The crew that stayed back split up, sending some people up to Locke, but the folks who stayed behind also described the tentative energy of the crowd. At one point, some HAF people tried to push through a police line and they saw about ten or fifteen people immediately leave the march. About a hundred and fifty people attended the counter-demonstration(s), and although that’s great to see, that so few of them had any street experience and that a significant portion of them weren’t prepared to go against the police should give us some pause. The counter-demo model has succeeded in mobilizing crowds of people at different times and definitely represents a step forward in terms of building an analysis of the far-right, but when it comes to going beyond symbolic protest, very few are prepared to do more than hold signs. It’s also just a funny situation where so many people came out to oppose a group that was seeking to support businesses vandalized by anarchists. It’s been a complicated month.

