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 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