Charlie Kirk, a Chicago area native and co-founder of Turning Point USA, sparred with a conventioneer inside the United Center, where Vice President Kamala Harris will be anointed as Democrat’s presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, Republican operative Jack Posobiec donned a traditional Middle Eastern headdress Monday while questioning demonstrators at Union Park about abortion.
So the expected 20,000 or so protestors ended up being only a few thousand. Almost all protested peacefully. A few managed to break down an external perimeter fence and throw some stuff at police. The police in kind … got the protesters to move back without using any violence or batons or chemicals. A handful of arrests. The operatives of the Right seemed pretty pathetic.
The convention isn’t over yet but so far a handful of bad actors on the protest side dealt with competently by well trained police on the job. No reports of massive crime resulting from police pulled from other neighborhoods to help in the convention areas.
Yeah; thing is, a lot of the Right really believes their claim that they represent some “silent majority”, and thinks they have far more support than they actually do. And since they really believe it you’ll periodically have incidents where they make some plan for a huge protest/riot, and be blindsided when only a small amount of true believers show up.
Heck, a few thousand is actually more than you could expect to actually show up with their track record. I recall one during the Obama Administration where after a months-long buildup online where they were talking up about how they’d fill the streets with hundreds of thousands of protestors and maybe even somehow push Obama out of office, a forlorn handful of people showed up tweeting “Where is everybody?! We’re here already!”
Good news—I was wrong !!! Virtually no violence…
Ya got me, @iiandyiiii !
I honestly expected to see the same scenes outside the convention hall that we saw* on the campuses a couple months ago, but worse…as they would be magnified by the importance of the convention, and the presence of the media.
Fox news was desperately trying to portray the convention as a shit-show. They had a headline at one point decrying “chaos” when a dozen protesters were arrested outside the Israeli consulate. But that was all the outrage that they could manufacture.
In the end, there just weren’t enough people in the streets to create negative energy, and detract from the positive vibes inside the convention center.
The protestors claimed to represent lots of different groups, and the major event of the convention is a logical focus point to gather their supporters in a show of force. The press are already there, and people are interested. But fortunately, it fizzled out.
Anybody want to offer explanations why?
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*(and will see again next month when the semester starts)
Exactly. There were few arrests, few complaints against the CPD, and it was, generally, peaceful. I was afraid for the worst, and I was happy and relieved to see that it didn’t happen that way.
