Editorial: As protests heat up in Chicago, a plea to keep the demonstrations peaceful
What began in Los Angeles over the weekend was disturbing and instructive. A protest over aggressive federal immigration raids gave way to scenes of destruction: fires in the streets, attacks on law enforcement and frightened families caught in the middle. The deployment of the National Guard and Marines escalated tensions rather than calming them. America saw once again how quickly righteous anger can descend into chaos — and a reminder to leaders at every level that inflammatory rhetoric and show-of-force politics come with real-world consequences.
We wrote earlier this week that we believe sending in troops went too far. We'd like to take a moment to issue a message to those who might seek to induce similar scenes here in Chicago.
While we laud your constitutional right to assemble and make your voices heard, we beseech you: Do not come here to destroy.
We cherish this city. We love our parks, our architecture, our restaurants, our schools, our streets. We will not tolerate them becoming collateral damage in a campaign of chaos.
Don't bring bricks, don't light fires, don't hurt people, don't attack police officers who have families just like you and are doing their jobs.
Destruction is not speech. Arson is not advocacy. And mayhem will never lead to meaningful reform.
With tensions high, we hope calm prevails over the coming days, especially Saturday when Chicago and the suburbs will see expansive 'No Kings' protests.
Protests already have begun this week. Fortunately, as of this writing, we haven't seen an escalation similar to what's happening in Los Angeles, but the Chicago Police Department did make some arrests Tuesday. Protests blocked Loop traffic and parts of DuSable Lake Shore Drive on Tuesday, disrupting ordinary Chicagoans — not distant politicians — just trying to get to work, pick up kids or buy groceries.
Other major cities are gearing up for increased protest activity as well, including New York City, which also has seen people begin taking to the streets. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said on X that the Texas National Guard 'will be deployed to locations across the state to ensure peace & order' ahead of planned protests in San Antonio.
We need city leaders to be prepared. Having handled widespread Democratic National Convention protests less than a year ago, we believe the men and women in uniform here know what they're doing. We suspect many CPD dads will be spending this Father's Day on the job in a situation that will test their strength and mental fortitude. For that, we, too, are grateful.
Chicago has much at stake beyond the immediate tensions. Unrest and wreckage similar to the summer of 2020 would be a devastating setback for our city. Chicago has recently been able to cheer declining violent crime after years of escalating activity. Scenes of looting and rioting that wrecked our city's neighborhoods after George Floyd's killing still mar Chicago's reputation.
In this charged moment, we have to keep faith in our democratic republic. Gov. JB Pritzker joins the national conversation on this issue today as one of three governors of so-called sanctuary states testifying before the U.S. House Oversight Committee, an opportunity to steer the conversation back to the issues instead of fanning the flames as Mayor Brandon Johnson did by using the word 'war' during a Wednesday news conference.
We need cooler heads to prevail right now.
Make no mistake, this board stands behind our country's long-standing right to peacefully protest.
Let's not forget that many who gathered in Los Angeles did so as a peaceful act of conscience, upset as they were by the spreading reach of President Donald Trump's push to deport people in our country without legal authorization.
But we must clearly distinguish between peaceful protest and violent extremism.
Scenes of vandalism and looting only serve to reinforce a law-and-order narrative that erodes public sympathy for the immigrants these protests aim to support. To avoid that, the people in charge in America's cities — primarily Democratic mayors and governors — should make clear they stand for peaceful protest. This is a moment for politicians on the left to demonstrate they learned something from the 2020 riots and draw a clear line against those who exploit unrest to create havoc.
There is a darker side to the Los Angeles protest landscape, an insidious vein of folks breaking glass, throwing large rocks off of bridges at police officers, setting Waymo cars on fire. Los Angeles police Chief Jim McDonnell said Sunday his forces were overwhelmed and under attack. 'Tonight we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers that can kill you,' McDonnell said. In no world is this sort of activity helpful in addressing the very serious conversation surrounding immigration policy.
Trump has been pouring fuel on a combustible America. Those who oppose him must resist the temptation to fan the flames.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
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Yahoo
32 minutes ago
- Yahoo
With troops in Los Angeles, echoes of the Kent State massacre
Ohio National Guard members with gas masks and rifles advance toward Kent State University students during an anti-war protest on May 4, 1970. More than a dozen students were killed or injured when the guard opened fire. (.) This article was originally published by The Trace. Earlier in June, President Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops and Marines to quell anti-deportation protests and secure federal buildings in downtown Los Angeles. The move, some historians say, harks back 55 years to May 4, 1970, when Ohio's Republican governor summoned the National Guard to deal with students demonstrating against the Vietnam War at Kent State University. Guard members were ordered to fire over the students' heads to disperse the crowd, but some couldn't hear because they were wearing gas masks. The troops fired at the students instead, killing four and wounding another nine. The shooting served as a cautionary tale about turning the military on civilians. 'Dispatching California National Guard troops against civilian protesters in Los Angeles chillingly echoes decisions and actions that led to the tragic Kent State shooting,' Brian VanDeMark, author of the book 'Kent State: An American Tragedy,' wrote this week for The Conversation. We asked VanDeMark, a history professor at the United States Naval Academy, more about the parallels between 1970 and today. His interview has been edited for length and clarity. After the Kent State shooting, it became taboo for presidents or governors to even consider authorizing military use of force against civilians. Is the shadow of Kent State looming over Los Angeles? VanDeMark: For young people today, 55 years ago seems like a very long time. For the generation that came of age during the '60s and were in college during that period, Kent State is a defining event, shaping their views of politics and the military. There are risks inherent in deploying the military to deal with crowds and protesters. At Kent State, the county prosecutor warned the governor that something terrible could happen if he didn't shut down the campus after the guard's arrival. The university's administration did not want the guard brought to campus because they understood how provocative that would be to student protesters who were very anti-war and anti-military. It's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The military is not trained or equipped to deal well with crowd control. It is taught to fight and kill, and to win wars. California Governor Gavin Newsom has said that deploying the guard to Los Angeles is inflammatory. What do you fear most about this new era of domestic military deployment? People's sense of history probably goes back five or 10 years rather than 40 or 50. That's regrettable. The people making these decisions — I can't unpack their motivation or perceptions — but I think their sense of history in terms of the dangers inherent in deploying U.S. troops to deal with street protests is itself a problem. There are parallels between Kent State and Los Angeles. There are protesters throwing bottles at police and setting fires. The Ohio governor called the Kent State protesters dissidents and un-American; President Trump has called the Los Angeles demonstrators insurrectionists, although he appears to have walked that back. What do you make of these similarities? The parallels are rather obvious. The general point I wish to make, without directing it at a particular individual, is that the choice of words used to describe a situation has consequences. Leaders have positions of responsibility and authority. They have a responsibility to try to keep the situation under control. Are officers today more apt to use rubber bullets and other so-called less-lethal rounds than in 1970? Even though these rounds do damage, they're less likely to kill. Could that save lives today? Most likely, yes. In 1970, the guard members at Kent State, all they had were tear gas canisters and assault rifles loaded with live ammunition. Lessons have been learned between 1970 and today, and I'm almost certain that the California National Guard is equipped with batons, plastic shields, and other tools that give them a range of options between doing nothing and killing someone. I've touched one of the bullets used at Kent State. It was five and a half inches long. You can imagine the catastrophic damage that can inflict on the human body. Those bullets will kill at 1,000 yards, so the likelihood that the military personnel in Los Angeles have live ammunition is very remote. Trump authorized the deployment of federal troops not only to Los Angeles but also to wherever protests are 'occurring or are likely to occur,' leading to speculation that the presence of troops will become permanent. Was that ever a consideration in the '60s and '70s, or are we in uncharted waters here? In the 1960s and early 1970s, presidents of both parties were very reluctant to deploy military forces against protests. Has that changed? Apparently it has. I personally believe that the military being used domestically against American citizens, or even people living here illegally, is not the answer. Generally speaking, force is not the answer. The application of force is inherently unpredictable. It's inherently uncontrollable. And very often the consequences of using it are terrible human suffering. Before the Kent State shooting, the assumption by most college-aged protesters was that there weren't physical consequences to engaging in protests. Kent State demonstrated otherwise. In Los Angeles, the governor, the mayor, and all responsible public officials have essentially said they will not tolerate violence or the destruction of property. I think that most of the protesters are peaceful. What concerns me is the small minority who are unaware of our history and don't understand the risks of being aggressive toward the authorities. In Los Angeles, we have not just the guard but also the Marines. Marines, as you mentioned, are trained to fight wars. What's the worst that could happen here? People could get killed. I don't know what's being done in terms of defining rules of engagement, but I assume that the Marines have explicitly been told not to load live ammunition in their weapons because that would risk violence and loss of life. I don't think that the guard or the Marines are particularly enthusiastic about having to apply coercive force against protesters. Their training in that regard is very limited, and their understanding of crowd psychology is probably very limited. The crowd psychology is inherently unpredictable and often nonlinear. If you don't have experience with crowds, you may end up making choices based on your lack of experience that are very regrettable. Some people are imploring the Marines and guard members to refuse the orders and stay home. You interviewed guard members who were at Kent State. Do you think the troops deployed to Los Angeles will come to regret it? Very often, and social science research has corroborated this, when authorities respond to protests and interact with protesters in a respectful fashion, that tends to have a calming effect on the protesters' behavior. But that's something learned through hard experience, and these Marines and guard members don't have that experience. The National Guard was deployed in Detroit in 1967; Washington, D.C. in 1968; Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992; and Minneapolis and other cities in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. Have the Marines ever been deployed? Or any other military branch? Yes. In 1992, in the wake of the Rodney King controversy, the California governor at the time, a Republican named Pete Wilson, asked President George H.W. Bush to deploy not only the guard but also the Marines to deal with street riots in Los Angeles. That's the last time it was done. And how did that go? I'm not an expert on this, but I assure you that the senior officers who commanded those Marines made it very clear that they were not to discharge their weapons without explicit permission from the officers themselves, and they were probably told not to load their weapons with live ammunition. In 1967, during the Detroit riots, the Michigan National Guard was called out to the streets of Detroit. When the ranking senior officer arrived, he ordered the soldiers to remove their bullets from their rifles. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
CNN
36 minutes ago
- CNN
On his 79th birthday, President Trump is getting a military parade – and millions of expected protestors
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Prev Next Demonstrators have since been protesting immigration action in cities across the nation, including New York, Seattle, Chicago, Austin, Las Vegas and Washington, DC, while the administration has doubled down on its display of military force against its own citizens. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has suggested that the order used to federalize the National Guard to Los Angeles could make way for a similar response to protests in other states. And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deployed the state's National Guard this week ahead of planned protests, including a 'No Kings' event in San Antonio on Saturday. Missouri's governor, Mike Kehoe, also activated the state's National Guard on Thursday 'as a precautionary measure in reaction to recent instances of civil unrest across the country.' 'We respect, and will defend, the right to peacefully protest, but we will not tolerate violence or lawlessness in our state,' the Republican governor said in a statement. 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Fox News
42 minutes ago
- Fox News
Soros-backed 'No Kings' rallies threaten America's cities with planned chaos
Get ready for the Summer of Love 2.0. The June 14 "No Kings" rallies may become the latest case study in how the radical left weaponizes protests, manipulates media narratives and enables organized chaos under the guise of peaceful resistance. If you lived through the "Summer of Love" like I did in Seattle, watching as my city collapsed into lawlessness in 2020, you should already know the blueprint. It always starts with a supposedly nonviolent, grassroots rally, but ends with Antifa and anarchists in masks, wielding hammers, launching assaults and torching property. And the media? They'll pretend they're just "mostly peaceful." The "No Kings" weekend protests are being staged by Indivisible and its partner organizations, including American Federation of Teachers, ACLU, Greenpeace and the Human Rights Campaign. Indivisible, a faux grassroots group that's been posing as a democracy-loving nonprofit since 2016, was created explicitly to resist Donald Trump's presidency. Like so many of these far-left outfits, it's backed by big money from progressive megadonors, including George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. Indivisible wants you to think its rallies are just a bunch of passionate Americans showing up for justice. In reality, they're running a sprawling network of interconnected activist groups, many of which are just rebranded arms of the same machine. You'll notice the same messaging, the same signage, the same faces — and yes, the same tactics — showing up at protests, whether the cause is abortion without restrictions, police defunding, gender surgeries for kids, or open borders. It's astroturf dressed up in grassroots drag. But Indivisible and like-minded groups don't get their hands dirty. That's what their militant allies are for. While most protesters this weekend may not show up intending to start fires or throw projectiles at cops, they will absolutely provide cover for those who do, if violence breaks out. That's the strategy. Professional activists — and I mean literal professionals, some on the payroll of activist nonprofits or political action committees — organize these events knowing full well that radical agitators will exploit the crowd. It's the same playbook we saw in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots — something I covered in detail in my book "What's Killing America: Inside the Radical Left's Tragic Destruction of Our Cities." I went undercover, infiltrating Antifa to expose what they were really up to, and I'm seeing the same tactics unfold in Los Angeles and around the country. Back then, activists would organize a supposedly peaceful protest and fill the streets with emotional, mostly well-intentioned people who bought the media's false narrative of police brutality and racial injustice. Then Antifa and anarchist cells would swoop in — masked, armed and ready for combat. They'd use the crowds as human shields, assault officers, destroy property and disappear back into the mass. That's not speculation. That's what they do. In fact, just last weekend in Los Angeles, police detained several people carrying weapons to a "protest" downtown — hammers, heavy-duty flashlights and leaf blowers, the latter of which are used to disperse tear gas during confrontations with police. Who brings that to protests? Rioters. These are the tools of rioters. And the media? They're not entirely wrong when they report that most people at these rallies aren't violent. But they're also not reporting in good faith. They know full well what's going on — and they refuse to call it out. Why? Because they sympathize with the goals, even if they may disapprove of the tactics. It's a symbiotic relationship. The radical left gives the media outlets the visuals they crave — emotional footage of "resistance." The media gives the radical left the cover they need — "peaceful protest turns violent after Trump needlessly sends National Guard." It's always the same script. KABC-TV Los Angeles anchor Jory Rand downplayed a riot, saying the scene "could turn very volatile if you move law enforcement in there the wrong way, and turn what is just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn into a massive confrontation and altercation between officers and demonstrators." Meanwhile, KREM-TV Spokane, Washington claimed police "deployed gas on a group of peaceful protesters outside the Spokane ICE office," without noting that those "peaceful protesters" were disobeying dispersal orders and illegally blocking traffic. Media seem incapable of directly calling out violence and lawlessness. And make no mistake, the violence isn't even directly about Trump. It's not even about ICE or immigration enforcement. These anarchists and Antifa thugs don't care about the actual issue. They care about chaos and have much larger goals. While most protesters this weekend may not show up intending to start fires or throw projectiles at cops, they will absolutely provide cover for those who do, if violence breaks out. That's the strategy. They are anti-capitalist, anti-border, anti-police, anti-American revolutionaries who seek to destabilize the country. They hate this nation, its founding and its principles. They crave destruction and collapse — and they hide behind the bodies of naive, college-educated white liberals and bored suburban moms carrying signs about "equity." It's all part of the "direct action" pipeline: organize, radicalize and agitate. But in the short term, Democrat lawmakers see this as politically beneficial. They said the bare minimum to condemn the violence, first spending days pretending it wasn't happening before switching gears and blaming the Trump administration for inspiring the violence. And their message? The best way to stop the violence is for the Trump administration to stop raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "This must stop. The president must call back these ICE agents. They must retreat in order for the locals to be given the opportunity to restore order, because that is what we are demanding right now," California Democrat Rep. Norma Torres explained on MSNBC, giving away the Democrats' strategy of now using the violence to achieve their own anti-ICE political agenda. As we head into the weekend, don't be fooled by the signs, slogans or Spotify protest playlists. This isn't a spontaneous uprising of grassroots frustration. It's a coordinated operation, backed by radical left money, bolstered by left-wing institutions and enabled by a media that's either willfully blind or actively complicit. We've seen what happens when we ignore these warning signs. Businesses burned. Officers injured. Cities hijacked by masked criminals who vanish into the night while MSNBC calls it a "mostly peaceful protest." I lived through it in 2020. And I'm telling you: get ready. Because "No Kings" is just the latest excuse. The goal is always the same — disruption, destruction and dismantling everything this country stands for. And we can't let that happen.
