Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to ick It Happen here. I'm your host Bia
Speaker 3: Wong with me as James Stout By men. Hello, this
Speaker 3: is a podcast about things falling apart putting it back
Speaker 3: together again. For the rest of this week, we are
Speaker 3: going to be going to our live correspondence from a
Speaker 3: Democratic National Convention. We're going to be getting a bunch
Speaker 3: of episodes from from the floor. We're you're gonna be
Speaker 3: gonna be hearing all about all of.
Speaker 4: The serve of excitement.
Speaker 3: But for sort of day one of our DNC convention,
Speaker 3: I thought we'd do something a little bit different, and
Speaker 3: that is I want to take a look back at
Speaker 3: the convention that I think I think most people have
Speaker 3: been thinking is the most similar to this one, which
Speaker 3: is the nineteen sixty eight Democratic National Convention, which is
Speaker 3: also a convention that featured large anti war protests and
Speaker 3: the vice president of an extremely unpopular president who was
Speaker 3: waging an unpopular war seized control of the nomination. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, and you know, and the parallels. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, there's occupations that Columbia. I mean, right down
Speaker 3: to the one that I think I've seen it. I
Speaker 3: haven't seen anyone else talk about. Is that one of
Speaker 3: the big uprisings in nineteen sixty eight is in Pakistan,
Speaker 3: and particularly in the part of Pakistan that is now Bangladesh.
Speaker 3: We are about a week ash maybe two weeks removed
Speaker 3: from an enormous uprising of Bangladesh that just knocked out
Speaker 3: theirlitical leadership. So you know, there are lots of sort
Speaker 3: of nineteen sixty eight vibes in the air.
Speaker 5: It's not unsimilar, but it's also not the same, as
Speaker 5: I'm sure I'm about to find out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think in some sense we'll get to
Speaker 3: this war as the episode progresses. But in some sense,
Speaker 3: sixty eight parts of it are sort of an inversion
Speaker 3: of what's happening now, and parts of it are an
Speaker 3: interesting case study and having the same pieces but having
Speaker 3: them fit into totally different configurations. And because of that,
Speaker 3: the results are going to be I think, very, very
Speaker 3: staggeraally different. Yeah, And I think maybe the primary difference
Speaker 3: is that really the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention does
Speaker 3: not start in the US at all. It starts in
Speaker 3: Vietnam on Vietnamese New Years, and it really starts with
Speaker 3: the Tet Offensive. So for people who have forgotten this
Speaker 3: from their history classes, like, so maybe some of you.
Speaker 4: Are around for this, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Statistically probably not, but I don't know.
Speaker 4: Maybe there's a few old timers here.
Speaker 3: So the Tet Offensive is this massive attack by the
Speaker 3: viet Cong A's or of North Vietnamese forces on New
Speaker 3: Years of well technically it's like Jenerary sick because the
Speaker 3: calendar dates are off. But it's this massive attack on
Speaker 3: American positions. It's an attempt really to sort of seize
Speaker 3: control of South Vieta. It doesn't really work militarily because
Speaker 3: and this is an interesting kind of display of bad judgment.
Speaker 3: The North Vietnamese leadership bizarrely makes almost exactly the same
Speaker 3: mistake that the Americans are going to make from the
Speaker 3: invasion of Iraq, which is that they are under the
Speaker 3: assumption that you know, their attack would trigger a series
Speaker 3: of urban revolts that would like drive out the corrupt
Speaker 3: Vietnamese South Vietnamese like puppet governments, and like run the
Speaker 3: Americans out of the country. And that doesn't happen. There's
Speaker 3: no uprisings. The viet Cong take a bunch of grounds,
Speaker 3: but unbelievable numbers of their caladurators are just wiped out
Speaker 3: by the sums of good American counterattack. But it didn't
Speaker 3: matter at all, because what the head offensive really did
Speaker 3: was instantly revealed to everyone in the US that LBJ
Speaker 3: and every previous American administration had been lying to them
Speaker 3: about the Vietnam War. In the wake of these attacks,
Speaker 3: it is instantly clear that the US is not the war.
Speaker 3: They are not making steady progress against the Communists. They
Speaker 3: are at best locked in a granding stalemate against an
Speaker 3: enemy with a capacity to launch attacks that could again
Speaker 3: temporarily like run the US out of cities.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And this this craters lbj's popularity. His popularity is
Speaker 3: in the thirties.
Speaker 6: Oh damn, yeah, when incumbent, that's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's really really bad. It's I think he's
Speaker 3: like thirty six percents he is. He is staggeringly, staggeringly unpopular.
Speaker 3: And you know, the tet offensive also in some sense validates,
Speaker 3: particularly the sort of radical wing of the anti war movements.
Speaker 3: You know, I think people remember the anti war movement
Speaker 3: today is this purely this sort of like hyper militant
Speaker 3: students for democratic society, the draft card burning stuff, and.
Speaker 2: There was that.
Speaker 3: But those people for the early especially the early sixties
Speaker 3: leading up to this point and even even eight are
Speaker 3: a minority, right. Most of the anti war people are
Speaker 3: sort of older, like anti nuclear activists, people who come
Speaker 3: up in the forties, people who'd you know, been through
Speaker 3: the Red Scare and are these sort of hypervigilant liberals.
Speaker 3: And these people thought that they could work with LBJ
Speaker 3: to end the war.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: LBJ comes in not like quite explicitly promising to end
Speaker 3: the war, but he comes in as the candidate who's
Speaker 3: not you know, who's not literally threatening the bombs I gone,
Speaker 3: and then he turns around a bombs I gone. And
Speaker 3: so this moment the TET offensive is this moment where
Speaker 3: the radical wing of the anti woman is vindicated, Right,
Speaker 3: LBJ has been lying to them the whole time. All
Speaker 3: of the sort of negotiations that people have been doing
Speaker 3: have been a complete failure. And in the sort of
Speaker 3: wake of this, there's a real sort of drive by
Speaker 3: a couple of different anti war factions to stage a
Speaker 3: protest at the Democratic National Convention for what you know,
Speaker 3: to protest what everyone assumes is going to be the
Speaker 3: coronation of LBJ. There are two different kind of umbrellas
Speaker 3: of groups I guess you could call it who wind
Speaker 3: up at sixty eight And this is something that we
Speaker 3: aren't gonna have now because neither of these two kinds
Speaker 3: of things really exists anymore. The first of these groups
Speaker 3: are the politically serious hard lighters. They are organized into
Speaker 3: this unbelievably large coalition of hundreds of groups called National
Speaker 3: Mobilization Committee to end the War in Vietnam. Nobody says
Speaker 3: that because it's so long. Everyone then and now just
Speaker 3: calls it MOB or sometimes mobilization, but everyone in the
Speaker 3: writing just calls them MOBE, and MOBE is one of
Speaker 3: the groups that's been getting more radical by sixty eight.
Speaker 3: But again, the Students for a Democratic Society, who are
Speaker 3: kind of the sixties parallel to the DSA.
Speaker 4: If you're going to sort.
Speaker 3: Of do these directly one to one lines, right, are
Speaker 3: a minority. And also sts basically lead is MOB to
Speaker 3: focus on other kinds of organizing. So at sds is
Speaker 3: going to be around, they're going to involved in this protest,
Speaker 3: but MOB is kind of not being ran by them.
Speaker 3: And MOB is also a very complicated endeavor because again,
Speaker 3: these are big ten groups, right, These are very very
Speaker 3: very big tent groups. You know, these range from honestly
Speaker 3: sort of right liberal professional groups who oppose the war
Speaker 3: to like one of one of the major leaders of
Speaker 3: MOB in this period is a senior member of the SWP,
Speaker 3: the Socialist Workers Party, who are like old school Trotskyit group, right. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And it's very very hard to get coalitions like this
Speaker 3: to work, partially because of secretariat infighting over some of
Speaker 3: it's over tactics, because a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 3: of people in MOB who do not want militant confrontation.
Speaker 3: They don't want there to be big confrontations with the police.
Speaker 3: And then also you know, these people just don't have
Speaker 3: the same ends, right the SMVP people are trying to
Speaker 3: have a socialist revolution. There's other people in this group
Speaker 3: who are trying to not have their tax dollars pay
Speaker 3: for a war.
Speaker 6: Not get their kids drafted into a war.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but MOBE is the big anti war hub. Right
Speaker 3: with the exception of group we're gonna talk about next,
Speaker 3: almost all anti war activity in the country is running
Speaker 3: through VBE just to some extent or another, because it's
Speaker 3: a coalition of like all of these groups. We don't
Speaker 3: really have anything like this anymore. There are kind of
Speaker 3: the tattered remains of this stuff, but they don't have
Speaker 3: the kind of poll and the kind of especially they
Speaker 3: don't have the kind of organizational capacity that this stuff had.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's not really like that. There are a wide
Speaker 6: variety of people.
Speaker 5: A posts to genocide and Palestine, but they're not united
Speaker 5: under any even this. There isn't like a popular front
Speaker 5: or a big tent. Yeah, that really brings them together.
Speaker 5: Even in twenty twenties, if you didn't really have like
Speaker 5: a big tent org did we like we had like
Speaker 5: BLM capital, BLM five, OHO one C three, But that
Speaker 5: wasn't really like an ORG that was that effective on
Speaker 5: the ground.
Speaker 3: And that's a key component that's very very different about
Speaker 3: you know, at about the sixty eight convention that the
Speaker 3: one's gonna happen. You know, as as this comes out,
Speaker 3: it will be day one of that convention. The terrain
Speaker 3: of groups who are opposed to it are staggeringly different.
Speaker 3: This kind of stuff, we just don't have it anymore now.
Speaker 3: Part of what MOB is struggling to do, and this
Speaker 3: is something that some of the things they're dealing with
Speaker 3: the things that we don't deal with now. Some of
Speaker 3: them are things that we deal with all the time.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: One of the big ones is they're trying to develop
Speaker 3: what eventually is going to be called the diversity of tactics.
Speaker 3: So they're trying to have protests that you can have
Speaker 3: three hundred thousand people and most of those people could
Speaker 3: be sitting around having a picnic. And then there's also
Speaker 3: a bunch of people who are like fighting the police
Speaker 3: in the front.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: We are, I think, sort of largely familiar with this
Speaker 3: kind of from twenty twenty.
Speaker 6: Right, yeah, then the police take ASTs everyone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well yeah, so this comes to another very important
Speaker 3: part about this, which is that MOBE, even in the
Speaker 3: planning stages, even the radicals, are not trying to fight
Speaker 3: the cops, right, nobody wants to do it because everyone
Speaker 3: is terrified about Chicago's reaction to the Holy Week uprising.
Speaker 3: Though we talked about the Holy Week uprising in another episode,
Speaker 3: very briefly, it's a massive series of riots and uprisings
Speaker 3: that follow the assassination of Art Luther King. There's a
Speaker 3: particularly bad one in Chicago where Mayor Daily is so
Speaker 3: pissed off that he goes on TV and gives a
Speaker 3: speech where he tells his cops to shoot and maim
Speaker 3: people they could accuse of looting good stuff. And you know,
Speaker 3: this goes over so badly that the next day he's
Speaker 3: giving statements to the media saying he never said this,
Speaker 3: but you know everyone saw him say it.
Speaker 2: I'm live TOV.
Speaker 3: So yeah, but people are terrified because this is a
Speaker 3: period where the cops really will shoot into crowds. So,
Speaker 3: you know, everyone into planning face of this. You know,
Speaker 3: I think most people broadly know how this turns out,
Speaker 3: which is there's a bunch of street fighting to police
Speaker 3: attack people. But none of the planners wanted that. They
Speaker 3: were very very deliberately trying to make sure there weren't
Speaker 3: confrontations with the police, because, as it turns out, These
Speaker 3: people are staggeringly unprepared for a confrontation with the cops.
Speaker 3: I'm going to read a quote from the very good
Speaker 3: book Chicago sixty eight, which is a politically it's a
Speaker 3: bit questionable, but it has an excruciatingly in depth account
Speaker 3: of these I mean we're talking hour to hour rundowns
Speaker 3: of the convention itself, you know, very well documented accounts
Speaker 3: of all of the meetings that produce this. So I'm
Speaker 3: going to read a quote this is about MO about
Speaker 3: their preparation for the Chicago D and C protests.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: Some even wanted to warn perspective protesters that they should
Speaker 3: bring protective clothing like helmets, bulky sweaters, and ben danafferteer gas,
Speaker 3: but it was decided that this might overly alarm would
Speaker 3: be protesters.
Speaker 4: Great.
Speaker 3: Now, again, this is MOBE. They are supposed to be
Speaker 3: the serious organizers here, right. The other group that we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about the Yippies. Like, compared to the Yippies,
Speaker 3: these guys look like shock troopers. And this is how
Speaker 3: unprepared they are.
Speaker 6: Yeah, wow, Like, looking.
Speaker 3: At this from our perspective, these people are dangerous amateurs.
Speaker 3: They have no idea what they're doing. They don't understand
Speaker 3: how to deal with police at all. One of the
Speaker 3: other things that happens is this is one of the
Speaker 3: first and early deployment of so cs tear gas, right,
Speaker 3: And they have a guy who'd been drafted into Vietnam
Speaker 3: was become a special Forces guy, who would you know,
Speaker 3: like after we got out, have become a leftist and
Speaker 3: he's telling them about this gas and he's saying, yeah,
Speaker 3: we need.
Speaker 2: To talk to the so they were thinking.
Speaker 3: That's going on here is you can tell how early
Speaker 3: this is into the cycle because they don't have dedicated
Speaker 3: street medics. They have basically a nurses association at doctors
Speaker 3: association that they've gotten to go get feel a better care,
Speaker 3: which is not bad, right, but no, I mean that's great,
Speaker 3: but people need to be aware of what they're getting into,
Speaker 3: and then the medical flats need to be aware of
Speaker 3: how they can mitigate that. And the most people overrule
Speaker 3: this guy and saying no, we're not going to tell
Speaker 3: the medical people about the sort of solution thing he's
Speaker 3: talking about to neutralize this gas. Right, These people are
Speaker 3: just staggeringly unprepared for an actual police confrontation, and something
Speaker 3: you have to keep in mind about about nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: eight America, Right, is that we have a very different
Speaker 3: sort of outlook on the police and how you deal
Speaker 3: with the police than these people.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: We come from basically the decade of the street fight
Speaker 3: since Occupy twenty eleven and really intensifying and ferguson in
Speaker 3: twenty fourteen. There has been a straight decade between conversations
Speaker 3: and the police. If you were out in the most
Speaker 3: intense parts of twenty twenty and statistically, if you're listening
Speaker 3: to this show, you probably at least were out there
Speaker 3: a little bit. You have seen shit that these kids,
Speaker 3: like I call them kids, right, These people are in
Speaker 3: the twenty thirties, but you have seen shit that these
Speaker 3: people cannot even imagine.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: If you're looking back from our perspective, right, you know,
Speaker 3: with the experience with the police that we have, you
Speaker 3: can look back at these people and you could instantly
Speaker 3: tell that they're going to get claubered. One of the
Speaker 3: things I trying to do is they're trying to copy
Speaker 3: some of the techniques from the Japanese student movement, which
Speaker 3: is an infamously very probably the best street fighters in
Speaker 3: the world. Yeah, and they're trying to copy their techniques
Speaker 3: and they can't do it. And they're trying to do
Speaker 3: the snake line thing to break police lines. They're all
Speaker 3: falling over and so it's very it's very clear from
Speaker 3: our perspectives that this is going to be a fiasco.
Speaker 3: But these people think that they understand how to manage
Speaker 3: the police.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean the state's capacity for violence has increased
Speaker 5: exponentially since then, Like you could kind of stand up
Speaker 5: to the cops just by staying in the streets, you know,
Speaker 5: to a degree. I think it's probably this is the
Speaker 5: beginning of the state sort of moving towards ming itself
Speaker 5: to deny people up access to public space in that fashion, right,
Speaker 5: which we saw like if you grew up at the
Speaker 5: time I did in Genoa, in Prague and these g
Speaker 5: eight Summits, Kanku and all the different ones right at Octorada,
Speaker 5: Like I think that was the beginning maybe of like
Speaker 5: modern crowd control policing. But yeah, these yeah, this is
Speaker 5: a different world to the one we are in now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they don't you know, and this is the
Speaker 3: beginning of the modern world, right, but they haven't seen
Speaker 3: it yet.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's any one way to really experience that.
Speaker 4: So yeah, you have to go through it.
Speaker 3: So we're going to take an ad break and when
Speaker 3: we come back, we are going to get to the Yippies,
Speaker 3: the other group that's protesting at this convention. All right,
Speaker 3: and we are back from the advertisements at the Yippies
Speaker 3: with have loved hijacking. So the Yippies are another group
Speaker 3: that we don't have anything really like this today because
Speaker 3: this is the year twenty two, twenty four. Everyone kind
Speaker 3: of smokes I mean not everyone, but people just kind
Speaker 3: of smoke weed right all the time. Yeah, it's pretty normal,
Speaker 3: but in sixty eight, this is really not that we're
Speaker 3: mob are very very explicit political people, right capital P politics,
Speaker 3: you know, communists, socialists, some like sort of left liberals, progressives,
Speaker 3: et cetera, et cetera. There, and they're very clearly doing
Speaker 3: politics conventionally. The Yippies are a counterculture group. It's this
Speaker 3: mix of people who are political radicals to get caught
Speaker 3: up in sort of this counterculture stuff. And then a
Speaker 3: lot of them are just kind of counterculture people who
Speaker 3: mostly just sort of want sex, drugs and rock and roll,
Speaker 3: but see this as the way to sort of resist
Speaker 3: the sort of death machine that they see themselves as
Speaker 3: living in.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think this is the time people start talking
Speaker 5: about the MARCUSI in great refusal a lot in nineteen
Speaker 5: sixty eight, right, and then kind of people going big
Speaker 5: are different directions with that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also these people are we'll get into this warness. These
Speaker 3: people are not very theoretically sophisticated. Ye right, I'm not
Speaker 3: reading her, but they are stoned out of their minds
Speaker 3: at literally all times, you know. And so yippie is
Speaker 3: a term that didn't exist before the sixty a Convention.
Speaker 3: It was developed specifically as part of a plan to
Speaker 3: do a sort of protest things as this rallying cry
Speaker 3: of yeppee against the sort of death machine of the
Speaker 3: Democratic National Convention, which everyone thought was going to nominate
Speaker 3: LBJA to do more firebombing of Vietnam. And so their
Speaker 3: plan is, and this is something that you can still
Speaker 3: see kind of reflections of in some Ish modern movements,
Speaker 3: so that we don't do it as much anymore. But
Speaker 3: their plan was to have this sort of festival of
Speaker 3: life to counterpose against the DNC's festival of death. They
Speaker 3: were going to have a bunch of singers and people
Speaker 3: were just going to like have public sex, and their
Speaker 3: thesis of how they're trying to do this is to
Speaker 3: hijack the sort of mass medium machine, which they see
Speaker 3: as the kind of defining element of modern society. Right
Speaker 3: it is the element a sort of totalitarian and social control,
Speaker 3: and their plan is to hijack it for for their
Speaker 3: own purposes. This is superficially similar to something you see
Speaker 3: from the French sixty eight ters, who have sort of,
Speaker 3: by the time this is happening, have done a revolution
Speaker 3: that doesn't quite work well. We'll cover on the show
Speaker 3: at some point. And the French sixty eight ters, both
Speaker 3: the students and the workers who very very nearly take
Speaker 3: control of France, are heavily influenced by a theorist named
Speaker 3: Guide to Board and his sort of ubiquitous book The
Speaker 3: Society a Spectacle, And superficially these are very similar things.
Speaker 2: But the Board's.
Speaker 3: Analysis is a technologically sort of ideologically sophisticated analysis the
Speaker 3: social relations. And again, the Yippies are, contrary to that,
Speaker 3: stone out of their minds at literally all times.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, they're doing like t moo dot com gidable. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, so I'm going to read back to back a
Speaker 3: line an average line from Guide to Board Society a spectacle.
Speaker 3: And then I'm going to give you a quote from
Speaker 3: an Abbi Hoffman, who's one of the people who invents
Speaker 3: the term yippium, to give a quote from one of
Speaker 3: his speeches at the sixty eight convention. So here is
Speaker 3: an average Guide to Board Society a spectacle line quote.
Speaker 3: The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself.
Speaker 3: It's laudatory monologue. It is the self portrait of power
Speaker 3: in the epoch if it's totalitarian management of the conditions
Speaker 3: of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance. The spectacular relations
Speaker 3: conceal the fact that their relations among men in classes.
Speaker 3: Second nature with its fatal law, seems to dominate our environments.
Speaker 3: But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development,
Speaker 3: seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is,
Speaker 3: on the contrary, the form which chooses its own technical content.
Speaker 3: So this is this is this is what the people
Speaker 3: and this is what the sixty eight is in France
Speaker 3: are reading. Here is Yippie founder Abbi Hoffman, this is
Speaker 3: this is in a speech. Why he would call it
Speaker 3: a rap or something, But this is in a rambling
Speaker 3: that he gives to a crowd sixty eight convention, meet
Speaker 3: the press, face the nation, issues and answers all those
Speaker 3: bullshit shows. You know, you get a Democrat and a
Speaker 3: Republican arguing back and forward, this and that, this and
Speaker 3: yeah yeah yeah. But at the end of the show,
Speaker 3: nobody changes their fucking mind, you see. But they're trying
Speaker 3: to push Brillo. You see, that's good. You want to
Speaker 3: use Brillo. See in about every ten minutes on will
Speaker 3: come three minutes of Brillo. Brillow is a revolution, Brillow
Speaker 3: is sex, Brillo is fun. Brillo is At the end
Speaker 3: of the show, people late fucking switching from Democrat or
Speaker 3: Republican or commis. You know, the right wingers ready of
Speaker 3: that shit. They're buying Brillo. I mean, can you imagine
Speaker 3: if they had the Beatles gain zing zing zing, all
Speaker 3: that jump and shout, you know, and all of a
Speaker 3: sudden they put an ad where this guy comes on
Speaker 3: very straight. You ought to buy Brillo because it's the
Speaker 3: rationally correct decision. Part of the American process is the
Speaker 3: right way to do things.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 3: Fuck, they'll buy the Beatles, they won't buy Brillow. So
Speaker 3: this is a semi incomprehensible rat right, is this just
Speaker 3: goes on. And in the middle of this kind of
Speaker 3: semi in cohre intentionally semi incoherent nonsense, is this point
Speaker 3: about how the thing that changes people's minds is advertising, right,
Speaker 3: and not not the sort of business of politics as usual.
Speaker 3: It's this sort of performance spectacle that is the real
Speaker 3: thing that like actually changes how people think. These are
Speaker 3: performance artists, right, Alan Ginsberg, sort of famous beat Poe
Speaker 3: is was one of the people who's going to be
Speaker 3: speaking there. He's writing sort of, he's writing poetry about it.
Speaker 3: The people are doing theater performances. If you've seen like
Speaker 3: the giant puppets that used to be at Big protest
Speaker 3: that was kind of a descendant of this stuff. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: And these performance artists are setting out to hijack the
Speaker 3: biggest stage in the world and turn it against the war.
Speaker 3: And that stage is the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Unfortunately, however,
Speaker 3: if there's one group in the US who is even
Speaker 3: less prepared for a street fight than MOBIZ, it is
Speaker 3: the Yippies. The Yippies they you know, at least the
Speaker 3: more radical members of MOBE have pretensions of street fighting.
Speaker 3: The Yippies are not street fighters at all, and this
Speaker 3: is something that's distinct from most of the sixty eight
Speaker 3: up prices. Most of the sixty eight uprisings everywhere are
Speaker 3: characterized by people who are very, very good at this, right,
Speaker 3: and these protesters fight very well. I mean, the most
Speaker 3: famous ones We've talked about it a little bit already
Speaker 3: of the Japanese student movements, who have this sort of
Speaker 3: iconic white construction hats and these giant wooden pulls. They
Speaker 3: used to literally fight riot police at rage. But you know, students, workers,
Speaker 3: and just like random people off the street everywhere from
Speaker 3: Italy to France to Pakistan are able to fight the
Speaker 3: police on fairly even footing. They equit themselves valiantly. The Yippies,
Speaker 3: on the other hand, every single time they come into
Speaker 3: contact with the police, they get absolutely mauled. And you know,
Speaker 3: the pre DNC Yippie protests are extremely peaceful, right, You're
Speaker 3: not even disruptive. They have permits and the police just
Speaker 3: batter them. And this is kind of the plan, right.
Speaker 3: These attacks are generating media coverage, and the Yippies are
Speaker 3: trying to hijack this media coverage to spread their message,
Speaker 3: and this kind of works to some extent. Part of
Speaker 3: the problem, though, is that one of the biggest newspapers
Speaker 3: in Chicago is Chicago Tribune, who are a kind of
Speaker 3: reactionary that I mean, I guess we still have them,
Speaker 3: but this is the kind of magazine that would have
Speaker 3: been right there with the economists saying that, like all
Speaker 3: of the Irish dying was good. Right, that's the kind
Speaker 3: of like when the British killed them with the famine, right, Like.
Speaker 3: This is the kind of kind of reactionary that the
Speaker 3: Chicago Tribune is. And so some of their protest hijacking
Speaker 3: stuff doesn't really work in Chicago because you'll have these
Speaker 3: protests where just the Tribune shows up, and if your
Speaker 3: Fribune shows up, the coverage of the cops just absolutely
Speaker 3: beating the crap out of a bunch of people who
Speaker 3: were just walking on sidewalks is going to be something
Speaker 3: like did the police defeat unruly demonstrators or something. Before
Speaker 3: we go any further, and by any further, we're gonna
Speaker 3: talk about how these years relate to each other, and
Speaker 3: oh boy, we need to go to the thing the
Speaker 3: Yippies would have been hijacking, which is these products and services.
Speaker 3: We're continuing in their noble tradition by using their money
Speaker 3: to do this episode.
Speaker 9: We are back.
Speaker 3: So something that I think is very interesting about these
Speaker 3: two groups. That is the final thing that you kind
Speaker 3: of have to understand about why these protests go the
Speaker 3: way they do. I've talked a bit about how sort
Speaker 3: of the more radical parts of MOB and the Yippies,
Speaker 3: who are very radical are are kind of being isolated
Speaker 3: from the more moderate elements right, and this is part
Speaker 3: of Mayor Daily's deliberate strategy. Daily is the all powerful
Speaker 3: mayor of Chicago. He's one of the sort of the
Speaker 3: builders of America's greatest ever political machine, which is the
Speaker 3: Chicago Machine. By this point, he has single hand almost
Speaker 3: single handedly like one elections for the Democratic Party by
Speaker 3: handing them ILLINOI on a platter. He is the guy,
Speaker 3: one of the people who turns Illinois from a swing
Speaker 3: state into a say that votes for Democrats by Norla's
Speaker 3: margins every single year. And he does this through this
Speaker 3: incredibly powerful patriotish network and corruption network, and Dalies deliver
Speaker 3: strategies to try to sort of separate He's trying to
Speaker 3: knock the moderates out of the protests by threatening that
Speaker 3: he's going to just like obliterate these people right by,
Speaker 3: and also by continuously denying them permits so that certain
Speaker 3: more water people won't show up. Yeah, and so the
Speaker 3: plan is basically to isolate them. And part of the
Speaker 3: other reason why this works is that this whole plan
Speaker 3: is opposed by a group you wouldn't really expect to
Speaker 3: be opposing it, which is the Communists. CPUSA wants nothing
Speaker 3: to do with this. Even the SVP Socials Workers Party,
Speaker 3: who are the Trotskyites who have very important roles in
Speaker 3: MOB they're part of a faction that doesn't want to
Speaker 3: do the DNC convention going in And this is something
Speaker 3: you see all over nineteen sixty eight because weirdly, the
Speaker 3: communist parties in sixty eight are a very conservative force.
Speaker 3: This is something that we've talked about on the show before.
Speaker 3: In places like Chile, you have fairly moderate Christian Democratic
Speaker 3: Workers going into the streets and meanwhile the Chilean Communist
Speaker 3: Party is going, no, no hold on, we must slow
Speaker 3: the pains of reforms.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, this isn't it.
Speaker 3: And you know that's even more mild example than what
Speaker 3: happens in France, where the French Communist Party blows its
Speaker 3: one shot of ever taking power by straight up working
Speaker 3: with the government to stamp out the May sixty eight uprisings.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 3: These old left parties are very conservative, both because you know,
Speaker 3: on an international level, because some of them are in
Speaker 3: the sort of common turn orbit right, so they're taking
Speaker 3: orders directly from Moscow, and Moscow doesn't want any disruption.
Speaker 3: And in the US a lot of the older activists
Speaker 3: don't want a confrontation because they're all still petrified of
Speaker 3: the Red Scare, and so they're terrified of anything that
Speaker 3: could like even sort of alienate a single person. And
Speaker 3: this means that to some extent, all Mob and the
Speaker 3: Yippies really have over each other. But the problem is
Speaker 3: the Mob and the Yippies hate each other.
Speaker 6: That's the Tennis Odust time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's amazing.
Speaker 3: And again this is something that like all of the
Speaker 3: mode people agree about which they agree about nothing. The
Speaker 3: only thing they agree about is they don't even they
Speaker 3: don't even agree about fully demanding an end to the
Speaker 3: Vietnam War right like a immediate They don't agree with
Speaker 3: anything except they hate the Yippies because they see the
Speaker 3: Yippies as these like deeply unseerious bourgeois degenerates who are
Speaker 3: just having sex and doing drugs that are just literally
Speaker 3: the same culture that they're trying to resist. The yippeec
Speaker 3: mobe has sort of self righteous assholes who are locked
Speaker 3: in this death spiral of comically serious politics that are
Speaker 3: also just a reflection of the thing they're opposing. So
Speaker 3: you know, they both of these people take the same
Speaker 3: things about each other. But meanwhile, both of these groups
Speaker 3: and really everyone else in the US is going to
Speaker 3: have to ride the wildest wave of vibe shifts in
Speaker 3: the entirety of American history. So all right, we we
Speaker 3: kind of famously had our vibe shift when Biden dropped
Speaker 3: out and everyone was like, whoa hold on? Better things
Speaker 3: are possible? Question mark, yeah, question. There's also a vibe
Speaker 3: shift in sixty eight when when LBJ drops out. It's
Speaker 3: March thirty first, But there are key differences here though,
Speaker 3: Right Biden has already won the nomination right by the
Speaker 3: time that he is forced out, and when he is
Speaker 3: forced out, there is great rejoicing. Everyone's really happy about it.
Speaker 3: Even the old Biden stalle wards immediately fall on line
Speaker 3: behind Kamal Harris.
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, right, that Biden's wins account changed his name.
Speaker 2: Ya, yeah right.
Speaker 3: Sixty eight is much much bessier than that. LBJ doesn't
Speaker 3: drop out until he almost loses a He almost think
Speaker 3: he's the new Hampshire primary to anti war candidate Eugene McCarthy,
Speaker 3: not to be confused with the other McCarthy. I was
Speaker 3: really baffled the first time I just saw people talking
Speaker 3: about McCarthy.
Speaker 4: I was like, what, wait, hold.
Speaker 3: On, yeah, this is this is anti war star warts
Speaker 3: Senator Eugene McCarthy. And McCarthy almost beating LBJ in a
Speaker 3: very conservative state really sort of lights this fire under LBJ.
Speaker 3: And LBJ realizes that he could win the nomination, but
Speaker 3: if he does that, he's going to lose general lussion,
Speaker 3: so he books it and drops out. When LBJ drops out,
Speaker 3: there's a competitive primary. The other reason the primary is
Speaker 3: competitive is that RFK takes this as a shining moment
Speaker 3: and goes, I am going to enter the race as
Speaker 3: the anti war candidate. Now we now have our tragedy
Speaker 3: as farce RFK.
Speaker 5: Gee jesus, Yeah, just to be clear, if people aren't familiar,
Speaker 5: not the same dude, no, no different, Bobby Kennedy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is RFK. RFK really is seen as as
Speaker 3: a guy, and both hum and McCarthy are seen by
Speaker 3: young people who have been disillusioned by LBJ as someone
Speaker 3: who can you can sort of like take this anti
Speaker 3: war platform national right, and there is a massive vibe shift.
Speaker 3: For a moment, there is hope. And this is a
Speaker 3: real problem for the antie war fashions because this kind
Speaker 3: of thing is exactly how the US got into this
Speaker 3: mess in the first place. LBJ ran this same con
Speaker 3: in sixty four. Yeah, exactly, and they got Leckt and
Speaker 3: immediately made the war worse. So, you know, I think
Speaker 3: there's a tendency to look back on the anti war
Speaker 3: protesters as these sort of like spoiler people who ruin
Speaker 3: the democratic nomination or whatever. But you know, they were
Speaker 3: right to a large extent to be incredibly suspicious of
Speaker 3: anti war democratic candidates.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But you know this also throws all of the planning
Speaker 3: for the protests and the chaos, because the center point
Speaker 3: of the protest for both MOB and the Yippies was
Speaker 3: to show an alternative to this sort of stagnant war,
Speaker 3: ubund death machine politics of LBJ. But suddenly, like if
Speaker 3: there's an anti war candidate who's a nominee, it becomes
Speaker 3: so much harder to make this case. And these people
Speaker 3: are really unbelievably depressed. The vibes everywhere else in the
Speaker 3: country are great. Everyone believes in hope again, it's hope
Speaker 3: and change. So they have their Obama and then RFK
Speaker 3: gets assassinated. Everything goes to shit almost immediately. I mean,
Speaker 3: the vibes are so bad that famously, one of the
Speaker 3: one of the mob guys, I think he's on camera
Speaker 3: just weeping because I mean, he and Bobby Kennedy had
Speaker 3: kind of had sort of known each other through the
Speaker 3: sort of anti war networks, and he's not a Kennedy supporter.
Speaker 3: But when Kennedy gets killed, it's basically imagine our vibe
Speaker 3: shift immediately flipped at his head and went even more
Speaker 3: rancid than it had been the feeling that you all
Speaker 3: had in the week after the failed Trump assassination. Right, yeah,
Speaker 3: And you can see this as interesting, Right, like all
Speaker 3: of the elements of ninety sixty eight are here in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four. Right, you have your own popular president leaving,
Speaker 3: you have a vibe shift, you have a Kennedy, you
Speaker 3: have an assassination attempt, but the pieces fit together differently
Speaker 3: because what happens is, you know, the vibe shift collapses
Speaker 3: with the RFK assassination, and suddenly, you know, anti war's
Speaker 3: back on the table. But on the other hand, McCarthy's
Speaker 3: still in the race, right, Eugie McCarthy, who's the other
Speaker 3: anti war candidate, is still.
Speaker 4: In the race.
Speaker 3: However, it is becoming increasingly clear that what is going
Speaker 3: to happen at the convention is that Eugene McCarthy is
Speaker 3: going to get rat fucked, and they are going to
Speaker 3: put Hubert Humphrey, who is lbj's vice president, back in
Speaker 3: the saddle under the same policies. And this too is
Speaker 3: a sort of inversion of twenty twenty four. The party
Speaker 3: elites ousting Biden and installing Kamala Harris is broadly unbelievably
Speaker 3: popular with the base. Yeah, Hubert Humphrey doesn't run in primaries.
Speaker 3: He just wins by rankling all the delegates to vote
Speaker 3: for him. In this incredible series and sort of smoke
Speaker 3: filled backroom deals and peeling off people who've been Kennedy delegates,
Speaker 3: and it becomes clear that he's going to win. But
Speaker 3: it's terrifying because what has happened is that the Democratic elite,
Speaker 3: against the will of law of democratic voters, has just
Speaker 3: straight up stolen this election. Right they have they have
Speaker 3: stolen it. They have rat fucked Eugene McCarthy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is kind of like the right has unsuccessfully
Speaker 5: tried to play this narrative again, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again. The thing about Harris is that she
Speaker 3: is seen as something different than Biden. Yeah, this is
Speaker 3: this partially has to do with the differences in Biden's
Speaker 3: weakness versus lbj's.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 3: A huge part of Biden's weakness that everyone thinks he's
Speaker 3: completely senile, Yeah, because she is objectively senile. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: because he can't fucking certain together. A sentence goes off
Speaker 3: that Trump can. No, not the Trump can either, right,
Speaker 3: but it was, but Biden's was sort of more visible, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: because of sort of the way the media works, because
Speaker 3: of Trump's ability to sort of run away.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of factors in this, right. Yeah.
Speaker 3: No one on Earth thinks that LBJ is seen now,
Speaker 3: not even his worst enemies. I think that that man
Speaker 3: is senile, right. His problem is his policies and the
Speaker 3: problem with that is that his policies are being transferred
Speaker 3: directly to his successor, who is as vice president. Whereas
Speaker 3: Kamala Harris does not have the fundamental weakness of Joe Biden,
Speaker 3: which is that she successfully and she is the first
Speaker 3: major American political figure has been able to do this
Speaker 3: in eight years. She can string together three consecutive sentences yeah.
Speaker 5: Which yeah, it appears like a manner from heaven to
Speaker 5: the sort of politics appreciator classes, right when they have
Speaker 5: to explain to all of us why we're pure rad
Speaker 5: and juvenile of warning politics outside of politicians, while their
Speaker 5: politicians are like struggling to do a whole paragraph without
Speaker 5: talking about their corn pop or Scranton, Pennsylvania or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And so this is you know, even as we're
Speaker 3: heading into the convention, things are things are going to
Speaker 3: be very different.
Speaker 4: Than they're going to play out now.
Speaker 3: But there's one thing that is exactly the same. If
Speaker 3: that is your your cargo police departments. No changes. The
Speaker 3: only change is they are slightly, slightly, not not significantly,
Speaker 3: they are slightly less willing to say the N word
Speaker 3: in public like a little baby.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And in return for that, they got approximately ten million
Speaker 5: dollars of fucking weapons. Yeah yeah, ready up to you.
Speaker 3: These people are exactly the same as today. They are
Speaker 3: overpaid and titled asshole screaming for violence. They are screaming it.
Speaker 3: They're going to take their vengeance against what they see
Speaker 3: as a leftist conspiracy to protect criminals and hand the
Speaker 3: country to communists. They are precisely the swine who beat
Speaker 3: us in the streets in twenty twenty. These people in
Speaker 3: sixty eight are precisely the men today who ran a
Speaker 3: black site at Home and Square to torture, to disappear,
Speaker 3: and torture suspects and the false confessions, and who boldly
Speaker 3: set out a few years ago to kill a sixteen
Speaker 3: year old with sixteen shots on a cover up. This
Speaker 3: is the exact same Chicago police department that it wasn't
Speaker 3: sixty eight, and in fact, all of the key elements
Speaker 3: of the modern police department.
Speaker 2: This is the period. Richard M.
Speaker 3: Daily is one of the people who gets the cops
Speaker 3: to unionize, and again we're gonna see Daily is really
Speaker 3: truly a terrible person. Daily wants the teamsters to organize
Speaker 3: the cops. That doesn't work at all. He's bid completely fails.
Speaker 3: The organized with the Fraternal Order of Police, who are
Speaker 3: just effectively a giant cartel for police murderers now and
Speaker 3: they were at the time. There are a bunch of
Speaker 3: unbelievable reaction areas, a bunch of their leaderships will do things.
Speaker 2: Like quote Hitler.
Speaker 6: They just can't fucking stop themselves.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, so I.
Speaker 3: Want to read I'm going to read sort of the
Speaker 3: modern police statements.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: The better we do our job of envoicing the law,
Speaker 3: the more we are attacked. The state of our so
Speaker 3: called objective press is sad to behold subtly. Too many
Speaker 3: so called objective news writers attempt to excuse the actions
Speaker 3: of minorities. Oh wait, that's not that's not the modern police,
Speaker 3: that's the sixty eight police saying a thing that is
Speaker 3: literally identical to every police statement today.
Speaker 6: They not changed at all, because no one made them.
Speaker 3: No, this is sort of the trap that the anti
Speaker 3: war people are walking into, right, they are walking into
Speaker 3: a bunch of ultra radicalized, unbelievably pissed off cops who
Speaker 3: are elevating at the attempt to sort of beat up
Speaker 3: long haired hippies. And also, there's one thing we should
Speaker 3: also make clear that's that's very different between this anti
Speaker 3: war movement and the modern one, which is that mob
Speaker 3: and the yippies are terrifyingly white. They might be whiter
Speaker 3: than the cops at this It's it's genuinely possible, that's true.
Speaker 3: You give these love for reasons that are incomprehensible to
Speaker 3: be other than racism. Absolutely love dressing up in like
Speaker 3: indigenous costumes. Oh god, yeah, it's awful.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And part of what's going on is that the sort
Speaker 3: of black radical groups don't really want to be involved
Speaker 3: in this. Yeah we can, we can see why, you know,
Speaker 3: they're anti war, but they're like, this is not our problem.
Speaker 3: You can sort this out.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And this is also another thing, a very very key
Speaker 3: difference between that anti war sort of coalition and today's
Speaker 3: because today's anti war coalition. If you go to any
Speaker 3: of the campus occupations, right, you go to an anti
Speaker 3: war protests, it's basically a combination of two of two groups.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It's queer white people and just non white people in general,
Speaker 3: some of whom are queer, with some of whom aren't.
Speaker 3: And that's the core of sort of protest organization of
Speaker 3: the US, right, those are the core of the people.
Speaker 5: Who show up, yeah, and then seventeen people with fucking
Speaker 5: clipboards trying to get them to sign up for their various.
Speaker 3: Well, those are the leeches that show up to sort
Speaker 3: of prey on pray on the Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they are the lamp prey on the on the
Speaker 5: shock of protests.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: But this plays out very differently politically because of who
Speaker 3: has been mobilized into sort of anti war things now
Speaker 3: versus who is showing up to this convention. And this
Speaker 3: is going to be true of the people who show
Speaker 3: up to the convention this time, right, Yeah, they are
Speaker 3: very much not the same kind of sort of middle
Speaker 3: class student people who were showing up to like disconventional
Speaker 3: though not all those people, but like there are a
Speaker 3: lot of people who are workers, right, but like they're
Speaker 3: distressingly white, and that is that is simply not true
Speaker 3: of the modern movement. It's one of the reasons why
Speaker 3: the pieces don't quite fit.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 3: We need to go do some more ads and then
Speaker 3: we're going to sort of wrap up what actually happened
Speaker 3: at the convention and how it.
Speaker 4: Sort of shook out politically.
Speaker 3: We are back. So the other thing that guarantees really
Speaker 3: that this is going to descend into sort of chaos.
Speaker 8: Is that?
Speaker 3: I mean, even days before the events, right, neither the
Speaker 3: mode people nor the Yippies really know what they're planning
Speaker 3: to do. The planning has been terrible. Part of it
Speaker 3: is because again they can't get permits from the city,
Speaker 3: and it's really hard to plan when you can't know
Speaker 3: what you're supposed to be doing. There's also internal disagreements
Speaker 3: in the groups of what to do. There's also a
Speaker 3: truly staggering federal infiltration and not just the normal feds, right,
Speaker 3: we're talking like military intelligence. Oh wow, the Army's intelligence
Speaker 3: office is spying on protesters. They have guys inside of
Speaker 3: McCarthy's campaign that should the legal like it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: if it's legal, it doesn't, right, it's but it's it's nuts,
Speaker 3: and you know, I mean there's an estimate that that's
Speaker 3: from sixty Chicago, that book, that one in six protesters
Speaker 3: were informants.
Speaker 5: Oh fuck me, it's like Afterwaffin ratio they've got going up.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And like part of this is the numbers of protests
Speaker 3: here aren't very good because people are terrified that the
Speaker 3: CPD is going to start killing everyone. So the actual
Speaker 3: number is even as peak is maybe ten thousand, which
Speaker 3: is pretty small considering that the Pentagon mob mobilization that
Speaker 3: mob had done in sixty seven was like one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand people. Well, right, they've been able to put together
Speaker 3: really massive protests, but this one is not that large.
Speaker 3: So the Yippi's kind of do their concert thing. But
Speaker 3: the moment night hits and they're trying to be in
Speaker 3: this park, the police attack. The police are incredibly brutal.
Speaker 3: By about three days in the National Guard gets deployed.
Speaker 3: And this is something about sixty eight that's also different
Speaker 3: from today. If the National Guard is deployed today, it's
Speaker 3: not the same thing now as as as a national
Speaker 3: Guard deployment CDA, because the national Guard deployment in sixty
Speaker 3: eight very well could mean that the army is going
Speaker 3: to kill you.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 3: This is a period in which the National Guard, their
Speaker 3: riot control mechanism is a line of guys with bayonets.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's not to say that these bayonets les lethal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's or less lethal because
Speaker 3: when they're actually going lethal, and they've done this in
Speaker 3: the past three or four years against a bunch of
Speaker 3: the sort of black cop risings have been happening. Is
Speaker 3: they just shoot people? Yeah, right, they straight up kill them.
Speaker 3: This happened in Chicago. That was more of the cops
Speaker 3: the National Guard because read Holy Week, they were sort
Speaker 3: of told to stand down. So it's not to like
Speaker 3: literally destroy the entire country in the giant war. But
Speaker 3: you know, them showing up also really pisses off the
Speaker 3: organizers and everything that happens to the cops start beating
Speaker 3: the organizers, and this, it turns out, is a bad
Speaker 3: idea because it turns out if you beat people, they
Speaker 3: get really angry at you. And so suddenly you have
Speaker 3: all these mob guys who literally their plan going into
Speaker 3: the convention was we don't want to have a fight
Speaker 3: because we're gonna lose. Who are suddenly like, well fuck it,
Speaker 3: they're attacking U. Anyway, We're gonna fight them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And this is where everything sort of the police completely
Speaker 3: go off the rails, right, This is where you see,
Speaker 3: you know, all of the sort of famous footage of
Speaker 3: beatings outside the convention. Although, and I will put this
Speaker 3: something Robert pointed out is that like anyone who was
Speaker 3: in Portland and twenty twenty has been through stuff that's
Speaker 3: way worse than anything anyone saw here. Like you statistically
Speaker 3: probably have seen something that was much worse than what
Speaker 3: happened to the people, Which is not saying it wasn't bad, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, these are people getting horribly beaten by guys
Speaker 3: with billy clubs.
Speaker 6: But yeah, it just happens all the time.
Speaker 3: Now, we are so far past this being a thing
Speaker 3: that nobody's ever seen before or whatever.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, we had a moment where I could have stopped,
Speaker 5: and a lot of people fucking tried. Yeah, And as
Speaker 5: a country, we are going down the path of the
Speaker 5: cops beating people and getting away with it like that
Speaker 5: is yeah, where we're at politically.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in experience saxty eight, the cops, the cops
Speaker 3: are able to go even more feral than they are now,
Speaker 3: which is slightly more fail Which is to say that
Speaker 3: this storm McCarthy's campaign office and they have his campaign
Speaker 3: staffers beaten.
Speaker 6: Oh damn, Yeah, that is that is advanced.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've never heard of another modern political thing where
Speaker 3: police straight up stormed a campaign office of a presidential
Speaker 3: campaign and had his staffers beaten. Right, And this has
Speaker 3: a massive impact inside of the convention itself because what's
Speaker 3: happening in the convention is not what we got with Kamala,
Speaker 3: where like the old is gone and here's the new
Speaker 3: or whatever, and you know you can you can look
Speaker 3: for some kind of break there. It is Humphrey has
Speaker 3: been put in. Humphrey is LBJ two. Lbj's Vietnam policy
Speaker 3: is inscribed by vote into the platform of the Democratic
Speaker 3: Party for what they're going to run in sixty eight.
Speaker 3: And meanwhile, outside right, as a sort of rat fock
Speaker 3: is happening, and as the party leadership is installing Hubert Humphrey,
Speaker 3: the sort of liberal anti war wing of the part
Speaker 3: Party is recoiling in horror. A McCarthy delegate who's a
Speaker 3: senator famously is about to go on stage and endorse,
Speaker 3: endorse super Humphrey because Humphrey's won the nomination. They have
Speaker 3: to come together unity. But he's washing out the window
Speaker 3: as the police are just like throwing kids around and
Speaker 3: beating the shit out of them, and he instead gives
Speaker 3: this speech where he says that if McCarthy was president,
Speaker 3: the cops wouldn't be using gestapo tactics, and Chicago Bay
Speaker 3: Or Richard M. Daly gets so angry that he starts
Speaker 3: screaming from the crowd, and I quote, and I apologize
Speaker 3: for saying this, but you need to understand who the
Speaker 3: party elite is in this period. He says, quote, fuck
Speaker 3: you, you juice, son of a bitch, You lousy motherfucker. Go home.
Speaker 3: He is the mayor of Chicago. On the floor live
Speaker 3: on TV at the Democratic National Convention. Jeez, you are
Speaker 3: watching in sixty eight. You can see in real time
Speaker 3: on TV the entire Democratic Party completely fall apart.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Fuck the Yeah, the mosque has come off, that hasn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything everything's flowing apart.
Speaker 2: You can see.
Speaker 3: You can see the divisions. A lot of liberal anti
Speaker 3: war candidates refuse to back, like Humphrey and his people.
Speaker 3: They eventually come back together sort of as the general
Speaker 3: election approaches, but the damage is done and that's not
Speaker 3: something that we're really at risk of.
Speaker 5: No, they seem to be a pretty much lock step
Speaker 5: right now, like both with police violence and with what
Speaker 5: was happening in Palestine. Like, there's not much like real
Speaker 5: within the party, the Democrat Party, like much descent that
Speaker 5: I can see.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and I think the other thing about
Speaker 3: about the state election, people are trying to compare it
Speaker 3: to the twenty twenty four election, is that the Democrats
Speaker 3: only lost by about one percent of the vote, or
Speaker 3: sub one percent of the vote, even even though it
Speaker 3: was a blowout. They only lost about one percent of
Speaker 3: the vote in sixty eight. And a big part of
Speaker 3: what happened also was that George Wallace, the insane segregate
Speaker 3: this guy was also running and drew a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of electoral votes.
Speaker 6: Yeah, which we'd an't really have.
Speaker 3: But you know, the Democrats almost succesfully rallied and beat
Speaker 3: Nixon Nixon, you know, and this is something that there's
Speaker 3: this narrative that Nixon wins by sort of unbelievable margins
Speaker 3: and that he represented the sort of silent majority, and
Speaker 3: that's only sort of true. But on the other hand,
Speaker 3: the ground in the US since then has changed, right
Speaker 3: the uprisings of the nineteen sixties, and this is from
Speaker 3: the Holy Week uprisings to the process of the d NC.
Speaker 3: All of these protests are hideously unpopular. Everything MLK does,
Speaker 3: everyone hates it, right literally until MLK dies, right. And
Speaker 3: there's actually a very fun example of this. Bear Daily
Speaker 3: had absolutely hated MLKA when he was alive. Right, he
Speaker 3: gives speeches to college him saying he's stirring up trouble
Speaker 3: and like Astlety despised him, and in the moment he dies,
Speaker 3: he gives a speech saying everyone should follow Mlka's example
Speaker 3: and remained peaceful and not in the state literally days after. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: but that's the thing. All of these, all of the
Speaker 3: these things are unbelievably unpopular. And you know, the gap
Speaker 3: between their giant uprising which was holy weak and the
Speaker 3: election was a few months whereas you know, in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four, Right, the twenty twenty four uprising was marked
Speaker 3: by over fifty percent approval for burning a police station down. Yeah, right,
Speaker 3: it was actually extremely popular. And even even four years later,
Speaker 3: you know, with the sort of memory of the tear
Speaker 3: gas fading, everything about American politics is operating in reverse. Increasingly,
Speaker 3: it is not the left that's seen as out of
Speaker 3: touch radicals to attempting to force their agenda on a
Speaker 3: compliant population. It's the right. The silent majority today is
Speaker 3: not composed of evangelical fanatics whose children monitor their porn consumption.
Speaker 3: It is composed of people who think that shit is weird.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing that I want to close on
Speaker 3: which is that you know, in twenty twenty four, in
Speaker 3: a lot of ways, is sixty eight standing on its head,
Speaker 3: because everything that comes after the election is seen as
Speaker 3: the backlash to the sort of excess of sixty eight. Right,
Speaker 3: But we are already living in the backlash the last
Speaker 3: four years, the last eight years, right. Trump Ism is
Speaker 3: the backlash of Ferguson, and then all of the sort
Speaker 3: of desant to stuff, the anti trans stuff, all of
Speaker 3: the weird grumor panic, you know, all the anti critical
Speaker 3: race theory stuff, all of the racism, all of that.
Speaker 3: That's all the backlash to twenty twenty and it sucks.
Speaker 3: Everyone hates it. It's awful. And so we are in
Speaker 3: a period where the backlash that sort of swept in
Speaker 3: the Republicans to power for a generation, that that's going
Speaker 3: to sort of come out of the Nickson EARI that's
Speaker 3: eventually going to lead to Reagan. It's entirely possible that
Speaker 3: we are about to see basically the opposite of that,
Speaker 3: where this kind of backlash politics, this kind of sort
Speaker 3: of Trumpian fascism, this very well could be twenty twenty
Speaker 3: four could be the shore on which that wave breaks.
Speaker 6: We can hope.
Speaker 3: I'm hoping.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I am mildly hopeful. I also, you know, and this
Speaker 3: is an other thing that's sport, is this convention. It's
Speaker 3: not going to look anything like even if there is
Speaker 3: intense suppression of the protests, it's not going to play
Speaker 3: the same way politically as as sixty eight convention did.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, right,
Speaker 5: and I think there will be similarities here. But it
Speaker 5: is impossible for the way that the state interacts with
Speaker 5: protest to beat the same and for people to be
Speaker 5: as shocked by it as they were in sixty eight, right,
Speaker 5: like a good number of Democrats, Like you know, if
Speaker 5: you go on social media, okay, it's my representative example,
Speaker 5: you've seen plenty of people barking for cops to crack
Speaker 5: the heads of kids or people of any age, like
Speaker 5: protesting against a fucking genocide. Like people don't care anymore.
Speaker 5: I guess if you're clapping for bombing babies, you're also
Speaker 5: going to clap for smashing students in the face of
Speaker 5: the club, Like I kind of go together.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, And I mean that, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think the sort of long range things about anti
Speaker 3: war movements is that the actual anti war movement almost
Speaker 3: never stops the war right in the short run. Immediately,
Speaker 3: it almost never works. But what happened with Vietnam was,
Speaker 3: in the long run, the protests and the sty eight
Speaker 3: did stop the war, right. But they stopped the war
Speaker 3: not by not by moving sort of traditional American politics.
Speaker 3: They stop the war by being one of the catalysts
Speaker 3: that radicalized enough enough of the US army that almost
Speaker 3: by by the time the war ends, something like half
Speaker 3: of it is either on strike or openly in revolt,
Speaker 3: and that eventually is the thing that crushes it. And
Speaker 3: I think that's also a thing for this, is that like, yeah,
Speaker 3: Kamala Harris probably not going to end the genocide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But.
Speaker 3: There's good reason for this, right. We're very used to
Speaker 3: looking for immediate, direct impacts of reactions, and a lot
Speaker 3: of times the impact of reactions are in things in
Speaker 3: the distant future in ways that we can't see right now.
Speaker 3: And maybe that gives you hope, maybe that doesn't, but
Speaker 3: that's sort of the way that these anti war things work,
Speaker 3: and I don't know, Hopefully we'll get a fucking better
Speaker 3: result this time and we can stop the rest of
Speaker 3: Palestine from being completely exterminated.
Speaker 6: But yeah, that would be nice.
Speaker 3: That's the not hopeful part of this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well I think it's so hopeful, But it's instructive, right, Like,
Speaker 5: if you're out there now and you're expecting some big change,
Speaker 5: if you joy attending at Chicago you're expecting some bid change,
Speaker 5: you probably won't see it. It doesn't mean that what
Speaker 5: you're doing isn't important, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't
Speaker 5: keep doing it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this has been taken happen here. The rest
Speaker 3: of the week will be an account of what actually
Speaker 3: does happen at this convention. So stay tuned, enjoy, enjoy that,
Speaker 3: and go stop genocidal.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about it
Speaker 2: happening here and here this week is Chicago. I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: I'm here in town with Sophie Lichterman, who will not
Speaker 2: be on MIC for this episode but will be later
Speaker 2: this week. And Garrison Davis, Hello, with whom I've been
Speaker 2: out all day in the streets.
Speaker 8: We are currently recording just a few blocks away from
Speaker 8: the DNC protest, the Coalition to.
Speaker 2: March Down on the corn out in the street.
Speaker 8: So we apologize for whatever sounds are getting picked up.
Speaker 8: Today's been very hectic. There's been protests all day that
Speaker 8: me and Robert have been at and that's mostly what
Speaker 8: we're gonna be talking with you today.
Speaker 2: So this is day one of the DNC. We actually
Speaker 2: have not yet been inside the venue, although we will
Speaker 2: be later for the speeches. Today has basically all been protests.
Speaker 2: So at the start of the day I went to
Speaker 2: the kind of temporary headquarters out of like a rental space,
Speaker 2: and I think North Chicago. Don't don't quote me on
Speaker 2: the exact chunk of town. I'm bad at directions. But
Speaker 2: organizations called behind Enemy Lines and it's a local they
Speaker 2: call themselves a militant activist group. That has been kind
Speaker 2: of controversial because they have made a couple of statements
Speaker 2: about something. So what was the rhyme nineteen sixty eight was.
Speaker 8: That the slogan they've been using is make it great,
Speaker 8: like sixty eight, make it.
Speaker 2: Great, because nineteen sixty eight was a famously bloody DNC
Speaker 2: as a result of the conflict over McGovern versus Hubert Humphrey.
Speaker 2: And this is not so far very much like sixty eight,
Speaker 2: because everyone's known who the candidates are going to be
Speaker 2: going into this thing, and the protest today, at least
Speaker 2: by the time we left, no serious violence. You know,
Speaker 2: I didn't want to talk a little bit about that
Speaker 2: group because they made some interesting statements and this is
Speaker 2: not their march today. The march today that we were
Speaker 2: at is specifically billed as the family friendly one, whereas
Speaker 2: Behind Enemy Lines has made a couple of statements about like,
Speaker 2: you know, collect bruises from the Chicago police. It's the
Speaker 2: new fall fashion, that sort of deal. So they're really
Speaker 2: playing up the hole. There's going to be a big
Speaker 2: conflict thing. If that happens, it'll be tomorrow because that's
Speaker 2: when their event is planned. Today was the event that
Speaker 2: everyone thought was going to be the largest march probably
Speaker 2: will be.
Speaker 8: It's called the March on the DNC twenty twenty four. Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's put together by a coalition of a lot of
Speaker 8: local different organs in Chicago as well as some once
Speaker 8: from around the country.
Speaker 2: So heading into this, when organizers were asked, they said
Speaker 2: they were expecting thirty to forty thousand. I saw a
Speaker 2: video by I think a CNN guy where he was
Speaker 2: like fifty thousand people could show up. That's not the
Speaker 2: numbers we've seen. I would say two to three thousand,
Speaker 2: maybe five at the most, maybe five k kind of
Speaker 2: on the outside end. One of the organizers on the
Speaker 2: mic said that they had fifteen k there. I don't
Speaker 2: think that was fifteen thousand people. I will say there's
Speaker 2: more protesters than cops, but it is closer to parody
Speaker 2: in terms of numbers than you normally get. The Chicago
Speaker 2: police have been lining every block for several blocks around
Speaker 2: the protest lines and lines of police vans, some of
Speaker 2: them fold with riot teams, some of them clearly for
Speaker 2: potential arrestees. Every time the protests moved, they started in
Speaker 2: Union Park and moved towards what was the number of the.
Speaker 3: Park, number five seven eight.
Speaker 2: Five to seven eight sounds like a fucking half life two, which.
Speaker 8: Is the park that Chicago and DC is wanting most
Speaker 8: of the protests to take place at. Protesters, at least
Speaker 8: these big coalitions have preferred to use Union Park as
Speaker 8: it's bigger. But in this very moment, we just walked
Speaker 8: over from PARC five seven eight, where people are currently
Speaker 8: lined up in front of the fence.
Speaker 2: I would say it was a very controlled event. It's
Speaker 2: possible something's happened since we've left or will happen later,
Speaker 2: especially people try to occupy the park, But from what
Speaker 2: happened while we were there, there was a group of
Speaker 2: a protest safety team who were all wearing Hiva's vests
Speaker 2: that the entire line of march. The march itself was
Speaker 2: him done on two sides by lines of bike cops
Speaker 2: using their bikes to make a mobile wall. Inside the
Speaker 2: line of bike cops was a line of protest safety
Speaker 2: people in Hiva's vests who when folks tried to confront
Speaker 2: the fence, there's a fence that is essentially the same
Speaker 2: fence we had in Portland lining et side of the DNC.
Speaker 2: Some groups of people tried to confront that tried to
Speaker 2: get off of the route of march and move somewhere
Speaker 2: other than back to the park that the safety team wanted,
Speaker 2: and the safety team basically walled off the protest from
Speaker 2: doing anything but going back into the park, essentially doing
Speaker 2: like kind of what the police were doing directly next
Speaker 2: to the police, which caused some conflict and some soreness
Speaker 2: among people, But as of the time we left like
Speaker 2: nothing else had really happened.
Speaker 8: Hello, Future Gear here cutting in from the middle of
Speaker 8: the DNC where I was just suffering through the Hillary
Speaker 8: Clinton speech, and I'm here to tell you that more
Speaker 8: in fact did happen and things actually did get a
Speaker 8: little bit more spicy. But you will hear about that
Speaker 8: a little bit later on in the episode. Anyway, back
Speaker 8: to us sitting on a random Chicago street corner. Yeah,
Speaker 8: among the five thousand people, there's a lot of like
Speaker 8: smaller groups. You know, you will have a few hundred
Speaker 8: people from this organization, this organization, and it's a lot
Speaker 8: of regular people who are both against the genocide in Palestine.
Speaker 8: They do not believe that either political party is going
Speaker 8: to put an effort to actually achieve that, and they
Speaker 8: put most of the blame for sending bombs to Israel
Speaker 8: on Biden and now Kamala.
Speaker 2: And I would say that's the vast majority. I did
Speaker 2: run into some people wearing like DNC Kamala shirts that
Speaker 2: my understanding was they were kind of here to get
Speaker 2: the vibe. And yeah, it was definitely a lot of
Speaker 2: hostility towards the DNC, So my guess would be not
Speaker 2: a positive reaction. There A couple of different communist organizations.
Speaker 3: Here, including five I've never heard of before.
Speaker 2: Yes, almost none of them. But RevCom was there, which
Speaker 2: is a fun one that's essentially a CULTL. A few
Speaker 2: other PSLs there also, kind of on the cult east
Speaker 2: side of things, I guess. Highlights. We did meet a
Speaker 2: lot of nice people out there, a lot of fans
Speaker 2: of the show. I was happy to see that they
Speaker 2: were not with the Popovacchi and crew. Everyone was very nice.
Speaker 2: I hope we weren't too kurt, which is kind of exhausted,
Speaker 2: and I've been talking to folks all day.
Speaker 8: I was able to geolocate enemy of the podcast.
Speaker 2: Jack Posobic. Yes, yes, he was in quote unquote Camo.
Speaker 2: He was just wearing a green shirt and a kefia
Speaker 2: around his face, trying to interview people. I ran up
Speaker 2: to him and yelled his name out repeatedly until he
Speaker 2: acknowledged that he was in fact Jack Pisobic. Then I
Speaker 2: asked him about an event from twenty seventeen where he
Speaker 2: showed up at a protest undercover as an ANTIFA with
Speaker 2: a sign that said rape Milania. BuzzFeed immediately published text
Speaker 2: messages of him essentially talking to a friend about like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think this would be a great idea. We need
Speaker 2: to get somebody in there with this fucked up sign.
Speaker 2: So I asked him about it. He didn't want to answer,
Speaker 2: but he eventually left. I think the only people who
Speaker 2: were willing to talk to him were communists who wanted
Speaker 2: to quote long passages of political writing at him. So
Speaker 2: I don't think it was a great content for Jack.
Speaker 2: But we'll see. Maybe this will be what causes him
Speaker 2: to blow up. We're gonna do some ads, then we're
Speaker 2: going to come back and talk about some of our highlights,
Speaker 2: what we expect from the week ahead, and the great
Speaker 2: city of Chicago, and we're back Garrison. Are you aware
Speaker 2: because we're in Chicago, but the south side of this
Speaker 2: very city is, according to many, the baddest part of town.
Speaker 2: And if you go down, I'm just telling you, if
Speaker 2: you go to the south side of Chicago, you need
Speaker 2: to be aware of a man called Leroy. B I
Speaker 2: knew it, bad, bad Leroy, But he's the baddest man
Speaker 2: in the whole damn town here. I knew it. I
Speaker 2: knew it batter than old King Kong. He's meaner than
Speaker 2: a junkyard dog.
Speaker 3: I'm not looking at my fucking notes.
Speaker 2: All right, okay, great.
Speaker 8: As Robert was checking out this office for this other
Speaker 8: group planning a protest at the Israeli Consulates tomorrow, I
Speaker 8: got to the Union Park protest early, was able to
Speaker 8: walk around. Got a whole bunch of flyers for communists
Speaker 8: magazines that again I have never heard of, and you
Speaker 8: don't need to seek them out either, they will walk
Speaker 8: up to you and put one in yours.
Speaker 2: I got a whole book by Caleb Mappin, who is
Speaker 2: a Lushite Communist, which is like it's like the it's
Speaker 2: like the Foiled Charizard Communist, Like you're really yeah, it's
Speaker 2: beautiful stuff.
Speaker 8: And then we had like three hours of speeches before
Speaker 8: people eventually left and marched to the march to the
Speaker 8: DNC fence by Park five seven eight. And although most
Speaker 8: of this is about Palestine, there also is some like
Speaker 8: intersectionality with a few other things.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a lot.
Speaker 2: Of LGBTQ stuff, a lot of trans.
Speaker 8: A lot of TBTQ stuff, a bottom stuff obviously a
Speaker 8: lot of abortion rights and stuff that is one of
Speaker 8: abortion rights that has become a recurring, recurring talking point
Speaker 8: that I think, I think I'll mention something a little
Speaker 8: bit closer to the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there's one of the groups of counter protesters
Speaker 2: who has kind of shown up for these people purporting
Speaker 2: to be like dims against abortion. Basically one of their
Speaker 2: chants was essentially being anti abortion is being pro trans
Speaker 2: because trans people might get aborted, which was a fascinating
Speaker 2: argument and an.
Speaker 8: Amazing chant that's both like abortion and is able lest abortions.
Speaker 8: Transphobic abortion is racist. You know, all of all the
Speaker 8: things and what.
Speaker 2: I'll say, so you know, obviously you and I have
Speaker 2: both expressed either of us really like it when at
Speaker 2: a protest you have a group of people basically being
Speaker 2: security who wall off other people from doing stuff. What
Speaker 2: I will say the protest safety team was effective at
Speaker 2: was every time someone like the Progressives against Abortion or
Speaker 2: whoever would show up, there was a one literal fascist
Speaker 2: lady who I was definitely unwell with like a cardboard
Speaker 2: sign covered in racial slurs. They would just get a
Speaker 2: team to kind of wall them off with their bodies
Speaker 2: and it kept them from becoming like media were not
Speaker 2: focused around the folks coming into disrep stuff like they
Speaker 2: were at the march yesterday, we were at a march
Speaker 2: on Sunday afternoon, where as soon as those anti abortion
Speaker 2: folks showed up, every camera turned towards them, because there's
Speaker 2: this thought that like, oh, maybe this is where there
Speaker 2: will be a conflict.
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 3: I think walling off groups like that makes sense.
Speaker 8: It's a very effective way to do it. I do
Speaker 8: get very hesitant and a little bit on my toes. Yes,
Speaker 8: whenever they start people in the crowd who are actual participants,
Speaker 8: who are just doing something that people in haives vests
Speaker 8: don't like. Yes, and when you start restricting their freedom
Speaker 8: of movement, when you start walling them off and keep
Speaker 8: and pushing them towards the police await, everyone.
Speaker 2: Else looks like they were trying to push a chunk
Speaker 2: of the crowd, you can get pretty fucked up, including
Speaker 2: the person with a YPG flag that you know, I
Speaker 2: don't know, I'm just inherently sympathetic towards, but yeah, trying
Speaker 2: to push them towards the police riot line. I did
Speaker 2: not like seeing that.
Speaker 3: And there was some talk about this leading up to
Speaker 3: the DNC.
Speaker 8: There was some like leaked memo I think from some
Speaker 8: PSL people and a few other orgs about plans too.
Speaker 8: If there was any like quote unquote like disruptors or whatever,
Speaker 8: to circle them off, keep them away from the march,
Speaker 8: make sure they cannot rejoin the march, and push them
Speaker 8: towards the police line. Yeah, and that is never great.
Speaker 8: That's never great to see.
Speaker 2: No, especially when all of your chants are like fuck
Speaker 2: the DNC, Kamala's evil, but like we need to do
Speaker 2: what the police are not doing here, Like we have
Speaker 2: to be the cops.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you're preventing people from actually marching to the DNC.
Speaker 8: And for most of this march on Monday, it was
Speaker 8: the cops who were leading the march. Yes, literallyhead of
Speaker 8: the march, in front of everybody.
Speaker 3: They both had all of the streets walled off.
Speaker 2: At the head it was about six to eight cops
Speaker 2: at any given time, and then a couple of dozen
Speaker 2: people with cameras, media, and then it was the actual protest.
Speaker 8: But it's essentially the whole the whole march is being
Speaker 8: is being led by police.
Speaker 3: And that's also one thing with.
Speaker 8: Men surrounded whenever you're chanting like who streets are streets
Speaker 8: and all these other things, you're like, this is this.
Speaker 3: Is basically a cop street.
Speaker 8: This is basically a cop led protest all the cops
Speaker 8: at most points I was I was walking by a
Speaker 8: Chicago ped sergeant who was on his comms and that
Speaker 8: he was telling like everyone on the walkie talkie system
Speaker 8: or whatever, like there's there's quote nothing nefarious going on,
Speaker 8: there's nothing to worry about. Everything's good and yeah, from
Speaker 8: their perspective, that was what most of today was like,
Speaker 8: at least until a few hours ago, when people in
Speaker 8: the actual protest organizing committee were sectioning off people that
Speaker 8: they didn't like.
Speaker 2: From what I have seen so far, you know, there's
Speaker 2: not much that would go viral that would be big
Speaker 2: news from this protest. Certainly not much that you would
Speaker 2: say it was embarrassing to anyone now. But there's also
Speaker 2: not much that's gonna like draw any attention if you're
Speaker 2: considering that the goal of activism like this. I don't
Speaker 2: see this as like being a needle moving march.
Speaker 8: And even if you have a martial tie dozen people,
Speaker 8: which is good when it's after three hours of speeches
Speaker 8: about communism, that's not actually doing anything to put pressure
Speaker 8: on like the Vite administration the Democrats to actually do
Speaker 8: something about Palestine.
Speaker 2: There were several minutes today about getting the US out
Speaker 2: of Korea, and like that's going to be your issue.
Speaker 2: That's going to be your issue. But like you, if
Speaker 2: you're kind of making it about everything, it's about nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's about nothing. It was not a lot of punch today.
Speaker 8: A ceasefire and Palestine is a very popular issue and important.
Speaker 8: But the more time that you're talking about and trying
Speaker 8: to recruit people for like the Revolution TM and fill
Speaker 8: up your sign up sheet and have speeches about about
Speaker 8: you know, Marxism, Marxism, Leninism, the immortal Science, that's not
Speaker 8: going to actually help anyone in Palestine. At this point.
Speaker 8: I'm not sure how effective these protests are are going.
Speaker 8: That's always hard to say. But if you are actually
Speaker 8: trying to apply pressure onto the Democrats onto, like the
Speaker 8: party in charge of the executive branch, I think focusing
Speaker 8: on that would would probably be be a slightly more beneficial. Hello,
Speaker 8: this is gear cutting in again from a corridor underneath
Speaker 8: the Democratic National Convention the United Center in Chicago. Sleepy
Speaker 8: Joe Biden's about hitting the stage. Before he does, I
Speaker 8: need to give you a special update. So right after
Speaker 8: we recorded this little street conversation between me and Robert
Speaker 8: a whole bunch of more things happened, So there was
Speaker 8: already some kind of inter conflict within the march. On
Speaker 8: the way to park five seven eight, people had differing
Speaker 8: ideas on where they wanted the march to be, like
Speaker 8: directed to whether that's just a stopping at the park
Speaker 8: or trying to break through and go further into the
Speaker 8: actual like DNC perimeter. And eventually we had a smaller
Speaker 8: group of people kind of up by the fence line
Speaker 8: that were able to breach a small secretion of the
Speaker 8: fence and people started going into one of the many
Speaker 8: layered barricades at the d and see now, as this
Speaker 8: was happening, some of the protest marshals like organizers and stuff,
Speaker 8: tried to rally the rest of the crowd to march
Speaker 8: back to Union Park away from this breach at the DNC,
Speaker 8: and others started pouring in. There was maybe about like
Speaker 8: fifty to seventy five people who actually broke through this line,
Speaker 8: and maybe like half of them were protesters, the other
Speaker 8: half were like press and media. A whole bunch of
Speaker 8: the guys that going through those barricades are people looking
Speaker 8: to take photos, and it was a lot of press,
Speaker 8: but police did pressure people out. I think they arrested
Speaker 8: maybe like three people in this whole mess. But police
Speaker 8: pushed the remaining people out of the park and closed
Speaker 8: it for safety concerns. And then those people who got
Speaker 8: pushed out, and then people who were kind of already
Speaker 8: were on the move met back at Union Park where
Speaker 8: the day's protests began, and almost immediately they started setting
Speaker 8: up in campments, setting up tents, doing like logistics stuff.
Speaker 8: Now police saw this happen and did not like this
Speaker 8: very much, and they quickly moved in and gave a
Speaker 8: dispersal order. I believe two people were arrested during this
Speaker 8: kind of second kerfuffle. Police were saying, people can stay
Speaker 8: in the park as long as you're not setting up
Speaker 8: tense as long as you're not doing like larger logistics,
Speaker 8: you know, using the sound system, all these kinds of things.
Speaker 8: And at a certain point, I think police push most
Speaker 8: people either onto the edges, onto the periphery orders out
Speaker 8: of the area. But a whole bunch of like swat
Speaker 8: to a whole bunch of Chicago PD just surrounded this
Speaker 8: whole area and kept a pretty tight lit on things.
Speaker 8: So I know people were planning to want to do
Speaker 8: a larger encampment tonight, and Chicago p D would not
Speaker 8: let that happen. And for whatever reason, there was either
Speaker 8: wasn't enough people or there wasn't enough like logistics or
Speaker 8: dedication to really fight off the chicagopd's.
Speaker 3: Incursion in Union Park.
Speaker 8: So now the day is wrapping up, Joe Biden's about
Speaker 8: to head on stage, and that is the situation for
Speaker 8: the protests. The first day of the DNC back to
Speaker 8: Robert Evans is sitting on a random street corner.
Speaker 2: So you know, the highlight to me of today Again,
Speaker 2: we met a lot of very nice fans and they
Speaker 2: all seem to be doing smart things, which I like seeing.
Speaker 2: There was an old man who had he had a
Speaker 2: big Palestinian flag and underneath it was a Bosnian flag.
Speaker 2: So we went up to him because I was just
Speaker 2: kind of curious. I had a feeling it had something
Speaker 2: to do with the genocide, but like you know, I
Speaker 2: wanted to talk. And he was a survivor of Strebernitza,
Speaker 2: which was a massacre during the the Yugoslav breakup. That was,
Speaker 2: I mean, just one of the worst exogenocide of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century. And we talked ab it because I'd been
Speaker 2: to streb Burnitza and interviewed some survivors and stuff, and
Speaker 2: he was like very moved to be here, expressed a
Speaker 2: lot of solidarity with Gaza. Essentially said like I lived
Speaker 2: through a genocide too, so I'm going to show up
Speaker 2: and support these people, which was very moving. Was probably
Speaker 2: the most moving part. Definitely the most moving part of
Speaker 2: the day for.
Speaker 8: Me, among all these big like socialist, communist newspaper organizations.
Speaker 2: People are handing out books.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they had a lot of just peapeople who actually
Speaker 8: really care about what's going on, and this feels like
Speaker 8: to them, like the only thing that they can do. Yes, Like,
Speaker 8: especially if you're like from this area, if you're from
Speaker 8: the Midwest, You're like, what can actually do to stop
Speaker 8: what's going on here?
Speaker 2: They are all of the leaders of the Democratic Party
Speaker 2: are here, you know.
Speaker 3: And that is a majority of the thousands that are gathered.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I have to say again not to
Speaker 2: just be shitting on people, but it's probably a tactical
Speaker 2: mistake to prior to the event. In the days heading
Speaker 2: up to this, some of the organizers said they were
Speaker 2: expecting thirty to forty thousand people in town for protests,
Speaker 2: and you know, the crowd we got today was a
Speaker 2: solid crowd, five thousand people or so, you know, marching
Speaker 2: three to five thousand not bad. But when you've gotten
Speaker 2: people prepped for that, then the story is going to
Speaker 2: be that, like, well, less people than expected showed up,
Speaker 2: and that can be used by folks to make the
Speaker 2: case that, like, well, this isn't really that popular an
Speaker 2: issue for the Democrats, why should they care as much
Speaker 2: about it as they would if you had gotten fifty
Speaker 2: thousand people in the street.
Speaker 8: Anyway, So that was the the second protest at the DNC.
Speaker 8: Technically the first protest was yesterday, the day before mission
Speaker 8: actually started.
Speaker 3: And yes, both me and Robert were there.
Speaker 8: I showed up as early as usual, and Robert showed
Speaker 8: up late as usual.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right, laid and hungover, don't you forget hungover?
Speaker 2: Of course, I got drunk as hell on that plane.
Speaker 8: It started off with maybe like five undred people slowly
Speaker 8: slowly accumulated to the two but like a thousand. This
Speaker 8: protest was called Bodies Outside Unjust Laws. It was about
Speaker 8: Palestine liberation as a part of reproductive justice and trying
Speaker 8: to tie these issues together, so trying to like rope
Speaker 8: in like a reproductive rights feminists who are here for
Speaker 8: the DNC into looking at Gaza as a part of
Speaker 8: the reproductive rights issue with like the deaths of you know, mothers,
Speaker 8: the restriction of healthcare, and gaza deaths of babies, childrens
Speaker 8: I've bred in children from families after bobbings or evacuations
Speaker 8: all all that kind of stuff. So initially they were
Speaker 8: all gathered in front of the Chicago Trump Tower, which
Speaker 8: unfortunately is a pretty good looking building at least in
Speaker 8: my opinion. There was also a few like big anti
Speaker 8: Trump scigns as there were today. There was a yeah,
Speaker 8: there was a woman with a sign that that just
Speaker 8: read Trump and JAD events are weird, but she also
Speaker 8: had Gaza stuff all like, she also had like Gaza pins.
Speaker 2: And there were also there's some people who I you
Speaker 2: could tell her here for the DNC, but who showed
Speaker 2: up and like yelled in support, but also had like
Speaker 2: a Kamala shirt. Or there was one lady who had
Speaker 2: like fuck Trump went written on her arm and who
Speaker 2: clearly just kind of showed up in between her day
Speaker 2: to like go cheer a couple of times.
Speaker 8: Then move on just up today. You know, there was
Speaker 8: there was PSL people.
Speaker 2: Party for Socialism and Liberation, if you're curious.
Speaker 8: There was there was this one other socialist group who
Speaker 8: was really repting Jill Stein, say Jill Stein, you know,
Speaker 8: saying she's the only candidate that is against the genocide,
Speaker 8: which technically isn't true.
Speaker 2: The Libertarian Party candidate, she's been pro several genocides and.
Speaker 3: Similar Today.
Speaker 8: You know, there were some people who showed up to
Speaker 8: be like corkers, right people on bikes to help section
Speaker 8: off the march from like roads or cars, which proved
Speaker 8: to be ultimately useless because police were doing all of
Speaker 8: the core and lots of cops immediately when I when
Speaker 8: I when I was walking downtown to this protest yesterday,
Speaker 8: just the sheer number of Chicago PD was just stifling.
Speaker 2: This is very different from the rn C almost I
Speaker 2: would say ninety five percent of the law enforcement we've
Speaker 2: seen have been Chicago and Illinois cops.
Speaker 8: Yes, actual local police, as opposed to the R and C,
Speaker 8: where there's a majority like out of state police. Yes
Speaker 8: yesterday did not have tons of medics today did. That's
Speaker 8: not unsurprising.
Speaker 2: Everyone was expecting today to be the biggest day, and
Speaker 2: it probably will turn out to be.
Speaker 8: Yes, But like I said, yeah, I mean even yesterday
Speaker 8: at the very first one, they still they still had
Speaker 8: one thousand people. They were really really tying as much
Speaker 8: as they could into the reproductive rights issue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we saw, we saw.
Speaker 8: Pussy hats, we saw you know, all of all that
Speaker 8: kind of stuff. And one of the funniest things from
Speaker 8: yesterday and we saw some of it today too, is
Speaker 8: that with all these different communist newspapers, they were like competing,
Speaker 8: they were competing to be the ones that have like
Speaker 8: the true path to the revolution, like like handing out flyers,
Speaker 8: handing out pamphlets, be like, no, this is we We're
Speaker 8: the ones that haven't figured out. And you have like
Speaker 8: seven of these groups going after this say like the
Speaker 8: same person.
Speaker 6: Yes.
Speaker 2: I felt very good when Jack wound up stumbling into
Speaker 2: one of those guys, because I was like, Okay, he
Speaker 2: is going to bore the hell out of Jack Psobic,
Speaker 2: but he's clearly he's also like has enough talking points
Speaker 2: that they're just kind of be going to be running
Speaker 2: talking points at each other, which is good. I always
Speaker 2: get worried when some one like Jack shows up, that
Speaker 2: they're going to find either some like nice normal person
Speaker 2: who's not ready to be on camera, or you know,
Speaker 2: somebody who's especially protests like this. She often I'm like
Speaker 2: an old guy who's an anti circumsition activist just shows
Speaker 2: up to every protest and he's like kind of harmless kook,
Speaker 2: and they get made fun of a lot. So I'm
Speaker 2: always happy to see when an asshole shows up and
Speaker 2: gets confronted by someone who is just ready to sit
Speaker 2: in there and talk for hours.
Speaker 8: And you know, similar to today, there was a small
Speaker 8: collection quote unquote like progressive anti abortion activists that showed up.
Speaker 8: They kept mostly to the side of the crowd largely
Speaker 8: ignored them. But one thing I did like is that
Speaker 8: there was people in the crowd caring around signs about
Speaker 8: like abortion pill instructions, like how to use one word
Speaker 8: to get one, and that was that that was very
Speaker 8: nice to see. And similar to today as well, there
Speaker 8: was a few like DNC volunteers walking through the crowd,
Speaker 8: either because they actually do agree with these issues or
Speaker 8: just because they're like just because like they're curious, who
Speaker 8: knows what I mean. Obviously they're still you know, probably
Speaker 8: more pro Haerrison, most people in the crowd, but they
Speaker 8: still might you know, nominally care about these issues.
Speaker 2: But yesterday they got booed.
Speaker 8: Well walking through the crowd, the crowd was was was
Speaker 8: not was not happy to have them, specifically the people
Speaker 8: from behind enemy lines.
Speaker 3: We're giving out most of the booze.
Speaker 8: Referring to the protest tomorrow at the Israeli Consulate at
Speaker 8: seven pm, that's Tuesday, they said that they're gonna be
Speaker 8: the group that quote unquote brings the ruckus, and that
Speaker 8: is the vibe that they have. I think that is
Speaker 8: probably that's gonna be maybe but one of the more
Speaker 8: like conflictual protests. Yes, that we're going to see this
Speaker 8: week tomorrow on that's that's too.
Speaker 2: Loud, doubt, So yeah, we will.
Speaker 8: We will be there on Tuesday to see what goes
Speaker 8: down there. I'm about to walk into the d n
Speaker 8: C to hear Old Sleepy Joe. We're taking bets to
Speaker 8: see if he has a stroke on stay age. One
Speaker 8: thing that people have been able to use a lot,
Speaker 8: and that is, you know, a very real and valid
Speaker 8: issue is that just last week the government, including you know,
Speaker 8: the Biden Harris administration as well as Congress proved a
Speaker 8: twenty billion dollar arms deal to Israel. We know how
Speaker 8: they're using these weapons as many meetings that Kamon's going
Speaker 8: to take about, you know, in arms embargo. At least
Speaker 8: currently we are still sending over we're doing the opposite,
Speaker 8: which is what most people gathered here are concerned about.
Speaker 8: You know, it's great to see people talking about abortion,
Speaker 8: LGBTQ stuff. You know, all the other reasons that the
Speaker 8: US is doing things that are bad. But you know,
Speaker 8: when it comes to like talking to like the Democrats
Speaker 8: at the DNC right that the Democrats are pro abortion.
Speaker 8: They are, they are nominally pro these things. Pressuring on
Speaker 8: the Palestinian stuff is going to be probably the biggest
Speaker 8: thing as expected in these next few days.
Speaker 2: So we'll see how that goes. We'll be back tomorrow
Speaker 2: and the rest of the week from the DNC. This
Speaker 2: has been it could happen here, happening to you, Welcome
Speaker 2: to it could happen here? A podcast about how to
Speaker 2: pronounce the vice president and maybe future president's name, which
Speaker 2: is Kamala. See I got it, Sophie.
Speaker 10: Yeah, but you looked at me for reassurance.
Speaker 2: No, I looked at you to be like look at me.
Speaker 2: I'm doing it. I'm riding a bike with no training wheels. Garrison,
Speaker 2: how's uh, how's grinder going?
Speaker 8: It's okay. I mean it's certainly better than the r
Speaker 8: n C. Yeah, but it's it's still slow picking because
Speaker 8: I mean to find better.
Speaker 2: Have you have you run into He lives in the
Speaker 2: South side of Chicago, a guy named six Garrison. So
Speaker 2: this is day two, ladies call him treat.
Speaker 8: The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 3: I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 8: We are here with Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans, and
Speaker 8: I guess let's pick up right where we left off yesterday,
Speaker 8: because we're recording this Tuesday morning. Yesterday we had a
Speaker 8: full day of protests. There's still some protests today that
Speaker 8: we'll get to later. But we were also able to
Speaker 8: spend a decent bit of time in the actual d
Speaker 8: and C last night. And I think me and Sophie
Speaker 8: will have certainly much to say about that. But I'm
Speaker 8: gonna throw it to Robert Evans, because Robert Evans went
Speaker 8: back to protests after our dinner, and how was that
Speaker 8: it was?
Speaker 2: You know, by the time I got back, the police
Speaker 2: had mostly knocked everything apart. There was a brief attempt
Speaker 2: to occupy the park after we left. So right after
Speaker 2: we left, there was a scuffle over the fence and
Speaker 2: some people managed to reach it, largely due to the
Speaker 2: fact that the kind of fences that they use that
Speaker 2: they put up outside of events like this are all
Speaker 2: the same. It's the same tile of fence they had
Speaker 2: up in Portland, and if you remember the fighting over
Speaker 2: the fence in Portland, part of why there was days
Speaker 2: of fighting is because it was a pretty short section
Speaker 2: of fence, they were able to have it enforced very heavily. Here.
Speaker 2: It was kind of more of a visual barrier than
Speaker 2: an actual physical barrier because they just there was two
Speaker 2: There's probably miles of cumulative fencing, and they don't have
Speaker 2: it all reinforced enough, so when a crowd got close enough,
Speaker 2: it was surprisingly easy for them to push their way in.
Speaker 2: Three people i think got arrested at the fence breach.
Speaker 2: I've heard some folks say it was partly because press
Speaker 2: crowding in made it impossible for people to get away
Speaker 2: from the cops. Just given the way the rest of
Speaker 2: the day worked and what I've seen, I think that's
Speaker 2: pretty credible. It was one of those things where on
Speaker 2: the ground, if you were just kind of looking at tweets,
Speaker 2: I think it would it would look like it had
Speaker 2: been a larger part of what happened that day than
Speaker 2: it was, because it really was a few minutes and
Speaker 2: then things calmed down relatively quickly. But it did have
Speaker 2: an impact on the actual DNC itself, like if you're
Speaker 2: looking at the protests outside over Gaza. As part of
Speaker 2: their goal being to disrupt the DNC, they succeeded in
Speaker 2: doing that because once there was a breach in the perimeter,
Speaker 2: the Secret Service has and I don't know what these are,
Speaker 2: but said they certainly do have like a checklist of like,
Speaker 2: these are the things we do if there is a breach,
Speaker 2: And one of the things that we know they did
Speaker 2: and after that breach is they shut down all of
Speaker 2: the other multiple entrances for media and delegates and attendees
Speaker 2: into the event and funneled everyone through one entrance, which
Speaker 2: caused a clusterfuck for a massive bottom.
Speaker 10: Line, I was gonna say, they sure did.
Speaker 2: They sure did.
Speaker 8: Me and Sophy spent quite a while trying to get
Speaker 8: into the DNC after this, because yes, all of the
Speaker 8: entrances on the northeast and west side of the convention
Speaker 8: all got shut down. Everyone was funneled into one entrance
Speaker 8: on the south side. The line to get in was
Speaker 8: just just crazy. It was so so large.
Speaker 2: I would have to say again if you're looking at
Speaker 2: the goal of these movements as like causing embarrassment and
Speaker 2: disruption to the DNC, because fucking up entrance to the
Speaker 2: DNC fucks up for all of the influencers and media
Speaker 2: people trying to get in. I saw more anger over
Speaker 2: how fucked up getting in last night was than anything
Speaker 2: that had happened, like in terms of like formative social
Speaker 2: media anger, than anything that had actually happened in the streets.
Speaker 2: So I would have to call that a pretty good
Speaker 2: win for the protest.
Speaker 1: I ever heard numerous DNC goers wearing their their best
Speaker 1: their best merch complaining that it was the protester's fault.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that the lines were so long.
Speaker 8: Well, I mean people were also complaining about just like
Speaker 8: the level of like the DNC's like organization and.
Speaker 3: Out because it was a mix.
Speaker 8: It was because of this, you know, triggered by actions
Speaker 8: via protesters, but also because of how the DNC was
Speaker 8: handling everything. It was a compounding, a compounding nightmare for
Speaker 8: many people. And I mean in terms of other like
Speaker 8: other disruptions. We heard from a woman who's staying at
Speaker 8: our same hotel that she left at four pm to
Speaker 8: get to the DNC. She left on like one of
Speaker 8: the the DNC shuttles and it took her four hours
Speaker 8: to get in now. And part of what happened was
Speaker 8: that if she left on the DNC shuttle at around four,
Speaker 8: she probably got to the area around four forty five,
Speaker 8: just because you know, there's slow it's traffic.
Speaker 10: No no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 8: And what happened next is that around four point fifty
Speaker 8: is when the is when the fence got breached, and
Speaker 8: then everyone getting off the shuttles could not what happened,
Speaker 8: they did like this like a mini security lockdown. Everyone
Speaker 8: was just told they have to stay in the shuttle.
Speaker 8: She had to stay sitting in the shuttle for an
Speaker 8: extra forty five minutes. She could not exit because they
Speaker 8: were not letting people get off the shuttles as as
Speaker 8: the fence was breached. So like it's it's stuff like
Speaker 8: that that creates like these like compounding fractures.
Speaker 2: And this is probably if something similar were to happen tonight,
Speaker 2: and the protests, as far as I know, are not
Speaker 2: planned to be in the same kind of locations as
Speaker 2: they were, so I don't think that's likely. I don't
Speaker 2: think it would have a severe response because a big
Speaker 2: part of what was going on Monday is that both
Speaker 2: the president and vice president were in the same building.
Speaker 2: So everything that normally exists in terms of security at
Speaker 2: an event like this was taken up to the suitcase
Speaker 2: that ends the world was in the venue right like,
Speaker 2: so everything was on and like just escalated to the
Speaker 2: nth degree, which is why never take the fucking buses.
Speaker 2: It's long, but one of my rules.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my take is she left a four pm. She
Speaker 1: didn't get in until about eight pm.
Speaker 2: Not worth it. Yeah, I would rather die. I would
Speaker 2: rather die.
Speaker 10: It sounds like a episode of Black Mirror.
Speaker 2: Uh huh. It's terrible. So I got back to the
Speaker 2: protest a little later. My understanding sounds like between seven
Speaker 2: and nine arrests over the course of the day. There
Speaker 2: were had been like three at the fence breach. There
Speaker 2: were three or four more when people tried to briefly
Speaker 2: set up an encampment that really did not last very long.
Speaker 3: Was very quick to take that down.
Speaker 2: And it was the I had been kind of wondering,
Speaker 2: and I still think we might see some mace to night,
Speaker 2: but it didn't, despite like the kind of Chicago sixty
Speaker 2: eight tear gas stories that people keep talking about, that
Speaker 2: did not seem likely at all during the no.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I've heard from ultiple people on the ground
Speaker 8: that it's it seems like chagoped is very aware of
Speaker 8: the optics. Yes, And you know, despite being like the
Speaker 8: police they are, they are trying to not immediately bring
Speaker 8: out the truncheons on everyone's heads.
Speaker 3: Now, they do have the truncheons on.
Speaker 2: They've all got and they've got they have the they
Speaker 2: have the worn ass old wooden ones.
Speaker 3: They do have them.
Speaker 8: But they are they are trying to be as hands
Speaker 8: off physically as they can, of course, like relying on
Speaker 8: the amount of like internal peace policing from these like
Speaker 8: big or mass groups.
Speaker 2: But the other thing that they have going for them
Speaker 2: is when they do have to get go hands on,
Speaker 2: there are so many of them that they do not
Speaker 2: need to use crowd control. Well, crowd control weapons are
Speaker 2: things police use when they are out number That's partly
Speaker 2: why Portland police are so nuts with it is because
Speaker 2: they're almost no police in Portland, like it is literally
Speaker 2: the least police city per capita in the country pretty much,
Speaker 2: whereas you know Chicago. I think the protesters outnumbered the
Speaker 2: police yesterday, but not by a lot, Like it was
Speaker 2: not an overwhelming amount.
Speaker 8: There is a few differences between you know this and
Speaker 8: the RNC, obviously, and one of the main ones is
Speaker 8: that most of the cops we have seen have been local.
Speaker 8: They have been Chicago PD. There's been some Illinois State troopers.
Speaker 8: Of course, there's like Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations FBI,
Speaker 8: but mostly it is just Chicago PUD even around the.
Speaker 2: Premier CPD and Illinois State Illinois State. Yeah, based on
Speaker 2: how because I had been I had been reading updates
Speaker 2: for the last couple of weeks on how security plans
Speaker 2: were proceeding for the DNC, I think that part of
Speaker 2: what we've seen, a large part was influenced by the
Speaker 2: guy that police murdered in Milwaukee, because it was a
Speaker 2: couple of days after the RNC that I started seeing
Speaker 2: the first articles about how there would not be out
Speaker 2: of state police doing trolling around the City of Chicago.
Speaker 2: So it does seem like, thankfully somebody over here recognized that, like,
Speaker 2: oh you if we have a bunch of fucking Ohio
Speaker 2: cops wandering around downtown Chicago like they're going to murder somebody,
Speaker 2: like they're going to freak out because these hay seed
Speaker 2: hicks have heard nothing in their entire lives as much
Speaker 2: as how dangerous Chicago is, They're just going to start blasting. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I guess I'm just glad that hopefully nobody gets
Speaker 2: murdered by the cops this this week.
Speaker 3: Well, do you know what we can't get murdered by?
Speaker 2: Yes, Garrison, Wow, Yes, Yes, indeed.
Speaker 8: Services. That's the fourth this podcast. If you enjoy them
Speaker 8: too much, you know, too much of a good thing
Speaker 8: is bad. That's what I've heard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's really why I'm not sure if
Speaker 2: you don't overdose on products. You meet with bad bad
Speaker 2: Lee Roy Brown, because he's got a custom continental, he's
Speaker 2: got an Alado, Sophie, I'm a trendsetter. Nobody was talking
Speaker 2: about bad Badle Roy Brown except for the one guy
Speaker 2: who very famously talked about bad bad Le Roy Brown.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to It could happen here.
Speaker 8: So after getting through that that clusterfuck of a security
Speaker 8: entrance means Zobe did eventually make it inside the DNC,
Speaker 8: which we'll talk about in a sec But as me
Speaker 8: and Robert we were parading around the protests on Monday,
Speaker 8: Sophie Lichterman was infiltrating dem Palooza, which is.
Speaker 2: The wrong way. It should be Demapalooza.
Speaker 3: It should be dema Paloza, but it's not.
Speaker 1: The angriest let me just give you some visuals here.
Speaker 10: First of all, you're absolutely cracked.
Speaker 1: The name is embarrassing, and that's generally how I felt
Speaker 1: about Dempaluza.
Speaker 2: What is dem Paluzavalusa is like a first off only
Speaker 2: the gen X people are going to remember Lollapalooza.
Speaker 8: No chapel Roone just performed at Lollapalooza.
Speaker 2: That doesn't seund do you? I don't some kind of
Speaker 2: horse great?
Speaker 3: Keep going keeping somebody Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Anyways, it was like half trade show, half panels by
Speaker 1: people talking about things that they think that the DNC
Speaker 1: crowd will care about, leaning in too hard on the memes,
Speaker 1: like a there was a booth.
Speaker 3: Was it the coconut Vibes booth.
Speaker 2: It was the I almost thought that was a bored
Speaker 2: apes thing at first.
Speaker 10: They just they just I was like, why are we
Speaker 10: why are we acknowledging?
Speaker 2: Fine, it's fine.
Speaker 1: There was there was like cool Coconut Vibes here booth,
Speaker 1: and right behind it was a seated area with like
Speaker 1: probably like one hundred chairs and there were two people
Speaker 1: giving speeches on something, and there were two people.
Speaker 10: In the crowd.
Speaker 8: Many many such cases, such cases, and you know, there
Speaker 8: was a lot of cardboard cutouts with VP Harris's face
Speaker 8: on it.
Speaker 10: There was like a VP. Harris as Wonder Woman section,
Speaker 10: and then there was a section with.
Speaker 2: Shirts they're having fun, just so.
Speaker 1: That people have an under understanding of like the level
Speaker 1: of embarrassing. There was a one booth while I was
Speaker 1: waiting in the very unorganized line to get into the
Speaker 1: Panels area of Den Paloza that had shirts for sale
Speaker 1: for twenty eight dollars, featuring one that said beware of
Speaker 1: the uptidy whities.
Speaker 3: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: Uptight white people? I'm guessing.
Speaker 1: Okay, I believe, I believe so, But also why twenty
Speaker 1: eight dollars? Band dictionaries at your own pearl?
Speaker 4: Oh god?
Speaker 10: Okay, make stupid embarrassing again.
Speaker 2: You get the picture.
Speaker 3: You get it, all right, you get the picture. So
Speaker 3: what panels did you attend at Den Paluza.
Speaker 1: The first panel I went to was a panel that
Speaker 1: was like, how to talk to your relatives about Project
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: A great Thanksgiving dinner talk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it was very unorganized, and so I was
Speaker 1: thirty minutes late getting into it because not a single
Speaker 1: volunteer had been trained on how to get people into panels.
Speaker 1: And they had a circuit all around the building several
Speaker 1: times until I found a very nice security guard who
Speaker 1: actually worked for the building that was like, you go
Speaker 1: that way, thank you, sir, And I walk into this panel.
Speaker 10: There are seats for maybe three hundred people.
Speaker 1: There is one man at the front of the stage
Speaker 1: and about fifteen people listening. And I sat there for
Speaker 1: about five minutes and got up because it was basically
Speaker 1: the sum of it was, if your your relatives that
Speaker 1: you disagree with are trying to tell you something, don't
Speaker 1: yell at them.
Speaker 10: Listen to them first, which is not terrible to look.
Speaker 2: If your relatives want to start talking politics at the
Speaker 2: dinner table this year, this is going to be terrible handgun,
Speaker 2: drop it on the table, and then just sit down,
Speaker 2: put your legs up, stare at them. Just like the
Speaker 2: post the exact I learn everything about negotiations from the
Speaker 2: Portland Police Union.
Speaker 8: This is interesting, though, Sovid because every night at the
Speaker 8: DNC they're going to be reading from Project twenty twenty
Speaker 8: five on the main stage. Yesterday they were reading about
Speaker 8: all of the plans within that document to basically make
Speaker 8: Trump a de facto dictator. Tonight they're going to be
Speaker 8: reading on sections about how Project twenty five will affect
Speaker 8: the economy in your pocketbook. So they have this plan
Speaker 8: to every night actually talk about and read from the
Speaker 8: actual document, you know. Framing this says like this is
Speaker 8: basically like Trump's plan for once he gets into office,
Speaker 8: or this is like Republicans plan for Trump once he
Speaker 8: gets into office, and you know, this type of like
Speaker 8: scaremongering fear rhetoric around what Trump would do was semi
Speaker 8: successful in twenty twenty, and I think they're trying to,
Speaker 8: you know, use this similarly now.
Speaker 2: I also think it's smart because there's two big threats here.
Speaker 2: One of them is does the election, you know, go
Speaker 2: badly for Trump, which is an open question. And then
Speaker 2: the other is if it does, he's not going to concede.
Speaker 2: Do the Republicans have shit together to actually steal the election,
Speaker 2: to do another Brooks Brothers riot, to refuse certification, to
Speaker 2: try and kick up enough uncertainty that they can take
Speaker 2: it to the Supreme Court for a steal. And the
Speaker 2: only way, ultimately, if it's an arrow enough election that
Speaker 2: the Republicans go for that, the only real way to
Speaker 2: fight back is to get an overwhelming number of people
Speaker 2: out and angry in the streets, like enough that it
Speaker 2: frightens you know, the Supreme Court and everyone else who
Speaker 2: would be required to actually put in like sweat equity
Speaker 2: to carry off that steel. And one of the ways
Speaker 2: you do that is by making the stakes really clear.
Speaker 2: And so I think this is a it's a good
Speaker 2: idea and responsible that they're focusing on Project twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five as much as they are, and probably what's necessary
Speaker 2: to I'm hoping that the dims don't fold. If that happens,
Speaker 2: I guess we'll fucking see. You know, it's not two thousand.
Speaker 8: Soby what was the second panel you went to at Dempaluzo?
Speaker 1: So I walked around and looked into a bunch of
Speaker 1: different rooms to see if panels had a big crowd
Speaker 1: or not, and it was definitely or not. And then
Speaker 1: I went to the Voices for Justice, Democrats for Palestinian
Speaker 1: Human Rights panel that was.
Speaker 11: Packed.
Speaker 3: It sounded like the most popular panel of the day.
Speaker 1: Packed, no seats available, standing room and just the the
Speaker 1: energy was very respectful. Everyone in there was earnestly excited
Speaker 1: that this was happening.
Speaker 10: But also it was.
Speaker 1: Mentioned many times that this was a step, but obviously
Speaker 1: not the step that they wanted. And it was filled
Speaker 1: with media but also just people that were there for
Speaker 1: Dempaluza wanting to hear what people had to say. It
Speaker 1: was a very diverse group of people and the panel featured,
Speaker 1: you know, several activists, former members of the House of Representatives.
Speaker 3: Someone from the Uncommitted Committee.
Speaker 1: Yes, I believe they were part of organizing this panel.
Speaker 1: Although this panel was a official campaign approved panel, which
Speaker 1: was brought up many times by each person who spoke
Speaker 1: as a thing that it was a first of its
Speaker 1: kind approved campaign panel in regard to the people of Palestine.
Speaker 2: And it's part of the dance the DNC has been
Speaker 2: trying to do where they it is such a popular
Speaker 2: issue like giving a shit about the genocide, wanting to
Speaker 2: cease fire, that they can't not signal to it. But
Speaker 2: also there's absolutely no willingness at the top to actually
Speaker 2: hold Israel accountable, so they like they hold this event,
Speaker 2: they approve it, and it becomes the most popular one
Speaker 2: at the DNC. Biden makes a very mild line and
Speaker 2: support of life, basically saying there was a line during
Speaker 2: speech last night that like the protesters outside of a
Speaker 2: point right, which is not taking meaningful action, but it
Speaker 2: is like it gets one of the largest reactions from
Speaker 2: the crowd that night. I mean, you guys were in
Speaker 2: the room, but at least from where I was watching
Speaker 2: at the bar, it sounded like a pretty sizable response.
Speaker 2: And that's I guess the juggling act that they're still
Speaker 2: trying to do is like can we continue not actually
Speaker 2: committing on anything while keeping some of these people happy.
Speaker 8: And the uncommitted people are basically like this the protest
Speaker 8: group that's holding their votes, you know, hostage almost to
Speaker 8: say like if you want us to vote for you, Harris,
Speaker 8: you have to signal something, whether that be like an
Speaker 8: arms embargo, a real effort towards getting a ceasefire done,
Speaker 8: trying to lobby for change by using their vote as
Speaker 8: a bargaining chip.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a couple interesting things to note before I
Speaker 1: play an audio clip for the listeners here. It took
Speaker 1: almost the entire panel for them to mention Joe Biden
Speaker 1: by name. I think that only happened once. It was
Speaker 1: mostly just referring to the party itself. At one point
Speaker 1: a panel member thank to VP Harris, and she's trying
Speaker 1: we need to hold her accountable, but give her a chance,
Speaker 1: which was the general energy from the entire entire group
Speaker 1: is like, she is.
Speaker 2: Not Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: We're hoping for better. Yeah, she's made an inch of
Speaker 1: a step. We need more, but we want to give
Speaker 1: her a chance.
Speaker 12: To do that.
Speaker 2: And I mean, it's a really different vibe from a
Speaker 2: lot of the protests where you have people who are
Speaker 2: kind of more committed political radicals as opposed to the
Speaker 2: uncommitted folks. The overwhelming vibe is we would really like
Speaker 2: to get on board this, but you need to do
Speaker 2: something right.
Speaker 1: The clip that I'm about to play for the listeners
Speaker 1: here comes from a doctor, doctor Tanya Haja San, who
Speaker 1: is a pediatric intensive care doctor who works with the
Speaker 1: humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, and she has spent the
Speaker 1: last decade as a medical trainer and helping people and
Speaker 1: organizations in Gaza in the West Bank. And she spoke
Speaker 1: for ten minutes, and I thought it was pretty moving.
Speaker 1: It was a large room and I was able to
Speaker 1: get very clear audio, which kind of says a lot
Speaker 1: about the crowd, and she kind of just spoke about
Speaker 1: her experience, and yeah, I guess I'll just played that
Speaker 1: clip for everyone now.
Speaker 12: When the Uncomitted.
Speaker 7: Movement asked me to be here, I be texted every
Speaker 7: doctor and surgeon.
Speaker 12: That I knew who had been to Gaza in the
Speaker 12: last ten months, and.
Speaker 7: I asked them if they wanted to join me here
Speaker 7: in Chicago. And the overwhelming response, actually every single person
Speaker 7: said yes, let me see if I can switch out
Speaker 7: of my shift, and many.
Speaker 12: Of them are actually here in Chicago right now.
Speaker 7: Because we cannot unsee what we witnessed and caused every
Speaker 7: single one of us, many of us have worked in
Speaker 7: many wars before and we have never seen.
Speaker 12: Anything so it reaches so atrocious.
Speaker 7: And that is why many of us swapped out shifts.
Speaker 7: Had phoned a very long way to speak to politicians
Speaker 7: when we're not helps ourself.
Speaker 12: As doctors were trained to protect and reserve.
Speaker 8: Life, and.
Speaker 12: This Israeli military.
Speaker 7: Campaign that's targeting life and every thing needed to statement.
Speaker 12: Has rendered that impossible. And that is why so many
Speaker 12: of us have.
Speaker 7: Taken to other needs of trying to protect life. For
Speaker 7: the past ten months, we have witnessed civilian massacre after civilian.
Speaker 12: Massacre, school massacres who internally displaced people with.
Speaker 7: Children, the Flower massacre, massacres of people try to collect water,
Speaker 7: massacres of people are collecting eight of eight sites massacre
Speaker 7: after civilian massacre, Entire families exterminated in one single bomb, humanitarians,
Speaker 7: healthcare workers killed at and journalists killed in record numbers,
Speaker 7: pediatric amputations, amputations, and children that are heartbreaking records over
Speaker 7: seventeen thousand children.
Speaker 12: Who have lost one or both parents.
Speaker 7: Since October in Gaza.
Speaker 12: We have treated so many children who have lost their
Speaker 12: entire family that it has a term has.
Speaker 7: Been coined to describe these children who probably heard it
Speaker 7: Wounded Child on Surviving Family in WCNSF. This is a
Speaker 7: term that has been coined since October to describe as
Speaker 7: very frequent phenomenon that I personally witnessed more times than
Speaker 7: I can count while I was there.
Speaker 1: For children.
Speaker 7: I have held the hand of children who are taking
Speaker 7: their last guests because their entire family was killed in
Speaker 7: the same attack and couldn't be there holding their hand
Speaker 7: and comforting them, and could not bury them thereafter. For
Speaker 7: the children who I treated who were discharged, they were
Speaker 7: and survived, they face a Russian let of a hundred
Speaker 7: ways that they will like me and pretend to die
Speaker 7: when they leave the hospital due to the service answer
Speaker 7: is incompatible with life that has been architectured vias, military assault,
Speaker 7: direct bombing, starvation, dehydration, disease. Alarming reports of the first
Speaker 7: cases of polio and gaza right now. Polio's a potentially
Speaker 7: deadly diseased that causes paralysis, including paralysis the muscles needed
Speaker 7: to breathe, that has been eradicated for decades in that region.
Speaker 7: There's been a polio fascination campaign that essentially is eradicated
Speaker 7: the disease from the majority of the world, and now
Speaker 7: we're seeing cases.
Speaker 12: Emerging in a.
Speaker 7: Area of the world that cannot that has a healthier
Speaker 7: system that has been completely and entirely annihilated. I mentioned
Speaker 7: these wounded children with no surviving family. I'm going to
Speaker 7: give you two quick stories just so that you can
Speaker 7: humanize what I mean when going to say this, because
Speaker 7: I know it's really hard to hear these numbers and
Speaker 7: think about individuals and what this means to them. I
Speaker 7: received a young boy in the emergency department during one
Speaker 7: of the mass casualties who had hating half of his
Speaker 7: face and antholwa Luckily, the organs that are lighted for
Speaker 7: breathing and blood supplied.
Speaker 12: To the brain were preserved.
Speaker 7: They were visible but preserved, and he was talking to us.
Speaker 12: He couldn't see himself, so.
Speaker 7: He didn't know what he looked like at that point
Speaker 7: in time, and he kept asking for his sister.
Speaker 12: His sister was in the bed next to him.
Speaker 7: The majority of her body was burned beyond recognition. He
Speaker 7: didn't recognize that.
Speaker 12: The girl in the bed next.
Speaker 7: In his sister, his entire family, parents, and the rest
Speaker 7: of his siblings who are killed in the same attack.
Speaker 7: That always survived. And the next day I went to
Speaker 7: see him. A very young plastic surgeon, one of the
Speaker 7: few remaining plastic surgeons in God because both the others
Speaker 7: have either been killed or have fled. To understand, Lee
Speaker 7: had removed part of his chest and created a graft
Speaker 7: to cover those vible that organs in the net. He
Speaker 7: was lying in his bed and mung Wing's so difficult
Speaker 7: to talk, and he kept saying I felt really close
Speaker 7: to him.
Speaker 3: And he said I envisioned and died too.
Speaker 11: And I said what And.
Speaker 7: He said, I think my entire family has gone to
Speaker 7: heaven or it's not. My entire comming is exact words
Speaker 7: or something effective. Everybody I loved is now in heaven.
Speaker 12: I don't want to be here anymore. That is one
Speaker 12: of so many stories.
Speaker 1: Well, uh, yep, that's yeah.
Speaker 10: Here's some ads, some ads.
Speaker 9: Yeah, all right, we are back.
Speaker 8: We're gonna close this episode by talking about means of
Speaker 8: these experiences in the actual DNC once we finally got
Speaker 8: past that ridiculous security gate. So we got in and
Speaker 8: the biggest thing that we realized first was just how
Speaker 8: disorganized this was, at least compared to the RNC. Now,
Speaker 8: this is due to number of factors, the protests being one.
Speaker 8: There's simply just more people at the DNC, like, way
Speaker 8: way more people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely feel like one of the right wing
Speaker 1: things to do right now is to be like there
Speaker 1: was nobody there.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it was packed. It was way more crowded than
Speaker 2: Monday at the Art.
Speaker 8: It was much harder to find a place to sit
Speaker 8: inside the arena.
Speaker 1: Honestly hard to find a place to comfortably stand inside
Speaker 1: the arena. No so unbelievably packed. Garrison and I got
Speaker 1: inside of the actual seating area trying to find a
Speaker 1: place to sit briefly as VP Harris came to greet
Speaker 1: the crowd, and it was roar y.
Speaker 8: It was what I would describe as electric electric. People
Speaker 8: really like to see her. She played it very casual
Speaker 8: to kind of open up the convention. She didn't even
Speaker 8: have a podium. She was just basically a stand upset
Speaker 8: walking around with him.
Speaker 10: She came out to be like hey girl.
Speaker 8: Yeah exactly, and she was. She was opening things up
Speaker 8: very formally. People seem to really like that, and then
Speaker 8: you know, a lot of a lot of the main
Speaker 8: speakers started started to kind of roll out. Now, me
Speaker 8: and Sophie were able to somehow get special tickets to
Speaker 8: go on the actual like delegate floor area, something we
Speaker 8: never were able to do during the R and C.
Speaker 8: Dare I say big mistake, which was this was a
Speaker 8: massive error on our part.
Speaker 2: This is why I just sat at the bar.
Speaker 8: Because it is a nightmare down there, so much pushing, shoving,
Speaker 8: no place to go.
Speaker 2: You really get to taste democracy.
Speaker 8: As soon as we stepped on the floor, AOC walked
Speaker 8: on stage, everything went crazy.
Speaker 3: It was it was.
Speaker 1: A nightmare called for ceasfire Gaza, which apparently I did
Speaker 1: not see any of the speeches before her, but apparently
Speaker 1: that was the first time that was done at night,
Speaker 1: and the.
Speaker 10: Crowd loved it.
Speaker 8: She gave a great speech, I mean speech talking about
Speaker 8: working people. I think it's also important because of just
Speaker 8: how well she was received and like the kind of
Speaker 8: the spot that she had at the convention. Like she is,
Speaker 8: she used to be kind of be like an outsider
Speaker 8: to like the Democrat Party. Right at this point she
Speaker 8: is like fully within the fold of like the Democrat
Speaker 8: machine and for better or worse, I mean to probably
Speaker 8: a mix of both.
Speaker 2: In some regards, there's a lot of talk that in
Speaker 2: eight or twelve years she's going to be running and.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, she she is preparing for a long political career. Yeah,
Speaker 8: and people seem to like her and the person that
Speaker 8: spoke immediately after AOC while while we while me and
Speaker 8: Sophie were still being shuffled around the show floor.
Speaker 10: I don't think shuffled is the way to even describe it.
Speaker 2: You guys have seen the Jordan Peele movie. Sorry, what's
Speaker 2: what's the one with the sky monster? Nope, nope. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like being it's caught. It's like you're being sharned
Speaker 2: with a bunch of other people.
Speaker 1: My hair, my hair was caught in like a CNN camera,
Speaker 1: like you could not breathe.
Speaker 10: It was like a mosh bit, but not fought.
Speaker 8: No, we were we were caught inside the jean jacket.
Speaker 8: But it was it was we were being slashed around.
Speaker 1: There's three I and we were in the center Aisle
Speaker 1: Jesus christatically like parallel to where the person who would
Speaker 1: be speaking comes up to talk.
Speaker 8: And then Hillary Clinton took the stage and unfortunately the
Speaker 8: crowd loved it.
Speaker 10: They went fairal for Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 2: Yeah, baffling, just baffling.
Speaker 5: It was.
Speaker 1: I looked back at Garrison and I and we both
Speaker 1: with each other like death.
Speaker 2: Wanted to die. It's it's like when you're in a
Speaker 2: foreign country and they eat some sort of like lutfisk
Speaker 2: or something some sort of like weird rotten fish dish
Speaker 2: that they just love over there.
Speaker 8: Or okay, or when they eat like American garbage fast
Speaker 8: food and also love it.
Speaker 3: You're like, oh no, it's a terrifying I don't know.
Speaker 1: What I was expecting, but I just didn't think the
Speaker 1: DNC still loved Hillary the way they do.
Speaker 10: But they went fairal she.
Speaker 2: Was like very popular. I mean, she won the primaries.
Speaker 2: She's got a base of support. She just is. The
Speaker 2: people who hate her hate her a lot. Excuse.
Speaker 8: She gave a very big mad speech.
Speaker 10: She loss of arm waving.
Speaker 2: People disagree about that, Garrison. People got angry at me
Speaker 2: for saying she seems angry. She she was a little
Speaker 2: big mad. I would I wouldn't say.
Speaker 1: I would say she gave a standard Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it was a pretty standard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's just not very likable and charismatic.
Speaker 2: So but she did. I do.
Speaker 1: I do have a great picture of wins Garrison and
Speaker 1: I survived the floor. We were up in a press
Speaker 1: area and of Hillary Clinton with both her hands in
Speaker 1: the air and the crowd eating it up.
Speaker 3: Again.
Speaker 8: A choice, Yeah, navigating this this whole place with an area.
Speaker 8: We're never gonna go in the on the delegate floor again.
Speaker 8: Just a nightmare, thank you, being shuffled around corridors. It's
Speaker 8: it's it's terrible. There was a few other you know,
Speaker 8: a few other speakers usher I think did didn't okay speech.
Speaker 8: You know, uh, lot of stuff about abortion, a lot
Speaker 8: of videos on the big jumbo tron about about cop
Speaker 8: prosecutor Kamala taken down the and Donald Trump. As expected,
Speaker 8: they had all.
Speaker 1: Do we want to play a clip of that? By
Speaker 1: the way, do you have the Law and Order clip?
Speaker 1: Sophie Heerson? Do I have the Law Order clip? Of course,
Speaker 1: I have the Law.
Speaker 8: And Order and we can play twenty seconds of the
Speaker 8: Law and Order clip.
Speaker 1: Yes. There was several different videos played throughout the night,
Speaker 1: but I would say the most memorable one was the
Speaker 1: Law and Order themed clip featuring big Bad kam Law
Speaker 1: as the prosecutor and criminal Donald Trump as the villain
Speaker 1: of the story the New York sex pest Criminal of
Speaker 1: the Week.
Speaker 11: The criminal justice system the people are represented by two
Speaker 11: separate yet equally important groups, the police who investigate crime
Speaker 11: and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. This is
Speaker 11: the story of Donald Trump his entire life. Trumps believed
Speaker 11: he's above the law, that no one would ever dare
Speaker 11: hold them accountable. For the first time in history, we
Speaker 11: have a convict felon running for president, and to take
Speaker 11: on this case, we need a president who has spent
Speaker 11: her life prosecuting perpetrators.
Speaker 2: Like God, God damn it.
Speaker 10: It was the choice and it was night one.
Speaker 2: We'll see how that plays.
Speaker 8: So Jill Biden introduced well, first introduced her daughter, and
Speaker 8: then they introduced Joe Biden. I think one interesting thing
Speaker 8: is that throughout the night, I started seeing more green
Speaker 8: Jill signs, which I thought was really confusing, like who's
Speaker 8: stuck in Jill Stein green party.
Speaker 3: Signs into this?
Speaker 8: And then I realized, no, the signs for Jill Biden,
Speaker 8: which I don't know if they chose green signs to
Speaker 8: be intentionally like trying to like reclaim green for Jill
Speaker 8: Biden instead of Jill Stein.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I found it to be odd.
Speaker 8: She led the crowd and like, we love Joe Chance
Speaker 8: And immediately as soon as everyone started changing, like we
Speaker 8: love Joe, thank you Joe. It's starting to feel like
Speaker 8: we're kind of just sending him out to pasture and
Speaker 8: that was the main vibe of the Joe Biden was very.
Speaker 2: Emotional putting on his favorite Spotify.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was very emotional, came out crying after his
Speaker 1: daughter introduced him. And I would say there was like
Speaker 1: a good ten minute standing ovation for him.
Speaker 3: Maybe maybe five, but it was. It was long.
Speaker 10: It was I was being generous. It's his last big thing.
Speaker 2: I don't they It's a really nice farm. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a great view of the mountains from it. Beautiful
Speaker 2: helpstrassed run through in the summer all day long, which
Speaker 2: we just run it.
Speaker 1: We had a direct view of the teleprompter. Did a
Speaker 1: great job reading that teleprompter. He won off script, you know,
Speaker 1: a handful of times.
Speaker 8: But his actual performance was pretty good, especially for coming
Speaker 8: out around like eleven pm. He did.
Speaker 2: He did pretty good.
Speaker 10: It was a strong It was a strong performance for Joe.
Speaker 8: One of the first things he mentioned was Charlottesville, as
Speaker 8: he talked about before in his campaign for being with
Speaker 8: the Reason that he ran in twenty twenty, you know,
Speaker 8: talking about how you know, lots of rhetoric was identical
Speaker 8: from Nazis and anti Semitic vile from nineteen thirties. He
Speaker 8: had a line describing kind of the alt right movements
Speaker 8: as old ghosts in new garments. I thought that was
Speaker 8: well written by whatever speed at the White House was
Speaker 8: putting that one together. Yeah, you know, talking about how
Speaker 8: Trump's being aligned with these like with this new version
Speaker 8: of the KKK. They just they just forgot to wear
Speaker 8: their hoods, talking about you know, very fine people on
Speaker 8: both sides. Hate has no safe harbor in America, all
Speaker 8: that kind of stuff. And you know, this was this
Speaker 8: rhetoric was a lot more common back in like, you know,
Speaker 8: twenty nineteen, you know, right after Charlotte's film, during like
Speaker 8: the height of like the alt right movement. We don't
Speaker 8: hear this as much anymore, but I think it is
Speaker 8: important to remember that this was not that long ago.
Speaker 8: He then kind of talked about mostly the past. He
Speaker 8: wasn't talking about kind of the future. He was talking
Speaker 8: about what the Biden administration has been able to do
Speaker 8: the past four years and trying to tie in, you know,
Speaker 8: Kamula to all of the good things that have happened,
Speaker 8: you know, talking about four years of progress, you know,
Speaker 8: making waves with a COVID, with the economy, lots of
Speaker 8: new jobs, inflation is down, at least now he gave
Speaker 8: his greatest shrinking the racial gaps. You know, health insurance
Speaker 8: stocks are good. We finally beat big Pharma, I'm sure whatever.
Speaker 8: A lot of stuff about tying him to the unions,
Speaker 8: you know, saying that people have called him the most
Speaker 8: the most pro union president in history, and he's like,
Speaker 8: I'm proud to I'm proud to take on that Moniker.
Speaker 10: Or something like that, chanting Union Joe.
Speaker 8: Union Joe said he was the first president to walk
Speaker 8: the picket line, so you know, they were definitely focusing
Speaker 8: a lot of that union messaging. It is interesting considering
Speaker 8: that one union leader spoke at the RNC yeah back
Speaker 8: when the nomination for the Democrats.
Speaker 2: Speech is yes, yes.
Speaker 8: Yes, very brief talk about carbon emissions and pollution, but similarly,
Speaker 8: very little climate change stuff.
Speaker 2: Almost yeah.
Speaker 8: It's which is which has been common throughout this whole campaign.
Speaker 8: This this this, this whole election has been very little
Speaker 8: mention of climate change stuff.
Speaker 2: You really get a feeling of what a gift it
Speaker 2: has been for the Democratic Party that the Republicans have
Speaker 2: given them all this fascism stuff to talk about, rather
Speaker 2: than actually needing to make any kind of serious statements
Speaker 2: about what they're going to do climate change.
Speaker 8: Part of the other kind of achievements that he was
Speaker 8: you know, Lotting was saying that they finally beat the
Speaker 8: NRA passing this gun safety bill, and next they're to
Speaker 8: ban assault weapons and pass universal background safety bill.
Speaker 2: Okay, it was one of the ones that didn't really
Speaker 2: do any Yeah. Correct.
Speaker 8: There was a brief section about the border, saying that
Speaker 8: there's now fewer border crossings than when Trump left office,
Speaker 8: saying that, you know, Trump tried to kill our border
Speaker 8: security bill, and he said, the main thing that makes
Speaker 8: us different from the Republicans is that we won't demonize immigrants.
Speaker 2: We are going to a They're going.
Speaker 8: To still do really really bad like border violence and
Speaker 8: really really bad.
Speaker 2: Border security policies from asylum from being able to like
Speaker 2: flee bad situations.
Speaker 8: But they're not going to be spending the whole convention
Speaker 8: every single day talking NonStop about how immigrants are coming
Speaker 8: to rape your family, and like, yeah, that is true.
Speaker 3: You don't talk about them the same way.
Speaker 8: But some of your actual policies are not all that
Speaker 8: different from what most Republicans in office want. You know,
Speaker 8: they're not calling for massive deportations at the same rate,
Speaker 8: but still that border security bill was very similar to
Speaker 8: ones that Trump was proposing, and the only reason that
Speaker 8: Trump killed it was so that Biden wouldn't be able
Speaker 8: to take credit, which Bin didn't also say during the.
Speaker 2: Speech order fear monger, I mean, it's just been a
Speaker 2: titanic victory for the right.
Speaker 8: And I'll talk about abortion, talk about how if Harris's
Speaker 8: is president, she'll be able to sign in something that
Speaker 8: puts into law that right to abortion, saying that quote,
Speaker 8: Maga found out the power of women in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 8: saying that they're going to find out again in twenty
Speaker 8: twenty four, which he's not wrong about, Dadley, that is
Speaker 8: that is repealing Roe v Wade did I did sign
Speaker 8: election results in twenty two, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Abortion's mandatory finally.
Speaker 8: And yeah, he's you know, talking about quote we got
Speaker 8: to put a prosecutor in the Oval office instead of
Speaker 8: a convicted Felon said, saying that Harris is going to
Speaker 8: be forty seven. And whenever he made a comment like that,
Speaker 8: talking about how Harris is going to be the next president,
Speaker 8: the whole crowd sort of breaking you own chance, saying
Speaker 8: thank you, Joe, thank you Joe. It's just really funny
Speaker 8: because they are just thanking him for stepping down for
Speaker 8: the race.
Speaker 2: Everybody wanted a chance to remember what two thousand and
Speaker 2: eight was like, and they got it and they could
Speaker 2: not be more.
Speaker 1: Are great and just just interesting to note that it
Speaker 1: took it did take him quite a while to really
Speaker 1: start talking about Kamala, but whenever the large chance of
Speaker 1: thank you Joe would start, he'd be like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: thank you Kamala.
Speaker 8: One of the last things that Joe talked about was
Speaker 8: briefly mentioning Ukraine and then talking about Gaza, and this
Speaker 8: is kind of one of the last things in his
Speaker 8: speech before he started like his closing remarks. You know,
Speaker 8: he talked about, you know, the need to get to
Speaker 8: get the hostages to safety and to quote unquote end
Speaker 8: of the war in Gaza, saying that they're working around
Speaker 8: the clock to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza and to
Speaker 8: get a lasting ceasefire. He then gave a small off
Speaker 8: the cuff mention to the DNC protests, and this part
Speaker 8: wasn't on the teleprompter. He said, quote, those protesters out
Speaker 8: in the street have a point. A lot of innocent
Speaker 8: people are being killed on both sides. And he made
Speaker 8: similar comments to this last March, saying that protesters who
Speaker 8: were disrupting a rally of his quote unquote have a point.
Speaker 8: So he has used this line before, but this was
Speaker 8: kind of the only acknowledgment of the protests that I
Speaker 8: saw today from any of the DNC speeches.
Speaker 3: It is interesting that this was not scripted. This was
Speaker 3: just something that.
Speaker 1: He said because, as mentioned before, we had a view
Speaker 1: of the telerompter.
Speaker 8: And at the same time that this happened, someone on
Speaker 8: the far side of the crowd unfurled a banner, and
Speaker 8: I think Robert has some more infro on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were a couple of delegates who managed to
Speaker 2: sneak in a banner. Do you know if they were delegates, Well,
Speaker 2: at least one of them was, okay, a banner that
Speaker 2: said stop arming Israel. They unfurled it and got a
Speaker 2: very strong and negative reaction from the people around them,
Speaker 2: some of whom were hitting them or at least shoving them.
Speaker 2: I think it kind of you could look at the
Speaker 2: video and use either term. They were definitely like moving,
Speaker 2: like pushing, They were definitely aggressively making contact with them.
Speaker 3: With these like big wooden signs that people have not.
Speaker 2: These thank you Joe signs, and then set up a
Speaker 2: chant of thank you Joe to kind of like drown
Speaker 2: them out out as the people filming in the venue
Speaker 2: like cut the lights, basically down the lights in that
Speaker 2: area so that it would it would be less visible.
Speaker 2: Eventually they got the banner away from them, but it
Speaker 2: was one of those like it shows you kind of
Speaker 2: the hollowness of there's enough of a need that even
Speaker 2: Biden had to make a positive reference to the protesters.
Speaker 2: They see it as enough of a potential threat to
Speaker 2: you know, being able to get the votes they need
Speaker 2: that they they have to signpost to it. But a banner,
Speaker 2: and this is not a radical banner. Stop arming Israel
Speaker 2: is not a radical stance down.
Speaker 3: It's not calling an end to the state of events.
Speaker 2: It wasn't an Intifada revolution banner, right right. It was
Speaker 2: a literally just stop sending guns and stopped doing this
Speaker 2: to Israel that's being used to bomb them and people.
Speaker 2: People were angry enough that I don't want to overstate
Speaker 2: the level of physical violence, but I don't want to
Speaker 2: understate it. They were physically aggressive over this, like to
Speaker 2: and and had this small group of people surrounded and
Speaker 2: seeing that that is a reminder that I am not
Speaker 2: in line with the people on the left who repeatedly
Speaker 2: call the DIMS fascist, because fascism means something, it's a
Speaker 2: real political Democrats have plenty of authoritarians, and that's that's
Speaker 2: what that is. Is that is authoritarian thinking, and it
Speaker 2: can and will, if not checked, lead to a lot
Speaker 2: uglier shift than what we saw last night. So I
Speaker 2: did not like seeing that. It is a reminder that
Speaker 2: even as nice as the vibe shift has been, and
Speaker 2: I'm I'm not going to try to take enjoyment from
Speaker 2: that away from people, we are still in a real
Speaker 2: pickle as a country. Ari are acceptance of authoritarian aims
Speaker 2: and tactics.
Speaker 3: And especially you know, sending twenty billion dollars in BOSS.
Speaker 2: And sending twenty billion dollars in BOP. Just send the tape,
Speaker 2: take all the Israel weapons and send them to the Ukrainians.
Speaker 2: That's that's my stance.
Speaker 3: I'm sure Rudy Giuliani will love that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so yeah, I mean you said that the crowd
Speaker 8: had a big reaction to some of the Palestine stuff,
Speaker 8: and at least from inside the convention certainly calls for
Speaker 8: ceasefire did that.
Speaker 2: That was big.
Speaker 8: When Biden made his little comment acknowledging the protests, the
Speaker 8: whole room kind of went silent, like everyone was kind
Speaker 8: of surprised. Like it was, it was like a chill
Speaker 8: went over the air, like no one knew how to
Speaker 8: take it. There. There wasn't like massive cheers, there wasn't
Speaker 8: booze either, but like it was because like arguably Biden
Speaker 8: gave a more positive comment referring to the protests than
Speaker 8: most of like the regular like delegates and attendees. Most
Speaker 8: of the attendees we were standing around in the waiting
Speaker 8: line were much more like negative and dismissive. And I
Speaker 8: think I think Biden's comment kind of like took the
Speaker 8: wind out of the air, at least inside the convention arena.
Speaker 8: But that was basically the end of it. He gave,
Speaker 8: you know, closing closing remarks. Kamala went onto stage, they hugged,
Speaker 8: they did their little thing, and then me and Sophie
Speaker 8: went out of the convention as fast as we could
Speaker 8: and we found this little corridor exit because we didn't
Speaker 8: want to mess with like the like with like the
Speaker 8: escalators or the elevators, because that's always a nightmare. So
Speaker 8: we found this nice little state case and I turned
Speaker 8: to the left walking down the stairs, and I saw
Speaker 8: two very large men in writing gear with two assault weapons,
Speaker 8: and I said, I guess we're not going that way.
Speaker 8: Then I turned around and walk the other direction.
Speaker 10: Honestly, funniest moment of the day.
Speaker 8: Were like ten feet away from these guys away some
Speaker 8: of the giants, some of the most heavily armed men
Speaker 8: I've ever seen. I think we stumbled across because I
Speaker 8: looked at that signs later, I think with someone across
Speaker 8: the security gate for the presidential motor case. So that's
Speaker 8: that's where we almost accidentally went.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, those are guys who have spent every year
Speaker 2: of the last twenty years of their lives just planning
Speaker 2: to kill as many people as they care. The second
Speaker 2: someone takes them off the leak, they would shoot a
Speaker 2: twink on site. They not care, They don't give you,
Speaker 2: they don't give a fuck who they shoot the instant
Speaker 2: they have a chance.
Speaker 8: So me and so Be left as soon as we
Speaker 8: could and went back to the hotel and immediately went
Speaker 8: to sleep.
Speaker 3: And that was the first night at the DNC.
Speaker 2: Drinks with me Garison, I did not. We shared a
Speaker 2: special moment.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to create a compelling narrative of the podcast.
Speaker 2: Well, I thought it was compelling narrative that we had
Speaker 2: a nice drenth It.
Speaker 10: Was I said hi to you and then I went
Speaker 10: okay bye.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wasn't interested in you because you left.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Sorry, I abandoned you. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 8: But that anyway, that was the first night at the
Speaker 8: dn Z. That was the first round of speeches. I
Speaker 8: believe tonight we're gon't split up. Somebody's going to go
Speaker 8: and then go over there, and me and Robert are
Speaker 8: going to be back in the streets.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I will report if anything of interest happens. It is
Speaker 1: the I believe Bill Clinton Obama Night. Jesus Chris, it's
Speaker 1: once again. The year is twenty twenty four. Is the
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton Obama Night.
Speaker 2: It would be pretty funny if Bill Clinton got played
Speaker 2: on the stage by bad Leroy Brown.
Speaker 3: All right, this is it happen? Think it happened year
Speaker 3: recording from Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 2: We'll see I did wuldn't walk all right, Jesus.
Speaker 8: Fuck.
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris and Tim Walls Little John didn't mention anything
Speaker 1: about sweat dripping off his balls.
Speaker 2: He sure did not. And that's the greatest act of
Speaker 2: you know, amongst all of the genocide denial, it takes
Speaker 2: a lot of cowardice to really stand up in this crowd.
Speaker 2: But Little John refusing to talk about sweat dripping down
Speaker 2: his balls in the middle of the DNC was a
Speaker 2: horrible mistake here.
Speaker 10: I'm sorry. I didn't know he was going to start
Speaker 10: that way.
Speaker 2: I knew I was going to start that way. I
Speaker 2: think it was o pain. Garrison, do you know the
Speaker 2: song we're talking about?
Speaker 3: Welcome to what happened here?
Speaker 8: I'm Garrison Davis Lloyd with my bosses, Sophie Lichtman and
Speaker 8: Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: Very old, very old. Remember when Lil John was slightly
Speaker 2: not He was never really that transgressive. Little John's always
Speaker 2: been pretty family friendly.
Speaker 1: I guess somebody somebody replied to the video I posted
Speaker 1: of Little John saying maybe the best lil And you know.
Speaker 2: Ah, there's I have a soft spot in my heart
Speaker 2: for Lil Wayne, not that he was good, but because
Speaker 2: he's really funny, Like missus Officer, that's that's a fun song.
Speaker 2: That's a fun story about Way pretending he had sex
Speaker 2: with a police officer.
Speaker 8: The Democratic National Convention continues inside Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 2: Lil Wayne not yet present, but maybe to night. People
Speaker 2: say Swift might show up soon.
Speaker 1: Well, she she had a couple shows and she could
Speaker 1: potentially get here by tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's great, that's great. I was actually talk about
Speaker 2: Jonathan Swift. Oh okay, author of a modest proposal.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but in my heart, I really don't think
Speaker 1: she's coming.
Speaker 2: No, why would she would? What does she gained from that?
Speaker 10: Yeah?
Speaker 8: So Tuesday we spent the day split up, mostly with
Speaker 8: me and Robert going to a protest and Sophie entering
Speaker 8: the United Center to watch the lib Utopia unveil, complete
Speaker 8: with an appearance. So happy Lil John, I believe is
Speaker 8: what he's referred to as.
Speaker 10: That is that is correct?
Speaker 2: Thank you? Yes, just checking my source as someone currently
Speaker 2: wearing a mesh shirt. He is in your line of descendants,
Speaker 2: like this is one of your one of your Saint
Speaker 2: At ancestors. I don't know how I feel about that.
Speaker 8: And we will we will get to the Little John
Speaker 8: antics uh, specifically with the State of Georgia, which made
Speaker 8: quite a show later on in the episode we will
Speaker 8: be talking about that, but first we will be talking
Speaker 8: about what me and Robert spent a good I don't
Speaker 8: know four hours yesterday doing.
Speaker 2: I was out for closer to eight because I went
Speaker 2: out earlier to look at some stuff I went to.
Speaker 2: There was a pro Israel Free the Hostages event that
Speaker 2: I went to and looked around. Briefly, not a whole
Speaker 2: lot to say about it other than some art that
Speaker 2: I don't fully know how to think about yet. They
Speaker 2: had a massive one of the young women that was
Speaker 2: abducted by Hamas that very famously had like blood on
Speaker 2: her gray sweatpants. They had just like a massive, two
Speaker 2: story tall pair of gray sweatpants covered in blood. But
Speaker 2: it wasn't really clear until you got up close what
Speaker 2: it was trying to be, So it was just kind
Speaker 2: of like it was odd, odd visuals for the event,
Speaker 2: I'll say that, but mostly pretty tame. There was maybe
Speaker 2: thirty or forty people there, and that was about two
Speaker 2: three blocks down from the plan side of the protest
Speaker 2: that you and I went to, which was the Acenture Tower,
Speaker 2: which is apparently it's like a mall on the inside
Speaker 2: and a metro station and also several floors mini floors
Speaker 2: of office space. So I'm guessing that the Israeli Consolate
Speaker 2: is a couple of small offices in this big building.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so there was a purchase plan for later this evening.
Speaker 8: As me and Sophie were going to get lunch, I saw.
Speaker 2: Like Sophie and I.
Speaker 1: I saw they both looked at me, deciding who I
Speaker 1: was going to give a dirty look to.
Speaker 2: I know you were the United Kingdom and me correcting
Speaker 2: Garrison's grammar, was the German army marching into Belgium.
Speaker 8: I saw a whole bunch of police vans driving through
Speaker 8: downtown Chicago on the way to the Israeli Consulate. And
Speaker 8: we showed up a few hours later for the for
Speaker 8: the protest planned that evening. Like usual, we tried to
Speaker 8: arrive early and there was a few kind of characters
Speaker 8: bumping around the area that a lot of media was
Speaker 8: just fascinated by.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the start of it was there was the same
Speaker 2: There was had been a Nazi lady out at the
Speaker 2: protest the day before as well. She has like bright
Speaker 2: purplish hair carried and on the first day just a
Speaker 2: cardboard sign covered in racial slurs. Loved shouting the end word.
Speaker 2: Today she had a friend. They unveiled a sign. People
Speaker 2: confronted them.
Speaker 8: It was like it was like a white genocide, white
Speaker 8: like white placement, great replacement type sign with a URL
Speaker 8: to a telegram channel, I believe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a channel. Yeah, I think she had a friend today,
Speaker 2: someone else.
Speaker 10: It is shocking news.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they usually have at least one, right, maybe,
Speaker 2: and then uh, I mean kind of the at one point,
Speaker 2: sort of while we were all waiting around, because it
Speaker 2: was initially just a shitload of press, uh, some lookie
Speaker 2: loose from the local area, and a bunch of cops,
Speaker 2: a bunch of a bunch of private security, a lot
Speaker 2: of private security, mostly for the media. There's a fun
Speaker 2: game of spot the concealed handgun, because none of these
Speaker 2: guys are very good at concealing their fucking handguns. But
Speaker 2: at one point I'm standing and talking to another media
Speaker 2: and I see this like massive circle of cameras fill
Speaker 2: up around, and so I'm wondering, Okay, maybe something's happened.
Speaker 2: I get over there, and I didn't even think to
Speaker 2: like stop myself from you know, using my outside voice.
Speaker 2: I just shouted as soon as I got close, oh fuck,
Speaker 2: it's the MyPillow guy, which is the least news anything
Speaker 2: could possibly be.
Speaker 3: But for some reason there was like maybe like cameras.
Speaker 8: It's just like huddled around this guy trying to get
Speaker 8: whatever picture or whatever.
Speaker 2: Let him talk. Yeah, a couple of protesters kept engaging
Speaker 2: him about Gaza, which I just don't think that there's
Speaker 2: anything to be gained from engaging the MyPillow guy. With
Speaker 2: the exception of Garrison, the way you chose to engage
Speaker 2: the MyPillow guy.
Speaker 8: I think there's really only one way to handle this,
Speaker 8: and well there's maybe two ways. You can just completely
Speaker 8: ignore him, which is probably probably probably the best. Ask
Speaker 8: what I did, because there's there's no reason to engage
Speaker 8: with this, there's no reason to give him what he wants.
Speaker 8: The other option is just to completely baffle him, just
Speaker 8: be really confusing. So I went up and I I
Speaker 8: didn't even ask a question.
Speaker 2: I just I just said you said Mike first, which
Speaker 2: I left so funny.
Speaker 1: I just let the listeners to know that after a
Speaker 1: fourteen hour day yesterday, I get I get back to
Speaker 1: the hotel. Garrison and Robert have had several drinks in
Speaker 1: Garrison is like.
Speaker 10: Did you see my video?
Speaker 2: Did you see my video?
Speaker 3: And what was that video?
Speaker 2: We'll play the audio here.
Speaker 8: Skimmity Biden, skimmity Biden, skibbity Biden, givity skimmity Biden. So no,
Speaker 8: I was able to get Mike. You know, we're pretty close.
Speaker 8: How you guys talk now, it's around to say skimmity Biden,
Speaker 8: because that's the only way to handle these guys is
Speaker 8: just like just like just really, you're not even like
Speaker 8: annoying them, You're just kind of baffling.
Speaker 2: Because all he wants.
Speaker 8: Is attention, to say, his little piece and trying to
Speaker 8: attract whatever media attention, and you just got to kind
Speaker 8: of fuck with them.
Speaker 2: And it's it's kind of a good sign that he
Speaker 2: did that, because this is not if you think about
Speaker 2: where he was in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, him
Speaker 2: showing up alone, no visible security escort to just kind
Speaker 2: of stand around before a protest and bullshit, is like,
Speaker 2: that's a man whose life has fallen apart, like he
Speaker 2: has nothing.
Speaker 8: Left, no everything he was saying I'm able to hear
Speaker 8: him say at four am on five Yeah, and that's
Speaker 8: that was pretty much the little pre show circus, and
Speaker 8: you know, people started to trickle into the area slowly,
Speaker 8: you know, people in kefeas you know, protesters, medics started
Speaker 8: to slowly, slowly enter enter this little like you know
Speaker 8: block radius, and then very very suddenly, from like the
Speaker 8: opposite side of where everyone else was stationed at, we
Speaker 8: saw a group of maybe like fifty march in all
Speaker 8: at the same time. Yeah, and this was kind of
Speaker 8: the start of the of the main of the main protests.
Speaker 2: And I would say at that point there were maybe
Speaker 2: fifty protesters scattered around within the clumps of media, most
Speaker 2: of whom ran over and joined that group. So it
Speaker 2: was probably around one hundred or so, maybe maybe as
Speaker 2: many as one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 8: And it probably grew to about like two hundred over
Speaker 8: the course of the next few hours, although they started
Speaker 8: to kind of bleed numbers as well. And I was
Speaker 8: I was taking notes on my little personal recorder during
Speaker 8: this time, and we put together a little kind of
Speaker 8: compilation to hear about what went down, and I'll probably
Speaker 8: cut in with some extra narration to kind of fill
Speaker 8: in the gaps, so to clarify. The audio you're about
Speaker 8: to hear was recorded over the course of like two
Speaker 8: and a half hours. We've cut this down for efficiency
Speaker 8: and clarity. So some of the sections you're about to hear,
Speaker 8: you know, may have happened a minute or two apart,
Speaker 8: but they're just could be mushed together to kind of
Speaker 8: help the action move along a little bit faster, not
Speaker 8: including you know, the sections of the protest where there's
Speaker 8: ten minutes of nothing happening. Here's a first time look
Speaker 8: at what happened during the protest at the Israeli Consulate.
Speaker 8: Moving back, all right, it's just from the it's just
Speaker 8: past seven. The behind enemy lines Israeli Consulate protest basically
Speaker 8: just started. A whole bunch of people in some form
Speaker 8: of block showed up in front of the building, started
Speaker 8: marching up the street.
Speaker 2: Very quickly.
Speaker 8: A three or four five layered line of Chicago PD
Speaker 8: came to block Clinton Street, so the march could not
Speaker 8: advance there now retreating back towards the building, and they
Speaker 8: might try to march the other direction. I'm going to
Speaker 8: be on the move here, trying to take notes as
Speaker 8: this progresses. A central tower is kind of a tricky
Speaker 8: spot for this sort of protest, Although it does house
Speaker 8: the Israeli Consulate. From the outside, there's no obvious indicators
Speaker 8: that this building is linked to the Israeli government, and
Speaker 8: it's about two miles away from the DNC, so this
Speaker 8: can be very little impact on DNC attendees. All the
Speaker 8: way over here in the West Loop area of Chicago, Chicago,
Speaker 8: ped is set up across the other street as well,
Speaker 8: blocking both ways in essentially kettling this entire protest. There's
Speaker 8: a loud speaker, people are talking in front of the building.
Speaker 8: The purple haired wig lady from before has moved her
Speaker 8: Nazi banner closer to this core of protesters right in
Speaker 8: front of the entrance of the building housing the Israeli consulate.
Speaker 8: All right, some of the protesters just announced that they
Speaker 8: have a couple of speakers that are going to talk
Speaker 8: in front of the Israeli Constant building. As people are
Speaker 8: now sandwiched in between two streets right in front of
Speaker 8: the entrance. Speeches discussed the genocide in Gaza and the
Speaker 8: US arm steels sending weapons and bombs to Israel as
Speaker 8: part of continuing US imperialism. As the speech is carried on,
Speaker 8: more and more police began to arrive.
Speaker 2: All right, it is seven.
Speaker 8: About nine or so white vans just showed up with
Speaker 8: tons of chicaga pad in ryagear, helmets, gas masks, now
Speaker 8: thicker sleeves, not just the blue button ups that the
Speaker 8: regular cops wear. All right, we're gonna run into a
Speaker 8: line of police. People have banners, bring the war home,
Speaker 8: shut down the DNC for Gaza.
Speaker 2: Palestine flags.
Speaker 8: As they are marching towards a massive line of riot cops.
Speaker 8: There's too much media in the way, see and a
Speaker 8: clash has started. Pushing up against lines. Police pulling apart
Speaker 8: the signs and banners. Sounds familiar, I bet to anyone
Speaker 8: who was at twenty twenty. The first clash lasted about
Speaker 8: a minute, as protesters tried to march forwards into the
Speaker 8: street and police pushed them back. I was off to
Speaker 8: the side, but the sheer amount of cameras and media
Speaker 8: in the middle of this scuffle prevented either side from
Speaker 8: gaining or losing much ground. All right, there was kind
Speaker 8: of a little bit of a back and forth. The
Speaker 8: protest line got pushed back slightly, but still in the
Speaker 8: middle of the Clinton Street, protesters telling the press to
Speaker 8: get out of the way, as many press are in between.
Speaker 8: As press moved slowly out of the way, police were
Speaker 8: able to successfully push the protest back Chicago pedis from
Speaker 8: redirecting some of their push towards the south. Now looks
Speaker 8: like some of the protesters were trying to move onto
Speaker 8: the sidewalk to get out of this mass, massive sandwich
Speaker 8: of police, and there's maybe three or four cops trying
Speaker 8: to prevent them from moving on the sidewalk. Here we'll
Speaker 8: see if they get past. Police have tackled some people.
Speaker 8: Police are going in for.
Speaker 2: A lot of arrests.
Speaker 3: It's very combative.
Speaker 8: Police with batons out, attacking people, hitting on the ground,
Speaker 8: tackling them. Police preventing all forwards movement on the sidewalk
Speaker 8: as well, not just the street. People are people are
Speaker 8: trying to get out and police a police are really
Speaker 8: trying to trap them.
Speaker 2: Police are squishing. We can't, we can't move dude, we
Speaker 2: can't move back.
Speaker 3: No lassoom, we can't, we can't move back.
Speaker 2: Police are telling people to move back into nothing. Wow,
Speaker 2: they have us trapped by this building.
Speaker 8: Eventually, police realize that they cannot push all fifty people
Speaker 8: into a flat wall and eased off, directing people back
Speaker 8: in front of the consulate. Police is pushing us into
Speaker 8: a very tiny corner a small line of police is
Speaker 8: separating two crowds, mostly on the sidewalk.
Speaker 2: All right, they're pushing us back towards the building.
Speaker 8: Action now paused for a few minutes as both sides
Speaker 8: figured out their next move. Protesters chanted for the release
Speaker 8: of detained comrades.
Speaker 4: Let them go, let them.
Speaker 2: Go, all right.
Speaker 8: Some of the crowd is trying to regroup, as police
Speaker 8: today to push people off of the sidewalk and back
Speaker 8: into the street. I guess the crowd has kind of
Speaker 8: been split now into four sections, police keeping them separate,
Speaker 8: not letting them reconvene. It's the section in front of
Speaker 8: the building, There's a section on the corner, this section
Speaker 8: behind the police line, and there's a section close to
Speaker 8: where people tried to march that it's now been cut
Speaker 8: off from the rest of the crowd, So we have
Speaker 8: these kind of four groups. A smaller group is reforming
Speaker 8: in the street in front of the building. This is
Speaker 8: kind of the section that got trapped by the building
Speaker 8: as the rest of the march tried to move forward,
Speaker 8: and some of the people from the side have linked
Speaker 8: up with them as well, but still mostly kind of
Speaker 8: four sections separated up by police.
Speaker 3: People chanting to get back in the street.
Speaker 8: We have little squads or AG's linking up with their
Speaker 8: mates again, linking arms, holding hands, kind of regrouping. Right now,
Speaker 8: Chicago p D is kind of doing the same. They're
Speaker 8: reforming their line, going back more into the middle of
Speaker 8: the street. If they did get any detainments or arrests,
Speaker 8: probably sorting those out right now.
Speaker 2: As they decide what to do next.
Speaker 8: During this loll period, I was able to hear a
Speaker 8: decent amount of police comms chatter coming from their walkie
Speaker 8: talkies as the police decided on.
Speaker 3: Their next move.
Speaker 8: All right, I just heard on police comms that they're
Speaker 8: gonna be asking for media to leave. Interesting, they are
Speaker 8: calling for transport vands, So if they're going to start
Speaker 8: doing arrests, they might try to get media to leave
Speaker 8: first then really move in. It sounds like to me
Speaker 8: on the comms they're calling out specific people to do
Speaker 8: targeted arrests. On the comms, they're calling out specific outfits,
Speaker 8: specific what people are wearing, what people are holding, to
Speaker 8: move in and do targeted arrests on the crowd.
Speaker 2: Some of the descriptions are very general.
Speaker 8: Like black hoodie, red hat, that kind of stuff. I
Speaker 8: really did not want to get a face full of mace,
Speaker 8: So as soon as I saw police carrying mace cans,
Speaker 8: I perhaps a bit prematurely decided to don my full
Speaker 8: face gas mask, which I then took off like ten
Speaker 8: minutes later as it became clear that we weren't in
Speaker 8: immediate danger of amazing, Well, I don't think I'm gonna
Speaker 8: see a Barack Obama today. There's been enough of a
Speaker 8: pause that the anticipation keeps growing. Does everyone knows what's
Speaker 8: about to happen? We're just waiting for it to happen,
Speaker 8: all right. The file Time protesters that are fund of
Speaker 8: the building are not moving towards the Israeli counter protesters
Speaker 8: on the other side. As things started to heap back up,
Speaker 8: some folks in the crowd opted to exit the area
Speaker 8: via a small EVAC route on the northwest corner of
Speaker 8: the street. Considering the talk of targeted arrests on the
Speaker 8: police scanner, police may have been eyeing up certain people
Speaker 8: in the crowd who then got the hint about what's
Speaker 8: about to go down next.
Speaker 2: You see that blocked the just bounce?
Speaker 8: Yeah, no, I think they can spot that they were
Speaker 8: about to get targeted for arrests. I think so because
Speaker 8: they were being followed up by some of some of
Speaker 8: the sergeants, because.
Speaker 2: I honestly I can't name any law breaking other than
Speaker 2: quote unquote shoving with the paw. Sure, but I mean,
Speaker 2: you know they can get you on something.
Speaker 8: The protest did not stay still for too long, and
Speaker 8: a little less than an hour since the last big confrontation,
Speaker 8: the crowd once again attempted to march.
Speaker 3: All right, it is nearly eight twenty.
Speaker 8: The crowd that remained in front of these early constant
Speaker 8: building is now moving up again towards Clinton Street to
Speaker 8: re engage the confrontation that happened nearly an hour ago. Look,
Speaker 8: there's less cameras in between the two factions, but not
Speaker 8: no cameras. The crowd of protesters is still approaching, and
Speaker 8: they're turning.
Speaker 2: They are turning. They turned down Clinton Street.
Speaker 8: This is the movement they tried to make before, but
Speaker 8: police prevented them from doing so.
Speaker 2: And now they're so far able to exit.
Speaker 8: The section of the protest that was still facing down
Speaker 8: the riot line split up into two smaller groups and
Speaker 8: then made this same movement down the sidewalk away from
Speaker 8: the police. The people that were traveling down the sidewalk
Speaker 8: and Clinton have now reformed on Moreau Street.
Speaker 2: And they are now marching.
Speaker 8: The police are now caught behind the protesters in the march,
Speaker 8: but sure enough police quickly arrived to contain the mobile protest.
Speaker 8: All right, bike cops have beat most of the crowd
Speaker 8: to the intersection, but they're still slowly arriving. The intersection
Speaker 8: up here is a T shape, so only two directions
Speaker 8: to go. Please are gonna try to get them to
Speaker 8: take a rite?
Speaker 2: It looks like.
Speaker 8: Yep, all right, more please catch it up.
Speaker 3: I was triakon here.
Speaker 8: Bike cops coming in from both sides. Oh, this is
Speaker 8: quite the pickle. Unfortunately, because of the T shape of
Speaker 8: this intersection, this is now a little bit of a
Speaker 8: tighter pinch. They can still get out and be a
Speaker 8: one path on the sidewalk, but they might prefer a
Speaker 8: confrontation with some of these police.
Speaker 4: We'll see.
Speaker 8: The march paused at this T shaped intersection for a
Speaker 8: few minutes as they decided their next move. All right,
Speaker 8: the crowd is standing in front of this very thin
Speaker 8: lineup bike comps. The police line's not very thick because
Speaker 8: they had to move kind of impromptu to adjust to
Speaker 8: the movements of the crowd. Small groups of the protests
Speaker 8: keep peeling off. They're slowly bleeding numbers. People chanting let
Speaker 8: us through as the police yelled to move back. Police
Speaker 8: have the remaining crowd in a pretty tight squeeze the moment.
Speaker 8: Smaller groups keep peeling off, but now the remaining march
Speaker 8: is moving forward as the bike cops slowly back up.
Speaker 8: Looks like most of the crowd has been moving onto
Speaker 8: the sidewalk to move down the street. They don't really
Speaker 8: have many more moves to make. There's just a saturation
Speaker 8: of police in this area that the cops can adapt
Speaker 8: to any movement this shrinking crowd makes. Police are piling
Speaker 8: into the sidewalk. Police are making arrests. Please are doing
Speaker 8: target arrests. They're grabbing people on the sidewalk. Numbers of
Speaker 8: arrests are being made. There's at least at least five
Speaker 8: from where I'm standing. Police ordering media out of the
Speaker 8: way on the side. On the side, protesters are now
Speaker 8: moving back on the sidewalk, backtracking.
Speaker 3: Away from the police.
Speaker 8: The remaining crowd attempted to move away from the police
Speaker 8: who were making arrests on the sidewalk but the only
Speaker 8: way left to move was back where they just came from.
Speaker 3: People are linking up with their AG's.
Speaker 8: Arm in arm, trying to move through this very, very
Speaker 8: tricky environment. Right now, there's so everywhere we go, I
Speaker 8: see a new a new battalion of cops. People really
Speaker 8: just have nowhere to go. There's just police everywhere. We're
Speaker 8: just at this point moving in circles, but not like
Speaker 8: the regular march circles, just on the sidewalk, going back
Speaker 8: and forth, backtracking, looping around.
Speaker 2: They're trying to find somewhere just to get out of
Speaker 2: this area.
Speaker 8: Mostly out of options on where to go. The protest
Speaker 8: entered a small patio terrace on the corner of the street.
Speaker 8: Protesters are now getting into the terrace of this building
Speaker 8: at five point twenty five West Monroe.
Speaker 2: That's probably not gonna end great. At this point.
Speaker 8: Police have the remaining much smaller crowd maybe fifty, squeezed
Speaker 8: in in this little building terrace corner. They are not
Speaker 8: letting any protesters leave. A shoving match just started. Police
Speaker 8: are moving in and they're tackling, pushing people on the ground.
Speaker 8: It's almost nine pm.
Speaker 3: Police have one arrest. Now they just drig someone out by.
Speaker 8: Their hair from the crowd that is currently just completely kettled.
Speaker 8: For the first time tonight, they're providing no evacuation ruts
Speaker 8: for protesters. They are trapped on this street corner, completely surrounded,
Speaker 8: not letting anyone leave. Eventually, a small hole opened up,
Speaker 8: letting a few protesters leave this kettled patio. Robert was
Speaker 8: able to exit with this group, but many people were
Speaker 8: not able to make it through, and this little patio
Speaker 8: was where a number of arrests were able to take
Speaker 8: place as others slowly dispersed throughout the West Loop neighborhood
Speaker 8: of Chicago. According to NBC, the police superintendent Larry Sneeling,
Speaker 8: which is kind of a great name for a cop,
Speaker 8: praised his officers for a quote unquote, showing restraint when
Speaker 8: no one else did, saying that they quote did an
Speaker 8: excellent job responding to violence and vandalism. He made a
Speaker 8: similar comment on Wednesday, saying that the protest quote showed
Speaker 8: up with the intention of committing acts of violence and
Speaker 8: vandalism unquote. Now, there was no vandalism that was actually
Speaker 8: committed during this protest.
Speaker 3: That did not happen.
Speaker 8: I'm not sure how the superintendent was able to infer
Speaker 8: the intention of this protest exactly as no vandalism took
Speaker 8: place and the only violence that happened was when police
Speaker 8: started pushing people who were trying to march forwards in
Speaker 8: the street.
Speaker 2: Wow, Garrison, that was a gripping story that we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about.
Speaker 8: After these services, services, products, okay, products and services.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, maybe we can't know. It's impossible to say
Speaker 2: we're back, so I don't know. I guess we should
Speaker 2: probably just kind of give some final thoughts on how
Speaker 2: we felt about this protest. My overwhelming impression, and I
Speaker 2: really am not saying this to try to be mean,
Speaker 2: is that the crowd came with a lot of rhetoric
Speaker 2: about this is the protest that matters, We are going
Speaker 2: to shut down the DNC, we are going to throw
Speaker 2: our bodies upon the machinery of empire. And then after
Speaker 2: the first couple of hand to hand clashes with the police,
Speaker 2: which were mostly just kind of shoving, people just wanted
Speaker 2: to get home. They wanted to leave, and most of
Speaker 2: the night was us following people attempting to get home
Speaker 2: and disperse and not being allowed to buy the police
Speaker 2: every time they would like do a big push in
Speaker 2: where they're all shouting move in unison. They're telling you
Speaker 2: to go back, They're telling you to do this or
Speaker 2: you'll get arrested. And there's always you're always surrounded on
Speaker 2: every side by cops and you know, sometimes by gaggles
Speaker 2: of media. But like it was impossible to comply, Like I,
Speaker 2: I can't say that I saw any law breaking really
Speaker 2: aside from assuming the cops called an unlawful assembly, which
Speaker 2: I did not hear. I don't know how you would
Speaker 2: have heard in most of the product protests, but assuming
Speaker 2: they did, as that's the law breaker.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there was no like property damage, there was no
Speaker 8: there was no no real right activity. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 8: people people tried to march and police prevented them with
Speaker 8: their bodies yep, and you know there's a confrontation that ensues,
Speaker 8: like at that point where where the two groups meet.
Speaker 8: But besides that, it was it was people trying to
Speaker 8: march and the cops that prevented them from doing so.
Speaker 2: And it was a lot. I got stuck at one
Speaker 2: point with a group of twenty or so people, a
Speaker 2: handful of protesters, couple of media, and then maybe a
Speaker 2: dozen or more, Like I think they were locals. I
Speaker 2: guess it's possible they were tourists, but people who had
Speaker 2: just seen the march going down the st and thought
Speaker 2: that they might follow along and watch for a little
Speaker 2: And then the cops moved in so fast. We all
Speaker 2: got walled off in the courtyard of a hotel that
Speaker 2: didn't actually have street access, but it wasn't clear that
Speaker 2: it didn't, and the police repeatedly said they were going
Speaker 2: to arrest all of us. I had like a discussion
Speaker 2: with one about my credentials because he was like, those
Speaker 2: are press credential. Eventually they got a cop who could read,
Speaker 2: but another journalists got arrested. I think there were at
Speaker 2: least four arrested.
Speaker 3: Even at least four journalists were at least.
Speaker 2: Four journalists were arrested. Yeah, because after I got out,
Speaker 2: they let most of the people in our kettle out,
Speaker 2: but they pulled one guy with a helmet that said
Speaker 2: press on It out of the kettle. I think his
Speaker 2: name was Josh Pacheco. I believe it was Josh that
Speaker 2: I was filming. Josh was definitely arrested and he is
Speaker 2: going to be raising money because his camera was broken.
Speaker 2: They tossed his cameras lens first onto the ground and
Speaker 2: did significant damage. If you want to find Josh's info
Speaker 2: online at JP Underscore OTG you can find his information.
Speaker 2: I'm sure he'll be doing a fundraiser at some point.
Speaker 8: And obviously there were many more protesters arrested. The actual
Speaker 8: final number is kind of up in the air. Police
Speaker 8: are saying that twenty two people at least were arrested,
Speaker 8: and ENLG is saying it's closer to a devan.
Speaker 2: Being the National Lawyer's Guild, they show up at protests
Speaker 2: to protect people's rights primarily in the event of arrest.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so there's kind of some confusion here on how
Speaker 8: many people were actually arrested. I'll try to get confirmations
Speaker 8: and I'll add that in later tonight. I'll also look
Speaker 8: for a bail fund. Yeah, to donate as well, because
Speaker 8: it is always unfortunate when journalists are arrested, but it's
Speaker 8: equally as unfortunate when people who are protesting, especially for
Speaker 8: a cause like this, get arrested as well.
Speaker 3: Like this is I think something that it's worthstating.
Speaker 2: Especially since again I can't say anything anyone did to
Speaker 2: precipitate arrest. It's not even like they were closing down
Speaker 2: streets because the police had closed down every street they
Speaker 2: were on before they showed up. I think the police
Speaker 2: very clearly were under orders to keep things peaceful as
Speaker 2: long long as possible, largely because they didn't want the
Speaker 2: DNC and the city government didn't want the embarrassment of
Speaker 2: anything really ugly. So there were no weapons used. There
Speaker 2: was no mace used. I didn't even really see the
Speaker 2: sticks used much.
Speaker 8: They were mostly used to like push. There was very
Speaker 8: little in terms of like like like overhand hitting.
Speaker 2: But they didn't need any of that stuff because there
Speaker 2: was no point at which they had less than a
Speaker 2: two to one numerical advantage, usually more like three or four.
Speaker 8: And the people that were organizing this protest in the
Speaker 8: in the days prior where like announcing part of their
Speaker 8: intention was to specifically get beat up by police and
Speaker 8: like beat up badly and have this like generate news coverage,
Speaker 8: you know, this slight Stare organization as well, Yeah, invoking
Speaker 8: Chicago nineteen sixty eight, and police largely like denied them
Speaker 8: that option. And you know, many of the participants also
Speaker 8: options to not continue, you know, an hour's long physical
Speaker 8: confrontation with police and instead opted to try to move
Speaker 8: around them, try to evade them, instead of trying to
Speaker 8: you know, push through police lines. You know, there was
Speaker 8: a few points where the the police lines that were
Speaker 8: blocking the street was very thin after people started to
Speaker 8: move around this kind of area, around around the Consulate building,
Speaker 8: and then you know, other times the police lines were
Speaker 8: very thick, but consistently people opted to not continue a
Speaker 8: long physical engagement with police.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a discretion is the better part of
Speaker 2: valor kind of night, and I think that's the point
Speaker 2: at which the police decided we are going to arrest people.
Speaker 2: There was a degree to which it felt like they
Speaker 2: were just kind of like trying out tactics. A lot
Speaker 2: of what they were doing was splitting up the crowd
Speaker 2: then doing targeted arrests and kind of separating, calving off
Speaker 2: chunks of it. I don't know the whole thing. I
Speaker 2: kind of couldn't stop myself from being drawn back to
Speaker 2: the whole time. It's like, what is the actual utility
Speaker 2: of this really? Because it didn't get attention, not much.
Speaker 2: You know, there's some news coverage and stuff, but it's
Speaker 2: not a Chicago sixty eight moment. I don't think this
Speaker 2: is going to move any needle for anybody, and obviously
Speaker 2: that's the goal, right is to have some kind of
Speaker 2: an impact. I mean everyone was saying, like the stated
Speaker 2: goal at all of these protests shut down the DNC,
Speaker 2: and the only time that kind of happened was at
Speaker 2: the less radical protest policed protests yesterday, right when largely
Speaker 2: kind of by accident. I don't know like that. I'm
Speaker 2: not trying to be like down on anyone. It just
Speaker 2: is one of those what when you're seeing the sheer
Speaker 2: weight of police and the numbers of protesters being generated
Speaker 2: is one hundred or two hundred, it just feels like
Speaker 2: you're asking people to get fucked up and damage their
Speaker 2: lives in a situation in which that's unlikely to actually
Speaker 2: lead to any of the things they want to see.
Speaker 3: Hey, this is gare cutting in again.
Speaker 8: The exact number of arrests is still a little bit unclear,
Speaker 8: but we have a clearer idea than what we did
Speaker 8: a few hours ago. The official number as of Wednesday
Speaker 8: evening is that fifty six people were arrested.
Speaker 3: I'm going to quote from the AP.
Speaker 8: Quote thirty of the people detained by police were issue
Speaker 8: citations for disorderly conduct. According to Chicago Police, one person
Speaker 8: was arrested on a felony charge of resisting police, while
Speaker 8: nine were charged with misdemeanors including disorderly conduct, resisting officers, battery, assault,
Speaker 8: and criminal damage to property. Police said, unquote for the record,
Speaker 8: neither myself nor Robert witnessed any criminal damage to property.
Speaker 2: I guess to kind of conclude a protest that's going
Speaker 2: to actually like move the Needler change, anything has to
Speaker 2: overwhelm like the capacity of the state system to deal
Speaker 2: with it. It has to be something that the state
Speaker 2: is not. We saw this in twenty twenty, right like
Speaker 2: just over I'm just talking about Portland. Just like overall,
Speaker 2: the George Floyd uprising was beyond what the state was
Speaker 2: prepared to handle for at least a sizable chunk, especially
Speaker 2: of the early days. It like overwhelmed the capacity of
Speaker 2: the resources the state had to respond adequately. The state,
Speaker 2: at least everything I've seen so far at the DNC
Speaker 2: has been perfectly prepared for everything that people brought to bear.
Speaker 2: And that's really the summary I've got.
Speaker 8: We're gonna go on a quick break and then be
Speaker 8: back to hear from Sophie about the Obama festival inside
Speaker 8: the Democratic National Convention. All right, we are back and
Speaker 8: as as this protest was happening in this area around
Speaker 8: like I think it's called the West Loop, Sophie was
Speaker 8: inside the DNC and there was also people similar to
Speaker 8: the first day of the DNC who snuck in like
Speaker 8: banners into the DNC and unfurled them like pro Palestine
Speaker 8: disarming as royal banners. I believe the banner from last
Speaker 8: night just read free Palestine and Sophie. What was it
Speaker 8: like in there exactly? Was it easier to get into
Speaker 8: than the than the day previous?
Speaker 10: Well, it was more, it was, It was it was
Speaker 10: is what I'll say. It wasn't as organized is the
Speaker 10: R and C, but it was. It was better than
Speaker 10: the day prior.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 10: A win is a win at this point.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the energy was electric, as I heard multiple
Speaker 1: people say throughout the night in the unassigned press area
Speaker 1: that I was.
Speaker 8: In, it felt like, at least from watching online afterwards,
Speaker 8: it gave really big, like two thousand and eight energy.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, obviously, you know, Michelle Obama Barack Obama are both speaking,
Speaker 8: so that that kind of carries with it.
Speaker 2: A little bit.
Speaker 8: But but even just like the general vibe just felt
Speaker 8: it felt very two thousand and eight, like that style
Speaker 8: of like two thousand and eight optimism.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that.
Speaker 1: I've been asked a lot like what the energy is
Speaker 1: compared to the rn C, and like the rn C
Speaker 1: was more like a WWE event and this was more
Speaker 1: like a you know, B level pop star concert, sure
Speaker 1: where everyone was very excited to be there, where I
Speaker 1: only knew a couple of the songs. Sure, that was
Speaker 1: that was the general of But the main speed section
Speaker 1: of the event started off with Center Majority leader Chuck Schumer.
Speaker 3: And I watched his speech. It was not very good.
Speaker 1: He came out and and was what some would describe
Speaker 1: as dancing on stage.
Speaker 2: He was quesetable. His speech was very like robotic. Yeah
Speaker 2: it was. He was not good. Well, he's the head
Speaker 2: of the dim Crypto Caucus, so like he's part robot.
Speaker 1: But it was like people were not super into him.
Speaker 1: He was whatever. But then Bertie Sayers came up and
Speaker 1: I was actually surprised at the crowd was as into
Speaker 1: him as.
Speaker 2: They were, but not super into No, no, no, don't.
Speaker 1: Get me wrong with nothing like nothing like the Obamas
Speaker 1: later in the night.
Speaker 2: Nothing even like AOC, it seems.
Speaker 13: No.
Speaker 10: They definitely loved AOC a lot, a lot more than Bernie.
Speaker 10: I enjoyed his speech.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he gave like one of the more like economically
Speaker 8: sound speeches talking about actual issues facing working people.
Speaker 10: Correct.
Speaker 1: I would say, you know, a lot of the other
Speaker 1: journalists around me were talking during that time. There was
Speaker 1: not They were not thoroughly paying attention to him, which
Speaker 1: was interesting to know.
Speaker 8: It was the same speech that he's been giving since
Speaker 8: twenty sixteen. Essentially, I feel like, unfortunately, the economic situation
Speaker 8: in the States has not changed all that much.
Speaker 10: I feel like Bertie Sands has been giving the same
Speaker 10: of speech his entire career.
Speaker 8: Sure, Yeah, and like the same stuff he was calling
Speaker 8: for back then, with the with the one percent and
Speaker 8: the billionaire class and healthcare and all these things that
Speaker 8: are still real issues. And in some ways, I feel
Speaker 8: like they were more talked about back in like, you know,
Speaker 8: twenty seventeen, and the fact that they aren't just talked
Speaker 8: about now is maybe, you know, to some degree, like
Speaker 8: a failing.
Speaker 3: But no, he gave the speech that he was expected
Speaker 3: to make, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he called for an end to his words, horrific
Speaker 1: war in Gaza and called for a ceasefire, one of
Speaker 1: the few this entire week that we've we've heard actually
Speaker 1: say that. AC said it yesterday.
Speaker 8: Well and and AOC's specific line was crediting Harris for
Speaker 8: working around the clock to make a ceasefire deal.
Speaker 2: It was specifically like the phrasing that AOC used. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't buy that, super well.
Speaker 3: No, well, I'm not afraid to is that.
Speaker 8: Because I was at the protest, I had the intention
Speaker 8: of just watching all the speeches in my hotel afterwards,
Speaker 8: and I got up to my room, I turned on CNN.
Speaker 8: They were replaying the whole night, and after Bernie's speech,
Speaker 8: I completely fell asleep. Well and then and then I
Speaker 8: woke up at eight am. CNN was still on my television.
Speaker 10: That is so cursed.
Speaker 3: I turned it off and I went back to Staarson.
Speaker 2: You had some nightmares on spooling.
Speaker 8: I don't know what was being subjected to my sleeping body.
Speaker 2: You're never recovering from.
Speaker 1: This after Bernie, you know, i'd say, the only other
Speaker 1: person until we get to the second gentleman, Doug m
Speaker 1: Hoff and then the Obama's liater that I was you know,
Speaker 1: the governor of Illinois, Pritzker.
Speaker 2: Pritzker.
Speaker 1: He he just was very very well received, obviously by
Speaker 1: by the crowd.
Speaker 8: He's one of the democrats favorite men, one of their
Speaker 8: favorite boys.
Speaker 2: Early on, a favorite for the VP slot. Yeah, he's very.
Speaker 10: Good at attacking Trump and his speeches. He said Trump
Speaker 10: is only rich in one thing, stupidity in the crowd.
Speaker 2: What fair role.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he was definitely like the most like a mean
Speaker 8: out of many of the speech kids.
Speaker 1: I would say though, like last night was the roasting
Speaker 1: nights last year was the roasting Okay, Okay, for sure
Speaker 1: they did Bamba made a dick Joe.
Speaker 10: Oh, Bama made a dick John. We'll get to We'll
Speaker 10: get to that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Also, just like visually, they have like those
Speaker 1: light up things that you have at concerts, you know
Speaker 1: I do. Before I get into taking this back into
Speaker 1: time to two thousand and eight, talk a little.
Speaker 8: Bit about the role call sure sure, And this is
Speaker 8: where they formerly like ceremonially nominate Harris and Walls to
Speaker 8: be the president and vice presidential nominees.
Speaker 1: Correct, And let's just say it was a little bit
Speaker 1: different than the the RNC. At the RNC, you have
Speaker 1: Speaker Johnson just telling the delegates that we need to
Speaker 1: keep order and there's a proper way to do things.
Speaker 1: And then you had people from each state come up
Speaker 1: and make speeches like this, finding liberty.
Speaker 14: Since sixteen seventy where the revolutionary or all was blown.
Speaker 2: We're in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 14: Donald Trump won his first primary victory ever. Lets rang
Speaker 14: in the trunk Carol of American history, the Great State
Speaker 14: of South Carolina, crown cass all of its foots for
Speaker 14: President Donovan K.
Speaker 1: Trump and on the flip side at the DNC, and
Speaker 1: I had several friends that were watching on TV say
Speaker 1: it was translating very well on TV. It was. It
Speaker 1: was a little bit more chaotic in person, and certain
Speaker 1: states didn't match the same energy.
Speaker 10: But each state had had a song.
Speaker 1: There was a whole playlist thing and that is now
Speaker 1: going around and the energy was of a I would
Speaker 1: say teen Choice.
Speaker 2: Awards, Tamala is Brandt.
Speaker 10: It was eighteen Choice Awards, vibe with Garrison. The State
Speaker 10: of Georgia doing this.
Speaker 3: The wow, So that's very cool, Sophie.
Speaker 10: I will say the state of Oregon did.
Speaker 8: Not well, No, that's because organ is allergic to fun
Speaker 8: Oregan in Wisconsin.
Speaker 10: Boy, howdy did they not bring the good vibes.
Speaker 8: Well, that's because all I can do in Wisconsin is drink,
Speaker 8: and all in organ you can do is smoke weed.
Speaker 2: So there you go.
Speaker 1: After the roll call, they cut to VP Harris and
Speaker 1: Governor Tim Walls streaming live from Milwaukee.
Speaker 8: The Pfizer Forum where we all suffered through last month.
Speaker 1: Yes, that was where the RNC was held last month,
Speaker 1: to be like, look at us, Donald.
Speaker 8: We're able to fill both venues at the same time.
Speaker 1: We are so hip and cool, and of course the
Speaker 1: crowd lost their minds.
Speaker 2: They ate it up.
Speaker 13: They love her, They love her so honestly pretty good.
Speaker 8: Burn, it's it's it's it's not a bad this was
Speaker 8: You're getting kind of a glimpse. Ever since, like the
Speaker 8: Republicans are weird stuff, they've been realizing that it's actually
Speaker 8: really useful to be kind of mean in politics. Yeah,
Speaker 8: for so long this party has been like linked to
Speaker 8: when they go low, we go high. You know, we're
Speaker 8: gonna we're gonna make a compromise. We're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 8: we're going to reach across the aisle.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, last night it was not they go low,
Speaker 10: we go high.
Speaker 1: It was definitely they go low, we also go low.
Speaker 1: And you know that was interesting to observe because the
Speaker 1: crowd loved it.
Speaker 2: It plays very well.
Speaker 10: It plays very well.
Speaker 1: Before the Obabas, we got a speech from the second Gentleman,
Speaker 1: which is very fun to say, Kablo Harris's husband, Doug.
Speaker 10: Doug, I like that, let's.
Speaker 2: Keep try that. You can't not.
Speaker 1: But they introed him with a video from his son
Speaker 1: and it was very TV movie of the Week, partwarming.
Speaker 1: And then he came out on stage and introduced his
Speaker 1: dad and there was hugging lah lah Lah, and the
Speaker 1: crowd was allowed, as it did Ben that night, and
Speaker 1: I was like.
Speaker 10: Wow, I love families, but I was like, wow, the
Speaker 10: crowd is so loud.
Speaker 1: And then like ten minutes later, Michelle Obama came out
Speaker 1: and I was like, the crowd was very quiet.
Speaker 10: For Doug impoff.
Speaker 1: In comparison, she is by far the most popular Democrat
Speaker 1: in the world.
Speaker 2: There is an Obama derangement syndrome. It ignites something in
Speaker 2: millennials and makes them really love the Obama. They really
Speaker 2: love their mamas, lose their minds.
Speaker 1: Doug's speech primarily focused on painting a picture of his
Speaker 1: wife as a family, family woman and talking about how
Speaker 1: great she is with their with their kids. He has
Speaker 1: two kids from his first marriage and they call her
Speaker 1: Mama La.
Speaker 2: But she's not a real mom, you know, Robert Roberts. Look,
Speaker 2: I've been I've been listening to a lot of Matt.
Speaker 2: This is a real scandal. They're not her born children.
Speaker 2: You know, you can't adopt kids.
Speaker 8: You gotta stop listening to Matt Walsh podcasts when you're
Speaker 8: doing your workout.
Speaker 2: I do love that the right has entirely chosen the
Speaker 2: line of attack on Kamala to be that like she's
Speaker 2: a fake mom. She's a fake mom. She raised Pamala.
Speaker 2: You know, because we're quoting Matt Wall. Oh okay, that's
Speaker 2: how he says.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely by the way Matt Walsh was like in
Speaker 1: a disguise. Also, they're all in disguise walking around the
Speaker 1: DNC doing something that doesn't matter.
Speaker 8: See that Matt Wall showed up in his like what
Speaker 8: is a woman liberal disguise with the with the little ponytails.
Speaker 2: Cowardly Harry, I show up. I should have kind of it.
Speaker 8: Well, my disguise just being a regular black suit, which
Speaker 8: I also wear regularly all the time. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 8: Walsh was trying to get some extra clips for his
Speaker 8: new like how Racism Isn't a real documentary that they're
Speaker 8: playing ads for in theaters in front of like queer
Speaker 8: and trans movies, like specifically to like fuck with people.
Speaker 8: So I'm pretty sure they're they're here collecting some kind
Speaker 8: of some kind of some kind of punts for that,
Speaker 8: because he had a little lav mic attached to his
Speaker 8: attached to his lapel, so he's he's doing some kind
Speaker 8: of hijinks.
Speaker 2: But Yeah, it's interesting to me how much of the
Speaker 2: attacks on Kamala right now are focused on her family
Speaker 2: not being a real family. It strikes me as kind
Speaker 2: of a sign of desperation because I'm not saying it
Speaker 2: get any traction. It's the same as like the Tim
Speaker 2: Wall stuff, where it's like nothing sticking that they're trying
Speaker 2: right now, and I think they've just gotten so far
Speaker 2: into their own fever swamps that they have completely forgotten
Speaker 2: how to connect with a hit, which is is an
Speaker 2: interesting place for the Republicans to be because that's all
Speaker 2: they have.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Duck read the teleprompter.
Speaker 1: He it's fun being able to see the teleprompter because
Speaker 1: you can see where they have bolded words or underlied
Speaker 1: words or capitalized words, and any bold or capitalized word.
Speaker 10: He really went for it, and I personally thought that
Speaker 10: was funny to observe. But the crowd liked him, and
Speaker 10: I was like, wow, they really like Doug em Hoff. Wow.
Speaker 10: And then I was like, no, that's not who they.
Speaker 1: Actually like, because then Michelle Obama came out and the
Speaker 1: crowd standing ovations. I can't even tell you it was
Speaker 1: louder than like I've seen Beyonce concert, same exact amount
Speaker 1: of loudness, but yeah, it was just very two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, very twenty twelve. Her speech was incredible.
Speaker 2: What did she actually talk about?
Speaker 10: Nothing, but it was incredible, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: She just basically talked about how important it is to
Speaker 1: do things without saying anything. She was able to resonate
Speaker 1: with every single person in the crowd. Every single person
Speaker 1: in the crowd was just enamored.
Speaker 2: What's been so many bad months in a row of
Speaker 2: news and just getting constantly down in every news cycle
Speaker 2: and war and genocide overseas, and a lot of people
Speaker 2: as soon as Biden stepped down, it was like a
Speaker 2: rubber band breaking, and everyone just went from what this
Speaker 2: this was supposed to not happen as a convention. There
Speaker 2: were serious efforts by the DNC when Biden was still
Speaker 2: a candidate to like, we don't even need to do
Speaker 2: a real convention because like, what is the benefit of
Speaker 2: sticking him in front of people for longer? And they
Speaker 2: broke a pinata full of party energy and that's that's
Speaker 2: what this has all been inside and honestly not a
Speaker 2: lot of energy outside in the streets, you know, energy
Speaker 2: from the people who were there. But like, I think
Speaker 2: there would have been much larger crowds if Biden had stayed.
Speaker 10: I one hundred percent agree with you.
Speaker 1: You know, Michelle Obama brought back, you know, one of
Speaker 1: the key things from two thousand and eight, Hope. She said,
Speaker 1: Hope is making a comeback, and the crowd lost it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I think that's really part of what made last night
Speaker 8: have so much of that two eight energy beyond, you know,
Speaker 8: like all of like all of like the pop songs beyond,
Speaker 8: like the Obamas. It's like this this messaging of like
Speaker 8: there's actually there's actually like a good future to look towards,
Speaker 8: like Hope, you know that's.
Speaker 10: As long as we defeat Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: Sure hope is available.
Speaker 1: Was the main theme of the night, and then she
Speaker 1: introduced President Obama. He came out hammed it up, told
Speaker 1: his little jokes.
Speaker 10: He was so excited.
Speaker 1: You could tell he was like so excited to be
Speaker 1: able to tell.
Speaker 10: His material to that largeer crowd. He was like very
Speaker 10: excited to be up there.
Speaker 1: We got yes we can chance, then later yes she
Speaker 1: can chance. At one point the crowd started chanting thank
Speaker 1: you Joe, as they do when Joe Biden was referenced,
Speaker 1: and he directly said that the torch has been passed.
Speaker 1: There we go, and that is generally the summary of
Speaker 1: the night. Lib Topia, as I'm calling the DNC was
Speaker 1: very excited.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that sounds thrilling. It's really making me optimistic about
Speaker 8: the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I am more optimistic of the future
Speaker 2: than I was. But also what I do foresee from
Speaker 2: this is that we are heading into a future assuming
Speaker 2: the dims win, especially if they win by a sizeable margin,
Speaker 2: where they get meaner to everyone. The thing they learned
Speaker 2: from Trump is you should call people names and be shit,
Speaker 2: and you know that'll get turned on the left because
Speaker 2: the left it already has, Yeah, as it already has.
Speaker 2: But also the left is going to continue not having
Speaker 2: much of an impact on the broader situation until people
Speaker 2: have any sort of ability to actually get folks out
Speaker 2: and have a clear understand like a clear plan for
Speaker 2: something to do that the system cannot easily easily contain
Speaker 2: and withstand right like little marches and demonstrations. Not only
Speaker 2: is the police prepared for them, but the Democratic Party,
Speaker 2: I think is increasingly prepared for how you isolate and
Speaker 2: sort of deflect a from that sort of thing, like
Speaker 2: a lot of what we've seen on the floor at
Speaker 2: the DNC with the Yeah, we'll have Bernie come up
Speaker 2: and he'll talk about a ceasefire. We'll have AOC have
Speaker 2: or ceasefire Led Joe, we'll say that the protesters have
Speaker 2: a point. You should listen to them. Now, you're not
Speaker 2: going to He's not going to draw any other attention
Speaker 2: if you were to come down an attack or you know,
Speaker 2: the protesters for you know, whatever bad piece of messaging
Speaker 2: or something happened outside that actually does draw some attention,
Speaker 2: you know, Like the DIMS have not just been smart
Speaker 2: in what they've signaled, but in how they've made sure
Speaker 2: that that really hasn't become part of the story of
Speaker 2: the DNC, and heading into this that was a huge
Speaker 2: fear a lot of people had, and a huge expectation
Speaker 2: a lot of people had. It was part of the
Speaker 2: planning that a lot of the protests that came in
Speaker 2: with that we are going to disrupt and damage this
Speaker 2: kind of coronation process in order to make it very
Speaker 2: clear that the Democratic Party has not made any meaningful
Speaker 2: movement on Gaza. And I think what we've seen here
Speaker 2: is the start up a replicable strategy that, unless there's
Speaker 2: an alteration in how people are organizing, is going to
Speaker 2: allow the DIMS to continue to sideline radical voices pushing
Speaker 2: for things that matter.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I think one trend that we're going to
Speaker 8: see continuing, especially if someone like Kamala wins. I'm starting
Speaker 8: to see a growing kind of reclamation of liberal patriotism.
Speaker 10: Yes, there were USA signs last.
Speaker 8: Night and USA chance and I think this will be
Speaker 8: something I'll probably talk a little bit more tomorrow or
Speaker 8: the next day after like Kamala's like big speech, and
Speaker 8: if they do win, I think this I think there
Speaker 8: actually is a decent bit of like two thousand and
Speaker 8: eight energy and like, yes, people are excited, there's the
Speaker 8: quote unquote vibe shift. But things didn't go great after
Speaker 8: Obama was elected, famously, like everything just kind of like
Speaker 8: the hope was mostly unfounded, like a.
Speaker 10: Lot of war crimes.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of war crimes and just not that
Speaker 2: much good stuff. Yeah, I mean, the the ACA mattered.
Speaker 2: There are some things that got better after it, but
Speaker 2: the whole fight to get there was so dispiriting, and
Speaker 2: I think that that kind of broke Obama the actual
Speaker 2: like interested in pushing radical change, and then the Republicans
Speaker 2: absolutely swept midterms to such a catastrophic extent, and I'd
Speaker 2: foresee Kamala getting stuck in the same thing that Obama
Speaker 2: did in terms of like it is actually very hard
Speaker 2: to make any substantive progress that helps people. I don't
Speaker 2: know that she's going to have to deal with a
Speaker 2: Republican party that is capable of doing what the Republicans
Speaker 2: did during like the Tea Party menters. That's just that's
Speaker 2: a very different Republican party and the one that exists now,
Speaker 2: the one that exists now has been lobotomized by Trump,
Speaker 2: and well he's going if he's alive, He's going to
Speaker 2: run in twenty twenty eight. Yeah.
Speaker 8: But this this kind of this growing reclamation of the
Speaker 8: patriotism we've already seen it with how like you know,
Speaker 8: the NFL is gone woke, all these things that have
Speaker 8: kind of been more affiliated with like you know, conservatism
Speaker 8: or like you know, like traditional Americana is slowly getting
Speaker 8: swept up more with like the liberal majority, and you know,
Speaker 8: those types of things that have kind of been gate
Speaker 8: kept from liberals for a while, especially especially that kind
Speaker 8: of style of patriotism. And this isn't this isn't necessarily
Speaker 8: a good thing. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just
Speaker 8: saying that this is going to be a trend that
Speaker 8: I think is going to be increasing, and it will
Speaker 8: also lead to, I think a bit more open hostility
Speaker 8: from liberals towards people that are more progressive, towards people
Speaker 8: more on the left, especially protesters, especially protesters who are
Speaker 8: not just doing protests that are big parades and marches.
Speaker 8: And we've already seen that here with a decent bit
Speaker 8: of conflict between you know, more radical attendees and the
Speaker 8: big coalitions with their safety teams. We were seeing a
Speaker 8: lot of fighting over you know, who is more justified,
Speaker 8: what's more valid? What should you be allowed to do
Speaker 8: at a protest like this? And those debates are going
Speaker 8: to continue. I think we're seeing more pressure on that front,
Speaker 8: even from liberals as well. And that's kind of the
Speaker 8: big the big trends that I'm seeing right now as
Speaker 8: we're about like halfway through the DNC.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm going to finally go to the DNC tonight,
Speaker 2: so that'll be fun.
Speaker 10: I'll show you around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can show me around. We're gonna meet Daddy Walls.
Speaker 2: I'll take my anti PTSD meds, all overdose on those meds.
Speaker 2: You can take me to the hospital. It's gonna be
Speaker 2: a nice night, Sophie.
Speaker 10: The good news is there's two more days of this.
Speaker 2: All right, last news I've heard in a while.
Speaker 3: I'm turning off this record.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go leap out of the window. Yeah
Speaker 2: all right, bye bye.
Speaker 15: Bye, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast
Speaker 15: being recorded in Garrison's hotel room, which is thirty percent
Speaker 15: the shopping bags that they got from.
Speaker 2: The Nazi clothing.
Speaker 3: No, you can't say that.
Speaker 10: You cannot say that.
Speaker 2: Well, look, they don't they used to be the Nazi
Speaker 2: clothing store. Now they just make suits right right.
Speaker 10: Buddy, why are you trying to cancel?
Speaker 2: It's a nice blazer. That white blazer you had on
Speaker 2: last night looks good. It's a good blazer. It's it's
Speaker 2: a good look. He's a good lace. Anyway, we're back,
Speaker 2: We're still in Chicago. We are all just exhausted.
Speaker 10: I feel like death.
Speaker 2: I am missing the unhurried, relaxed pace of war zone journalism,
Speaker 2: full nights of sleep, long rides and humvies.
Speaker 8: Even the RNC felt a little bit more male.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I'll tell you what it is.
Speaker 1: They were so unbelievably scheduled at the RNC, where like
Speaker 1: you knew nobody was going to be speaking past ten pm.
Speaker 10: It was done by ten pm.
Speaker 1: We were safely back in our very very bad hotel.
Speaker 2: And the actual physical setup of the event was more.
Speaker 2: For one thing, it's smaller. There's more people here, so
Speaker 2: that makes but it was also kind of I think,
Speaker 2: better laid out for walking and stuff.
Speaker 10: I agree, everything is very spread out here.
Speaker 2: The entrances here to it especially take a lot longer
Speaker 2: to get into. Now. I think that some of that's
Speaker 2: not even on the DNC. It's just the fact that
Speaker 2: the DNC has the president and vice president at it,
Speaker 2: and so it's going to have more security. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it is just fucking exhausting. And I guess probably the
Speaker 2: main reason why Garrison and I are so tired is
Speaker 2: every day has been many thousands of steps of walking
Speaker 2: around Chicago with different protests. So we'll be talking about
Speaker 2: all of that. But we wanted to get into the
Speaker 2: episode by kind of doing some horse race stuff, like
Speaker 2: actually talking about what are we seeing and polling what
Speaker 2: are we seeing in like viewership numbers. So Sophie wanted
Speaker 2: to start with one of our favorite topics, the popularity
Speaker 2: of the various vice presidential candidates.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like you know, national polls find that, like
Speaker 1: still that both vice presidential nominees are pretty much fighting
Speaker 1: to make themselves known to the US voters. But as
Speaker 1: of this week, and this is before Walls's speech last night,
Speaker 1: so they haven't come back with a poll just yet
Speaker 1: on that part of this week, Walls is viewed more
Speaker 1: favorably than Advanced, with twenty seven percent of US adults
Speaker 1: saying Vance is favorable. Forty four percent find him unfavorable.
Speaker 1: Compared to thirty six percent who think Walls is favorable
Speaker 1: and twenty five percent who find him unfavorable. And interesting
Speaker 1: to note, more Democrats are supportive of Walls sixty two
Speaker 1: percent than Republicans of Vance fifty seven percent, which is.
Speaker 2: Wild, but also very consistent with what we saw at
Speaker 2: the RNC, where Like at the Heritage Foundation event, which
Speaker 2: Vance is supposed to be their man, no one would
Speaker 2: say a nice thing at him. Like at the Heritage
Speaker 2: Foundation event, I could not hear a good word about JD.
Speaker 2: Vance the night of his speech, Whereas the sheer number
Speaker 2: of dims that I've seen with Coach Walls signs last night,
Speaker 2: including people like walking up to and interacting with folks
Speaker 2: at the uncommitted demonstration in front of the Convention Center,
Speaker 2: was like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, Like, I haven't
Speaker 2: seen any JD.
Speaker 1: Vans people genuinely liked Tim Walls versus I don't think
Speaker 1: I heard a single person at the RNC give any
Speaker 1: inclination that they deeply liked JD. Vans, Particularly when he
Speaker 1: was speaking, people were very much asleep.
Speaker 3: Very bored.
Speaker 2: It's I mean, it's reinforced that so far outside of
Speaker 2: Biden's stepping down. Picking walls is the best decision I've
Speaker 2: seen the DIMS make this year.
Speaker 10: He got a great reaction from the crowd last night.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I wanted to talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: kind of what we're seeing and polling. At least according
Speaker 2: to Nate Silver's analysis, there's a tiny tick down between
Speaker 2: Tuesday and Wednesday and commalist chances Visa v. Trump just
Speaker 2: based on some poles that had come out. All of
Speaker 2: that's kind of it's you can't really tell if there's
Speaker 2: going to be a convention bump until after the convention,
Speaker 2: so one way or the other, I wouldn't read too
Speaker 2: much into that. What is kind of worth reading into
Speaker 2: is is the comparative popularity of the DNC televised speeches
Speaker 2: with the RNC, And so far from Monday through Wednesday,
Speaker 2: the DNC is ahead, and on Tuesday in particular, they
Speaker 2: were well ahead with Barack Obama and Michelle both speaking.
Speaker 2: That got something like five million more viewers than the
Speaker 2: comparative night at the RNC, which is a really significant
Speaker 2: and all of these is obviously beating twenty twenty. It's
Speaker 2: kind of unclear the biggest night for the RNC was Thursday,
Speaker 2: So we'll see if Kamala can crack the twenty eight
Speaker 2: or twenty nine million viewers that Trump got the height
Speaker 2: of his event, but so far a sizeable like maybe
Speaker 2: fifteen to twenty percent edge for the DIMS in terms
Speaker 2: of viewership. And obviously you have to keep in mind
Speaker 2: that like half of the people listening to any convention
Speaker 2: are not necessarily supporters of that cannonet. They're just people
Speaker 2: who want to be informed. But it furthers the narrative
Speaker 2: that there is a lot of energy behind the DIMS
Speaker 2: right now, that kind of like vibe thing that people
Speaker 2: have been.
Speaker 1: Talking about and speaking of vibes, speaking of vibes, Boy howdy.
Speaker 2: We wanted to end this segment before we get into
Speaker 2: the pro Palestine protests and the uncommitted sit in that's
Speaker 2: still going on at the convention center by talking just
Speaker 2: one more time about jd Vance, who, while all of
Speaker 2: this is going on, yesterday, as Tim Wallas was preparing
Speaker 2: his speech at the DNC, jd Vance visited a donut shop,
Speaker 2: and we're just going to play you audio of him
Speaker 2: talking to employees at the donut shop trying to trying
Speaker 2: to get a photo opportunity or a good video clip.
Speaker 2: The zoom has come to tell thank you for let
Speaker 2: us coming here.
Speaker 8: Okay, well sorry, okay, yeah, she doesn't want to be
Speaker 8: on film, guys, so just cut her out of anything.
Speaker 4: Appreciate that man of Jade Dance American vice President.
Speaker 13: They see it.
Speaker 12: Okay, I'm years the game answer man.
Speaker 6: Okay, okay, good, how about you, sir?
Speaker 3: And then almost two.
Speaker 8: Years okay, good, helps to everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of glaze to here, some sprinkle stuff,
Speaker 2: somebody sending the roles. Just my experience as play for
Speaker 2: a round four years, about four years.
Speaker 3: Okay, how have you been here?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 4: Good?
Speaker 1: Quite literally nobody has ever been worse at interacting them beings?
Speaker 10: What is wrong with good?
Speaker 2: Okay, good? Good? Yeah.
Speaker 3: That was by the way in Georgia.
Speaker 2: Oh Georgia, great, great. I'm JD.
Speaker 10: Vance. I'm running for vice president.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay. If I wanted to win Georgia, that was Trump. JD.
Speaker 8: Fance is the last man I would send to the
Speaker 8: state of Georgia.
Speaker 10: I'm JD Vance. Oh God, but I'm JD Vance.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, all right.
Speaker 10: It was like that SNL Pete Davidson skit where he
Speaker 10: just goes.
Speaker 2: He just orders a random assortment of dome.
Speaker 10: That's how everyone should react to JD.
Speaker 2: Vance. Okay, Like if he loses, that's going to be
Speaker 2: the rest of his life. Is him showing up places
Speaker 2: going I'm JD Vance and people going, all right.
Speaker 8: Please stay away from my Childrenyody, you're about to tell
Speaker 8: me that you can't be within one hundred meters.
Speaker 2: Of a school. Yeah, seriously, sow that beard looks anyway. Ads,
Speaker 2: here's some ads. We're back and yeah. So the protests
Speaker 2: have continued. Garrison and I nearly got arrested during a
Speaker 2: kettle that wound up being about sixty It looked like
Speaker 2: people who were both sighted and arrested. Most of those
Speaker 2: people cited and released on the scene. A couple about
Speaker 2: two dozen or so actually arrested, including four members of
Speaker 2: the press. Pretty nasty scene. Yesterday was very different. There
Speaker 2: was a protest march that moved up to the gates
Speaker 2: of the convention and then marched back. There were a
Speaker 2: couple of moments where like police would grab people that
Speaker 2: happened at the train station and detain them, but ultimately
Speaker 2: did not significant numbers of arrests, at least from what
Speaker 2: I saw, and from talking to people, it did sound
Speaker 2: like they were mostly kind of detaining and releasing. We
Speaker 2: had not intended to do more protests last night, just
Speaker 2: because the first two nights were supposed to be the largest,
Speaker 2: and I had not even been to the DNC until
Speaker 2: last afternoon actually passed the gate, so we all went
Speaker 2: in together. We watched a couple of speeches. Thank god,
Speaker 2: I got to catch the Bill Clinton speech. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: I don't wanted to miss that.
Speaker 1: Barn Berners' affiliate Bill Clinton.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, So he sounded almost closer to death than
Speaker 2: Joe Biden. Yeah, which was just shocked. Bisen sounds a
Speaker 2: lot better now. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He also spoke very early on in the night, and
Speaker 1: his speech was so long.
Speaker 2: It wasn't great, and it was bad. It was I
Speaker 2: don't know why speech.
Speaker 10: Don't speak for that long if your speech is bad.
Speaker 10: But also just like, don't invite him in the first place.
Speaker 2: It's because, probably because of the sheet amount of clout
Speaker 2: that the Clintons have within the Democratic Party still to
Speaker 2: this day, because if you don't have Bill there, well,
Speaker 2: they also they wanted Hillary, and Hillary did get a
Speaker 2: big reaction, and I'm sure Hillary dislikes Bill Clinton as
Speaker 2: much as anyone. Sure, but for a variety of complicated
Speaker 2: and stupid reasons, you can't both have Hillary Clinton and
Speaker 2: exclude Bill and repeatedly attack Trump for his Epstein connections.
Speaker 2: It just doesn't work very well, which is why they
Speaker 2: shouldn't have had any Clinton's there and hit on Trump
Speaker 2: for being a pedophile. But yes, I don't know.
Speaker 1: He spoke for so long I can't it set me
Speaker 1: over the edge.
Speaker 2: It was fine. It was not like you're just kind
Speaker 2: of boring, Thankfully, more important things happened, if not inside
Speaker 2: the DNC, just just outside, yes, the actual United Center
Speaker 2: like stadium, still inside the security perimeter. So while we
Speaker 2: were watching Mindy Kaling talk about how she should be
Speaker 2: the ambassador to Italy, which I know was a bit
Speaker 2: but I was just not in the mood. Now we
Speaker 2: start I start getting like updates from there's a journalist
Speaker 2: on the ground, Prem Thacker, who was outside with some
Speaker 2: representatives of the uncommitted movement. So the uncommitted movement started
Speaker 2: as Democrats who were voting uncommitted in the primaries in
Speaker 2: order to make a point about, you know, the fact
Speaker 2: that there is significant solidarity among the Democratic voters with
Speaker 2: Gaza and that if Democrats do not do something more
Speaker 2: than the thoughts in prayers, they won't get those votes.
Speaker 2: And particularly Chicago massive Palestinian population, it could be something
Speaker 2: that you know matters in some of the swing states.
Speaker 2: So the uncommitted movement has kind of coalesced over the
Speaker 2: last couple of months into a group of delegates who
Speaker 2: are again we're not talking about like the folks marching outside.
Speaker 2: These are not people who are just like committed radicals.
Speaker 2: Are're certainly not communists. I heard a number of folks
Speaker 2: who engaged with people from the DNC who were and again,
Speaker 2: these are members of the uncommitted movement wearing like Palestinian scarves,
Speaker 2: who specifically like would say I think Israel has a
Speaker 2: right to defend itself.
Speaker 10: Describe these folks as moderate Democrats.
Speaker 2: It's a mix of moderate, moderate and like radical Democrat,
Speaker 2: but Democrats right progressive, progressive. And the point I'm making
Speaker 2: about like I heard a couple of them say no,
Speaker 2: I think Israel has a right to defend itself is
Speaker 2: not that I think that's a particularly valid thing to mention,
Speaker 2: but that it shows you the level of rhetoric which
Speaker 2: they were taking pains to be speaking within the bounds
Speaker 2: of extremely acceptable Democratic Party rhetoric. Right, we are loyal Democrats.
Speaker 2: We were very excited. I listened to a couple of
Speaker 2: representatives of the movement give speeches. One of them was
Speaker 2: Delegate June Rose, which in my initial threat I think
Speaker 2: I went with he him, but I believe their pronouns
Speaker 2: are they them? And Rose basically mentioned this is a
Speaker 2: quote from them. When President Biden was the nominee, I
Speaker 2: felt hopeless. And this is both because Biden was providing
Speaker 2: Israel with bombs and because he could not win. This
Speaker 2: is a quote from them. When Harris was chosen, I
Speaker 2: heard empathy in her voice for Palestinian suffering. But then
Speaker 2: June says they remembered what Democrats give Republicans shit for saying,
Speaker 2: you know, thoughts and prayers after mass shootings, And I
Speaker 2: thought that was a valid point to make. Right a
Speaker 2: month ago, the fact that dimm's had really changed their
Speaker 2: messaging on Gaza sounded like it could be the start
Speaker 2: of something promising, but it hasn't led to any kind
Speaker 2: of like strong commitment for actually anything actionable. Right, just
Speaker 2: saying I support a ceasefire isn't enough when people are
Speaker 2: getting killed. It's not like an actual commitment to, for example,
Speaker 2: stop sending Israel arms now. To be totally fair, I
Speaker 2: don't want to be flattening this too much. There have
Speaker 2: been some significant concessions from the DNC to Palestinian solidarity movement, right,
Speaker 2: not just a number of mentions and embraces of ceasefires
Speaker 2: from multiple speakers that got massive lines of applause. But Sophie,
Speaker 2: you went to the panel that the DNC put on
Speaker 2: with doctors who had just been working in Gaza, and
Speaker 2: that particularly.
Speaker 10: It was a verse of its kind panel.
Speaker 2: And that I would say more than people advocating a ceasefire,
Speaker 2: and their speech is that's not nothing right like that,
Speaker 2: that's an actual no.
Speaker 1: And Robert June also posted that over two hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty Harris delegates have signed their letter demanding a permanent
Speaker 1: ceasefire in arms embargo and says not another bomb, which
Speaker 1: is which was one of the signs that they had
Speaker 1: last night. So that two hundred, over two hundred eighty
Speaker 1: Harris delegates, that is not insignificant.
Speaker 2: No, that's a and those people you know come here
Speaker 2: representing you know, a large significantly larger number of voters.
Speaker 2: So what had happened outside of the United Center is uncommitted.
Speaker 2: Led by the co founder of the organization, A Boss
Speaker 2: all Away, we're essentially engaging in a sit in, although
Speaker 2: A Boss was very open about like, I don't want
Speaker 2: this to be a set in. I want to go home.
Speaker 2: I'm very tired, my feet hurt. I am just waiting
Speaker 2: for a call. We presented the DNC some time ago.
Speaker 2: The conversations really started about a month ago. They were
Speaker 2: initially trying to get a doctor a five minute speaking
Speaker 2: slot at the DNC to talk about medical care for
Speaker 2: children in Gaza. That has evolved over time into they
Speaker 2: have a list of Palestinian American Democrats who they were
Speaker 2: willing to let the DNC pick from and let them
Speaker 2: vet a speech.
Speaker 3: Including some who have endorsed terrorists already.
Speaker 2: From what I was listening to, all of this was
Speaker 2: very much in the context of and endorsing Harris right.
Speaker 2: I've seen a lot of people be like, yeah, but
Speaker 2: what if they come up and attack the Democratic Party
Speaker 2: and call you know them genocide supporters or whatnot. And
Speaker 2: I don't get that feeling from this group of people. Now,
Speaker 2: I understand if you're like, well, that's what they should do.
Speaker 2: But these folks are not coming at this and certainly
Speaker 2: not framing themselves as we are radical left. They're framing
Speaker 2: themselves as we are normal Democrats who want to see
Speaker 2: the Democratic Party acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians and also
Speaker 2: start taking real steps to reduce and mitigate the violence
Speaker 2: that is really able to do over there. And that's
Speaker 2: what these people were standing for.
Speaker 8: And at least in terms of the actually d NC
Speaker 8: like convention at the United Center, the fact that they
Speaker 8: do not want to do this and would rather just
Speaker 8: continue like this big like party to.
Speaker 2: Be partying with you is really part of the vibe
Speaker 2: that they were getting on.
Speaker 8: Sure, and but the dn Z doesn't even want that
Speaker 8: to like put at risk this whole vibe shift party
Speaker 8: that they have going on, and that that is like,
Speaker 8: you know, a massive issue. And similarly, we had we
Speaker 8: had videos coming out last night of DNC attendees leaving
Speaker 8: the area plugging their ears as as people read out
Speaker 8: like names of dead Palestinian children. It just creates this
Speaker 8: overwhelming like atmosphere that these people don't want to be
Speaker 8: inconvenienced by the genocide and the genocide for them, it
Speaker 8: just is a political inconvenience that's phibiting them from stopping
Speaker 8: Trump and prohibiting them from just making this big like
Speaker 8: Kamala Party.
Speaker 2: And it is very much an own goal because one
Speaker 2: thing I will say, if I'm trying again, if I'm
Speaker 2: trying to be fair, is when I saw people leaving
Speaker 2: the event, I saw people who got angry. I saw
Speaker 2: people who tried to ignore it, and I also saw
Speaker 2: a decent number of people come up and engage politely
Speaker 2: and with interest in the people who were doing a
Speaker 2: sit in. Yes, And in fact, before the event let out,
Speaker 2: there were maybe one hundred people including press around the
Speaker 2: un committed sit in, and it was a couple hundred
Speaker 2: when I left, get a lot of infinitely people who
Speaker 2: had come out. And so it is not it is
Speaker 2: not fair to say, but when you have people reading
Speaker 2: out the names of folks killed in a genocide leaving
Speaker 2: an event, and you get any photos of Democrats leaving
Speaker 2: plugging their ears, that's that's the image that's going to
Speaker 2: stick with people, right, And that was obvious going into this.
Speaker 2: It's a sign number one, I think of how scared
Speaker 2: people are of a pack, but also of kind of
Speaker 2: the lack of trust that the DNC leadership has in
Speaker 2: anyone Palestinian being able to balance being a Democrat with
Speaker 2: wanting to end a genocide. And you know, again, I
Speaker 2: think that probably a lot of folks who were outside
Speaker 2: of the event at the more radical protests would be
Speaker 2: frustrated by some of the language that I heard uncommitted
Speaker 2: representatives use. But I think that sit in is having
Speaker 2: more of an impact than any of the demonstrations outside
Speaker 2: right because it's right in the middle of the DNC.
Speaker 2: It's impossible to ignore, and you cannot write these people
Speaker 2: off as protesters who are out there breaking the law.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a guy with a hes Bula flag.
Speaker 2: Why are they walking around the hes bull of flag.
Speaker 2: These are people who's messaging is as moderated as it
Speaker 2: could possibly be. They just want the reality of a
Speaker 2: genocide to be acknowledged, which is not a big ask
Speaker 2: in my opinion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and did you go to any other protests that night, Robert, Yes,
Speaker 1: I shared did.
Speaker 2: Garrison and I had several drinks at the hotel, which
Speaker 2: we've been doing because you know, when you get a
Speaker 2: chance to sit with your friend both wearing your nice
Speaker 2: suit and act world weary at a political convention. It's
Speaker 2: really nice. I wish we could still smoke indoors Garrison.
Speaker 2: We'd be four packs of pall mall into this by now.
Speaker 3: Once we get back to Vegas.
Speaker 2: Once we get back to Vegas, cees right around the corner, buddy,
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry. So like at one am, and at
Speaker 2: one am in the morning, we go to bed, just
Speaker 2: fucking exhausted, and there had been sort of word that
Speaker 2: was supposed to be some kind of radical demonstration, and
Speaker 2: it was unclear exactly what was going to happen. And
Speaker 2: then right as I got up to my hotel room,
Speaker 2: I saw from one of the reporters I cover on
Speaker 2: the ground here, Talia Jane at Talia OTG, that a
Speaker 2: noise demonstration had opened up outside of the They'd figured
Speaker 2: out what Hotel Kamala Harris is at and had started
Speaker 2: doing a noise demonstration, just making as much noise outside
Speaker 2: of the hotel well as possible. And it was like
Speaker 2: a block away from us. So down the street I
Speaker 2: went maybe one hundred people or so, including one individual
Speaker 2: with a flute playing as badly as they possibly could
Speaker 2: while standing as close to the police riot line as
Speaker 2: they possibly care. A hero. A hero it was, And yeah,
Speaker 2: it was interesting because when I got there, I expected
Speaker 2: because the police were telling people to move. They were
Speaker 2: in front of the President's hotel. It was one in
Speaker 2: the morning, and they were being very loud in front
Speaker 2: of people who have money, So I kind of expected, Okay,
Speaker 2: wagons are going to come in and people are going
Speaker 2: to get the absolute shit beat out of them. But
Speaker 2: nothing happened. The cops didn't even keep a tight cordon.
Speaker 2: There was clearly no as we saw last night, there
Speaker 2: was no walling in the protest. There was no sign
Speaker 2: that they considered this something that needed to be met
Speaker 2: with a significant degree of force. I kind of think
Speaker 2: some of it maybe that they were tired too, because
Speaker 2: they looked exhausted, So I wonder how much of it
Speaker 2: is that. I think it also they got supp as
Speaker 2: opposed to yesterday, where they came in knowing, Okay, this
Speaker 2: is supposed to be a radical militant demo, so we're
Speaker 2: going to have an overwhelming force response. I think they
Speaker 2: just had some teams show up and kind of catches
Speaker 2: catch can handle the event. But you know, they played
Speaker 2: around outside of Harris's place for thirty or forty minutes
Speaker 2: and then marched on and dispersed, And it was fine,
Speaker 2: no arrests that I saw whatsoever, pretty calm night.
Speaker 8: And I believe the actual hotel she was staying it
Speaker 8: was actually like a like a one or two blocks
Speaker 8: over they it was fortified.
Speaker 2: It's a fortress. Right, You're not going to get that close.
Speaker 8: It's the Secret Service like headquarters essentially. Right, the vice
Speaker 8: president is sleeping in the building here. There's not going
Speaker 8: to be protesters directly outside on the sidewalk. They're going
Speaker 8: to have some kind of radius. Yeah, people got as
Speaker 8: close as they could to what they believed the hotel was,
Speaker 8: but you know, it's not like they're going to be
Speaker 8: thrown eggs on the window of the Vice president.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: And I didn't even see any implication that people wanted
Speaker 2: to do that. I have not, at any of these
Speaker 2: demonstrations seen any sort of cohesive committed property destruction or
Speaker 2: even like a hint that people are thinking of property.
Speaker 2: These are and part because I think most of the
Speaker 2: people have seen have been younger. They seem to be
Speaker 2: newer to this kind of protest. It seems like a
Speaker 2: younger movement is the core of things here, and I
Speaker 2: don't think if they ever do, I certainly they have
Speaker 2: not yet psyched themselves up to that kind of direct action.
Speaker 8: Yeah, all right, we will go on an that break
Speaker 8: and come back to hear about a few of the
Speaker 8: other speeches that took place last night at the DNC,
Speaker 8: including Governor Tim Walls.
Speaker 2: So the window, Okay, we could, So we're back. I
Speaker 2: did want to note before we get into this that
Speaker 2: Texas delegate who was in the South side of Chicago
Speaker 2: got robbed last night. Oh yes, which is not surprising
Speaker 2: because the South side of Chicago is the baddest part
Speaker 2: of town. And as I was warned before coming here,
Speaker 2: if you get down there, you'd better be aware. A
Speaker 2: man named Leroy Brown.
Speaker 10: All right, anyways, scarus.
Speaker 2: He stands about six foot four, so this week has
Speaker 2: lasted a month. I've aged all the downtown ladies call
Speaker 2: him treetop Lover, but before the men just call him
Speaker 2: sir if you were curious about his pronouns.
Speaker 8: I'm just trying to make sure that we refer to
Speaker 8: So the theme for Wednesday night inside the DNC was
Speaker 8: a fight for our democracy and with like a big
Speaker 8: emphasis on like trying to maintain the freedoms that we
Speaker 8: now have. There's a lot of we're not going back
Speaker 8: chance that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: A lot of.
Speaker 1: Speech is focused on redefining freedom. Yes, and curious this.
Speaker 8: Is this is kind of part of like this like
Speaker 8: liberal reclaiming of like patreat has been freedom that I've
Speaker 8: that I've kind of been talking about these past few weeks.
Speaker 2: It's probably the smartest thing they could be doing.
Speaker 8: Yes, So this was kind of the main push not
Speaker 8: only how Democrats will continue to secure these freedoms, but
Speaker 8: if Trump is elected, these freedoms will be gone and people.
Speaker 8: The judge gave an okay speech, you know, talking about
Speaker 8: how his current life being married with kids was like,
Speaker 8: you know, impossible twenty five years ago, and if Project
Speaker 8: twenty twenty five gets enacted, it will be no longer
Speaker 8: possible anymore. So, like a lot of stuff kind of
Speaker 8: like that. Oprah Winfrey showed up and gave a very
Speaker 8: long speech.
Speaker 2: I did have a moment of very jarring disconnect where
Speaker 2: as I listened to the boss who was openly weeping
Speaker 2: talking about his grandmother having to flee her home in
Speaker 2: Lebanon as it was bombed and then I look up
Speaker 2: as this man is crying on the ground talking about
Speaker 2: his grandmother fleeing bombs, and there's Oprah Winfrey's giant head
Speaker 2: speaking on the JumboTron above me.
Speaker 10: Yeah, similar to the RNZ.
Speaker 13: When the crowd started enchanting Usa, Usa, Usa during Oprah's speech,
Speaker 13: I got one of what those alert said my smart
Speaker 13: watch that my heart was a little too high, which
Speaker 13: again very funny.
Speaker 10: That's all that it takes to trigger my poor little heart.
Speaker 2: I got some magnesia and supplement, Sophie. Let's take though.
Speaker 8: And then even though there's just all this like you know, freedom,
Speaker 8: democracy stuff, there was also some of the most conservative
Speaker 8: speakers of the night were also here. There was there
Speaker 8: was a few police officers. There was a sheriff talking
Speaker 8: about the border and how how Trump killed the most
Speaker 8: secure border bill. Even though they're denying any any Palestinian
Speaker 8: to speak on the main stage, they are inviting like
Speaker 8: former Trump co workers, a sheriff, a police officers. So
Speaker 8: all of these guys are speaking, which people are similarly
Speaker 8: pointing to, is is you know, showcasing what exactly the
Speaker 8: DNC I think actually cares about right now? But I
Speaker 8: think I just want to go straight over to mister
Speaker 8: Walls Coach Walls. Right before he came out, volunteers at
Speaker 8: the convention center were handing out these big coach Walls signs.
Speaker 8: There must have must have been thousands of them just
Speaker 8: handing them out to like everyone on the floor, almost
Speaker 8: everyone in the stands, just the whole the whole stadium
Speaker 8: was full of people holding these big Coach Walls signs.
Speaker 8: He comes out onto stage and people seem to really
Speaker 8: like him. He gave it short but sweet speech. I
Speaker 8: guess he was one of the most efficient speakers of
Speaker 8: the night. He talked a lot about schools and how
Speaker 8: how schools are kind of one of the big battlegrounds
Speaker 8: for freedom right now because he used to be a
Speaker 8: teacher for you know, geography.
Speaker 2: As well as well as football.
Speaker 8: He had this line that instead of instead of banning books,
Speaker 8: we've been banishing hunger in his schools. How he signed
Speaker 8: that free lunch bill. Meanwhile, all these Republicans are just
Speaker 8: trying to ban science books, banned social studies, and he's
Speaker 8: giving kids free food. So it's a lot of stuff
Speaker 8: about protecting schools, a lot of stuff about empowering teachers.
Speaker 8: That got great reactions from the crowd. So I'm sure
Speaker 8: there's plenty of teachers here at the DNC.
Speaker 1: Sure speaking of crowd reactions, Joe Biden was very briefly
Speaker 1: mentioned in the thank You Joe chance that normally go
Speaker 1: on for a.
Speaker 10: Very long time.
Speaker 8: They've been getting shorter, getting shorter, shorter, getting shorter and shorter.
Speaker 1: It was quite literally, thank you Joe once and then
Speaker 1: thank you, and then he kept talking and the chance ended.
Speaker 2: So yeah, the party along weaning themselves off of haired
Speaker 2: Joe in so Walls could.
Speaker 8: Walls's approach in his speech was similarly on this like
Speaker 8: freedom and democracy theme. One of the reoccurring talking points
Speaker 8: he used was back in either Minnesota or Nebraska, because
Speaker 8: he's lived in both places. Their golden rule is to
Speaker 8: mind your own damn business, and that's kind of his
Speaker 8: stated approach to a lot of these things. It's like
Speaker 8: Republicans are trying to get up into your business. The
Speaker 8: Republicans talk about freedom, but what they really mean is
Speaker 8: freedom for the government to get involved in your own business. Yes,
Speaker 8: saying that the Democrats are going to not do such
Speaker 8: a thing. We're going to keep the government out of
Speaker 8: your doctor's office. We're going to provide reproductive freedom. That's
Speaker 8: kind of the messaging that he kept using because consistently
Speaker 8: throughout the night about being a good neighbor, calling you know,
Speaker 8: stuff like Project twenty twenty five, an agenda that no
Speaker 8: one has really asked for, but Republican like oligarchs are
Speaker 8: trying to force upon the nation just to get more
Speaker 8: involved in everyone's lives. And this is something that me
Speaker 8: and Robert we're talking about kind of back in the hotels.
Speaker 8: Everyone really likes like libertarian messaging. Yeah, Like this style
Speaker 8: of messaging always plays very well. People just don't like
Speaker 8: actual libertarians, and they don't like, you know, lots of
Speaker 8: like libertarian like you know, urban policy, right, But this
Speaker 8: style of messaging typically plays really well and is something
Speaker 8: that Republicans have been using increasingly, like since like the
Speaker 8: Tea Party and stuff. And because the Republican Party has
Speaker 8: has gotten much more authoritarian over the years, I think
Speaker 8: it's interesting to see the Democrats are starting to realize
Speaker 8: that they can actually weaponize this style of framing themselves
Speaker 8: to a very good reaction. You know, this is where
Speaker 8: we get these big we're not going back chants.
Speaker 10: He in one of his many sports metaphors.
Speaker 1: He said, when somebody draws up a playbook, they're going
Speaker 1: to use it. Referred to Project twenty twenty five and
Speaker 1: the crowd loved that.
Speaker 3: A lot of sports references that I saw. That sport
Speaker 3: reference I did not really get.
Speaker 2: But that's cans. You guys don't like the only real
Speaker 2: sport in this lie, I.
Speaker 10: Was translating all the sports reference since.
Speaker 1: Robert you don't know sports, I know football, great, sob Anyways.
Speaker 8: He also talked about things that Kamala has helped fight for,
Speaker 8: including fighting big pharma, security rights for workers, healthcare, and housing.
Speaker 8: There's just a few of the actual kind of still
Speaker 8: not not super big policy things, but hinting towards policy
Speaker 8: things that Democrats have gotten closer to over these last
Speaker 8: few days as they did release their actual like DNC
Speaker 8: party platform. And finally, the kind of last thing I
Speaker 8: want to mention is that with like buddhaj Edge and
Speaker 8: a few a few other like LGBTQ speakers, you know Walls,
Speaker 8: Walls talked about how he sponsored the Gaystraight Alliance in
Speaker 8: the nineties and that under his and Kamala's watch, the
Speaker 8: government's going to stay out of your bedroom. Similarly, you know,
Speaker 8: going back to this like freedom messaging. But there has
Speaker 8: been these few mentions of like you know, keeping the
Speaker 8: government out of the bedroom, and.
Speaker 10: Like doctor's appointments as well.
Speaker 8: Doctors appointments, and and not and and not regressing on
Speaker 8: LGBTQ rights. There's been very little actually talked about positively
Speaker 8: about helping secure the LGBTQ rights that are currently like
Speaker 8: actually a jeopardy, like specifically like trans healthcare. Like there's
Speaker 8: not been a trans speaker at the DNC. I've heard
Speaker 8: almost no mention of trans issues on any of the
Speaker 8: speeches or any of the or any of the panels.
Speaker 8: And that this is I guess just slightly.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 8: I guess I was expecting something, honestly on this because
Speaker 8: this is such a big topic for Republicans, because there
Speaker 8: was consistently every night mentions of trans people at the RNC.
Speaker 8: I was expecting at least some degree for the DNC
Speaker 8: to like push back on that and be like, no,
Speaker 8: we actually are gonna make sure we have health care
Speaker 8: for trans people and make sure that trans people are
Speaker 8: not unfairly discriminated against. And they have just sidesteped this
Speaker 8: whole issue, and that has been that's not great. That
Speaker 8: is that is another thing as well as Palestine to
Speaker 8: push them on, because this is like literally one of
Speaker 8: the core parts of the Republican Party right now is
Speaker 8: attacking the ability for trans people to not only get
Speaker 8: health care, but it's just to exist in public life.
Speaker 2: And it's specifically something Walls has a really good record on. Yes,
Speaker 2: some of these people do have a good recordation ban
Speaker 2: and stuff, so it's not something that they have shied
Speaker 2: away from in their own electoral history.
Speaker 8: But at least at the DNC, they're not putting it
Speaker 8: on like the national stage, and maybe they think it
Speaker 8: won't play well. Maybe they think it's a little bit
Speaker 8: too weird for some of the people that they're trying
Speaker 8: to kind of court their votes for.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. I wonder if the calculation is a
Speaker 2: little different. The only direct references I've heard of trans
Speaker 2: people have been as part of LGBTQ. I wonder if
Speaker 2: there's a degree of strategy where they're thinking, like the
Speaker 2: smart way to play this is to reconnect trans people
Speaker 2: with LGBTQ as opposed to deal with it as if
Speaker 2: there's some sort of like separate thing going on. I
Speaker 2: wonder if that's a calculation that they're making. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but you're right, it is kind of it is very
Speaker 2: conspicuous in its absence.
Speaker 8: I mean, we just had this massive flare about the
Speaker 8: Olympics with this like increasing like trans panic stuff, and yeah,
Speaker 8: it's just something I've observed the past few days that
Speaker 8: I mean, we'll see if we'll see if there's anything Tonight,
Speaker 8: I'm going to try to talk to the people who've
Speaker 8: been at the LGBTQ caucuses these past few days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to end by just as we're recording this,
Speaker 2: it's come out Mother Jones is published at the text
Speaker 2: of the speech that the Uncommitted Movement wanted to give
Speaker 2: it the DNC. This was from rep Rua Roman was
Speaker 2: supposed to be the one giving this and this was
Speaker 2: like specifically turned down by the Democratic Party. And I
Speaker 2: want to read a couple of paragraphs from it, just
Speaker 2: to give you an idea again, make it very clear
Speaker 2: the actual kind of rhetoric and how modest it is
Speaker 2: that these people are using in this pain. I've also
Speaker 2: witnessed something profound, a beautiful, multi faith, multiracial and multi
Speaker 2: generational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party. For
Speaker 2: three hundred and twenty days, we've stood together, demanding to
Speaker 2: enforce our laws on friend and foe alike, to reach
Speaker 2: a ceasefire in the killing of Palestinians, fore all the
Speaker 2: Israelian Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of
Speaker 2: building a path to collective peace and safety. That's why
Speaker 2: we are here, members of this Democratic Party, committed to
Speaker 2: equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here
Speaker 2: echoes around the world. They'll say, this is how it's
Speaker 2: always been, that nothing can change. But remember Fanny lou
Speaker 2: Hamer shunned for her courage, yet she paved the way
Speaker 2: for an integrated Democratic Party. Her legacy lives on and
Speaker 2: it's her example we follow. But we can't do it alone.
Speaker 2: This historic moment is full of promise, but only if
Speaker 2: we stand together. Our party's greatest strength has always been
Speaker 2: our ability to unite. Some see that as a weakness,
Speaker 2: but it's time we flex that strength. Let's commit to
Speaker 2: each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump,
Speaker 2: who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur.
Speaker 2: Let's fight for the politics long overdue from restoring access
Speaker 2: to abortions, to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an
Speaker 2: end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To
Speaker 2: those who doubt us, to the cynics and naysayers, I say,
Speaker 2: yes we can. Yes, we can be a democratic party
Speaker 2: that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars,
Speaker 2: that fights for in America, that belongs to all of us, black, brown,
Speaker 2: and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my
Speaker 2: grandfather taught me together Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's the least
Speaker 2: objectionable thing I can imagine. Yeah, So anyway, that's what
Speaker 2: the DNC didn want people do here.
Speaker 10: Pretty despicable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty frustrating.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Well, this is how we're gonna be closing this week
Speaker 8: of coverage. We will start next week's episodes by talking
Speaker 8: about the final day of the DNC, including Kamala Harris's speech.
Speaker 8: And I also have some kind of disjointed thoughts I'll
Speaker 8: try to put together more about some of like the
Speaker 8: discourse revolving around some of these protests, how they've been
Speaker 8: handled a few like tactics things. But yeah, this has
Speaker 8: been this week at It could Happen here. Recording from Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 2: Nice exhausted, Well, you guys, listen to the speeches. I'm
Speaker 2: going to try to find Jake Tapper at the Politico
Speaker 2: Bar and Grill and uh, you know, read him the
Speaker 2: lyrics of bad bad Le Roy Brown. Let us know
Speaker 2: all that baddest man in the whole damn town.
Speaker 1: Normally I would I would be against abandoning you at
Speaker 1: a big public event.
Speaker 10: But see you.
Speaker 2: It's fine if it turns into a fist fight. I
Speaker 2: feel confident. We all view. I feel very confident I
Speaker 2: can win.
Speaker 8: If you're getting close to Jake Kapper, it's going to
Speaker 8: turn into a fistfight.
Speaker 3: We all know this, all right, horrible.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 10: Slash sources. Thanks for listening,