I think too many people are too self conscious to join a protest. I think they’re (protests) belittled too much to feel impactful, and a lot of that lies in the division falsely created by the media.
all by design. Notice how the No Kings protests happen on a Saturday? you know…when the majority of people have time off work. that’s the problem. When employment is tied to healthcare and the fact you can’t take time off from it to, like, take back your country combined with many states being at will employment states…yeah it’s all by design to prevent the mass populace from rebelling.
For these protests to REALLY be effective they need to jam up downtown cores at 8am on a weekday and last throughout the day. but they never will. and if they did the turn out would be minimal. My point is you CAN peacefully protest but when it’s on a weekend then no one cares. you’re not hindering anything.
Part of the reason why the protests in 2020 were so big and lasted so long was because if quarantine. A lot of people got laid off. They didn’t have jobs to go to, so there was nothing stopping them from protesting.
When the AI bubble bursts and the recession/depression goes full swing with mass layoffs, I think we’ll see more protests that last weeks or months at a time…
That right there is a big fucking part of why I feel such a deep sense of ennui about the likely outcome of any protests, and any impact it might have on our political system. So much money and effort and time has been exerted to convert the American economic system into a neofeudal serfdom that it’s going to take a genuine catastrophe for anything to change meaningfully - and by change meaningfully, I mean “reverse wealth disparity and rampant corporatism”.
As much as I am glad No Kings had so many people attend it, and I am glad for the small good it does, it barely counts as a protest.
There are no goals, no demands, no threats. It didn’t inconvenience anyone (especially not the people in charge of the country) or cause commotion in the least. It was on a saturday with predefined start and end times.
In other words, it accomplished very little other than potentially being a networking event for like minded people. If everyone who showed up to a No Kings event actually protested, things would be changing the next fucking day
I went with a pocket full of anarchist flyers and a sign that got people asking me about it. I got to distribute about 30 flyers in my fairly rural town.
I swapped signal info with one young punk.
I know the thrust of the entire things was pretty liberal but there were some read happenings going on under the surface, and I don’t feel I wasted my time at all.
I feel like the point is less about size and more about the methods. I think it aims at the issue highlighted by an other comment that this protest while good doesn’t really disrupt the system.
For real, the articles I’ve seen about it from the other side of the pond have looked almost dystopianly Hunger Games-esque. Almost like the media was giving them a gold star for all the pretty photo-ops they’d supplied them, where no property was damaged, no police showed up, and nobody got hurt. It was kinda sickening.
Even the most lackluster, neighborhood block protest in France or the UK captures the outrage of the people more potently. Going off what I’ve seen, Americans seem awfully comfortable right now.
Don’t mistake awareness for comfort. We catch a lot of heat for our ridiculous levels of gun violence, but living around that many guns, in a nation where cops, ICE, and counter-protestors armed with assault rifles are just looking for an excuse to unload, you learn how far to push without causing a situation where strays are flying into the crowd. At Defund the Police and Pride we’ve had jacked up pick-ups filled with armed red necks roll coal and brandish on us in full view of the cops; nothing happened. At BLM one of them popped a shot off to spook the crowd; caught, claimed he accidentally turned the safety off, no charges. How many videos are there of monster trucks plowing into crowds? Plus, the new tactic is to show up covered in cameras, incite a fight, play victim, get the protestor arrested. Our courts are theirs and our prison system is egregiously punitive. And don’t doubt that a lot of us protesting are legally carrying. You really don’t want to see an American protest turn into a shootout, and the closer it gets to becoming one the more cautious we are about setting it off without a safety plan.
Until the other issue highlighted in that comment - that the majority of people can’t afford to take the time off work to do something disruptive - is solved, I’m not sure how we get from here to there, unfortunately.
I think too many people are too self conscious to join a protest. I think they’re (protests) belittled too much to feel impactful, and a lot of that lies in the division falsely created by the media.
all by design. Notice how the No Kings protests happen on a Saturday? you know…when the majority of people have time off work. that’s the problem. When employment is tied to healthcare and the fact you can’t take time off from it to, like, take back your country combined with many states being at will employment states…yeah it’s all by design to prevent the mass populace from rebelling.
For these protests to REALLY be effective they need to jam up downtown cores at 8am on a weekday and last throughout the day. but they never will. and if they did the turn out would be minimal. My point is you CAN peacefully protest but when it’s on a weekend then no one cares. you’re not hindering anything.
Part of the reason why the protests in 2020 were so big and lasted so long was because if quarantine. A lot of people got laid off. They didn’t have jobs to go to, so there was nothing stopping them from protesting.
When the AI bubble bursts and the recession/depression goes full swing with mass layoffs, I think we’ll see more protests that last weeks or months at a time…
That right there is a big fucking part of why I feel such a deep sense of ennui about the likely outcome of any protests, and any impact it might have on our political system. So much money and effort and time has been exerted to convert the American economic system into a neofeudal serfdom that it’s going to take a genuine catastrophe for anything to change meaningfully - and by change meaningfully, I mean “reverse wealth disparity and rampant corporatism”.
…yet.
This is a weird statement coming less than 24 hours after the largest protest in the history of the country.
As much as I am glad No Kings had so many people attend it, and I am glad for the small good it does, it barely counts as a protest.
There are no goals, no demands, no threats. It didn’t inconvenience anyone (especially not the people in charge of the country) or cause commotion in the least. It was on a saturday with predefined start and end times.
In other words, it accomplished very little other than potentially being a networking event for like minded people. If everyone who showed up to a No Kings event actually protested, things would be changing the next fucking day
Cool. Now tell me what did that protest achieve?
Hell, can you even tell me what the actual aim of the protest was? What were the demands? What was the threat if they didn’t get their demands?
Because otherwise it was just a fan meetup for people that don’t like Trump to show each other their quippy signs.
I went with a pocket full of anarchist flyers and a sign that got people asking me about it. I got to distribute about 30 flyers in my fairly rural town.
I swapped signal info with one young punk.
I know the thrust of the entire things was pretty liberal but there were some read happenings going on under the surface, and I don’t feel I wasted my time at all.
I feel like the point is less about size and more about the methods. I think it aims at the issue highlighted by an other comment that this protest while good doesn’t really disrupt the system.
For real, the articles I’ve seen about it from the other side of the pond have looked almost dystopianly Hunger Games-esque. Almost like the media was giving them a gold star for all the pretty photo-ops they’d supplied them, where no property was damaged, no police showed up, and nobody got hurt. It was kinda sickening.
Even the most lackluster, neighborhood block protest in France or the UK captures the outrage of the people more potently. Going off what I’ve seen, Americans seem awfully comfortable right now.
Don’t mistake awareness for comfort. We catch a lot of heat for our ridiculous levels of gun violence, but living around that many guns, in a nation where cops, ICE, and counter-protestors armed with assault rifles are just looking for an excuse to unload, you learn how far to push without causing a situation where strays are flying into the crowd. At Defund the Police and Pride we’ve had jacked up pick-ups filled with armed red necks roll coal and brandish on us in full view of the cops; nothing happened. At BLM one of them popped a shot off to spook the crowd; caught, claimed he accidentally turned the safety off, no charges. How many videos are there of monster trucks plowing into crowds? Plus, the new tactic is to show up covered in cameras, incite a fight, play victim, get the protestor arrested. Our courts are theirs and our prison system is egregiously punitive. And don’t doubt that a lot of us protesting are legally carrying. You really don’t want to see an American protest turn into a shootout, and the closer it gets to becoming one the more cautious we are about setting it off without a safety plan.
Until the other issue highlighted in that comment - that the majority of people can’t afford to take the time off work to do something disruptive - is solved, I’m not sure how we get from here to there, unfortunately.
It’s a problem that will start to solve itself as the economy collapses 😕, though that’s when things start to get interesting.
I’m tired of living in interesting times.
What protest? Apparently I live under a rock, didn’t see anything about it.
Just search for ‘no kings march 2026’ and you’ll get pages of results.
I honestly barely heard a peep about it.