said, the main thing that makes us different from the Republicans is that we won't demonize immigrants.
We are going to a They're going.
To still do really really bad like border violence and really really bad.
Border security policies from asylum from being able to like flee bad situations.
But they're not going to be spending the whole convention every single day talking NonStop about how immigrants are coming to rape your family, and like, yeah, that is true.
You don't talk about them the same way.
But some of your actual policies are not all that different from what most Republicans in office want. You know, they're not calling for massive deportations at the same rate, but still that border security bill was very similar to ones that Trump was proposing, and the only reason that Trump killed it was so that Biden wouldn't be able to take credit, which Bin didn't also say during the.
Speech order fear monger, I mean, it's just been a titanic victory for the right.
And I'll talk about abortion, talk about how if Harris's is president, she'll be able to sign in something that puts into law that right to abortion, saying that quote, Maga found out the power of women in twenty twenty two, saying that they're going to find out again in twenty twenty four, which he's not wrong about, Dadley, that is that is repealing Roe v Wade did I did sign election results in twenty two, twenty twenty five.
Abortion's mandatory finally.
And yeah, he's you know, talking about quote we got to put a prosecutor in the Oval office instead of a convicted Felon said, saying that Harris is going to be forty seven. And whenever he made a comment like that, talking about how Harris is going to be the next president, the whole crowd sort of breaking you own chance, saying thank you, Joe, thank you Joe. It's just really funny because they are just thanking him for stepping down for the race.
Everybody wanted a chance to remember what two thousand and eight was like, and they got it and they could not be more.
Are great and just just interesting to note that it took it did take him quite a while to really start talking about Kamala, but whenever the large chance of thank you Joe would start, he'd be like, no, no, no, thank you Kamala.
One of the last things that Joe talked about was briefly mentioning Ukraine and then talking about Gaza, and this is kind of one of the last things in his speech before he started like his closing remarks. You know, he talked about, you know, the need to get to get the hostages to safety and to quote unquote end of the war in Gaza, saying that they're working around the clock to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza and to
get a lasting ceasefire. He then gave a small off the cuff mention to the DNC protests, and this part wasn't on the teleprompter. He said, quote, those protesters out in the street have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides. And he made similar comments to this last March, saying that protesters who were disrupting a rally of his quote unquote have a point.
So he has used this line before, but this was kind of the only acknowledgment of the protests that I saw today from any of the DNC speeches.
It is interesting that this was not scripted. This was just something that.
He said because, as mentioned before, we had a view of the telerompter.
And at the same time that this happened, someone on the far side of the crowd unfurled a banner, and I think Robert has some more infro on that.
Yeah, there were a couple of delegates who managed to sneak in a banner. Do you know if they were delegates, Well, at least one of them was, okay, a banner that said stop arming Israel. They unfurled it and got a very strong and negative reaction from the people around them, some of whom were hitting them or at least shoving them. I think it kind of you could look at the
video and use either term. They were definitely like moving, like pushing, They were definitely aggressively making contact with them.
With these like big wooden signs that people have not.
These thank you Joe signs, and then set up a chant of thank you Joe to kind of like drown them out out as the people filming in the venue like cut the lights, basically down the lights in that area so that it would it would be less visible. Eventually they got the banner away from them, but it was one of those like it shows you kind of the hollowness of there's enough of a need that even Biden had to make a positive reference to the protesters.
They see it as enough of a potential threat to you know, being able to get the votes they need that they they have to signpost to it. But a banner, and this is not a radical banner. Stop arming Israel is not a radical stance down.
It's not calling an end to the state of events.
It wasn't an Intifada revolution banner, right right. It was a literally just stop sending guns and stopped doing this to Israel that's being used to bomb them and people. People were angry enough that I don't want to overstate the level of physical violence, but I don't want to
understate it. They were physically aggressive over this, like to and and had this small group of people surrounded and seeing that that is a reminder that I am not in line with the people on the left who repeatedly call the DIMS fascist, because fascism means something, it's a real political Democrats have plenty of authoritarians, and that's that's what that is. Is that is authoritarian thinking, and it can and will, if not checked, lead to a lot uglier shift than what we saw last night. So I
did not like seeing that. It is a reminder that even as nice as the vibe shift has been, and I'm I'm not going to try to take enjoyment from that away from people, we are still in a real pickle as a country. Ari are acceptance of authoritarian aims and tactics.
And especially you know, sending twenty billion dollars in BOSS.
And sending twenty billion dollars in BOP. Just send the tape, take all the Israel weapons and send them to the Ukrainians. That's that's my stance.
I'm sure Rudy Giuliani will love that.
Yeah, so yeah, I mean you said that the crowd had a big reaction to some of the Palestine stuff, and at least from inside the convention certainly calls for ceasefire did that.
That was big.
When Biden made his little comment acknowledging the protests, the whole room kind of went silent, like everyone was kind of surprised. Like it was, it was like a chill went over the air, like no one knew how to take it. There. There wasn't like massive cheers, there wasn't booze either, but like it was because like arguably Biden gave a more positive comment referring to the protests than
most of like the regular like delegates and attendees. Most of the attendees we were standing around in the waiting line were much more like negative and dismissive. And I think I think Biden's comment kind of like took the wind out of the air, at least inside the convention arena. But that was basically the end of it. He gave,
you know, closing closing remarks. Kamala went onto stage, they hugged, they did their little thing, and then me and Sophie went out of the convention as fast as we could and we found this little corridor exit because we didn't want to mess with like the like with like the
escalators or the elevators, because that's always a nightmare. So we found this nice little state case and I turned to the left walking down the stairs, and I saw two very large men in writing gear with two assault weapons, and I said, I guess we're not going that way. Then I turned around and walk the other direction.
Honestly, funniest moment of the day.
Were like ten feet away from these guys away some of the giants, some of the most heavily armed men I've ever seen. I think we stumbled across because I looked at that signs later, I think with someone across the security gate for the presidential motor case. So that's that's where we almost accidentally went.
Yeah. No, those are guys who have spent every year of the last twenty years of their lives just planning to kill as many people as they care. The second someone takes them off the leak, they would shoot a twink on site. They not care, They don't give you, they don't give a fuck who they shoot the instant they have a chance.
So me and so Be left as soon as we could and went back to the hotel and immediately went to sleep.
And that was the first night at the DNC.
Drinks with me Garison, I did not. We shared a special moment.
I'm trying to create a compelling narrative of the podcast.
Well, I thought it was compelling narrative that we had a nice drenth It.
Was I said hi to you and then I went okay bye.
Yeah, I wasn't interested in you because you left.
Yeah.
Sorry, I abandoned you. I'm so sorry.
But that anyway, that was the first night at the dn Z. That was the first round of speeches. I believe tonight we're gon't split up. Somebody's going to go and then go over there, and me and Robert are going to be back in the streets.
Yeah.
I will report if anything of interest happens. It is the I believe Bill Clinton Obama Night. Jesus Chris, it's once again. The year is twenty twenty four. Is the Bill Clinton Obama Night.
It would be pretty funny if Bill Clinton got played on the stage by bad Leroy Brown.
All right, this is it happen? Think it happened year recording from Chicago, Illinois.
We'll see I did wuldn't walk all right, Jesus.
Fuck.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walls Little John didn't mention anything about sweat dripping off his balls.
He sure did not. And that's the greatest act of you know, amongst all of the genocide denial, it takes a lot of cowardice to really stand up in this crowd. But Little John refusing to talk about sweat dripping down his balls in the middle of the DNC was a horrible mistake here.
I'm sorry. I didn't know he was going to start that way.
I knew I was going to start that way. I think it was o pain. Garrison, do you know the song we're talking about?
Welcome to what happened here?
I'm Garrison Davis Lloyd with my bosses, Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans.
Very old, very old. Remember when Lil John was slightly not He was never really that transgressive. Little John's always been pretty family friendly.
I guess somebody somebody replied to the video I posted of Little John saying maybe the best lil And you know.
Ah, there's I have a soft spot in my heart for Lil Wayne, not that he was good, but because he's really funny, Like missus Officer, that's that's a fun song. That's a fun story about Way pretending he had sex with a police officer.
The Democratic National Convention continues inside Chicago, Illinois.
Lil Wayne not yet present, but maybe to night. People say Swift might show up soon.
Well, she she had a couple shows and she could potentially get here by tomorrow.
Okay, that's great, that's great. I was actually talk about Jonathan Swift. Oh okay, author of a modest proposal.
But yeah, but in my heart, I really don't think she's coming.
No, why would she would? What does she gained from that?
Yeah?
So Tuesday we spent the day split up, mostly with me and Robert going to a protest and Sophie entering the United Center to watch the lib Utopia unveil, complete with an appearance. So happy Lil John, I believe is what he's referred to as.
That is that is correct?
Thank you? Yes, just checking my source as someone currently wearing a mesh shirt. He is in your line of descendants, like this is one of your one of your Saint At ancestors. I don't know how I feel about that.
And we will we will get to the Little John antics uh, specifically with the State of Georgia, which made quite a show later on in the episode we will be talking about that, but first we will be talking about what me and Robert spent a good I don't know four hours yesterday doing.
I was out for closer to eight because I went out earlier to look at some stuff I went to. There was a pro Israel Free the Hostages event that I went to and looked around. Briefly, not a whole lot to say about it other than some art that I don't fully know how to think about yet. They had a massive one of the young women that was abducted by Hamas that very famously had like blood on her gray sweatpants. They had just like a massive, two
story tall pair of gray sweatpants covered in blood. But it wasn't really clear until you got up close what it was trying to be, So it was just kind of like it was odd, odd visuals for the event,
I'll say that, but mostly pretty tame. There was maybe thirty or forty people there, and that was about two three blocks down from the plan side of the protest that you and I went to, which was the Acenture Tower, which is apparently it's like a mall on the inside and a metro station and also several floors mini floors of office space. So I'm guessing that the Israeli Consolate is a couple of small offices in this big building.
Yeah, so there was a purchase plan for later this evening. As me and Sophie were going to get lunch, I saw.
Like Sophie and I.
I saw they both looked at me, deciding who I was going to give a dirty look to.
I know you were the United Kingdom and me correcting Garrison's grammar, was the German army marching into Belgium.
I saw a whole bunch of police vans driving through downtown Chicago on the way to the Israeli Consulate. And we showed up a few hours later for the for the protest planned that evening. Like usual, we tried to arrive early and there was a few kind of characters bumping around the area that a lot of media was just fascinated by.
Yeah, the start of it was there was the same There was had been a Nazi lady out at the protest the day before as well. She has like bright purplish hair carried and on the first day just a cardboard sign covered in racial slurs. Loved shouting the end word. Today she had a friend. They unveiled a sign. People confronted them.
It was like it was like a white genocide, white like white placement, great replacement type sign with a URL to a telegram channel, I believe.
Yeah, a channel. Yeah, I think she had a friend today, someone else.
It is shocking news.
Yeah, I mean they usually have at least one, right, maybe, and then uh, I mean kind of the at one point, sort of while we were all waiting around, because it was initially just a shitload of press, uh, some lookie loose from the local area, and a bunch of cops, a bunch of a bunch of private security, a lot of private security, mostly for the media. There's a fun game of spot the concealed handgun, because none of these
guys are very good at concealing their fucking handguns. But at one point I'm standing and talking to another media and I see this like massive circle of cameras fill up around, and so I'm wondering, Okay, maybe something's happened. I get over there, and I didn't even think to like stop myself from you know, using my outside voice. I just shouted as soon as I got close, oh fuck, it's the MyPillow guy, which is the least news anything could possibly be.
But for some reason there was like maybe like cameras.
It's just like huddled around this guy trying to get whatever picture or whatever.
Let him talk. Yeah, a couple of protesters kept engaging him about Gaza, which I just don't think that there's anything to be gained from engaging the MyPillow guy. With the exception of Garrison, the way you chose to engage the MyPillow guy.
I think there's really only one way to handle this, and well there's maybe two ways. You can just completely ignore him, which is probably probably probably the best. Ask what I did, because there's there's no reason to engage with this, there's no reason to give him what he wants. The other option is just to completely baffle him, just be really confusing. So I went up and I I didn't even ask a question.
I just I just said you said Mike first, which I left so funny.
I just let the listeners to know that after a fourteen hour day yesterday, I get I get back to the hotel. Garrison and Robert have had several drinks in Garrison is like.
Did you see my video?
Did you see my video?
And what was that video?
We'll play the audio here.
Skimmity Biden, skimmity Biden, skibbity Biden, givity skimmity Biden. So no, I was able to get Mike. You know, we're pretty close. How you guys talk now, it's around to say skimmity Biden, because that's the only way to handle these guys is just like just like just really, you're not even like annoying them, You're just kind of baffling.
Because all he wants.
Is attention, to say, his little piece and trying to attract whatever media attention, and you just got to kind of fuck with them.
And it's it's kind of a good sign that he did that, because this is not if you think about where he was in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, him showing up alone, no visible security escort to just kind of stand around before a protest and bullshit, is like, that's a man whose life has fallen apart, like he has nothing.
Left, no everything he was saying I'm able to hear him say at four am on five Yeah, and that's that was pretty much the little pre show circus, and you know, people started to trickle into the area slowly, you know, people in kefeas you know, protesters, medics started to slowly, slowly enter enter this little like you know block radius, and then very very suddenly, from like the opposite side of where everyone else was stationed at, we saw a group of maybe like fifty march in all
at the same time. Yeah, and this was kind of the start of the of the main of the main protests.
And I would say at that point there were maybe fifty protesters scattered around within the clumps of media, most of whom ran over and joined that group. So it was probably around one hundred or so, maybe maybe as many as one hundred and fifty.
And it probably grew to about like two hundred over the course of the next few hours, although they started to kind of bleed numbers as well. And I was I was taking notes on my little personal recorder during this time, and we put together a little kind of compilation to hear about what went down, and I'll probably cut in with some extra narration to kind of fill in the gaps, so to clarify. The audio you're about to hear was recorded over the course of like two
and a half hours. We've cut this down for efficiency and clarity. So some of the sections you're about to hear, you know, may have happened a minute or two apart, but they're just could be mushed together to kind of help the action move along a little bit faster, not including you know, the sections of the protest where there's ten minutes of nothing happening. Here's a first time look at what happened during the protest at the Israeli Consulate.
Moving back, all right, it's just from the it's just past seven. The behind enemy lines Israeli Consulate protest basically just started. A whole bunch of people in some form of block showed up in front of the building, started marching up the street.
Very quickly.
A three or four five layered line of Chicago PD came to block Clinton Street, so the march could not advance there now retreating back towards the building, and they might try to march the other direction. I'm going to be on the move here, trying to take notes as this progresses. A central tower is kind of a tricky spot for this sort of protest, Although it does house
the Israeli Consulate. From the outside, there's no obvious indicators that this building is linked to the Israeli government, and it's about two miles away from the DNC, so this can be very little impact on DNC attendees. All the way over here in the West Loop area of Chicago, Chicago, ped is set up across the other street as well, blocking both ways in essentially kettling this entire protest. There's a loud speaker, people are talking in front of the building.
The purple haired wig lady from before has moved her Nazi banner closer to this core of protesters right in front of the entrance of the building housing the Israeli consulate. All right, some of the protesters just announced that they have a couple of speakers that are going to talk in front of the Israeli Constant building. As people are now sandwiched in between two streets right in front of
the entrance. Speeches discussed the genocide in Gaza and the US arm steels sending weapons and bombs to Israel as part of continuing US imperialism. As the speech is carried on, more and more police began to arrive.
All right, it is seven.
About nine or so white vans just showed up with tons of chicaga pad in ryagear, helmets, gas masks, now thicker sleeves, not just the blue button ups that the regular cops wear. All right, we're gonna run into a line of police. People have banners, bring the war home, shut down the DNC for Gaza.
Palestine flags.
As they are marching towards a massive line of riot cops. There's too much media in the way, see and a clash has started. Pushing up against lines. Police pulling apart the signs and banners. Sounds familiar, I bet to anyone who was at twenty twenty. The first clash lasted about a minute, as protesters tried to march forwards into the street and police pushed them back. I was off to the side, but the sheer amount of cameras and media in the middle of this scuffle prevented either side from
gaining or losing much ground. All right, there was kind of a little bit of a back and forth. The protest line got pushed back slightly, but still in the middle of the Clinton Street, protesters telling the press to get out of the way, as many press are in between. As press moved slowly out of the way, police were able to successfully push the protest back Chicago pedis from
redirecting some of their push towards the south. Now looks like some of the protesters were trying to move onto the sidewalk to get out of this mass, massive sandwich of police, and there's maybe three or four cops trying to prevent them from moving on the sidewalk. Here we'll see if they get past. Police have tackled some people. Police are going in for.
A lot of arrests.
It's very combative.
Police with batons out, attacking people, hitting on the ground, tackling them. Police preventing all forwards movement on the sidewalk as well, not just the street. People are people are trying to get out and police a police are really trying to trap them.
Police are squishing. We can't, we can't move dude, we can't move back.
No lassoom, we can't, we can't move back.
Police are telling people to move back into nothing. Wow, they have us trapped by this building.
Eventually, police realize that they cannot push all fifty people into a flat wall and eased off, directing people back in front of the consulate. Police is pushing us into a very tiny corner a small line of police is separating two crowds, mostly on the sidewalk.
All right, they're pushing us back towards the building.
Action now paused for a few minutes as both sides figured out their next move. Protesters chanted for the release of detained comrades.
Let them go, let them.
Go, all right.
Some of the crowd is trying to regroup, as police today to push people off of the sidewalk and back into the street. I guess the crowd has kind of been split now into four sections, police keeping them separate, not letting them reconvene. It's the section in front of the building, There's a section on the corner, this section behind the police line, and there's a section close to where people tried to march that it's now been cut off from the rest of the crowd, So we have
these kind of four groups. A smaller group is reforming in the street in front of the building. This is kind of the section that got trapped by the building as the rest of the march tried to move forward, and some of the people from the side have linked up with them as well, but still mostly kind of four sections separated up by police.
People chanting to get back in the street.
We have little squads or AG's linking up with their mates again, linking arms, holding hands, kind of regrouping. Right now, Chicago p D is kind of doing the same. They're reforming their line, going back more into the middle of the street. If they did get any detainments or arrests, probably sorting those out right now.
As they decide what to do next.
During this loll period, I was able to hear a decent amount of police comms chatter coming from their walkie talkies as the police decided on.
Their next move.
All right, I just heard on police comms that they're gonna be asking for media to leave. Interesting, they are calling for transport vands, So if they're going to start doing arrests, they might try to get media to leave first then really move in. It sounds like to me on the comms they're calling out specific people to do
targeted arrests. On the comms, they're calling out specific outfits, specific what people are wearing, what people are holding, to move in and do targeted arrests on the crowd.
Some of the descriptions are very general.
Like black hoodie, red hat, that kind of stuff. I really did not want to get a face full of mace, So as soon as I saw police carrying mace cans, I perhaps a bit prematurely decided to don my full face gas mask, which I then took off like ten minutes later as it became clear that we weren't in immediate danger of amazing, Well, I don't think I'm gonna see a Barack Obama today. There's been enough of a pause that the anticipation keeps growing. Does everyone knows what's
about to happen? We're just waiting for it to happen, all right. The file Time protesters that are fund of the building are not moving towards the Israeli counter protesters on the other side. As things started to heap back up, some folks in the crowd opted to exit the area via a small EVAC route on the northwest corner of
the street. Considering the talk of targeted arrests on the police scanner, police may have been eyeing up certain people in the crowd who then got the hint about what's about to go down next.
You see that blocked the just bounce?
Yeah, no, I think they can spot that they were about to get targeted for arrests. I think so because they were being followed up by some of some of the sergeants, because.
I honestly I can't name any law breaking other than quote unquote shoving with the paw. Sure, but I mean, you know they can get you on something.
The protest did not stay still for too long, and a little less than an hour since the last big confrontation, the crowd once again attempted to march.
All right, it is nearly eight twenty.
The crowd that remained in front of these early constant building is now moving up again towards Clinton Street to re engage the confrontation that happened nearly an hour ago. Look, there's less cameras in between the two factions, but not no cameras. The crowd of protesters is still approaching, and they're turning.
They are turning. They turned down Clinton Street.
This is the movement they tried to make before, but police prevented them from doing so.
And now they're so far able to exit.
The section of the protest that was still facing down the riot line split up into two smaller groups and then made this same movement down the sidewalk away from the police. The people that were traveling down the sidewalk and Clinton have now reformed on Moreau Street.
And they are now marching.
The police are now caught behind the protesters in the march, but sure enough police quickly arrived to contain the mobile protest. All right, bike cops have beat most of the crowd to the intersection, but they're still slowly arriving. The intersection up here is a T shape, so only two directions to go. Please are gonna try to get them to take a rite?
It looks like.
Yep, all right, more please catch it up.
I was triakon here.
Bike cops coming in from both sides. Oh, this is quite the pickle. Unfortunately, because of the T shape of this intersection, this is now a little bit of a tighter pinch. They can still get out and be a one path on the sidewalk, but they might prefer a confrontation with some of these police.
We'll see.
The march paused at this T shaped intersection for a few minutes as they decided their next move. All right, the crowd is standing in front of this very thin lineup bike comps. The police line's not very thick because they had to move kind of impromptu to adjust to the movements of the crowd. Small groups of the protests keep peeling off. They're slowly bleeding numbers. People chanting let
us through as the police yelled to move back. Police have the remaining crowd in a pretty tight squeeze the moment. Smaller groups keep peeling off, but now the remaining march is moving forward as the bike cops slowly back up. Looks like most of the crowd has been moving onto the sidewalk to move down the street. They don't really have many more moves to make. There's just a saturation of police in this area that the cops can adapt to any movement this shrinking crowd makes. Police are piling
into the sidewalk. Police are making arrests. Please are doing target arrests. They're grabbing people on the sidewalk. Numbers of arrests are being made. There's at least at least five from where I'm standing. Police ordering media out of the way on the side. On the side, protesters are now moving back on the sidewalk, backtracking.
Away from the police.
The remaining crowd attempted to move away from the police who were making arrests on the sidewalk but the only way left to move was back where they just came from.
People are linking up with their AG's.
Arm in arm, trying to move through this very, very tricky environment. Right now, there's so everywhere we go, I see a new a new battalion of cops. People really just have nowhere to go. There's just police everywhere. We're just at this point moving in circles, but not like the regular march circles, just on the sidewalk, going back and forth, backtracking, looping around.
They're trying to find somewhere just to get out of this area.
Mostly out of options on where to go. The protest entered a small patio terrace on the corner of the street. Protesters are now getting into the terrace of this building at five point twenty five West Monroe.
That's probably not gonna end great. At this point.
Police have the remaining much smaller crowd maybe fifty, squeezed in in this little building terrace corner. They are not letting any protesters leave. A shoving match just started. Police are moving in and they're tackling, pushing people on the ground. It's almost nine pm.
Police have one arrest. Now they just drig someone out by.
Their hair from the crowd that is currently just completely kettled. For the first time tonight, they're providing no evacuation ruts for protesters. They are trapped on this street corner, completely surrounded, not letting anyone leave. Eventually, a small hole opened up,
letting a few protesters leave this kettled patio. Robert was able to exit with this group, but many people were not able to make it through, and this little patio was where a number of arrests were able to take place as others slowly dispersed throughout the West Loop neighborhood
of Chicago. According to NBC, the police superintendent Larry Sneeling, which is kind of a great name for a cop, praised his officers for a quote unquote, showing restraint when no one else did, saying that they quote did an excellent job responding to violence and vandalism. He made a similar comment on Wednesday, saying that the protest quote showed up with the intention of committing acts of violence and
vandalism unquote. Now, there was no vandalism that was actually committed during this protest.
That did not happen.
I'm not sure how the superintendent was able to infer the intention of this protest exactly as no vandalism took place and the only violence that happened was when police started pushing people who were trying to march forwards in the street.
Wow, Garrison, that was a gripping story that we're going to talk about.
After these services, services, products, okay, products and services.
Yeah, well, maybe we can't know. It's impossible to say we're back, so I don't know. I guess we should probably just kind of give some final thoughts on how we felt about this protest. My overwhelming impression, and I really am not saying this to try to be mean, is that the crowd came with a lot of rhetoric about this is the protest that matters, We are going to shut down the DNC, we are going to throw
our bodies upon the machinery of empire. And then after the first couple of hand to hand clashes with the police, which were mostly just kind of shoving, people just wanted to get home. They wanted to leave, and most of the night was us following people attempting to get home and disperse and not being allowed to buy the police every time they would like do a big push in where they're all shouting move in unison. They're telling you to go back, They're telling you to do this or
you'll get arrested. And there's always you're always surrounded on every side by cops and you know, sometimes by gaggles of media. But like it was impossible to comply, Like I, I can't say that I saw any law breaking really aside from assuming the cops called an unlawful assembly, which I did not hear. I don't know how you would have heard in most of the product protests, but assuming they did, as that's the law breaker.
Yeah, there was no like property damage, there was no there was no no real right activity. Yeah, you know, people people tried to march and police prevented them with their bodies yep, and you know there's a confrontation that ensues, like at that point where where the two groups meet. But besides that, it was it was people trying to march and the cops that prevented them from doing so.
And it was a lot. I got stuck at one point with a group of twenty or so people, a handful of protesters, couple of media, and then maybe a dozen or more, Like I think they were locals. I guess it's possible they were tourists, but people who had just seen the march going down the st and thought that they might follow along and watch for a little
And then the cops moved in so fast. We all got walled off in the courtyard of a hotel that didn't actually have street access, but it wasn't clear that it didn't, and the police repeatedly said they were going to arrest all of us. I had like a discussion with one about my credentials because he was like, those are press credential. Eventually they got a cop who could read, but another journalists got arrested. I think there were at least four arrested.
Even at least four journalists were at least.
Four journalists were arrested. Yeah, because after I got out, they let most of the people in our kettle out, but they pulled one guy with a helmet that said press on It out of the kettle. I think his name was Josh Pacheco. I believe it was Josh that I was filming. Josh was definitely arrested and he is going to be raising money because his camera was broken. They tossed his cameras lens first onto the ground and
did significant damage. If you want to find Josh's info online at JP Underscore OTG you can find his information. I'm sure he'll be doing a fundraiser at some point.
And obviously there were many more protesters arrested. The actual final number is kind of up in the air. Police are saying that twenty two people at least were arrested, and ENLG is saying it's closer to a devan.
Being the National Lawyer's Guild, they show up at protests to protect people's rights primarily in the event of arrest.
Yeah, so there's kind of some confusion here on how many people were actually arrested. I'll try to get confirmations and I'll add that in later tonight. I'll also look for a bail fund. Yeah, to donate as well, because it is always unfortunate when journalists are arrested, but it's equally as unfortunate when people who are protesting, especially for a cause like this, get arrested as well.
Like this is I think something that it's worthstating.
Especially since again I can't say anything anyone did to precipitate arrest. It's not even like they were closing down streets because the police had closed down every street they were on before they showed up. I think the police very clearly were under orders to keep things peaceful as long long as possible, largely because they didn't want the DNC and the city government didn't want the embarrassment of anything really ugly. So there were no weapons used. There
was no mace used. I didn't even really see the sticks used much.
They were mostly used to like push. There was very little in terms of like like like overhand hitting.
But they didn't need any of that stuff because there was no point at which they had less than a two to one numerical advantage, usually more like three or four.
And the people that were organizing this protest in the in the days prior where like announcing part of their intention was to specifically get beat up by police and like beat up badly and have this like generate news coverage, you know, this slight Stare organization as well, Yeah, invoking Chicago nineteen sixty eight, and police largely like denied them
that option. And you know, many of the participants also options to not continue, you know, an hour's long physical confrontation with police and instead opted to try to move around them, try to evade them, instead of trying to
you know, push through police lines. You know, there was a few points where the the police lines that were blocking the street was very thin after people started to move around this kind of area, around around the Consulate building, and then you know, other times the police lines were very thick, but consistently people opted to not continue a long physical engagement with police.
Yeah, it was a discretion is the better part of valor kind of night, and I think that's the point at which the police decided we are going to arrest people. There was a degree to which it felt like they were just kind of like trying out tactics. A lot of what they were doing was splitting up the crowd then doing targeted arrests and kind of separating, calving off chunks of it. I don't know the whole thing. I kind of couldn't stop myself from being drawn back to
the whole time. It's like, what is the actual utility of this really? Because it didn't get attention, not much. You know, there's some news coverage and stuff, but it's not a Chicago sixty eight moment. I don't think this is going to move any needle for anybody, and obviously that's the goal, right is to have some kind of
an impact. I mean everyone was saying, like the stated goal at all of these protests shut down the DNC, and the only time that kind of happened was at the less radical protest policed protests yesterday, right when largely kind of by accident. I don't know like that. I'm
not trying to be like down on anyone. It just is one of those what when you're seeing the sheer weight of police and the numbers of protesters being generated is one hundred or two hundred, it just feels like you're asking people to get fucked up and damage their lives in a situation in which that's unlikely to actually lead to any of the things they want to see.
Hey, this is gare cutting in again.
The exact number of arrests is still a little bit unclear, but we have a clearer idea than what we did a few hours ago. The official number as of Wednesday evening is that fifty six people were arrested.
I'm going to quote from the AP.
Quote thirty of the people detained by police were issue citations for disorderly conduct. According to Chicago Police, one person was arrested on a felony charge of resisting police, while nine were charged with misdemeanors including disorderly conduct, resisting officers, battery, assault, and criminal damage to property. Police said, unquote for the record, neither myself nor Robert witnessed any criminal damage to property.
I guess to kind of conclude a protest that's going to actually like move the Needler change, anything has to overwhelm like the capacity of the state system to deal with it. It has to be something that the state is not. We saw this in twenty twenty, right like just over I'm just talking about Portland. Just like overall, the George Floyd uprising was beyond what the state was prepared to handle for at least a sizable chunk, especially of the early days. It like overwhelmed the capacity of
the resources the state had to respond adequately. The state, at least everything I've seen so far at the DNC has been perfectly prepared for everything that people brought to bear. And that's really the summary I've got.
We're gonna go on a quick break and then be back to hear from Sophie about the Obama festival inside the Democratic National Convention. All right, we are back and as as this protest was happening in this area around like I think it's called the West Loop, Sophie was inside the DNC and there was also people similar to the first day of the DNC who snuck in like banners into the DNC and unfurled them like pro Palestine disarming as royal banners. I believe the banner from last
night just read free Palestine and Sophie. What was it like in there exactly? Was it easier to get into than the than the day previous?
Well, it was more, it was, It was it was is what I'll say. It wasn't as organized is the R and C, but it was. It was better than the day prior.
That's good.
A win is a win at this point.
But yeah, the energy was electric, as I heard multiple people say throughout the night in the unassigned press area that I was.
In, it felt like, at least from watching online afterwards, it gave really big, like two thousand and eight energy.
Yeah.
Yeah, obviously, you know, Michelle Obama Barack Obama are both speaking, so that that kind of carries with it.
A little bit.
But but even just like the general vibe just felt it felt very two thousand and eight, like that style of like two thousand and eight optimism.
Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that.
I've been asked a lot like what the energy is compared to the rn C, and like the rn C was more like a WWE event and this was more like a you know, B level pop star concert, sure where everyone was very excited to be there, where I only knew a couple of the songs. Sure, that was that was the general of But the main speed section of the event started off with Center Majority leader Chuck Schumer.
And I watched his speech. It was not very good.
He came out and and was what some would describe as dancing on stage.
He was quesetable. His speech was very like robotic. Yeah it was. He was not good. Well, he's the head of the dim Crypto Caucus, so like he's part robot.
But it was like people were not super into him. He was whatever. But then Bertie Sayers came up and I was actually surprised at the crowd was as into him as.
They were, but not super into No, no, no, don't.
Get me wrong with nothing like nothing like the Obamas later in the night.
Nothing even like AOC, it seems.
No.
They definitely loved AOC a lot, a lot more than Bernie. I enjoyed his speech.
Yeah, he gave like one of the more like economically sound speeches talking about actual issues facing working people.
Correct.
I would say, you know, a lot of the other journalists around me were talking during that time. There was not They were not thoroughly paying attention to him, which was interesting to know.
It was the same speech that he's been giving since twenty sixteen. Essentially, I feel like, unfortunately, the economic situation in the States has not changed all that much.
I feel like Bertie Sands has been giving the same of speech his entire career.
Sure, Yeah, and like the same stuff he was calling for back then, with the with the one percent and the billionaire class and healthcare and all these things that are still real issues. And in some ways, I feel like they were more talked about back in like, you know, twenty seventeen, and the fact that they aren't just talked about now is maybe, you know, to some degree, like a failing.
But no, he gave the speech that he was expected to make, and.
Yeah, he called for an end to his words, horrific war in Gaza and called for a ceasefire, one of the few this entire week that we've we've heard actually say that. AC said it yesterday.
Well and and AOC's specific line was crediting Harris for working around the clock to make a ceasefire deal.
It was specifically like the phrasing that AOC used. Yeah, I don't buy that, super well.
No, well, I'm not afraid to is that.
Because I was at the protest, I had the intention of just watching all the speeches in my hotel afterwards, and I got up to my room, I turned on CNN. They were replaying the whole night, and after Bernie's speech, I completely fell asleep. Well and then and then I woke up at eight am. CNN was still on my television.
That is so cursed.
I turned it off and I went back to Staarson.
You had some nightmares on spooling.
I don't know what was being subjected to my sleeping body.
You're never recovering from.
This after Bernie, you know, i'd say, the only other person until we get to the second gentleman, Doug m Hoff and then the Obama's liater that I was you know, the governor of Illinois, Pritzker.
Pritzker.
He he just was very very well received, obviously by by the crowd.
He's one of the democrats favorite men, one of their favorite boys.
Early on, a favorite for the VP slot. Yeah, he's very.
Good at attacking Trump and his speeches. He said Trump is only rich in one thing, stupidity in the crowd.
What fair role.
Yeah, he was definitely like the most like a mean out of many of the speech kids.
I would say though, like last night was the roasting nights last year was the roasting Okay, Okay, for sure they did Bamba made a dick Joe.
Oh, Bama made a dick John. We'll get to We'll get to that.
But yeah, Also, just like visually, they have like those light up things that you have at concerts, you know I do. Before I get into taking this back into time to two thousand and eight, talk a little.
Bit about the role call sure sure, And this is where they formerly like ceremonially nominate Harris and Walls to be the president and vice presidential nominees.
Correct, And let's just say it was a little bit different than the the RNC. At the RNC, you have Speaker Johnson just telling the delegates that we need to keep order and there's a proper way to do things. And then you had people from each state come up and make speeches like this, finding liberty.
Since sixteen seventy where the revolutionary or all was blown.
We're in twenty sixteen.
Donald Trump won his first primary victory ever. Lets rang in the trunk Carol of American history, the Great State of South Carolina, crown cass all of its foots for President Donovan K.
Trump and on the flip side at the DNC, and I had several friends that were watching on TV say it was translating very well on TV. It was. It was a little bit more chaotic in person, and certain states didn't match the same energy.
But each state had had a song.
There was a whole playlist thing and that is now going around and the energy was of a I would say teen Choice.
Awards, Tamala is Brandt.
It was eighteen Choice Awards, vibe with Garrison. The State of Georgia doing this.
The wow, So that's very cool, Sophie.
I will say the state of Oregon did.
Not well, No, that's because organ is allergic to fun Oregan in Wisconsin.
Boy, howdy did they not bring the good vibes.
Well, that's because all I can do in Wisconsin is drink, and all in organ you can do is smoke weed.
So there you go.
After the roll call, they cut to VP Harris and Governor Tim Walls streaming live from Milwaukee.
The Pfizer Forum where we all suffered through last month.
Yes, that was where the RNC was held last month, to be like, look at us, Donald.
We're able to fill both venues at the same time.
We are so hip and cool, and of course the crowd lost their minds.
They ate it up.
They love her, They love her so honestly pretty good.
Burn, it's it's it's it's not a bad this was You're getting kind of a glimpse. Ever since, like the Republicans are weird stuff, they've been realizing that it's actually really useful to be kind of mean in politics. Yeah, for so long this party has been like linked to when they go low, we go high. You know, we're gonna we're gonna make a compromise. We're gonna we're gonna we're going to reach across the aisle.
Yeah, I mean, last night it was not they go low, we go high.
It was definitely they go low, we also go low. And you know that was interesting to observe because the crowd loved it.
It plays very well.
It plays very well.
Before the Obabas, we got a speech from the second Gentleman, which is very fun to say, Kablo Harris's husband, Doug.
Doug, I like that, let's.
Keep try that. You can't not.
But they introed him with a video from his son and it was very TV movie of the Week, partwarming. And then he came out on stage and introduced his dad and there was hugging lah lah Lah, and the crowd was allowed, as it did Ben that night, and I was like.
Wow, I love families, but I was like, wow, the crowd is so loud.
And then like ten minutes later, Michelle Obama came out and I was like, the crowd was very quiet.
For Doug impoff.
In comparison, she is by far the most popular Democrat in the world.
There is an Obama derangement syndrome. It ignites something in millennials and makes them really love the Obama. They really love their mamas, lose their minds.
Doug's speech primarily focused on painting a picture of his wife as a family, family woman and talking about how great she is with their with their kids. He has two kids from his first marriage and they call her Mama La.
But she's not a real mom, you know, Robert Roberts. Look, I've been I've been listening to a lot of Matt. This is a real scandal. They're not her born children. You know, you can't adopt kids.
You gotta stop listening to Matt Walsh podcasts when you're doing your workout.
I do love that the right has entirely chosen the line of attack on Kamala to be that like she's a fake mom. She's a fake mom. She raised Pamala. You know, because we're quoting Matt Wall. Oh okay, that's how he says.
It's absolutely by the way Matt Walsh was like in a disguise. Also, they're all in disguise walking around the DNC doing something that doesn't matter.
See that Matt Wall showed up in his like what is a woman liberal disguise with the with the little ponytails.
Cowardly Harry, I show up. I should have kind of it.
Well, my disguise just being a regular black suit, which I also wear regularly all the time. I'm pretty sure Walsh was trying to get some extra clips for his new like how Racism Isn't a real documentary that they're playing ads for in theaters in front of like queer and trans movies, like specifically to like fuck with people.
So I'm pretty sure they're they're here collecting some kind of some kind of some kind of punts for that, because he had a little lav mic attached to his attached to his lapel, so he's he's doing some kind of hijinks.
But Yeah, it's interesting to me how much of the attacks on Kamala right now are focused on her family not being a real family. It strikes me as kind of a sign of desperation because I'm not saying it
get any traction. It's the same as like the Tim Wall stuff, where it's like nothing sticking that they're trying right now, and I think they've just gotten so far into their own fever swamps that they have completely forgotten how to connect with a hit, which is is an interesting place for the Republicans to be because that's all they have.
Yeah, Duck read the teleprompter.
He it's fun being able to see the teleprompter because you can see where they have bolded words or underlied words or capitalized words, and any bold or capitalized word.
He really went for it, and I personally thought that was funny to observe. But the crowd liked him, and I was like, wow, they really like Doug em Hoff. Wow. And then I was like, no, that's not who they.
Actually like, because then Michelle Obama came out and the crowd standing ovations. I can't even tell you it was louder than like I've seen Beyonce concert, same exact amount of loudness, but yeah, it was just very two thousand and eight, very twenty twelve. Her speech was incredible.
What did she actually talk about?
Nothing, but it was incredible, is what I'm saying.
She just basically talked about how important it is to do things without saying anything. She was able to resonate with every single person in the crowd. Every single person in the crowd was just enamored.
What's been so many bad months in a row of news and just getting constantly down in every news cycle and war and genocide overseas, and a lot of people as soon as Biden stepped down, it was like a rubber band breaking, and everyone just went from what this this was supposed to not happen as a convention. There were serious efforts by the DNC when Biden was still a candidate to like, we don't even need to do a real convention because like, what is the benefit of
sticking him in front of people for longer? And they broke a pinata full of party energy and that's that's what this has all been inside and honestly not a lot of energy outside in the streets, you know, energy from the people who were there. But like, I think there would have been much larger crowds if Biden had stayed.
I one hundred percent agree with you.
You know, Michelle Obama brought back, you know, one of the key things from two thousand and eight, Hope. She said, Hope is making a comeback, and the crowd lost it.
Yeah.
I think that's really part of what made last night have so much of that two eight energy beyond, you know, like all of like all of like the pop songs beyond, like the Obamas. It's like this this messaging of like there's actually there's actually like a good future to look towards, like Hope, you know that's.
As long as we defeat Donald Trump.
Sure hope is available.
Was the main theme of the night, and then she introduced President Obama. He came out hammed it up, told his little jokes.
He was so excited.
You could tell he was like so excited to be able to tell.
His material to that largeer crowd. He was like very excited to be up there.
We got yes we can chance, then later yes she can chance. At one point the crowd started chanting thank you Joe, as they do when Joe Biden was referenced, and he directly said that the torch has been passed. There we go, and that is generally the summary of the night. Lib Topia, as I'm calling the DNC was very excited.
Yeah, that sounds thrilling. It's really making me optimistic about the future.
Yeah, I mean I am more optimistic of the future than I was. But also what I do foresee from this is that we are heading into a future assuming the dims win, especially if they win by a sizeable margin, where they get meaner to everyone. The thing they learned from Trump is you should call people names and be shit, and you know that'll get turned on the left because the left it already has, Yeah, as it already has.
But also the left is going to continue not having much of an impact on the broader situation until people have any sort of ability to actually get folks out and have a clear understand like a clear plan for something to do that the system cannot easily easily contain
and withstand right like little marches and demonstrations. Not only is the police prepared for them, but the Democratic Party, I think is increasingly prepared for how you isolate and sort of deflect a from that sort of thing, like a lot of what we've seen on the floor at the DNC with the Yeah, we'll have Bernie come up and he'll talk about a ceasefire. We'll have AOC have or ceasefire Led Joe, we'll say that the protesters have
a point. You should listen to them. Now, you're not going to He's not going to draw any other attention if you were to come down an attack or you know, the protesters for you know, whatever bad piece of messaging or something happened outside that actually does draw some attention, you know, Like the DIMS have not just been smart in what they've signaled, but in how they've made sure that that really hasn't become part of the story of the DNC, and heading into this that was a huge
fear a lot of people had, and a huge expectation a lot of people had. It was part of the planning that a lot of the protests that came in with that we are going to disrupt and damage this kind of coronation process in order to make it very clear that the Democratic Party has not made any meaningful
movement on Gaza. And I think what we've seen here is the start up a replicable strategy that, unless there's an alteration in how people are organizing, is going to allow the DIMS to continue to sideline radical voices pushing for things that matter.
Yeah, and I think one trend that we're going to see continuing, especially if someone like Kamala wins. I'm starting to see a growing kind of reclamation of liberal patriotism.
Yes, there were USA signs last.
Night and USA chance and I think this will be something I'll probably talk a little bit more tomorrow or the next day after like Kamala's like big speech, and if they do win, I think this I think there actually is a decent bit of like two thousand and eight energy and like, yes, people are excited, there's the quote unquote vibe shift. But things didn't go great after Obama was elected, famously, like everything just kind of like the hope was mostly unfounded, like a.
Lot of war crimes.
There's a lot of war crimes and just not that much good stuff. Yeah, I mean, the the ACA mattered. There are some things that got better after it, but the whole fight to get there was so dispiriting, and I think that that kind of broke Obama the actual like interested in pushing radical change, and then the Republicans absolutely swept midterms to such a catastrophic extent, and I'd foresee Kamala getting stuck in the same thing that Obama did in terms of like it is actually very hard
to make any substantive progress that helps people. I don't know that she's going to have to deal with a Republican party that is capable of doing what the Republicans did during like the Tea Party menters. That's just that's a very different Republican party and the one that exists now, the one that exists now has been lobotomized by Trump, and well he's going if he's alive, He's going to run in twenty twenty eight. Yeah.
But this this kind of this growing reclamation of the patriotism we've already seen it with how like you know, the NFL is gone woke, all these things that have kind of been more affiliated with like you know, conservatism or like you know, like traditional Americana is slowly getting swept up more with like the liberal majority, and you know, those types of things that have kind of been gate kept from liberals for a while, especially especially that kind
of style of patriotism. And this isn't this isn't necessarily a good thing. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that this is going to be a trend that I think is going to be increasing, and it will also lead to, I think a bit more open hostility from liberals towards people that are more progressive, towards people more on the left, especially protesters, especially protesters who are not just doing protests that are big parades and marches.
And we've already seen that here with a decent bit of conflict between you know, more radical attendees and the big coalitions with their safety teams. We were seeing a lot of fighting over you know, who is more justified, what's more valid? What should you be allowed to do at a protest like this? And those debates are going to continue. I think we're seeing more pressure on that front,
even from liberals as well. And that's kind of the big the big trends that I'm seeing right now as we're about like halfway through the DNC.
Yeah, well, I'm going to finally go to the DNC tonight, so that'll be fun.
I'll show you around.
Yeah, you can show me around. We're gonna meet Daddy Walls. I'll take my anti PTSD meds, all overdose on those meds. You can take me to the hospital. It's gonna be a nice night, Sophie.
The good news is there's two more days of this.
All right, last news I've heard in a while.
I'm turning off this record.
I'm going to go leap out of the window. Yeah all right, bye bye.
Bye, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast being recorded in Garrison's hotel room, which is thirty percent the shopping bags that they got from.
The Nazi clothing.
No, you can't say that.
You cannot say that.
Well, look, they don't they used to be the Nazi clothing store. Now they just make suits right right.
Buddy, why are you trying to cancel?
It's a nice blazer. That white blazer you had on last night looks good. It's a good blazer. It's it's a good look. He's a good lace. Anyway, we're back, We're still in Chicago. We are all just exhausted.
I feel like death.
I am missing the unhurried, relaxed pace of war zone journalism, full nights of sleep, long rides and humvies.
Even the RNC felt a little bit more male.
Yeah, I'll tell you what it is.
They were so unbelievably scheduled at the RNC, where like you knew nobody was going to be speaking past ten pm.
It was done by ten pm.
We were safely back in our very very bad hotel.
And the actual physical setup of the event was more. For one thing, it's smaller. There's more people here, so that makes but it was also kind of I think, better laid out for walking and stuff.
I agree, everything is very spread out here.
The entrances here to it especially take a lot longer to get into. Now. I think that some of that's not even on the DNC. It's just the fact that the DNC has the president and vice president at it, and so it's going to have more security. But yeah, it is just fucking exhausting. And I guess probably the main reason why Garrison and I are so tired is every day has been many thousands of steps of walking around Chicago with different protests. So we'll be talking about
all of that. But we wanted to get into the episode by kind of doing some horse race stuff, like actually talking about what are we seeing and polling what are we seeing in like viewership numbers. So Sophie wanted to start with one of our favorite topics, the popularity of the various vice presidential candidates.
Yeah, and like you know, national polls find that, like still that both vice presidential nominees are pretty much fighting to make themselves known to the US voters. But as of this week, and this is before Walls's speech last night, so they haven't come back with a poll just yet on that part of this week, Walls is viewed more favorably than Advanced, with twenty seven percent of US adults saying Vance is favorable. Forty four percent find him unfavorable.
Compared to thirty six percent who think Walls is favorable and twenty five percent who find him unfavorable. And interesting to note, more Democrats are supportive of Walls sixty two percent than Republicans of Vance fifty seven percent, which is.
Wild, but also very consistent with what we saw at the RNC, where Like at the Heritage Foundation event, which Vance is supposed to be their man, no one would say a nice thing at him. Like at the Heritage Foundation event, I could not hear a good word about JD.
Vance the night of his speech, Whereas the sheer number of dims that I've seen with Coach Walls signs last night, including people like walking up to and interacting with folks at the uncommitted demonstration in front of the Convention Center, was like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, Like, I haven't seen any JD.
Vans people genuinely liked Tim Walls versus I don't think I heard a single person at the RNC give any inclination that they deeply liked JD. Vans, Particularly when he was speaking, people were very much asleep.
Very bored.
It's I mean, it's reinforced that so far outside of Biden's stepping down. Picking walls is the best decision I've seen the DIMS make this year.
He got a great reaction from the crowd last night.
Yeah, so I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of what we're seeing and polling. At least according to Nate Silver's analysis, there's a tiny tick down between Tuesday and Wednesday and commalist chances Visa v. Trump just based on some poles that had come out. All of that's kind of it's you can't really tell if there's going to be a convention bump until after the convention, so one way or the other, I wouldn't read too
much into that. What is kind of worth reading into is is the comparative popularity of the DNC televised speeches with the RNC, And so far from Monday through Wednesday, the DNC is ahead, and on Tuesday in particular, they were well ahead with Barack Obama and Michelle both speaking. That got something like five million more viewers than the comparative night at the RNC, which is a really significant
and all of these is obviously beating twenty twenty. It's kind of unclear the biggest night for the RNC was Thursday, So we'll see if Kamala can crack the twenty eight or twenty nine million viewers that Trump got the height of his event, but so far a sizeable like maybe fifteen to twenty percent edge for the DIMS in terms of viewership. And obviously you have to keep in mind that like half of the people listening to any convention
are not necessarily supporters of that cannonet. They're just people who want to be informed. But it furthers the narrative that there is a lot of energy behind the DIMS right now, that kind of like vibe thing that people have been.
Talking about and speaking of vibes, speaking of vibes, Boy howdy.
We wanted to end this segment before we get into the pro Palestine protests and the uncommitted sit in that's still going on at the convention center by talking just one more time about jd Vance, who, while all of this is going on, yesterday, as Tim Wallas was preparing his speech at the DNC, jd Vance visited a donut shop, and we're just going to play you audio of him talking to employees at the donut shop trying to trying to get a photo opportunity or a good video clip.
The zoom has come to tell thank you for let us coming here.
Okay, well sorry, okay, yeah, she doesn't want to be on film, guys, so just cut her out of anything.
Appreciate that man of Jade Dance American vice President.
They see it.
Okay, I'm years the game answer man.
Okay, okay, good, how about you, sir?
And then almost two.
Years okay, good, helps to everything.
Yeah, a lot of glaze to here, some sprinkle stuff, somebody sending the roles. Just my experience as play for a round four years, about four years.
Okay, how have you been here?
Okay?
Good?
Quite literally nobody has ever been worse at interacting them beings?
What is wrong with good?
Okay, good? Good? Yeah.
That was by the way in Georgia.
Oh Georgia, great, great. I'm JD.
Vance. I'm running for vice president.
Okay, okay. If I wanted to win Georgia, that was Trump. JD.
Fance is the last man I would send to the state of Georgia.
I'm JD Vance. Oh God, but I'm JD Vance.
Okay, okay, all right.
It was like that SNL Pete Davidson skit where he just goes.
He just orders a random assortment of dome.
That's how everyone should react to JD.
Vance. Okay, Like if he loses, that's going to be the rest of his life. Is him showing up places going I'm JD Vance and people going, all right.
Please stay away from my Childrenyody, you're about to tell me that you can't be within one hundred meters.
Of a school. Yeah, seriously, sow that beard looks anyway. Ads, here's some ads. We're back and yeah. So the protests have continued. Garrison and I nearly got arrested during a kettle that wound up being about sixty It looked like people who were both sighted and arrested. Most of those people cited and released on the scene. A couple about two dozen or so actually arrested, including four members of
the press. Pretty nasty scene. Yesterday was very different. There was a protest march that moved up to the gates of the convention and then marched back. There were a couple of moments where like police would grab people that happened at the train station and detain them, but ultimately did not significant numbers of arrests, at least from what I saw, and from talking to people, it did sound
like they were mostly kind of detaining and releasing. We had not intended to do more protests last night, just because the first two nights were supposed to be the largest, and I had not even been to the DNC until last afternoon actually passed the gate, so we all went in together. We watched a couple of speeches. Thank god, I got to catch the Bill Clinton speech. Oh my god, I don't wanted to miss that.
Barn Berners' affiliate Bill Clinton.
Oh wow, So he sounded almost closer to death than Joe Biden. Yeah, which was just shocked. Bisen sounds a lot better now. Yeah.
He also spoke very early on in the night, and his speech was so long.
It wasn't great, and it was bad. It was I don't know why speech.
Don't speak for that long if your speech is bad. But also just like, don't invite him in the first place.
It's because, probably because of the sheet amount of clout that the Clintons have within the Democratic Party still to this day, because if you don't have Bill there, well, they also they wanted Hillary, and Hillary did get a big reaction, and I'm sure Hillary dislikes Bill Clinton as much as anyone. Sure, but for a variety of complicated and stupid reasons, you can't both have Hillary Clinton and exclude Bill and repeatedly attack Trump for his Epstein connections.
It just doesn't work very well, which is why they shouldn't have had any Clinton's there and hit on Trump for being a pedophile. But yes, I don't know.
He spoke for so long I can't it set me over the edge.
It was fine. It was not like you're just kind of boring, Thankfully, more important things happened, if not inside the DNC, just just outside, yes, the actual United Center like stadium, still inside the security perimeter. So while we were watching Mindy Kaling talk about how she should be the ambassador to Italy, which I know was a bit but I was just not in the mood. Now we start I start getting like updates from there's a journalist on the ground, Prem Thacker, who was outside with some
representatives of the uncommitted movement. So the uncommitted movement started as Democrats who were voting uncommitted in the primaries in order to make a point about, you know, the fact that there is significant solidarity among the Democratic voters with Gaza and that if Democrats do not do something more than the thoughts in prayers, they won't get those votes. And particularly Chicago massive Palestinian population, it could be something that you know matters in some of the swing states.
So the uncommitted movement has kind of coalesced over the last couple of months into a group of delegates who are again we're not talking about like the folks marching outside. These are not people who are just like committed radicals.
Are're certainly not communists. I heard a number of folks who engaged with people from the DNC who were and again, these are members of the uncommitted movement wearing like Palestinian scarves, who specifically like would say I think Israel has a right to defend itself.
Describe these folks as moderate Democrats.
It's a mix of moderate, moderate and like radical Democrat, but Democrats right progressive, progressive. And the point I'm making about like I heard a couple of them say no, I think Israel has a right to defend itself is not that I think that's a particularly valid thing to mention, but that it shows you the level of rhetoric which they were taking pains to be speaking within the bounds of extremely acceptable Democratic Party rhetoric. Right, we are loyal Democrats.
We were very excited. I listened to a couple of representatives of the movement give speeches. One of them was Delegate June Rose, which in my initial threat I think I went with he him, but I believe their pronouns are they them? And Rose basically mentioned this is a quote from them. When President Biden was the nominee, I felt hopeless. And this is both because Biden was providing Israel with bombs and because he could not win. This is a quote from them. When Harris was chosen, I
heard empathy in her voice for Palestinian suffering. But then June says they remembered what Democrats give Republicans shit for saying, you know, thoughts and prayers after mass shootings, And I thought that was a valid point to make. Right a month ago, the fact that dimm's had really changed their messaging on Gaza sounded like it could be the start of something promising, but it hasn't led to any kind
of like strong commitment for actually anything actionable. Right, just saying I support a ceasefire isn't enough when people are getting killed. It's not like an actual commitment to, for example, stop sending Israel arms now. To be totally fair, I don't want to be flattening this too much. There have been some significant concessions from the DNC to Palestinian solidarity movement, right, not just a number of mentions and embraces of ceasefires
from multiple speakers that got massive lines of applause. But Sophie, you went to the panel that the DNC put on with doctors who had just been working in Gaza, and that particularly.
It was a verse of its kind panel.
And that I would say more than people advocating a ceasefire, and their speech is that's not nothing right like that, that's an actual no.
And Robert June also posted that over two hundred and eighty Harris delegates have signed their letter demanding a permanent ceasefire in arms embargo and says not another bomb, which is which was one of the signs that they had last night. So that two hundred, over two hundred eighty Harris delegates, that is not insignificant.
No, that's a and those people you know come here representing you know, a large significantly larger number of voters. So what had happened outside of the United Center is uncommitted. Led by the co founder of the organization, A Boss all Away, we're essentially engaging in a sit in, although A Boss was very open about like, I don't want this to be a set in. I want to go home. I'm very tired, my feet hurt. I am just waiting for a call. We presented the DNC some time ago.
The conversations really started about a month ago. They were initially trying to get a doctor a five minute speaking slot at the DNC to talk about medical care for children in Gaza. That has evolved over time into they have a list of Palestinian American Democrats who they were willing to let the DNC pick from and let them vet a speech.
Including some who have endorsed terrorists already.
From what I was listening to, all of this was very much in the context of and endorsing Harris right. I've seen a lot of people be like, yeah, but what if they come up and attack the Democratic Party and call you know them genocide supporters or whatnot. And I don't get that feeling from this group of people. Now, I understand if you're like, well, that's what they should do. But these folks are not coming at this and certainly
not framing themselves as we are radical left. They're framing themselves as we are normal Democrats who want to see the Democratic Party acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians and also start taking real steps to reduce and mitigate the violence that is really able to do over there. And that's what these people were standing for.
And at least in terms of the actually d NC like convention at the United Center, the fact that they do not want to do this and would rather just continue like this big like party to.
Be partying with you is really part of the vibe that they were getting on.
Sure, and but the dn Z doesn't even want that to like put at risk this whole vibe shift party that they have going on, and that that is like, you know, a massive issue. And similarly, we had we had videos coming out last night of DNC attendees leaving the area plugging their ears as as people read out
like names of dead Palestinian children. It just creates this overwhelming like atmosphere that these people don't want to be inconvenienced by the genocide and the genocide for them, it just is a political inconvenience that's phibiting them from stopping Trump and prohibiting them from just making this big like Kamala Party.
And it is very much an own goal because one thing I will say, if I'm trying again, if I'm trying to be fair, is when I saw people leaving the event, I saw people who got angry. I saw people who tried to ignore it, and I also saw a decent number of people come up and engage politely and with interest in the people who were doing a
sit in. Yes, And in fact, before the event let out, there were maybe one hundred people including press around the un committed sit in, and it was a couple hundred when I left, get a lot of infinitely people who
had come out. And so it is not it is not fair to say, but when you have people reading out the names of folks killed in a genocide leaving an event, and you get any photos of Democrats leaving plugging their ears, that's that's the image that's going to stick with people, right, And that was obvious going into this.
It's a sign number one, I think of how scared people are of a pack, but also of kind of the lack of trust that the DNC leadership has in anyone Palestinian being able to balance being a Democrat with wanting to end a genocide. And you know, again, I think that probably a lot of folks who were outside of the event at the more radical protests would be frustrated by some of the language that I heard uncommitted
representatives use. But I think that sit in is having more of an impact than any of the demonstrations outside right because it's right in the middle of the DNC. It's impossible to ignore, and you cannot write these people off as protesters who are out there breaking the law. You know, there's a guy with a hes Bula flag. Why are they walking around the hes bull of flag. These are people who's messaging is as moderated as it
could possibly be. They just want the reality of a genocide to be acknowledged, which is not a big ask in my opinion.
Yeah, and did you go to any other protests that night, Robert, Yes, I shared did.
Garrison and I had several drinks at the hotel, which we've been doing because you know, when you get a chance to sit with your friend both wearing your nice suit and act world weary at a political convention. It's really nice. I wish we could still smoke indoors Garrison. We'd be four packs of pall mall into this by now.
Once we get back to Vegas.
Once we get back to Vegas, cees right around the corner, buddy, I'm so sorry. So like at one am, and at one am in the morning, we go to bed, just fucking exhausted, and there had been sort of word that was supposed to be some kind of radical demonstration, and
it was unclear exactly what was going to happen. And then right as I got up to my hotel room, I saw from one of the reporters I cover on the ground here, Talia Jane at Talia OTG, that a noise demonstration had opened up outside of the They'd figured out what Hotel Kamala Harris is at and had started doing a noise demonstration, just making as much noise outside of the hotel well as possible. And it was like
a block away from us. So down the street I went maybe one hundred people or so, including one individual with a flute playing as badly as they possibly could while standing as close to the police riot line as they possibly care. A hero. A hero it was, And yeah, it was interesting because when I got there, I expected because the police were telling people to move. They were
in front of the President's hotel. It was one in the morning, and they were being very loud in front of people who have money, So I kind of expected, Okay, wagons are going to come in and people are going to get the absolute shit beat out of them. But nothing happened. The cops didn't even keep a tight cordon. There was clearly no as we saw last night, there was no walling in the protest. There was no sign that they considered this something that needed to be met
with a significant degree of force. I kind of think some of it maybe that they were tired too, because they looked exhausted, So I wonder how much of it is that. I think it also they got supp as opposed to yesterday, where they came in knowing, Okay, this is supposed to be a radical militant demo, so we're going to have an overwhelming force response. I think they just had some teams show up and kind of catches
catch can handle the event. But you know, they played around outside of Harris's place for thirty or forty minutes and then marched on and dispersed, And it was fine, no arrests that I saw whatsoever, pretty calm night.
And I believe the actual hotel she was staying it was actually like a like a one or two blocks over they it was fortified.
It's a fortress. Right, You're not going to get that close.
It's the Secret Service like headquarters essentially. Right, the vice president is sleeping in the building here. There's not going to be protesters directly outside on the sidewalk. They're going to have some kind of radius. Yeah, people got as close as they could to what they believed the hotel was, but you know, it's not like they're going to be thrown eggs on the window of the Vice president.
No.
And I didn't even see any implication that people wanted to do that. I have not, at any of these demonstrations seen any sort of cohesive committed property destruction or even like a hint that people are thinking of property. These are and part because I think most of the people have seen have been younger. They seem to be
newer to this kind of protest. It seems like a younger movement is the core of things here, and I don't think if they ever do, I certainly they have not yet psyched themselves up to that kind of direct action.
Yeah, all right, we will go on an that break and come back to hear about a few of the other speeches that took place last night at the DNC, including Governor Tim Walls.
So the window, Okay, we could, So we're back. I did want to note before we get into this that Texas delegate who was in the South side of Chicago got robbed last night. Oh yes, which is not surprising because the South side of Chicago is the baddest part of town. And as I was warned before coming here, if you get down there, you'd better be aware. A man named Leroy Brown.
All right, anyways, scarus.
He stands about six foot four, so this week has lasted a month. I've aged all the downtown ladies call him treetop Lover, but before the men just call him sir if you were curious about his pronouns.
I'm just trying to make sure that we refer to So the theme for Wednesday night inside the DNC was a fight for our democracy and with like a big emphasis on like trying to maintain the freedoms that we now have. There's a lot of we're not going back chance that kind of stuff.
A lot of.
Speech is focused on redefining freedom. Yes, and curious this.
Is this is kind of part of like this like liberal reclaiming of like patreat has been freedom that I've that I've kind of been talking about these past few weeks.
It's probably the smartest thing they could be doing.
Yes, So this was kind of the main push not only how Democrats will continue to secure these freedoms, but if Trump is elected, these freedoms will be gone and people. The judge gave an okay speech, you know, talking about how his current life being married with kids was like, you know, impossible twenty five years ago, and if Project twenty twenty five gets enacted, it will be no longer possible anymore. So, like a lot of stuff kind of
like that. Oprah Winfrey showed up and gave a very long speech.
I did have a moment of very jarring disconnect where as I listened to the boss who was openly weeping talking about his grandmother having to flee her home in Lebanon as it was bombed and then I look up as this man is crying on the ground talking about his grandmother fleeing bombs, and there's Oprah Winfrey's giant head speaking on the JumboTron above me.
Yeah, similar to the RNZ.
When the crowd started enchanting Usa, Usa, Usa during Oprah's speech, I got one of what those alert said my smart watch that my heart was a little too high, which again very funny.
That's all that it takes to trigger my poor little heart.
I got some magnesia and supplement, Sophie. Let's take though.
And then even though there's just all this like you know, freedom, democracy stuff, there was also some of the most conservative speakers of the night were also here. There was there was a few police officers. There was a sheriff talking about the border and how how Trump killed the most secure border bill. Even though they're denying any any Palestinian to speak on the main stage, they are inviting like
former Trump co workers, a sheriff, a police officers. So all of these guys are speaking, which people are similarly pointing to, is is you know, showcasing what exactly the DNC I think actually cares about right now? But I think I just want to go straight over to mister Walls Coach Walls. Right before he came out, volunteers at the convention center were handing out these big coach Walls signs.
There must have must have been thousands of them just handing them out to like everyone on the floor, almost everyone in the stands, just the whole the whole stadium was full of people holding these big Coach Walls signs. He comes out onto stage and people seem to really like him. He gave it short but sweet speech. I guess he was one of the most efficient speakers of
the night. He talked a lot about schools and how how schools are kind of one of the big battlegrounds for freedom right now because he used to be a teacher for you know, geography.
As well as well as football.
He had this line that instead of instead of banning books, we've been banishing hunger in his schools. How he signed that free lunch bill. Meanwhile, all these Republicans are just trying to ban science books, banned social studies, and he's giving kids free food. So it's a lot of stuff about protecting schools, a lot of stuff about empowering teachers. That got great reactions from the crowd. So I'm sure there's plenty of teachers here at the DNC.
Sure speaking of crowd reactions, Joe Biden was very briefly mentioned in the thank You Joe chance that normally go on for a.
Very long time.
They've been getting shorter, getting shorter, shorter, getting shorter and shorter.
It was quite literally, thank you Joe once and then thank you, and then he kept talking and the chance ended.
So yeah, the party along weaning themselves off of haired Joe in so Walls could.
Walls's approach in his speech was similarly on this like freedom and democracy theme. One of the reoccurring talking points he used was back in either Minnesota or Nebraska, because he's lived in both places. Their golden rule is to mind your own damn business, and that's kind of his stated approach to a lot of these things. It's like Republicans are trying to get up into your business. The Republicans talk about freedom, but what they really mean is
freedom for the government to get involved in your own business. Yes, saying that the Democrats are going to not do such a thing. We're going to keep the government out of
your doctor's office. We're going to provide reproductive freedom. That's kind of the messaging that he kept using because consistently throughout the night about being a good neighbor, calling you know, stuff like Project twenty twenty five, an agenda that no one has really asked for, but Republican like oligarchs are trying to force upon the nation just to get more involved in everyone's lives. And this is something that me and Robert we're talking about kind of back in the hotels.
Everyone really likes like libertarian messaging. Yeah, Like this style of messaging always plays very well. People just don't like actual libertarians, and they don't like, you know, lots of like libertarian like you know, urban policy, right, But this style of messaging typically plays really well and is something that Republicans have been using increasingly, like since like the
Tea Party and stuff. And because the Republican Party has has gotten much more authoritarian over the years, I think it's interesting to see the Democrats are starting to realize that they can actually weaponize this style of framing themselves to a very good reaction. You know, this is where we get these big we're not going back chants.
He in one of his many sports metaphors.
He said, when somebody draws up a playbook, they're going to use it. Referred to Project twenty twenty five and the crowd loved that.
A lot of sports references that I saw. That sport reference I did not really get.
But that's cans. You guys don't like the only real sport in this lie, I.
Was translating all the sports reference since.
Robert you don't know sports, I know football, great, sob Anyways.
He also talked about things that Kamala has helped fight for, including fighting big pharma, security rights for workers, healthcare, and housing. There's just a few of the actual kind of still not not super big policy things, but hinting towards policy things that Democrats have gotten closer to over these last few days as they did release their actual like DNC
party platform. And finally, the kind of last thing I want to mention is that with like buddhaj Edge and a few a few other like LGBTQ speakers, you know Walls, Walls talked about how he sponsored the Gaystraight Alliance in the nineties and that under his and Kamala's watch, the government's going to stay out of your bedroom. Similarly, you know, going back to this like freedom messaging. But there has been these few mentions of like you know, keeping the government out of the bedroom, and.
Like doctor's appointments as well.
Doctors appointments, and and not and and not regressing on LGBTQ rights. There's been very little actually talked about positively about helping secure the LGBTQ rights that are currently like actually a jeopardy, like specifically like trans healthcare. Like there's not been a trans speaker at the DNC. I've heard almost no mention of trans issues on any of the speeches or any of the or any of the panels. And that this is I guess just slightly.
I don't know.
I guess I was expecting something, honestly on this because this is such a big topic for Republicans, because there was consistently every night mentions of trans people at the RNC. I was expecting at least some degree for the DNC to like push back on that and be like, no, we actually are gonna make sure we have health care for trans people and make sure that trans people are not unfairly discriminated against. And they have just sidesteped this
whole issue, and that has been that's not great. That is that is another thing as well as Palestine to push them on, because this is like literally one of the core parts of the Republican Party right now is attacking the ability for trans people to not only get health care, but it's just to exist in public life.
And it's specifically something Walls has a really good record on. Yes, some of these people do have a good recordation ban and stuff, so it's not something that they have shied away from in their own electoral history.
But at least at the DNC, they're not putting it on like the national stage, and maybe they think it won't play well. Maybe they think it's a little bit too weird for some of the people that they're trying to kind of court their votes for.
I'm not sure. I wonder if the calculation is a little different. The only direct references I've heard of trans people have been as part of LGBTQ. I wonder if there's a degree of strategy where they're thinking, like the smart way to play this is to reconnect trans people with LGBTQ as opposed to deal with it as if there's some sort of like separate thing going on. I
wonder if that's a calculation that they're making. I don't know, but you're right, it is kind of it is very conspicuous in its absence.
I mean, we just had this massive flare about the Olympics with this like increasing like trans panic stuff, and yeah, it's just something I've observed the past few days that I mean, we'll see if we'll see if there's anything Tonight, I'm going to try to talk to the people who've been at the LGBTQ caucuses these past few days.
Yeah, I want to end by just as we're recording this, it's come out Mother Jones is published at the text of the speech that the Uncommitted Movement wanted to give it the DNC. This was from rep Rua Roman was supposed to be the one giving this and this was like specifically turned down by the Democratic Party. And I want to read a couple of paragraphs from it, just to give you an idea again, make it very clear the actual kind of rhetoric and how modest it is
that these people are using in this pain. I've also witnessed something profound, a beautiful, multi faith, multiracial and multi generational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party. For three hundred and twenty days, we've stood together, demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike, to reach a ceasefire in the killing of Palestinians, fore all the Israelian Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of
building a path to collective peace and safety. That's why we are here, members of this Democratic Party, committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world. They'll say, this is how it's always been, that nothing can change. But remember Fanny lou Hamer shunned for her courage, yet she paved the way for an integrated Democratic Party. Her legacy lives on and it's her example we follow. But we can't do it alone.
This historic moment is full of promise, but only if we stand together. Our party's greatest strength has always been our ability to unite. Some see that as a weakness, but it's time we flex that strength. Let's commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump, who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let's fight for the politics long overdue from restoring access to abortions, to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an
end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and naysayers, I say, yes we can. Yes, we can be a democratic party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars, that fights for in America, that belongs to all of us, black, brown, and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me together Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's the least
objectionable thing I can imagine. Yeah, So anyway, that's what the DNC didn want people do here.
Pretty despicable.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty frustrating.
Yeah.
Well, this is how we're gonna be closing this week of coverage. We will start next week's episodes by talking about the final day of the DNC, including Kamala Harris's speech. And I also have some kind of disjointed thoughts I'll try to put together more about some of like the discourse revolving around some of these protests, how they've been handled a few like tactics things. But yeah, this has been this week at It could Happen here. Recording from Chicago, Illinois.
Nice exhausted, Well, you guys, listen to the speeches. I'm going to try to find Jake Tapper at the Politico Bar and Grill and uh, you know, read him the lyrics of bad bad Le Roy Brown. Let us know all that baddest man in the whole damn town.
Normally I would I would be against abandoning you at a big public event.
But see you.
It's fine if it turns into a fist fight. I feel confident. We all view. I feel very confident I can win.
If you're getting close to Jake Kapper, it's going to turn into a fistfight.
We all know this, all right, horrible.
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com.
Slash sources. Thanks for listening,