Outside of typical remarks from Donald Trump, JD Vance and Mike Johnson and a Fox News report, party stayed mum
Republican voices were mostly silent as No Kings rallies and marches against Trump administration policies unfurled on Saturday, many in the spirit of a street party that countered the “hate America” depiction advanced by senior members of the party.
Instead of provocation, there were marching bands, huge banners with “we the people” references to the US constitution, and protesters wearing inflatable costumes, particularly frogs, which have emerged as a sign of resistance.
It was the third mass mobilization since Trump’s return to the White House and came against the backdrop of a government shutdown that not only has closed federal programs and services but is testing the core balance of power, as an aggressive executive confronts Congress and the courts in ways that protest organizers warn are a slide toward authoritarianism.
My teenage pot head kid wrote this.
Sorry about that, let me know what you don’t understand and I’ll be happy to explain it to you.
It’s not true. Nobody outside of leftist groups or media care about this. It’s not out of trying to maintain fear or concern about erosion.
There’s nothing that comes from these protests anymore. We’re in a digital world. These analog solutions don’t work anymore. You need digital solutions. You need a network and digital presence to spread anything you do like this. But we all removed ourselves from any digital spaces so there’s no need for the right to prevent anything. They know this even 24hrs ago. We’re all back to work. A lot of people didn’t even realize this was going on.
Eight million people disagreed with you on Saturday. That’s a significant fraction of the adult population.
More to the point, history disagrees with you. No fascist regime has ever survived large-scale protests by a significant percentage of their population.
In an increasingly digital world, the only thing that does work is analog solutions.
Know what happens if you email a senator? Even a state senator? You get a canned auto-reply. For a while, the workaround was faxes. I’m not kidding, that got through. But then they stopped acknowledging those, too. The only things that work anymore are analog: phone calls and showing up in their office.
This applies to almost every political action, too. Digital marketing barely moves the needle; a lot of campaigns don’t even bother anymore. But door-knocking sure does. Phone banking sure does. Digital spaces are great for organizing and for dissemination of information, but the spaces are too siloed for any reasonable hope of changing anyone’s mind, even before you get to the astroturfing and foreign actors.
Even better, analog action demonstrably gets under Trump’s skin. And the more he shows himself to be bothered by it, the more he looks weak and impotent.
Yeah, I mean, we still have to eat. But nobody’s under the illusion that one protest is going to do this; it’s about the long game, about the conservatives on the ground seeing that it’s not actually a “hate America” rally, and if the GOP is lying about that, what else might they be lying about?
So we’ll capture a news cycle here and there. And we’ll keep doing it until something changes, for better or for worse.
But a lot of people did. People who only believed the Fox talking points saw that they were wrong this weekend. And the fact that the people at the top are quiet about it means that they know they can’t fight it. Which means that at least they know it could work.
Sure, we’ll see.
I’ve said this after every major protest the past ten years. But yes, I’ll say it again and again and again.
Ten years is not very much time, in protest terms. When I say “long game,” I really mean it. But we’re getting ever closer to critical mass. Don’t get impatient.
You’re not reaching critical mass because of protests. You’re reaching critical mass because people are communicating and sharing content that highlights what the Trump government is doing. The protests success resr on how effectively the left has shown his corruption and not just shown but marketer the messages enough to convince people to pay attention
That’s also critical! As I noted earlier, digital sources are fantastic for news dissemination but terrible for changing minds. Growing protest would not be possible without strong reporting; I don’t think there’s any way that either arm of this could possibly happen alone.
How is it terrible for changing minds?
If it’s terrible for changing minds, why is there so much money invested into advertising using it?
Are these massive professional companies ignorant to something and like wasting billions on useless tactics?
Sounds like you raised a better man than yourself.