CHICAGO — While hundreds of hard left, pro-Palestine activists faced off against Chicago police officers in riot gear outside the Israeli consulate on Tuesday night, agents of chaos lurked nearby.
Nazis and white nationalist provocateurs tailed the protest, along with right-wing media performers seeking potentially violent content for MAGA audiences that support Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
One of the Nazi provocateurs, a woman with purple hair identified by her LinkedIn profile as Rachel Siegel, drew immediate attention before the protest by unfurling a banner before the start of the protest that read, “Stop white replacement. Deport them all.”
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After the police arrested several pro-Palestine protesters by wading into the crowd and grabbing them — sometimes with nightsticks swinging — Siegel stood with a group of right-leaning onlookers observing as uniformed officers led the zip-tied activists into the back of a prisoner wagon.
An unidentified, left-wing woman confronted the group.
“You can shut the f--- up, white supremacist,” she said.
Siegel called the woman a “fat b----” and covered her mouth to stifle a laugh.
“Is that all you have to say?” the left-wing woman asked.
“Filthy old f-----,” Siegel rejoined, and then threw up a straight-arm Hitler salute, waving her arm slightly as if to turn the military salute into a light-hearted gesture of mockery.
One of the right-wing men standing nearby taunted the left-wing woman.
“Blame white people for all your problems,” he said.
“Yeah, blame white people for all your stupid, insignificant problems,” Siegel agreed.
The others in the right-wing group mostly avoided any overt gestures of support for white supremacy, giving them a thin shroud of plausible deniability.
When another woman confronted the man about “hanging out with a literal fascist who hates Jews,” he protested that Siegel was just “making fun” of the pro-Palestine protesters.
Rachel Siegel gives a Hitler salute in response to a pro-Palestine protester calling her a white supremacist. (Jordan Green / Raw Story)
The exchange here in Chicago’s streets illustrates the often murky circumstances surrounding Nazi provocateurs who insert themselves into left-wing protests, especially when they attempt to graft their antisemitism onto pro-Palestine protesters’ opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza.
And while pro-Palestine protesters often let Nazis know they’re not welcome, the aim by the more militant left-wing faction to cause maximum disruption to the Democratic National Convention means they don’t always have much bandwidth to police their own ranks.
The protest, organized by a group called Behind Enemy Lines — a militant alternative to the more moderate Coalition to March on the DNC — named the protest outside the Israeli consulate “Make it great like ’68.”
The term is a direct nod to the troubled legacy of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when street violence marred the city and doomed the Democratic Party’s prospects ahead of that year’s general election.
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“We’re here to make it great like ’68,” one of the protest leaders shouted, as rows of Chicago police flanked the protesters at either end of the 500 block of Madison Street. “In 1968, thousands of people marched on the DNC. Thousands of people made history.”
That 1968 is historic isn’t in dispute. But the allegory today’s anti-war protesters are making doesn’t foreshadow a promising outcome. That year, Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency, which led to an expansion of the war in Vietnam, which would drag on for another seven years.
What these protesters think about that is unclear: Two protesters approached by Raw Story curtly declined to talk.
Separately, a protest leader expressed frustration with “the failure of the left to mount any offensive against this bullshit, to mount any offensive against these pigs.” The goal, he suggested, was not to sway Vice President Kamala Harris to adopt a more even-handed policy on Israel and Palestine, but to “bring the war home.”
“Make the DNC feel what Gaza feels,” he raged. “The f---ing empire has got to burn to the ground.”
Militant pro-Palestine protesters gather in front of the Israeli consulate on Tuesday. (Jordan Green / Raw Story)
The militant, far-left insistence on tearing down the system or entertaining support for a third-party spoiler candidate — as they did when they listened to Green Party nominee Jill Stein at Chicago’s Union Park on Wednesday — creates a magnet for far-right provocateurs looking for openings to inject their ideas into the national discourse.
“White nationalists have a long history of inserting themselves into left-wing spaces in an attempt to provoke conflict and also gain media attention,” Stephen Piggott, a director at the Bridging Divides Initiative dedicated to tracking and mitigating political violence, told Raw Story. “Their presence at the DNC is just the latest example of this tactic.”
For all the shouting and scuffling, the pro-Palestine protests this week have created minimal disruption for the convention itself.
The protest outside the Israeli consulate on Tuesday took place about two miles from the United Center and likely made next to zero impression on Democratic delegates participating that hour in a ceremonial roll call to nominate Kamala Harris for president.
During a march on Monday, protesters briefly removed a section of security fencing on the outer perimeter, but police officers — there are thousands of law enforcement officials patrolling and guarding the convention facilities — quickly responded and sealed the breach. Other protests throughout the week have remained largely peaceful.
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That hasn’t stopped Nazis and other far-right activists from nevertheless using the protests to seek attention for themselves.
Siegel, the Nazi who threw up a Hitler salute on Tuesday night, had strolled around Union Park on Monday holding a cardboard sign with messaging lifted from the most vile, abjectly racist, antisemitic and homophobic corners of the internet.
The incendiary slogans on the sign included, “Jews f--- off,” “F--- n------,” and, “F—s eat s---. Get AIDS and die!”
Siegel explained to a reporter that her presence at the protest was meant as a response to both the pro-Palestine protesters’ insistence that Americans care about the suffering in Gaza and a “globalist, interventionist agenda” that sustains U.S. support for Israel.
“I see that this is kind of like an insult to being an American and being an insult to being proud of who you are and having integrity in your nation,” she told a reporter, referring to the pro-Palestine protest. “And I feel personally as a white person that things are kind of getting out of hand for my race. I feel that things are kind of going down the toilet. I feel that we are not being taken seriously as individuals of this nation.”
By Wednesday, the ranks of oddball far-right provocateurs at the pro-Palestine protest at Union Park had expanded to more than a dozen, including one man who carried a swastika flag. While their ideological signaling may have varied, they demonstrated a common affinity for trolling leftists by mingling with one another.
One faction included three men who paraded around with a National Bolshevism flag representing an ideology that blends Nazism with Bolshevism, a political ideology inspired by the communist government of the 1917 Russian revolution.
Paul, one of the men who would only identify himself by his first name, said none of them were actually National Bolsheviks. “It’s a meme ideology,” he said. “I don’t take it seriously.
They were joined by a group of young men from New Frontier, which openly supports fascism and excludes Jews. The five men followed Williams around the park as he carried an American flag.
Williams, who is Black, confronted protesters wearing kaffiyehs — scarves that represent Palestinian national pride — and T-shirts displaying the Palestinian flag.
“America first,” he said. “Put your nation and your people first…. My nation, and my people first.”
Some of the protesters were visibly angered by Williams, and a Black protester called him a “disgrace.” A speaker from the stage urged protesters to not engage with Williams, and eventually, the police escorted him away from the rally.
Nick Sortor, a right-wing video journalist who has been interviewed by Tucker Carlson and Tim Pool, quickly circulated a video clip of the confrontation to his nearly 500,000 followers on X that cast the protesters as unpatriotic.
“NOW: This Army veteran is being HARASSED by ‘protestors’ at Union Park in Chicago simply for flying an American flag and saying ‘America First,” Sortor’s post reads. “These people aren’t just anti-Israel. They’re ANTI-AMERICA.”
Making the issue of Nazi provocateurs even more murky, some Nazis have claimed that Siegel is a Jew, notwithstanding the fact that her sign on Monday included the invective, ‘F— off Jews.”
The banner that Siegel displayed promoting the false Great Replacement conspiracy theory included an address for a Telegram channel of a white supremacist group that calls itself “White Lives Matter.”
On Wednesday morning, the white supremacist group disavowed Siegel. A post on the channel read: “You will never see a jew throwing a roman salute at a legit WLM event. We have no clue who Rachel Siegel is, nor have we ever engaged with her.”
Siegel told Raw Story that she’s Persian-Russian, and not Jewish.
“That’s false,” she said. “Absolute smear campaign.”
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