I spent about four hours rubbernecking there today for laughs. Observations in no particular order:

-Besides the handful of bored-looking rally attendees trapped in the gazebo, 99.99% of protesters were from the far left. Though I searched hard, there was not a single identifiable Nazi or white supremacist anywhere within sight for the entire four hours, despite thousands of signs excoriating them. I actually overheard a few leftists talking of their disappointment with the lack of enemies.

-There were a lot of whites and blacks, but there seemed to be very few Hispanics, even relative to the city’s population. Of the few Hispanics on the common, I got the sense that most of them were just there napping or relaxing, rather than protesters. The few Hispanic protesters generally looked like Conquistador-Americans.

-Except for (presumably) cops and people traveling incognito like me, I only saw 2-4 Trump supporters, all fairly early in the day. I passed one chap in a MAGA hat and GOP t-shirt, to whom I gave a hat-tip and who quietly reciprocated with a nod. I saw two guys with an anti-Nazi & anti-Antifa sign that said nothing specific about President Trump. I chatted for a bit with a 19-year-old whose sign said “F*** Nazis, F*** Antifa, Donald Trump 2020“, hanging around at a quiet end of the common away from the commotion. He had apparently been surrounded by hundreds of angry protesters and rescued from the crowd by a team of cops, and wasn’t sure what to do with himself, so I advised him to steer clear of the big crowds and stick to the outskirts.

-Vermin Supreme put in an appearance, unsurprisingly.

-One Antifa group appeared to be chanting old 1920s Communist slogans in Italian, which I understand is bizarrely common.

There’s a memorial to Sacco & Vanzetti in the Boston Public Library, which the Mayor and Governor dedicated in 1997. I haven’t heard anything about taking it down.

-Notwithstanding the plethora of signs employing the word “f**k“, lots of (awful) parents brought their young children along, duly kitted out in propaganda-wear.

-The BPD seemed the very model of professionalism and discipline, from what I saw.

-At least one passerby within earshot seemed to assume that the large crowd of left-wing protesters was in fact a large crowd of Klansmen.

-There are a lot of homeless beggars who inhabit that neighborhood, but unsurprisingly, the egalitarian socialist protesters mostly ignored them. I didn’t see sign-wavers offer to buy any poor man a drink on a hot day, or even speak to one.

-Left-wing protesters go to alarming lengths to make themselves as ugly as possible. It’s not simply that they have a lot of tattoos and piercings, but that these are peculiarly hideous in placement and form. They also dress horribly. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some of them are demonically possessed, which is one reason I stopped for Eucharistic adoration a few blocks away after leaving. You can imagine the contrast.

-There was a big commotion at one point and I heard “They found one!“. Some distance away, a crowd was moving as a unit, and I heard things like “Get him! Get the Nazi! Smash Fascists!“. Closer up, I saw a frightened normal-looking guy (with no political badges of any kind) surrounded buy six or seven big cops, plowing through the crowd at high speed. After he had passed, one lass exclaimed “I got to yell at a Nazi!” as though this had made her day, but of course nobody in our part of the common had the slightest idea who the guy was, or why the mob started chasing him in the first place. I didn’t stick around after that to have them decide I was the next “Nazi” they were going to smash.