Anticipated protest at CT Capitol doesn’t materialize

HARTFORD — Hundreds of law enforcement officers with tactical weapons and armored vehicles closed down the city’s streets on Sunday, effectively discouraging more than a handful of demonstrators at the State Capitol on a day when the nation was on edge for a possible backlash against President Donald Trump’s reelection defeat.

News reporters and photographers outnumbered members of the public, a few of whom stayed well behind the metal barriers ringing the Capitol in what was initially feared would be a day of confrontation before the inauguration on Wednesday, even as more rioters who invaded the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6 were arrested around the

country.

Instead, at noon, when the #StoptheSteal moment was supposed to flame up, Joanne Iovino, an anti-fascist from Hartford, and a teenaged a gun-rights advocate from Norwich who is not old enough to vote, shared the Capitol’s sloping east lawn, as the anticipated protest failed to materialize.

Waving a copy of a Revolutionary War flag, a 17-year-old home-schooler who said his name was Duncan Lemp, journeyed with his grandfather Don, a retired long-haul trucker, to the Capitol to make his voice known on guns, COVID restrictions and police brutality.

“I’m here to protest three main points, but the whole system, from top to bottom,” said Lemp, who supported Trump in 2016 but changed his mind after the president opposed so-called bump stocks, a simple mechanism to make rifles fire faster.

“I think we have to open this economy up,” Iovino said near the metal fencing set up around the perimeter of the 143-year-old Capitol, which was patrolled by State Capitol Police. Local Hartford police were set up around every nearby intersection and in the adjacent Bushnell Park, rerouting traffic away from the Capitol.

Tactical vehicles in desert camouflage were parked a couple blocks away, between the Legislative Office Building and the Gov. William A. O’Neill Armory. Hundreds of State Police who reported for duty between 8 and 9 a.m. were kept in reserve in the Legislative Office Building, which is separated from the Capitol by an exist ramp off Interstate 84. The Connecticut National Guard was also on alert, after 300 members were dispatched to Washington in advance of Wednesday’s inauguration.

“Joe Biden definitely won,” Lemp said near the east entrance of the circular Capitol driveway, closed in recent days by more metal barriers. “I think there was fraud. A lot of fraud, but I think he still won.” Trump’s legal team failed in dozens of challenges to the election around the country, but little to no actual fraud was found in Biden’s victory.

Iovino, 47 and disabled, said she and several friends were also at the Capitol on Saturday, when only a few cars in a Trump flag-waving Make America Great Again procession drove by.

“I guess maybe they heard I was coming,” Iovino quipped when asked about the lack of a response to a call on social media to protest Biden’s victory. “We are out here because we really thought there was something saying that there might be 2,000 Trump supporters out here, and we are out here to make a very clear statement against fascism.”

Carrying a homemade anti-MAGA sign, Iovino said that without opposition, a Trump rally might shift the nation’s political discourse to the right, “which is not beneficial for anybody except for the top 1 percent of the wealthiest people. So we are out here as anti-fascists. If someone had stood up against Hitler in the beginning, things might not have happened the way they happened. We don’t want this country being pushed further and further and further to the right, or we’ll end up with another Confederacy and another Nazi Germany.”

The State Capitol is itself a monument to the Civil War. On top of a massive stone plinth at the Capitol Avenue entrance to the 1878 building, is a artillery piece that was used to bombard the city of Petersburg, Va., in 1864 and 1865. The battle was the site of action by Connecticut’s Black troops in late June 1864.

At about 12:30 p.m., when it became clear that the crowds were not coming, Brian Foley, assistant to the commissioner of the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, told reporters that the highprofile security procedures had helped.

“Certainly part of the planning was transparency,” Foley said during an impromptu news conference on top of the garage of the Legislative Office Building. “I don’t believe that you can over-prepare for this type situation. I’d much rather be here next Friday telling you guys that we over-prepared, as opposed to saying that we under-prepared.”

The bans of Trump and his supporters on social media also helped, he said. “Certainly law enforcement lost an arm of their intelligence gathering,” Foley said. “Just an arm, a big one, but they have other ways of doing it. There is a whole other side of the web to look at and a lot of other things going on.”