🌊 Roca Goes Inside the DNC Unrest

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Amid the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago on Tuesday night, baton-wielding police stood in a line as protesters screamed at them: “You f****g pigs!”

“Back the f**k up!” the cops shouted back. “Back the f**k up!”

This was the culmination of months of planning, a calculated effort to force the Democratic Party to withdraw its support of Israel. How would it go?

For months, pro-Palestine activists had called on their supporters to seize the opportunity presented by the Chicago DNC to express their discontent with Joe Biden and his support of Israel, namely sending arms and not calling for a ceasefire more forcefully. “Genocide Joe” and “Killer Kamala” would be in town and the protesters saw an opportunity to make their voices heard.

Organizers had a template: The 1968 DNC, also in Chicago.

That convention took place six months after President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not run for re-election, stunning the nation. Johnson – of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party – had dramatically escalated US involvement in Vietnam, splitting his party. By 1968, 25,000 Americans had died in Vietnam and the Democrats were fiercely divided between pro- and anti-Vietnam War factions.

That spring, protests spread across the nation. As young Americans were being drafted to fight, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, prompting riots across American cities. So was Robert F. Kennedy, a popular presidential candidate. Discontent with the war and political system simmered and tens of thousands of protesters converged on Chicago.

Sleeping in parks and demonstrating throughout the city, they clashed with police throughout Chicago’s streets. On the third night, the most intense, the police responded with what was later found to be “unrestrained and indiscriminate” violence, including beatings and tear gas. This chaos played out on national television alongside the DNC. Perceptions of it are widely believed to have helped “tough-on-crime” Richard Nixon win that year’s election.

Squint and you could see the parallels between 1968 and 2024: A divided party, discontent with the political establishment, anger over American policies abroad.

So this spring, pro-Palestine organizers started organizing protests to accompany this year’s Chicago DNC. Their slogan was, “Make it Great like ‘68!”

Would it be?

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