Lots of protests, lots of people willing to go out and disrupt cities and force the state to listen. Great! I know Americans suffer under a fascist police state, commit genocides, underfund public services, ooh - they have a shitty bourgeois democratic system, maybe they’re protesting to fix that, or maybe they’re demanding free healthcare, that’s long overdue. No, I know, it’ll be about the insane amount of school shootings, or serious police violence. I know the LA riots started against ICE, that’s cool, so maybe they’re protesting for actually fair justice! That’d be a step forward.
Whatever they’re protesting, they seem to be in huge numbers, so they’ll probably make an actual effort to disrupt things. Occupy buildings. You know, some sort of direct action, they can’t all stand around pointlessly. Anyway, enough anticipation let’s go look and find out
Oh, the protests are just “Trump bad” in another form. And they’re decrying all forms of violence. And the police are literally collaborating with some. Oh.
Americans really took all these years of mistreatment, fascism, genocide with their tax dollars, deliberately being made poorer year after year, violent suppression, being allowed to die in droves, and the mass culmination of that is… “trump bad, also be polite while saying it”??? And then the protests are used as an excuse to tighten the fascism.
I can’t wrap my head around it. Millions(?) of people coming out to protest, and the overwhelming demand is ‘replace orange man with another genocidal fascist pls’. ie. basically for nothing to change whatsoever.
At least leftists try to get the fucking goods. Lib organising is the worst.
EDIT: I’mma just be clear - protesting ICE is extremely cool and not the part I’m complaining about.
The women’s protests in 2017 had so many participants, one of the biggest in the history of the US. The Iraq War protests were the biggest in the US and global. Occupy was pretty big too
None of it did anything. Of course it didn’t. They just had to wait out the protesters, let them blow off steam and if any so much as step a toe out of line you can lay the power of the state on them. You’d have to shut shit down for days to weeks to impact the US, people will go to protests and the back to work. Nevermind sabotage or violence - but even violence you can just put some cops in riot gear let them knock each other about for a bit and then people will just go home and back to work after a dat.
And I’d argue this is an issue of civility mostly. Unless you start breaking rules and fucking the state’s shit up, nobody cares.