#March on the DNC

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Sharon Black

In both 1968 and 2024, the resistance of colonized and occupied people fueled an outpouring of protest and resistance. In 1968, it was the Vietnamese people; today, it is the resistance of the Palestinian people and the horror of the U.S.-funded genocide.

When all is said and done, it is back into the streets where history is made! I intend to be at the 2024 Chicago DNC protests.

[their-name-is-fake]

Hey y’all remember the delegate who was attacked at the dnc? She was attacked by 5 men with signs to the point she suffered a concussion. The men were part of the laborers union of North America

You can’t make this shit up

[calmbelly]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Natasha Korecki at NBC News:

David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 shooting at his high school in Parkland, Florida, who turned into a national anti-violence activist, has launched a bid to serve in leadership of the Democratic National Committee.  Hogg, 24, announced on Monday he is running to become a vice chair of the DNC, arguing he would focus on winning back young voters who have drifted from the Democratic Party to Republicans. That shift came profoundly, and abruptly, in November, when young voters who predominantly favored President Joe Biden just four years earlier backed Donald Trump in larger numbers than any Republican presidential candidate since 2008, according to NBC News exit polling.

“Moving forward, we must have a renewed focus on our youth outreach in all states and territories to rebuild our coalition after the massive shift to the right among young voters this election,” Hogg said in a statement. Beyond reaching out to young voters, Hogg is urging the party to take a deeper look within itself to assess the setbacks that befell Democrats on Nov. 5. He was critical of some of Kamala Harris' team, among others, saying they took on an almost blasé attitude after the vice president lost, despite warning repeatedly of dangers that Trump would bring to democracy if reelected.

"You raised an absurd amount of money. This was our race to lose, and we lost it. And it's time to really peel back the curtain and say, 'Okay, what did we do wrong?' Instead of just protecting the consultants that brought us into this place in the first place," Hogg said in an interview. Hogg said he is aggressively tackling the race to become DNC vice chair, having already emailed every one of the 448 active members of the DNC who would cast a ballot in the election and rapidly booking follow-up conversations. Hogg expressed outrage over what he described was a lack of awareness by the party in the months before the election. Hogg said that at a brunch during the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he asked why the party wasn't doing more to reach out to young men. "I got messages from different consultants saying, 'Here you go, saying this stupid stuff again.' As if they know what young people are thinking, when it's emblematic of the broader problem at hand for the Democratic Party, where we would rather choose to live in a consultant-curated fictional reality," Hogg said.

[...] Hogg's announcement is the latest in recent activity around new DNC leadership, since current DNC Chair Jaime Harrison announced he was stepping down. The party itself is reeling after losing the White House to Trump despite outspending him and boasting of superior organizational strength in the weeks leading up to the election.

David Hogg, who was brought into the spotlight in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, FL, will launch a bid for the DNC Vice-Chair.

[american-joy-92-percent]

VOTE 💙🇺🇸 VOTE 💙🇺🇸 VOTE 💙🇺🇸

USA: How to register to vote:

https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote

USA: Check to see if you are registered to vote: https://vote.gov/

Voter Registration deadlines are here:

https://www.vote.org/voter-registration-deadlines/

Ohio Voters: Check Your Registration:

https://voterlookup.ohiosos.gov/voterlookup.aspx

Vote BLUE the whole ballot through.

[american-joy-92-percent]

DonOLD is a Russian asset. Sold America for a buck to pay his neverending bills and is running for president to run from prison.

Him, his family and all his associates ARE TRAITORS OF THE AMERICAN NATION

Trump is the Russian wing of the Republican Party, full of traitors and vicious dull people.

[immaculatasknight]

All meet in Chicago

[vague-humanoid]

Chicago police carried out mass arrests at a pro-Palestine march outside the Israeli Consulate during the second day of the Democratic National Convention, taking 72 people into custody on Tuesday evening, including several journalists, according to legal observers. A small group of protesters gathered in front of the consulate in downtown Chicago as Democratic officials took the convention’s main stage at the United Center, carrying signs that read “Democrats drop bombs and faux promises” and a large “Shut Down the DNC for Gaza” banner.

After a series of speeches, demonstrators started marching down the street away from the consulate, where they were met with several lines of officers who immediately stopped the march and pushed the group backward, according to video and live broadcasts from the rally posted on social media. The National Lawyers Guild Chicago, a nonprofit legal support organization, said in a statement that police “provoked confrontations, rushed the crowd, indiscriminately arrested people on the sidewalk, and entrapped groups in order to carry out mass arrests.”

[whereiamgoingisrightwhereiam]

He did it.

Trump has won.

(EDIT) Before I begin, it appears to be critical I say this. In no way, shape, or form do I support Genocide in any way, shape or form. What Benjamin Netanyahu is doing is despicable. It needs to end, and it needs to end soon

(EDIT) Please stop weaponizing my words as a way to prove Democrats are wrong. Or weapons my words. I merely wished to push a vent into the abyss. I am saddened by his Victory. Shame on you for weaponizing this post. I am very politically centralist.

(EDIT) Some of yall in the comments prove my point of ignorance. My points have unfortunately passed way over some heads.

(EDIT) To the conservatives who have weaponized this post. Why? You’ve already won.

To the people who voted against her in protest. Are you happy? Are you happy that millions of people are losing their rights?

There is a reason we put our plane mask on before our kids.

You have to save yourself before others.

Your protest, to save Gaza, has led to the dismantling of our democracy.

Protest in the streets. March and make it known. I HATE the war. I hate both sides of it (Hamas, Netanyahu’s regime)

Harris has NO ability to do ANYTHING relating to what is going on there. A simple Civics textbook can tell you that. But many can’t be bothered, and stay in an endless cycle of online algorithm.

But to dismantle your rights? To dismantle the rights of our queer, non-white, disabled friends? That’s too far. Worry about our own issues first. Your vote? It means nothing.

You have voted, in essence, for Russian Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine. You have voted for someone who has bragged about Sexual Assault. You have voted for someone who has made it clear that if you’re not cis, Straight, and aryan, you do not belong in our wonderfully diverse country

Incredibly bright young students will not be able to afford school. People who can solve major issues in our world. But anti-Netanyahu is more important? Yea. Sure

I did not like either candidate. In a heartbeat i will vote for Harris. Should the DNC have pushed a different, less left candidate? Absolutely

I am scared for what the future holds. The nuclear weapons.

Please stop using personal social media blogs for your research.

Thank you for reading this.

God bless you, the reader, god bless this country, and god please have mercy on us.

[mariacallous]

Glad people are finally finding out that these Pro Palestine protestors are ratfuckers-by-design at best (and Republicans at worst) and that's why they support Trump:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/dnc-palestinian-gaza-protests/679524/

One month ago, an NBC News headline reported:

Protesters made a tiny footprint at the RNC in Milwaukee. Other than a modest daytime march on Monday afternoon, the first day of the Republican National Convention, there were virtually no protests over the event’s four days and nights.

Obviously, the story from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago is already proving different.

This is part of a pattern. Gather any large number of Democrats together, in almost any city or state, whether at rallies, fundraisers, or presidential appearances, and pro-Palestinian protesters will try to wreck the event. These actions have been building to threats of outright violence. Pro-Trump and Republican events, meanwhile, are almost always left in peace.

Of the two big parties, the Democrats are more emotionally sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. The Biden administration is working to negotiate the cease-fire that the pro-Palestinian camp claims to want. The administration has provided hundreds of millions of dollars of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. President Joe Biden’s terms for ending the fighting in Gaza envision a rapid movement to full Palestinian statehood.

By contrast, former President Donald Trump uses Palestinian as an insult. His administration moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. In 2016, Trump campaigned on a complete shutdown of travel by Muslims into the United States; Trump now speaks of deporting campus anti-Israel protesters. He has pledged to block Gaza refugees from entering the United States.

Trump wants to tell the story that he and his party will enforce public order. He alleges that Democrats cannot or will not protect Americans against chaos spread by extremist elements. The pro-Palestinian movement works every day to create images that support Trump’s argument. As a visibly annoyed Vice President Kamala Harris asked protesters in Detroit earlier this month: Do they want to elect Donald Trump?

Not all pro-Palestinian demonstrators are thinking about the election. Many seem driven by moral outrage or ideological passion. But for those who are thinking strategically, the answer is obvious: Yes, they want to elect Trump. Of course they want to elect Trump. Electing Trump is their best—and maybe only—hope.

To understand why, cast your mind back a quarter century.

In the election of 2000, Vice President Al Gore faced Texas Governor George W. Bush. Gore probably would have won in a straight two-way contest. But that same year, the progressive advocate Ralph Nader entered the race as a third-party challenger—and he pulled just enough of the vote to tip the Electoral College and the presidency toward Bush.

Nader later professed regret for running as a third-party candidate. But at the time, Nader understood exactly what he was doing. Defeating Gore and electing Bush was the intended and declared purpose of Nader’s candidacy. Nader detailed his logic in many speeches, including this one to the summer-2000 convention of the NAACP:

If you ever wondered why the right wing and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party has so much more power over that party than the progressive wing, it’s because the right wing and the corporate wing have somewhere to go: It’s called the Republican Party. And so they’re catered to and they’re regaled—like the Democratic Leadership Council, they’re catered to and they’re regaled. But if you look at the progressive wing … they have nowhere to go. And you know when you’re told that you have nowhere to go, you get taken for granted. And when you get taken for granted, you get taken.

To paraphrase his argument even more bluntly: If progressives caused the Democrats to lose the presidency in the election of 2000, then Democrats would take progressives more seriously in all the elections that followed.

Nader’s logic was not altogether wrong. In many ways, the post-2000 Democratic Party has shifted well to the left of where the party was in the 1980s and ’90s. But catering to the party’s left has cost Democrats winnable races, and with them, key priorities: The Iraq War and 20 years of inaction on climate change head the list of progressive disappointments since the 2000 election, and the list extends from there. Whether or not the shift was worth the price, Nader was neither ignorant nor deceived. He identified his goal and willingly accepted the risks for himself and his movement.

So it is now with the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of 2024.

They start with a fundamental political problem: Their cause is not popular. Solid majorities of Americans accept Israel’s war in Gaza as valid and fiercely condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks as unacceptable. The exact margin varies from poll to poll depending on how the question is asked, but when presented with a binary choice between Israel and the Palestinians, Americans prefer Israel by a factor of at least two to one.

The brute fact of those numbers makes it very difficult for pro-Palestinian activists to win elections. In this cycle, despite all the emotion stirred by the Gaza war, two of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress lost their primaries to pro-Israel challengers.

From the point of view of any practical politician: If a cause is so unpopular that it cannot help its friends, why listen to its advocates?

The only answer to that question, again from the practical point of view, is the message of the protesters in Chicago: Maybe we can’t help you if you do listen to us, but we can hurt you if you don’t!

Think of it another way. Since the bloody attack by Hamas on October 7 and the Israeli response, pro-Palestinian protesters have marched and agitated all over the United States. They have occupied college campuses. They have impeded access to Jewish schools, businesses, and places of worship. They have posted impassioned words and images on social media.

Yet all of their militant action has barely budged U.S. policy. Arms, intelligence, and economic assistance continue to flow from the United States to Israel. U.S. military forces cooperate with Israel against Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen. Although the U.S. has imposed restraint on some Israeli operations, Israel has mostly been allowed to fight its own war in its own way.

These were President Biden’s decisions, not Vice President Harris’s. But she was the second-highest-ranking member of the administration. If Biden’s deputy inherits Biden’s office, the message is clear: His administration’s record of support for Israel carried no meaningful political price. All of those street demonstrations and campus occupations will have amounted to so much empty noise. All of those articles arguing that Gaza explained Biden’s troubles with young voters would be exposed as ideological wishcasting.

If Harris wins, the pro-Palestinian movement will have lost.

If Harris loses, however, pro-Palestinian protesters can claim that they were responsible for her defeat. That claim might not be true—in fact it probably would not be true—but try disproving it. The pro-Palestinian movement would have at least some basis to argue: You lost because you alienated us.

If Harris wins, she may want to do something about the pro-Palestinian cause—for humanitarian reasons, for reasons of diplomacy and geopolitics, for reasons of Democratic-constituency management in particular congressional districts. But she won’t have to do it. She’ll know that the protesters tried to beat her, and they failed.

If Harris loses, however, future Democratic candidates will tread more carefully on Israeli-Palestinian terrain. Even if they privately doubt that the party’s position on Gaza explains anything truly important, they will be worried by advisers and donors who will believe it or who will want to believe it.

But what about Trump? Why aren’t the pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Chicago more fearful of Trump’s possible return to the presidency?

Although the pro-Palestine cause attracts support from progressives, it is not exactly a progressive cause. Americans associate progressivism with secularism, feminism, and gay-rights advocacy, among other causes. The Palestinian national movement, especially now that Hamas has effectively replaced the Palestine Liberation Organization as leader of “the resistance,” has become markedly religious, patriarchal, and socially reactionary. But it is also a movement fiercely opposed to American global hegemony—and that is its “anti-imperialist” appeal to Western progressives.

If you oppose American global hegemony, Trump is your candidate (as a long list of anti-American dictators have already figured out). Trump fiercely opposes the alliances and trade agreements that magnify American power and make the U.S. the center of a huge network of democratic, market-oriented countries. Trump’s “America First” bluster is actually a pathway to American isolation and weakness that will further remove American power from the world.

If you wish America ill, of course you wish Trump well. The far left and far right of U.S. politics may disagree on much, but they agree on that.

The protesters in the streets of Chicago are not acting aimlessly or randomly. The people on the receiving end of their protests would benefit from equal clarity. The protesters want chaos and even violence in order to defeat Harris and elect Trump. They are not ill-informed or excessively idealistic or sadly misled. They are not overzealous allies. They are purposeful adversaries.

The Chicago-convention delegates should recognize that truth, and act accordingly.

[victusinveritas]

"The coming days will be ugly. Yet I feel it’s my job to remind you that, bad as this is, we are not Weimar Germany, and this is not 1933. Trump and his lieutenants aren’t battle-hardened trench fighters, they’re Elon Musk and a coterie of half-enthusiastic half-frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmate’s tits. Their foot soldiers are used car salesmen from Encino, not Freikorps. The United States is not starving to death and crippled by war, it’s irritated and anxious because its working people have been robbed blind by those same billionaires.

The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them not out of enthusiastic consent but exhaustion, cowardice and above all a feeling that it didn’t really matter.

That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there’s no point in engaging or organizing- that is the most powerful weapon they have right now. Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them. From interrupting as they reach out, yet again, to take something you love or need.

But there’s a danger here too. In moments of stress and anger the desire to DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING can be intense. And when we’re swept up in that mood the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best. The things we’ve done before. The marches and chants and poster-boards we’ve been walking and shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those old tactics without iteration or acknowledgement of their limitations is a road to failure.

I’ve been to a lot of protests, starting at Zuccotti Park in 2011 and ending last year in Chicago, at the DNC. One of the most dispiriting moments of my life was listening to young anti-genocide activists vow to shut down the DNC, to “make it great like ‘68”. This was a reference to the 1968 DNC. Mass protests were ignited when the preferred anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was rat-fucked by Democratic party insiders in favor of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching.”

It may have been then. But the war went on. Nixon won election, then re-election, and then finally pulled U.S. troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on South-East Asia to have ended several Third Reichs.

During one particularly bad night at the 2024 DNC, miles away from the event itself, a march of self-described “radical protesters” confronted the police while chanting “the whole world is watching” and I can say, unequivocally, it was not. The only people watching were me, several other journalists, and a handful of folks on Twitter. The police, as they kettled, maced and arrested members of the crowd, barely seemed to care. The DNC didn’t shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee. There wasn’t even a real anti-war candidate for party insiders to rat-fuck in her favor.

Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right.

On the stage floor all the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton, drooling out the same platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the first place and doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and slept in front of the convention center to protest the genocide in Gaza.

Meanwhile in the streets a lot of very nice, earnest people (alongside a handful of grifters) did the only thing they could think of doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted. The police and city largely let them, because they knew none of it was going to change a damn thing.

I’d felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned, not because I loved Kamala but because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment. Or at least it seemed that way at first. The DNC made it clear that Biden’s advisors and consiglieres, the powers behind the throne, still ran the show, and would not allow any real change. The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything.

It was my accurate belief in 2020 that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers and organizational capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in 2024 that this might still be the case. I had hope because I’d lost any sense of actual productive optimism. We lean on hope when we have no ideas to brace ourselves against.

Hope, as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go crazy. That’s where we are now, going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent regular people who fill the party not the soulless shoggoths of capital who run things, are going crazy because they got what they thought they wanted for four years. We returned a “decent” normal politician to office, he kept the economy humming along, got us out of Afghanistan…and everyone still hated him.

Leftists are going crazy for different reasons. In 2020 this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history and nothing, fundamentally, changed. In its aftermath, the oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure no similar movement would ever gain that kind of steam again. Their efforts have been largely successful.

And yet many organizers, be they progressive social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, are still stuck in the same loops. Behind each march to nowhere and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social democrats dream of a giant, continent-sized Denmark, with cyclists replacing Ford Trucks, universal healthcare, good schools and a bevy of other lovely things both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent. The authoritarian Communists dream of a new October Revolution, but this one will work rather than just creating a new dictatorship that ages and dies within the space of a single human lifetime.

Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws in the logic and futility of the hopes of the previous two groups, but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what’s coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, of an end to industrial society and either living in the woods eating berries or some sort of solarpunk daydream, wildflowers sprouting from rubble. The latter is a nice dream but try offering either future to a single mom who can’t afford her 5-year-old’s insulin and see how she reacts.

Most of the anarchists I know define themselves as “helpers” before anything else. They’ll cheerfully admit they don’t know how to solve the big problem but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month, or do water drops down at the border so migrants don’t die of dehydration, or crowdsource insulin from their friends to help that single mom through a bad week or two.

If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they’re defaulting to what they’ve been doing, but at least what they’ve been doing helps people.

The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new. Something we haven’t tried yet. I feel very confident they won’t take the form of another march or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist/anarchist/whatever. Shawn Fain, chief of the United Auto Workers Union, has called for a General Strike in 2028, and that so far is the only clear plan I’ve heard anyone make that feels like it has a ghost of a chance.

It’s an audacious plan, and I recommend reading what Shawn’s laid out about it. But half of why I support the idea is because it IS audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold. As I laid out earlier, fascists win because they always try, and this is something we need to copy.

Shit can be different, but not unless we’re willing to try different shit.

Many pundits and columnists were shocked and horrified by the massive and instant support for Luigi Mangione when he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually-sweating oligarchs characterized this as evidence of bloodthirstiness. Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Mangione as proof that the body politic did, indeed, have energy for an uprising.

I saw something different. More than the actual killing itself I think people were excited to see someone try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic, carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entre Occupy movement.

Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione together. The enthusiastic public response to both men’s actions and the simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In 2024, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple cart in some way that benefited them. He rode a global anti-incumbent wave back to the White House.

The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment. This is an underappreciated downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright. He is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly.

I suspect the same thing will be true of the copycats who follow in Luigi Mangione’s footsteps.

Most of his plagiarists won’t be good at what they do. At best newly heightened security will see Luigi’s plagiarists dropped before they can pull a trigger. At worse, innocent people will be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets or do but with a lot of collateral damage.

I don’t know what the next new thing will be. But between Trump and Mangione there aren’t many old norms left to shatter. We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some of them will be we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own.

The present is ugly, the future unwritten. The only way we’ll make it a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity and, perhaps, a little overconfidence of our own."

-Robert Evans

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Live video feed from March on the DNC

[their-name-is-fake]

Just learned a DNC member assaulted a Muslim woman, a dnc delegate, at the convention, and there has been no condemnation from any one. This is who you want me to vote for? On top of their party platform including the normalization of Israel and the continued sending of weapons?

Yeah ok let’s see how that plays out

[socialistexan]

The inside game to go with the outside game of protests and boycotts

[hotvampireadjacent]

March on the DNC for Palestine in Chicago August 19& 20

https://t.co/HJRvqHEEwP

I got this information from this Twitter account

https://x.com/marchondnc2024/status/1800599098573336593?s=46&t=kvJFP3BjKnMEl5NO2bJUMA

RT’d by an organization I trust (U.S. Palestine community network)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Olivia Reingold

Published: Apr 15, 2024

CHICAGO — About 300 anti-war activists crowded into the basement of the Teamsters Union’s headquarters on Saturday to hear organizers from all over the country describe their plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention this August. Joe Biden’s backing of Israel since Hamas’s October 7 attack has turned these left-wing radicals against their own party.

“It’s really inspiring to see that people are just as enthusiastic, and maybe even more enthusiastic, to march on the DNC as they are to march on the RNC,” says Omar Florez, a Milwaukee-based activist. “We can thank Genocide Joe and our movement for that.”  

But then a man stumbles to the podium, wiping sweat from his forehead. He grabs the microphone to announce that the Islamic regime of Iran has launched missiles and drones heading straight toward Israel.

“They believe that they will be in Palestinian—I don’t call it Israeli—airspace between two and four a.m., which means about two to four hours from now,” he says. “In addition, there are reports of drones having been fired on Israel from Yemen and Iraq.”

The crowd, all wearing black N95s, erupts into applause. Someone in the back lowers their mask to send a celebratory whistle soaring throughout the room.  

The man at the podium, Hatem Abudayyeh, heads the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, “a purported community group which, on information and belief, is an affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terror organization based in Gaza,” according to a lawsuit over the alleged relations between U.S. advocacy groups and Hamas. 

“This is when this country and the world needs us because the United States is going to, quote unquote, defend the criminal Israeli state,” says Abudayyeh, whose home was raided by the FBI in 2010 as part of an investigation “concerning the material support of terrorism.” 

“We have to assume that the United States is going to try to retaliate against Iran.”

After the boos and calls of “shame” subside, Abudayyeh says it is “incumbent” upon Americans to “stop the United States from expanding this war and hitting Iran.”

“We’ve got to be the strong, powerful anti-war movement that we are,” he says, placing the microphone down and exiting the stage. 

The crowd immediately began chanting, “Hands off Iran.”

A woman in a hot pink gas mask, wielding a matching neon cane and dressed in a “Protect Trans Kids” t-shirt, throws her fist in the air. Nearby, a service poodle is taking a nap under the chair of his owner, who is wearing a leather harness over his t-shirt. Then the group that has joined here from cities across America—Seattle, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles—cheers and claps in celebration. 

Joe Iosbaker, an organizer with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which called October 7 a “good turn of events” in its press release about the terrorist attacks, tells me he supports Iran. His organization has since released a statement backing Iran, where citizens gathered to shout “Death to America” during their nation’s strike against Israel Saturday night.

“We demand hands off Iran,” the statement says. “The people have power, and we will exercise it in the streets.” 

Earlier that day, before news of the attack broke, at a “breakout session” on “the anti-war movement,” Shabbir Rizvi, an organizer with Anti-War Committee Chicago, taught participants how to chant “death to Israel” and “death to America” in Farsi. 

“Marg bar Israel,” he chanted, leading a group of about 80 attendees along with him. A man draped in a Soviet flag bearing a gold hammer and sickle clapped his hands. 

A man in a full black denim outfit shouted out behind his N95—“Can we get a ‘marg bar America’?”

“We can get a ‘marg bar America,’ ” Rizvi replied. 

Then Rizvi raised his hand in the air, leading the crowd like a conductor.

“Marg bar America,” they cheered. 

On my way out of the event, I ask a woman smoking a cigarette to fill me in on the latest news regarding Iran’s lobbing of missiles and drones, which were later intercepted with help from forces from France, the U.S., and the UK. Iran said its strike was retaliation for Israel’s hit on the Iranian embassy in Syria earlier this month, which destroyed the consulate building next to the embassy and killed two of Tehran’s top commanders, and that the matter is “concluded”—unless Israel hits back.

“Iran is part of the resistance,” said the woman, who flew in that morning from New Orleans, where she’s been part of an effort to disrupt Israel-bound shipments in her hometown. “Yemen and Iran and Hezbollah, who are also a militant group in Lebanon, and the Syrian government are all parts of the arc of resistance.” 

A smile creeps across her face as she tells me: “They’re part of the arc of resistance because the enemies are Israel and the USA.” 

==

Remember Mahsa Amini? These insane fuckers don't. They've sided with the brutal Islamic Republic of Iran.

They hate our liberal, secular countries and they want to destroy them. They keep telling us who they are. Do you believe them yet?

Revoke citizenship and deport. I wasn't kidding before and I'm still not kidding now.