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.
I saw a car with a DPRK flag and was happy, then saw that it was covered in other shit and had a fake missile on the top, then the driver got out in a Trump mask and started dancing around and I realized it was actually some incoherent lib mocking Korea, and that soured my mood immediately
I know why, in terms of omnipresent propaganda. But turning a (supposed) day of resistance to your own country’s public evil into an occasion to look down on another people who actually resisted it is the most “what the fuck did they ever do to you” shit-for-brains American move ever.
Yeah, remember all those books we’re supposed to be reading that most of us do not?
In some of them they talk about having a permanent professional revolutionary class, right? A small group that basically waits for moments like these and has some plans as to how to try to galvanize, organize and direct the angry masses.
The libs have their permanent professional counter-revolutionaries to nudge things in a direction more favorable to their goals.
We seem to be lacking a counter to that in the USofA.
Huh I never considered the Democrats an anti-vanguard party before
Its more than just the dems. They exist in depth through a multitude of NGOs.
Yeah, for sure. I’ve seen the talk of how nonprofits and prestigious universities capture the revolutionary potential of the working class, but never thought of the Democrats as a professional organization to act as an anti-vanguard
DSA is that. The mainline democrats are just the terminus of the defanging pipeline.
In my fiction of the future, the DSA is who wins and ushers in the age of socialism by necessity
The masses in most of these cities aren’t even angry though. They are mildly annoyed that the man on the TV isn’t the correct looking man on the TV.
The libs have their permanent professional counter-revolutionaries to nudge things in a direction more favorable to their goals.
Bingo. 99% of the people who showed up for No Kings protests would never attend any kind of protest if Kamala was president, even if she did a lot of the same shit as Trump. I don’t even think I’m being facetious here.
there were fucking ‘out to brunch’ signs fucking everywhere.
On the other hand though, I guess that an optimistic view would be that theres maybe something to be said for the fact that this has driven people who ordinarily would never protest U.S. policy like this to protest.
Whether or not that protesting is effective is another topic but it at least feels like more people are engaged now.
My view of it is that news media isn’t interactive enough for them anymore, especially since Jan 6th, they want to be part of the participatory television. It’s not that they want or hope for real change, they just want to be part of the spectacle, not just observe it.
it’s called the PSL
There is a lack of any coherent organizing structure on the left. Leftist media is for example dominated by a myriad of unaffiliated breadtubers who spew nonsense. Why is there no officially linked “influencer type” for the PSL? Is there an financial support system for people on strike or on the run? Safehouses? Community first response? I think the PSL is only barely approaching most of the fundamentals.
Not even stalin himself led the bank robberies in Georgia, he coordinated it. Literally event management is half the revolution.
This is just the state of American political awareness
They all went out willingly and independently and believe they achieved something
They think this is what politics is
I think if you view the protests as the end goal, then yea they are pointless. Libs are mad and need a way to let out that frustration and the protests are the most effective way to absorb it. It doesnt require them to get too far out of their comfort zone or face the systemic question of how we got to this point in the first place.
As leftists i think we can view these protests as a sort of “career fair” for trying to organize people. We need to go to where the people are at and i feel like a liberal at a protest is on the path to being radicalized and forming a revolutionary consciousness, but there still needs to be some sort of nudge to get there. The nudge will have to be from another human being because social relations do dominate people’s conscious.
Theres also a sense of solidarity that builds up when you are among others who are also sharing in the disatisfaction.
DTLA yesterday was nut to butt, shoulder to shoulder, LIBS. Libs dressed like founding fathers, libs leaving water bottles and flowers at the feet of the National Guards, libs with chihuahuas in strollers. Libs libs libs everywhere. No material analysis beyond “Trump bad”. Thousands and thousands of people and basically none of them will ever be willing to do anything more radical than dress up and hold signs. Depressing
Edit: fuck I wrote were on fire and not were not on fire
I went out to a protest yesterday and saw so many American flags that weren’t on fire. I wish I had brought lighter fluid.
I did browbeat a bunch of white boomer libs about how MLKs nonviolence got him killed and only worked because the BPP scared white people.
I did meet some cool younger comrades though and was passing out links to the Chunka Luta online library to everyone I talked to.
Gave me psychic damage
2 days ago they were on their couches. Yesterday they got out. Call it baby steps, or too late, or whatever, but you can push them further now that they’re actually starting to try something even if you view it as ineffective.
I’ve been hearing this for the last decade at least, I don’t believe it any more. These people aren’t budding revolutionaries. They show up in droves to choke the life out of any radical movement and water down its demands until it can be safely ignored.
Seems like you had an opportunity to talk to the community that arose around you. My mutual aid group leaned into that and ended up raising hundreds of dollars and filled 5 vans with donations.
The org I went with for several hundred new sign ups yesterday, PSL had a table set up too, had a good chat with them.
It’s true that it’s 90% liberals who think their sign-making contest is peak activism. It’s about hitting the 10% who literally don’t know how to do any better. It’s very convenient to have that 10% all in one place.
Yeah, they got out and did an imitation protest. All spectacle and no substance. That doesn’t bring people closer to doing real things, it’s reinforcing the learned skill of denying that real things exist.
I think it’s interesting that the media and Democratic party approved relief valve movement is using “no kings” instead of “no oligarchs.” I know we all know that
and 
are also liberals who don’t really want to address material conditions, but the “no oligarchs” branding was getting some traction with mainstream liberals. A well designed movement that actually wanted to generate some momentum could have capitalized on that to create unified messaging and cohesion. But the people who are designing this protest movement either are oligarchs or are trying to cozy up to them: that rhetoric is dangerous and needs to be quashed. So “no oligarchs” becomes “no kings,” which can be spun as only applying to the Republicans instead of American politics across the board. This has the side benefit of bleeding some momentum off the more left-oriented “oligarch” rhetoric, which is probably just as (if not more) important to them.The protests were funded/organized by a Walmart heiress, a literal billionaire oligarch. If you combined all the Walton wealth they would be the wealthiest family in the world.
Yeah, that’s exactly my point. The choice of language is not an accident, nor is it organic. It’s deliberate rhetorical propaganda that’s primarily aimed at defusing any nascent class solidarity.
Worth noting that there were “no kings” protests outside the US (fuckin why??) and they renamed them “no clowns” because they didn’t want to offend the commonwealth monarchy
nothing but a pressure relief valve to stop any actual action
If it makes you feel better my city had specifically anti-ICE protests this week organized by PSL that drew more people than the no kings protest
Just curious, how well was that covered by the local news media? I suspect coverage of these protests is being skewed to fit an establishment friendly narrative.
Basically not at all, other than the more left wing news sources.
It does make me feel better
Hell yeah
Democrats using Trump as a shield. Elect us and we can get back to brunch. No policy push. No laws drafted. No plan. Just put yourself out there for the Actblue and NGPVan to be a virus to harass and stalk you forever. Register as a Democrat and not as PSL / Green. Rinse repeat rehabilitate the public perception of the aging faciat you all supposed to oppose.
I hear you, but most people aren’t well informed.
Most people are just trying to get by and are highly vulnerable to oppositional propaganda.
Will the No Kings protests directly change the system? No.
But the fact that millions of people across the country came together and touched grass as a group with some united mindset still matters.
General strikes, government occupation, and corporate sabotage do not “just happen”.
These things require mass cohesion and unified goals. These protests are a critical first step in building that cohesion and getting people motivated to physically gather and DO SOMETHING.
Don’t let the doomer brains infect you. Seeing ordinary and under informed people work together is a great sign that we still have a chance.
In some cases these protests are also probably radicalizing new people. I was watching Hasan’s stream last night and there was part of it where there was a girl with a lib protesting sign walking up from an area where protestors were just brutalized by cops, and he was talking about how that might affect those people who showed up expecting something more peaceful.
That’s only if the cops overreact and brutalize the lib prostesters. AFAIK there were only crackdowns in LA due to the existing conflict.
Exactly. For the vast majority of these protestors, the police will not brutalize them, because they pose no actual threat to their operations. For these liberals, the narrative that it is only violent protestors who get the boot will be entrenched.
They will say to themselves and other, ‘I went to the No Kings protests and was perfectly fine, I even shook hands with the police, those BLM protestors and (insert group of the year) must have been doing something dangerous and illegal!’
Or if angry chuds show up to start fights or shoot people.
Good take
I wish and HOPE this to be true. But there have been many major, and better directed protests over the years that achieved nothing, and did not prove a first step in building cohesion to do stuff. So I have little faith that this was any different.
libshit sucks but flyover cities having bigger turnouts than Trump’s birthday bash is extremely funny, tbh.
Pacifism and “civility” are two of the greatest tricks ever played on the working class. It’s going to take a lot of material condition worsening until people finally realize there’s no point being peaceful against people who would throw you in the fire pit if it was the best way to make profits.
One of the decent clips we got was some people running those patriot front dinguses off. Some guy bellowed “get in your fucking truck and die!” at them and I laughed at that. So that was nice. Possibly the most American thing to yell at an American that doesn’t involve a burger.
They were all geared up, had shields, and then just… let themselves get run off by like 3 normal people. It’s so weird that even the people who chased them away weren’t quite expecting it. One of them, you can see his body language go “Huh, they seem to be backing away from me. I guess I’ll walk forward?” The unsure aggression of an unaggressive person who just realized they’re in a position of strength can be charming to witness when it’s against fascist cowards.
The one near me had a really huge turnout and was blocking traffic all over the lib’est area during peak brunch hours, so that’s kind of funny. Saw tables for food not bombs, some worker thing associated with Kshama Sawant, and a bunch of people wearing local DSA chapter shirts. Lots of Palestinian flags too. Some people I talked to had earlier in the day been protesting a potential future ICE facility in a nearby town with immigrant rights groups and prison abolitionists. These protests aren’t going to change anything and we have to stop centering nonviolence as the highest virtue. But it seems like a good thing that people are meeting and talking to each other in physical reality… anything that defies the gravitational pull of social media.
But absolutely don’t let libs use this little afternoon field trip as a chance to pat themselves on the back. More people go to sports bars to watch the football game every week.
Hell yeah, that’s cool. Definitely not saying it’s entirely fruitless to go out there, just that the meat of them were extremely misdirected.
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.
yeah it’s been very black pilling for me. the thing that’s got millions of people out into the streets is “no kings”, which isn’t even in the top 20 best reasons to protest against america. it’s making me feel insane
Tbf though, the protest I went to felt like it was equal parts anti trump and anti ICE kidnappings. Saw a lot of Palestinian flags too
true, i imagine the media are giving all the attention to the pointless lib parades to funnel energy away from the actual protests
Yeah the other thing is that at my protest the police did not escalate, but we did basically block traffic on multiple streets in a large area by just marching through the streets for like 2 hours after the designated protests were done. This thing gathered a fuck ton of people.
It felt like things could have gotten intense and possibly violent if the police instigated it but the police basically completely avoided confrontation which led to it being peaceful.
