Left’s protest dwarfs the right
Thousands gather, 14 arrested in Berkeley; no injury or vandalism
BERKELEY >> It was the Great Right-Wing Rally that wasn’t. After days of on-again, off-again plans for a demonstration by President Trump supporters and others at a downtown Berkeley park, right-wing protesters and counterprotesters gathered Sunday by the thousands in downtown Berkeley to demonstrate against a “No Marxism in America” event that never even took place.
Despite the fact that rally organizer Amber Cummings had earlier canceled her demonstration, saying she worried that protesters would attack her supporters, an estimated 4,000 people still showed up in the record heat to voice
their opposition to white supremacists and other “alt-right” groups, which accounted for about two dozen in all. Berkeley police said by mid-afternoon they’d arrested 14 protesters, but there were no reports of injuries or vandalism, perhaps because the right-wing demonstrators never showed up in large numbers. However there were a few skirmishes between both groups.
“Berkeley right now is tinderbox ready to explode,” Cummings said in a Facebook message to the Bay Area News Group on Sunday morning. The city had denied her request for a permit Wednesday, largely for technical reasons.
The afternoon was sunny and warm. The scene was tense, with people carrying signs, chanting and beating on drums. “It’s important to let white supremacists and Nazis know they’re not welcome in our community and in our country,” said one 59-year-old counterprotester, who declined to give her name. “If we’re too afraid to come out, that’s playing right into their hands.”
Riot-ready officers
By the time the original rally was set to begin at 1 p.m., several people had been detained as a small number of Trump supporters were surrounded by a much larger group of counterprotesters in Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park near Berkeley’s former City Hall. At the same time, a strong contingent of riot-ready police officers from Berkeley and other local agencies set up lines to keep the two sides from fighting. One of the protesters was removed as a large group chanted, “Nazi scum off our streets.”
At about 11:50 a.m., police led a handcuffed man in a yellow T-shirt out of Civic Center park. Witnesses said he was a Trump supporter who tried to start a fight. Immediate police information on the man’s detention was not available. Two others were detained for wearing masks.
Earlier Sunday morning, downtown had been quiet, with more police officers than civilians on hand at the park. But by 10:30 a.m., a small group of protesters from both sides had started to gather, a few of them getting into heated arguments. But there was no violence, and police officers worked to get between the two groups.
The city of Berkeley had issued a warning to residents last week, encouraging demonstrators and members of the public to steer clear of downtown on Sunday. But the messages didn’t seem to be reaching the people planning counterprotests. A separate event, billed on Facebook as “Stand up against the Fascists,” asked people to mobilize at Civic Center park in response to the “No Marxism” event.
Officials installed white concrete dividers around the park late Saturday night, said Berkeley resident Jef Poskanzer, who attended the protests despite warnings from police who urged people to stay away.
“The local establishment leftists’ theory of ‘just stay away’ has proven to not work,” he said. “I don’t want to see the Nazis make chumps of us again. They’ll keep coming back and doing it again until we scare them off with a massive response like San Francisco and Boston did.”
Rose Fried, a 27-year-old resident of Oakland who works in San Jose, said she had shown up because “as a white person, I need to use my privilege to stand in solidarity with people being persecuted.”
Some downtown Berkeley stores were already boarded up early Sunday morning, as property owners worried about vandalism.
Shortly after 1 p.m., about 25 supporters of Trump and other right-wing protesters gathered in the park, essentially surrounded by several thousand counterprotesters in the park and filling nearby streets. Every so often, chanting counterprotesters would encircle someone wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and chase them out of the park, often as police officers would try to shield the Trump supporter.
Joey Gibson, founder of the Portland-based conservative group — Patriot Prayer — that canceled Saturday’s event in San Francisco citing safety concerns, appeared at the Berkeley park Sunday afternoon with several supporters. Antifa members ran them off as people hit them and someone sprayed a Mace-like product at Gibson, according to eyewitnesses. Police, who had abandoned the park over the past hour, largely remained off-site, waiting behind the old City Hall on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
Antifa presence
By mid-afternoon, an estimated 4,000 people had come to the park, including a band of about 100 Antifa, or self-styled ‘anti-Fascist” protesters, who often are involved in violence during these political rallies. They were wearing black masks as they staged a brief standoff with a phalanx of police officers from Berkeley, Fremont and other law enforcement agencies. Many in the group yelled profanities at the police as they stood to protect the park across the street from Berkeley City Hall.
Police had donned riot helmets and gas masks and some pulled out billy clubs while the Antifa activists tried to antagonize them. One protester got on a loudspeaker to warn people to get back because there was “going to be violence.” Then suddenly, the police left.
This pattern — police coming and then leaving, Trump supporters trying to speak out, but getting hit and driven away by black-hooded protesters — continued for the next two hours. Then a group of African-American ministers showed up, beckoning the protesters to leave the area and come to nearby Ohlone Park, which many demonstrators did. By 4 p.m., most of the crowd had left the area, leaving only a homeless man sleeping in the park.