Putting that on a sign might hit the point uncomfortably home to anyone with a shred of decency left.
The only forms of protest that actually work are illegal. They are illegal because they actually work. Its a catch-22. If a form of protest and resistance starts to work, they make it illegal.
The only real form of resistance that works that isn’t illegal is voting in primaries and general elections.
But as far as protests you need mass labor mobilization across industries to bring the economy to a standstill for it to be effective. That was made illegal in 1947. Violent resistance is illegal unless you’re a Trump supporter on January 6th.
Jury nullification is an effective form of protests used by abolitionists. When abolitionists would beat the hell out of slave catchers, even if they got arrested at least 1 juror would vote not guilty and they would go scott free. There is resistance to ICE agents all over the US, if one of the resistors get arrested and requests a jury trial, you are free to vote not guilty for the crimes of obstruction, resisting police, etc. If someone resists fascism and breaks a law in the process, you are free to vote ‘not guilty’ on a jury so they do not get convicted. The problem is 99% of people plea bargain instead of going to trial.
But with that, don’t be surprised if both democrats and republicans come together to make voting not guilty on a jury illegal unless its under very narrow circumstances, the same way democrats and republicans came together to make the railway strike illegal under Biden.
Basically if a form of resistance actually works, then there will be bipartisan support to make it illegal.
Its off topic, but that is (as far as I’m concerned) an intentional psyop to make people support abandoning social safety net programs like social security. The fewer safety nets the public has, the easier they are to control with economic threats. The powers that be want us desperate and insecure, because people like that are easier to control and threaten.
With mild reforms (higher tax rate, taxes on investments instead of just income, lifting the tax cap, etc), social security will be fine until the 22nd century. Even without those reforms, it’ll still exist in the 22nd century, it’ll just only pay about 3/4 of what it pays now.
Up until 1993, medicare was only taxed at 2.9% on the first (in today’s dollars) 168k in income. bill Clinton and the democrats lifted that cap and now medicare is taxed for all income including income above 168k a year, while the SS tax ends on income above 168k a year. Plus under Obama, the tax was raised to 3.8% on the wealthy and a tax was added for high levels of investment income.
Point is, SS can be reformed and has been in the past (it was reformed and the taxes expanded under Reagan for example). Its currently at 12.4% tax split between employer and employee. I think just raising the tax to 16% split between employer and employee, and doing nothing else (no raising the tax cap, no taxing investments, no cutting benefits, no raising the retirement age, etc), that alone would keep social security solvent until the 22nd century. FWIW, when social security was created in the 1930s, its tax rate was only 2%. Now its 12.4%. We’ve raised the taxes in the past and been fine.
This sounds fun, but it would be more fun to create divisions between Trump supporters, alongside making Trump supporter seem so extreme it alienates ‘moderates’ (who the fuck is moderate in this climate anyway?)
Like hold up a placard saying ‘catholics are fake christians who worship the woke pope’ to try to stoke anti-catholic bias among protestant Trump supporters. Some of the most diehard MAGA I know are catholics, it would be interesting to see how they respond to this.
Or ‘Only land owning men should be allowed to vote’ so female Trump voters and male renters who support Trump would be upset.
‘The only good latino is a dead latino’ might resonate with the 45% of latinos who voted for Trump.
I want to expand on doing false flag protests within the Trump movement. So I can see at least 3 targets for this.
- Trump supporting men who subscribe to standards of traditional masculinity
- Trump supporters who are marginalized in some way or another (non-white, catholics, women, etc)
- Moderates who are offended by extremism
You could infiltrate protests with all 3 of these tactics. The tactics I mentioned above are more for group 2, trying to stoke anti-woman, anti-renter, anti-catholic, anti-latino sentiment to drive away these demographics who support trump.
But for group 1 you could hold placards that say things like
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“I need Daddy Trump to tell me what to do, the world is scary and confusing”
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“Black people frighten me, please keep me safe mr Trump”
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“I deepthroat the entire boot” (I saw this one on tiktok)\
For group 3 you could have placards that say things like
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“America was better off under the British monarchy”
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“America went to hell when we gave women the right to vote”
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“Black people were happier as slaves, its been proven”
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“Nuke Canada, they betrayed us”
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We need a rapist to keep us safe from feminism
The problem is walking the tightrope of being outrageous but believable.
But at the end of the day, I have 0 faith in the US electorate. Trump won 63 million votes in 2016, 74 million in 2020, and 77 million votes in 2024. There is no moral line that’ll peel off voters from him. Trump truly is made of teflon.
I’m not sure if you’re saying I’m intentionally engaging in a psyop or whether you think I’ve fallen prey to an intentional psyop — but, either way, I can only say that my genuine reaction upon getting my first paycheck was to say oh, hey, I don’t want anyone to take Social Security money away from me today, ostensibly for my own good; can I, instead, just keep the money? And I was informed that, oh, no, the money will be taken from me regardless of whether I say I’d prefer to keep the money now — but, y’know, decades down the road, people who aren’t listening to me today will someday start listening to me as I keep saying please put the money in my hand.
And on every payday since, I’ve thought: but why would they listen to me then, if they’re not listening to me now? They’re taking my money, over my objections, today; it seems like a psyop, or something, to assure me they’ll eventually hand me money — while they only ever take my money while I keep wishing they wouldn’t.
And, well, nothing changed as years and decades went by, is all.
My friend and I have been working on a costume for an anti Trump rally. The face is a US map and the body is a trunk from an old wrestling outfit. My friend, a costume maker for a local theater group, improved upon it with a kind of inflated gargoyle of President Trump atop the outfit. The Trump is attempting to do something unspeakable to me while wearing the costume. I’ve sized up the costume but am still considering which protest to which I should wear it.
Any protest that doesn’t result in your arrest is mere cosplay. We need mass civil disobediance that will jam the gears of this authoritarian regime. Good trouble.
Yes. We should fight.
You are close, but no cigar.
You don’t need mass arrests.
You need enough protesters that the cops are too afraid to arrest anyone.
Get together with 100k+ friends and the cops will not be a problem.
Then police yourself so your protest doesn’t devolve in a free for all. A riot is easily dismissed. A large peaceful protest not so much.
First, they ignore us.
Then they laugh at us.
Then they fight us.
Then we win.
We must be willing to provoke them enough to fight us. They are comfortable ignoring us. They are comfortable laughing at us. We must not be timid about going the distance.
What would John Lewis do?
I think we need to get better at making memes. Seriously. We have all the smart, cleaver, funny people. I really think we could brute force a simple message like, “STOP TREATING PEOPLE LIKE SHIT” through clever memes.
A new headline about an unlawful deportation or face-eaten-by-leopard budget cut followed by:
STOP TREATING PEOPLE LIKE SHIT.
I still like to think people are good, and that we’ve just been out memed for now. Maybe I’m just dreamin
But even with a massive peaceful protest of 100,000+ people, what does it achieve? What makes Trump, Vance, MAGA look at, say, 110,000 peaceful liberals in San Francisco or New York City and say, “That’s it, we need to change our policies and stop being the bad guys?” It still exerts no meaningful leverage.
What peaceful protest movements have succeeded in the past? The only ones that come to mind are those led by Mahatma Gandhi. Wiki link
The self-immolating monks near the end of US involvement in Viet Nam may have had some effect. They certainly got a lot of publicity. I don’t think self-immolation is very effective here in the US. An example would be the Black former Marine who torched himself in his dress blues, to protest Trump back in 2016. He died slowly over the course of a few days. I keep up with Wyoming news but I didn’t become aware of this until years later when I stumbled accross the now-disappeared article that I kept a copy of and will quote from now:
" Gilchrist walked outside the cafe, gave his cell phone to a stranger and asked him to record what would happen next. He went to his car and got a can of gasoline, doused himself and set himself on fire.
The stranger was able to put out the fire, but not before the flames burned his clothes and flesh. Gilchrist lay on the ground in a fetal position and was burned over 60 percent of his body from his chest down.
He was taken to the Akron Children’s Hospital for burn treatment, where he remains.
Michael Miller, the Gilchrist family spokesman, said the two have been dear friends for 40 years.
“We met as police officers in San Mateo, (Calif.),” Miller said. “We were roommates, and we remained friends for all these years in regular contact.”
Being a cop was part of Gilchrist’s legendary life. He grew up an orphan in Cleveland, was raised by his grandparents, and attended Father Flanagan’s Boys Town in Omaha, Neb., where excelled in sports, especially football.
He came to Wyoming in the mid-1960s to work as a lumberjack."
So he was a quite popular individual, which is especially amazing considering how conservative Casper is and how few Black people there are. But I didn’t know about it until years later. Yeah, I was living in a different part of the state but I was looking at the Casper newspaper most days.
So is violence justified in a Revolution? I think it depends. The great Filipino author Jose Rizal dithered to great length over that question and never really made a convincing case either way. But this much is certain- when a normal person kills someone, he/she loses a part of his/her’s soul and doesn’t get it back. You can’t say that a killing is “just business”. Killing is inherently personal.
I go to protests to …protest. I don’t even know what meaningful change could happen. All I know is that I cannot sit silently by while this turn to fascism is happening in the country I love. If anyone has better non-violent ideas, I am all ears.
Another thought I had about protests is to make them local. Start with a single issue in your community. How has a Trump administration policy harmed your community directly? And protest that specific issue loud and often.
If we focus on a specific local issue, perhaps we can force our local politicians to respond or be replaced.
For us here in Western North Carolina, for instance, it should be easy. We are currently being abandoned to deal with our devastating Helene aftermath after we were specifically promised by Trump directly that we would see better help if he was elected. Our state senators and local congressman are Republicans. I think if we could direct our protest to this abandonment we would reach a larger group of people who might not otherwise protest.
You need to do at least one of two things:
- Start costing them money
- Make it impossible for them to carry out their plans
100K people in a park shouting slogans does neither. 100K people surrounding a business, or an ICE detention facility, can make it impossible for them to function. Yes, this is a bigger risk to the people involved, but you won’t get out of this mess without risk.
Every time someone suggests using more-active tactics, someone chimes in, “What, do you expect me to (take time off work/get fired/get arrested)?”, as if that’s the ultimate trump card that can’t be argued against. Except, yes, that’s exactly what you’ll need to be willing to risk, if you want to win. You can’t win by appealing to MAGA’s better nature, because they don’t have one. You win by hurting them enough that they decide quitting their bullshit is the best option.
And this is why you won’t defeat MAGA any time soon. Not enough Americans are desperate enough to take these steps. Not yet, and maybe, not ever?
Pretty much, and that’s why the Martin Luther King-era protests were effective: they weren’t just peaceful, but also hit the pockets. The bus boycotts after Rosa Parks caused the bus companies to lose revenue, and the sit-ins at restaurants meant that those restaurant seats were occupied and thus would at least partially prevent white patrons from dining in and hence cost the restaurant owners revenue. But even then, it still took a very long time for the change to happen. Years.
A lot of the anti-Trump “protests” so far were one-day events, like getting many thousands of people to gather together for one single day of waving placards and shouting slogans, and didn’t affect MAGA anyway (such as blocking ICE buildings as you mentioned.) It doesn’t do a thing. The fact that it’s a one-day event means Trump can just ignore it for that day. And Trump facilities/activities aren’t affected in any way.
Exactly, and this is exactly why politicians and the media recommend protests like this, because they’re ineffective. Its like how parents encourage their kids to play with nerf guns because nerf guns are harmless. The powers that be want the public busy with ineffective forms of protest so they can feel like they’re accomplishing something while truly accomplishing nothing.
People go to an anti-Trump protest, or they sign a petition, or they go to a ‘fight the oligarchy’ rally and feel they accomplished something, when they really accomplished nothing and the nation continues to move towards fascism. Its like encouraging a victim of domestic violence to hit a punching bag at the gym. It helps them let off some steam but it doesn’t affect the underlying problem.
Several effective forms of protest are illegal.
- Mass protests that are against the law
- Massive, organized labor strikes across industries
- Acts of violent resistance
- Acts of sabotage
The only (currently) legal forms of effective protest are:
- Filing lawsuits and hoping the judiciary upholds its effectiveness
- Voting in every election possible (primaries, general elections, state, local, federal, special elections, etc) with the goal of getting as many effective, competent politicians and judges who reject fascism elected.
- Using jury nullification to ensure people who resist authoritarianism do not get convicted of a crime.
- Donating money to groups that engage in effective protest
- Boycotts arguably work (Tesla is suffering due to boycotts)
Trump’s supporters want to treat people like shit. Thats why they worship Trump so much, he is the first politician to tell them its ok to hate the people they hate. Other republicans made dog whistles about hating people, but Trump is open and unapologetic in his hatred.
I don’t think this will work. Anyone who has a conscience has already rejected Trump. The ones who support him either like how full of hatred and cruelty he is, or they are enablers who don’t oppose it. Trumps supporters are either bad people, or they enable bad people. So pointing out how its wrong to be a bad person won’t work.
More effective anti-Trump memes would be ones where Trump rejects social hierarchies and promotes egalitarianism.
Deepfake videos of Trump apologizing to BLM and saying we need reparations for black people due to how badly they’ve been mistreated by racists and the police. Deepfake videos of Trump promoting an affirmative action immigration system for muslims, so muslim immigrants move to the front of the line regarding immigration to the US. Videos of Trump saying that any police officer who mistreats a black person deserves life in prison.
Stuff like that would actually turn Trumps voters against him.