From Chris Lynch:
Democratic National Convention
The 2020 Democratic National Convention is supposed to start on Monday August 17th and end on Thursday August 20th in Milwaukee. How long before it is announced that the convention will be "cancelled"?
COVID-19 will surely be blamed and the DNC will try to turn this into a virtual event but how many people will want to tune in to watch that?
The DNC probably wants to avoid having Joe Biden speak for any length of time at all costs but at the same time they need a national stage and a big audience to launch the Party's VP pick. That VP pick may be the DNC's only hope at avoiding a down-ticket bloodbath in November.
At the same time cancelling the event makes sense in that the DNC also knows an in-person event will devolve quickly into a BLM, Defund the Police, Green New Deal orgy broadcast on national TV with most likely a sideshow of protests and violence. Chicago 1968 anyone?
Get the popcorn out. This will be interesting to watch.
Interesting to watch indeed. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was very interesting - this was the first time that television cameras had low-light level capabilities so the news media (back when they were real journalists) was able to broadcast the police brutality and the rioting. Inside the convention hall, Dan Rather was grabbed by security guards and roughed up while on a live microphone. And then this happened:
August 28, 1968 came to be known as the day a "police riot" took place. The title of "police riot" came out of the Walker Report, which amassed a great deal of information and eyewitness accounts to determine what happened in Chicago. At approximately 3:30 p.m., a young man lowered the American flag at a legal rally taking place at Grant Park. The demonstration was made up of 10,000 protesters. The police broke through the crowd and began beating the boy, while the crowd pelted the police with food, rocks, and chunks of concrete. Police fought with the protesters and vice versa. The chants of the protesters shifted from "Hell no, we won't go" to "Pigs are whores". Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, encouraged protesters to move out of the park to ensure that if they were to be tear gassed, the whole city would be tear gassed, and made sure that if blood were spilled in Chicago it would happen throughout the city. The amount of tear gas used to suppress the protesters was so great that it eventually made its way to the Hilton Hotel, where it disturbed Hubert Humphrey while in his shower. The police were taunted by the protesters with chants of "Kill, kill, kill". They sprayed demonstrators and bystanders indiscriminately with mace. The police assault in front of the Hilton Hotel the evening of August 28 became the most famous image of the Chicago demonstrations of 1968. The entire event took place live under the T.V. lights for seventeen minutes with the crowd shouting, "The whole world is watching".
Meanwhile, in the convention hall, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff used his nominating speech for George McGovern to tell of the violence going on outside the convention hall, saying that "And, with George McGovern as President of the United States, we wouldn't have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago!" Mayor Daley responded to his remark with something that the television sound was not able to pick up. Whatever Daley said, Ribicoff replied, "How hard it is to accept the truth!" That night, NBC News had been switching back and forth between the demonstrators being beaten by the police to the festivities over Humphrey's victory in the convention hall, making it clear to the nation that the Democratic party was sorely divided.
After the Chicago protests, the demonstrators were confident that the majority of Americans would side with them over what had happened in Chicago, especially because of police behavior. They were shocked to learn that controversy over the war in Vietnam overshadowed their cause. Daley shared he had received 135,000 letters supporting his actions and only 5000 condemning them. Public opinion polls demonstrated that the majority of Americans supported the Mayor's tactics. It was often commented through the popular media that on that evening, America decided to vote for Richard Nixon.
I was in my Junior year at High School and involved in the anti-Vietnam war. It seems that a lot of the culture from this era has been dusted off and is being recycled. Here we go again...
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