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 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.