Waukegan, which is just north of Chicago, was recently the site of a protest. This one didn’t take place near any public buildings. Instead, a group of 10-20 people gathered at the home of Third Ward Alderman Gregory Moisio near midnight and started shouting through a bullhorn about defunding the police.
Members of the Waukegan People’s Council issued their demands through a megaphone on the sidewalk in front of Moisio’s home starting around 11 p.m. and continuing until just after midnight amid what they described as a large police presence.
“The police were blocking off all areas of the neighborhood,” [organizer Kim] Davis said Tuesday. “When we got to the public area in front of his house, we started chanting and stating our demands on a megaphone. We saw someone looking between the curtains, but no one came out.”…
Colin Byers of Waukegan, another organizer, said the protesters did not feel they were getting a response from the council and Mayor Sam Cunningham, so they decided to stage a demonstration late at night to get more attention.
“Demonstrations are not meant to be convenient,” Byers said Tuesday, referring to the late hour of the event. “We were chanting, ‘No justice no sleep.‘”
Would you come out of your house around midnight to engage with people shouting at you through a bullhorn? I’d call the police. That’s something that the Waukegan People’s Council (all 20 of them) want to make much harder for residents to do. Their goal is a 50 percent cut to the police budget. Hopefully that’s never going to happen. It certainly isn’t going to happen because they harassed an alderman at his home.
Waukegan’s mayor, Sam Cunningham, wasn’t impressed by what he saw. “They’re a small group making a lot of noise at 11 p.m.,” he told the Tribune. “They are trying to incite riots in Waukegan. They’re trying to disrupt, not bring people together. They’re no different than a bully on the block.”
He’s right about that. BLM has been doing this for quite a while already. First it was blocking traffic. Then it was blocking traffic on the freeway. More recently it has been vandalism and arson in various cities. Protesting at private homes has become the hot new trend. And that’s still not the most extreme version of this. Protesters are now marching around the streets at night confronting strangers in the street and demanding their homes or demanding compliance.
It’s not clear to me how this is going to end because a) there’s not a natural limit on where the far left campus politics will draw the line and b) even when the progressives running these cities tell them no, they don’t listen. So it’s probably going to continue to get more extreme and more ‘in your face’ until something tragic happens. To be clear, I’m not wishing for that to happen; I just think it looks inevitable from where we are now.
