Politics & Power Quote by William Kunstler

May 4th becomes a trapdoor in Kunstler's hands: step on it and you drop through a century of American protest, policing, and panic. His line isn’t just calendar trivia. It’s an attempt to force a pattern onto what the state prefers to treat as isolated “incidents” - Kent State as a regrettable anomaly, Haymarket as an antique labor riot. By yoking them together “84 years to the day,” Kunstler turns memory into argument: the violence around dissent isn’t episodic, it’s structural, and it keeps landing on the same date like a bruise that never quite fades.

The phrasing is lawyerly, almost studiously restrained. “Another demonstration” underplays the historic stakes of Haymarket - the bomb, the crackdown, the show trials, the execution of anarchists - which is exactly the point. He’s normalizing protest while indicting the disproportionate responses that often follow. That neutrality becomes a rhetorical dare: if these are merely “demonstrations,” why do they so reliably invite state force and moral hysteria?

Context matters. Kunstler, the celebrity radical attorney who defended the Chicago Seven and spoke in the wake of Kent State, is building a genealogy of repression. He’s telling his audience that the argument isn’t only about Vietnam or students or labor; it’s about how American power manages dissent, then manages the story after. The date is doing the work of a courtroom exhibit: correlation as character evidence, history as motive.