Chicago’s DNC: A Cacophony of Fury, Hate, Whining, and Wretched Music

Jack Lucey visited the epicenter of the DNC protests. This is what he learned.

"Any play that can be described in one sentence should be one sentence long," Edward Albee once said. Best known for his award-winning 1962 play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee could have said the same thing about last week's protests during the Democratic National Convention. 

Here is my one-sentence description about those protests: The participants, loudly, want to overthrow western society and capitalism, and they despise police.

Here's Act II of that play: The themes include dislike of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, support for Hamas and Palestine over Israel in the Gaza War, enthusiasm for Marxism, and championing the LGBTQ+ agenda. 

The intersectionality of these protests will be covered in a forthcoming piece on Chicago Contrarian.

I attended four DNC protests, which spanned from Sunday, August 18th to Thursday, August 23rd. Maybe it was three protests — or five — as these events blend together, and the two press conferences I witnessed had the feel of protest rallies. On Thursday, two protests were scheduled at Union Park on the Near West Side, but I only counted one.

On the evening before the DNC opened, protesters staged a march on Michigan Avenue that was advertised as a protest in favor of gay and transgender rights — as well as access to abortion — but it turned into a "Queers for Palestine" rally in all but name.

Different groups sponsored each rally and march, but I saw many of the same participants, as well as the same signs and banners — most of them professionally printed — at each gathering. Strangely, like many of the faces I saw, the chants never seemed to change. 

And those chants, by way of bullhorns or a public address system and often backed with drums, were blasted out. 

Speaker after speaker screamed: "Free, free Palestine!" And like the sheep in George Orwell's Animal Farm, the leftists would shout back the same phrase.

In other moments, I was able to make out other chants, all of which were stale and unoriginal:

"The people united, will never be defeated!" 

"Hey, hey, ho ho, Genocide Joe has got to go!" 

"Killer Kamala you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!"

"From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!"

"Whose streets? Our streets!"

"CPD, KKK, IOF, all the same!"

CPD of course is short for the Chicago Police Department, and everyone knows the hate group, the KKK. As for IOF, after some asking around at these rallies, I discovered it stands either for Israeli Offensive Forces or Israeli Occupation Forces, a snide twist of IDF, that is, the Israeli Defense Forces.

That CPD et cetera chant is particularly shameful regarding the DNC host city. One of the leaders of the Monday march — he was holding the main banner — was none other than Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez (BSL) of the 25th Ward. Covering protests sometimes means being reluctantly pulled into them, so I was standing 10 yards behind Sigcho-Lopez for the entire march that day. And it meandered from Union Park to Park 578 — when an Orwellian "CPD, KKK, IOF, all the same" two-minute hate within a broader hate broke out. 

BSL votes on municipal budgets, including, of course the CPD budget.

A member of the Chicago City Council's Democratic Socialist Caucus, Sigcho-Lopez notoriously spoke steps away from the ashes of a burned American flag at a Cancel the DNC rally earlier this year. That, however, didn't stop BSL from attending the DNC last week, that is, when the Marxist wasn't protesting it.

"We serve and protect" is the motto of the CPD. Byron Sigcho-Lopez' motto should be, "I serve, sometimes, and protest."

As for his "serving" part, BSL is Mayor Brandon Johnson's choice to lead the powerful City Council Zoning Committee. Pushback from centrist aldermen because of his undisguised radicalism has blocked the mayor's move — so far.

The "CPD, KKK, IOF, all the same" was recited ad nauseam Thursday night after another Union Park to Park 578 march. The ward superintendent of the 33rd Ward — another feral socialist, was seen cheerfully pounding on drums as if he was the frenetic "Animal" from the Muppets during that chant. 

That ward superintendent in Rossana’s ward collects an annual salary of $94,000 to protest against Chicago Police, all paid for by taxpayers.

For me, attending those protests was like living inside rap song with the same sampling on repeat mode. The same chants. The same noise. 

I was hoping to see Alderman Bill Conway of the nearby 34th Ward erect his notorious "Zone of Quiet" signs — he had them placed outside of an abortion clinic in the West Loop this spring — but alas, no such luck.

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And after each day of witnessing rabblerousing, I felt like the titular character in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. "Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise!" Those chants were ringing in my head — and they still are. Only the Who’s of Whoville were sweet folks and these leftists — well, not so much.

To summarize, the protests, reaching back to Orwell again, were a five-day long, two-minute hate. Albeit likely a very expensive one, as the police presence was heavy, there were hundreds of officers at each rally. Presumably, police overtime expenses will be substantial.

The police, incidentally, did a fantastic job keeping order, all while enduring some of the most vile anti-law enforcement invective. It is amazing what the Chicago Police Department can do when they are allowed to perform their duties without interference from City Hall. 

Yes, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, City Hall includes you.

The chant-repeat-chant fest had other consequences, effects that were not explained to Chicagoans when the Democrats announced their choice of Chicago for their convention. Last week the express lanes of the Kennedy Expressway, which have been closed for months, were reopened — but only to allow VIP Democrats and far-Left, Hollywood celebrities swift access to the United Center. The irony is quite thick, because the Democrats are the party of promoting mass transit at the expense of automobiles. 

For much of the Kennedy Expressway, running between the northbound and southbound lanes, is of course the Blue Line of the CTA.

To expedite the protest marches during the week of the Democratic National Convention — whether the groups behind them had permits or not — parking was banned on the streets between Union Park and Park 578 between 8am-8pm each day, which is effectively a 24-hour ban. I spoke to several residents who live in the de-facto protest zone. They told me during the DNC they parked their cars several blocks away from their homes because they feared having their vehicles towed if they weren’t moved at 8:01am.

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The belief that government is slow is false — it moves as fast as it wants to move. Occasionally, government, even in Chicago, will act very quickly.

The slice of the Near West Side between Union Park and Park 578 is a predominantly minority and a mostly low-income area; its residents are the kind of people that the Democratic Party purports to champion.

Whatever the financial windfall for Chicago from the DNC — and my suspicion is that it will be only a modest gain — little if any of it will benefit residents of the West Side near where protests took place.

The protests and marches were not well attended. I suspect at most there were about 4,000 activists at each of them, far short of the 50,000 that organizers predicted. In contrast, there were nearly 5,000 delegates at the Democratic National Convention.

In a nutshell, the rallies were nothing more than street theater for the activists. No minds were changed. Outside of maybe one-hundred curiosity seekers, including a few cosplay performers, the only other people in attendance at these protests were law enforcement officers and the media. When the marches passed through residential areas, very few people watched from their homes.

And, as I mentioned earlier, my mind is still suffering from runaway thoughts caused by the constant clamor of the protests. So, it is not as if people living in the protest zone could not hear the marchers.

One final observation: The media, unsurprisingly, did an atrocious job covering the protests. Sometimes I read articles about rallies that I attended, and immediately noticed what was and was not reported by journalists who were present.

The establishment media, with few exceptions, ignored the anti-police and anti-Semitic signage and chants at the rallies.

"From the River to the Sea" is generally understood to mean the end of Israel. The mainstream media might want to take note of that.