Just want to say estimates for both no kings and hands off were much higher.
No kings estimated at 13 million and hands off at over 10 million. The estimated amounts on Wikipedia are way under imo.
We clearly have the numbers against traitorous conservatives.
Would be really cool if we could use those numbers before allowing them to destroy our society.
1 George Floyd protests 500,000[5] 15,000,000–26,000,000 2020
2 Earth Day 20,000,000[6] 1970
3 No Kings protests 5,000,000 2025
4 Hands Across America (poverty) 5,000,000 1986
5 2017 Women’s March 3,300,000–4,600,000
Did any of these have any lasting impact?
take a guess
Ok I will. Yes
Can you provide examples? From what I gather, 1 cops are still killing people, 2 we’re still speeding towards climate catastrophe, 3 Trump is still in power, 4 Poverty and wealth disparity is getting worse, 5 Women in many walks of life are still second class citizens.
Unless the lasting impact you mean is one step forwards three steps backwards.
They asked a question, were asked to guess, and now are being demanded proof for the answer they are still seeking.
Do you think that the needle has moved in a positive direction since these protests? Even if it feels like only a few millimetres?
Starting from the bottom of this list: 5. There’s more women in the workforce than ever before https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2022001/article/00009-eng.htm 4. We’ve seen a drop in poverty since 2017 (but it’s climbing back up!) https://www160.statcan.gc.ca/prosperity-prosperite/poverty-pauvrete-eng.htm 3. As a direct response to Trump, Canada elected a Centre-Left Prime Minister in Marl Carney’s Liberals when the election was decidedly going to be a Rightwing landslide with the Poilievre’s Conservatives. 2. Green, renewable energy has never been more popular.
- There have been significant reforms since the George Floyd protests. Some cops have seen prison time, or lost their jobs entirely.
That’s not to say our job is done and everything is a utopia now - we still have a lot of work to do. However, we do need to acknowledge when things have moved in a good direction or we’ll be overwhelmed by the bad and lose hope.
You’ve gotta see some of the good through all the shitty headlines that want to make you click and feel bad.
Your first source is about women working in Canada and your second is about poverty in Canada.
Unless I missed something, Canada still is a sovereign nation despite what Trump wants.
Great observation.
You asked for examples and sources - I gave examples and 2 sources. Maybe it’s drastically different where you live?
My challenge to you is - what are you doing to change the narrative where you live?
Anyone can sit from the sideline and comment that nothing has changed since these protests took place - it’s a lot harder to get out there and make the change happen. Maybe you’re already making those changes already, in which case - keep going!
Reminds me of this:
And then i’m told I should be happy the “needle is moving in a positive direction.”
The comment told me to take a guess so I did although my answer was intentionally wrong because I thought my questions answer was obvious. None of the things listed have remained relevant
I’m sorry, but every significant change in the world started with violence.
Intense violent changes are more suited for writing stories about than gradual non-violent changes. I’m not saying gradual non-violent changes is what US needs right now, but your statement is false and I think you should stop instigating violence in this thread.
The United States was created by the Revolutionary War.
We live in a country that only exists because of violence. We celebrate and honor this violence every year on July 4 (and on Memorial Day and Veterans Day)
Clearly we as a nation deeply believe in the transformative power of violence. It’s literally what it means to be an American.
I mean, yeah- they all did an excellent job of reinforcing the fascists’ understanding of how little a threat the US “left” is.
So do something about it, or you’re just as much a part of the sheep.
Good… now repeat it but as a General Strike
A general strike would be devastating. But we ain’t there yet.
Not that I don’t love the idea. It requires a robust support network. Start building a small local community that can be self sufficient. Grow food. Make tools. Sell things to neighboring communities.
The owners will still expect rent during a general strike. We have the numbers, they have the funds to we wait us out. They’ll do everything they can to make it hurt us more than them.
But we ain’t there yet.
Sorry but this line is how the USA fell off the wagon in the first place
nd not only that, you got there on Jan 6
A 1-week strike ahead of the mid-terms would be enough to make the GOP turn on Trump.
But that’s over a year out.
All I’m saying is build a support network before calling for a general strike.
Most people can’t afford to strike even if they wanted to.
A year is a nice long runway for that.
It sucks, but we aren’t getting rid of the fascists over the weekend. They’re in this for the long haul, and we need to be strategic about when and how we proceed. A general strike is a HUGE offensive in the fight, and it needs to be planned well. If we just mass buy shit before and after it doesn’t do anything.
Targeted boycotts are similar. They need to be strategic in their timing. Refusing to shop on Amazon for a week doesn’t do anything if we just go back to purchasing from them a week later. But what we can do is time it so it hits right before a fiscal quarter. That way it impacts the stock price and doesn’t fully bounce back until the following quarterly report.
wouldnt the Rs have to strike too, that would be effective. but we know Rs will never strike or protest on thier own.
The R’s are stupid and lazy. They don’t want to do all the work themselves. They’ll fold. Except the rich ones.
Defeatism has NO PLACE HERE. Pack your shit and leave, fucker! SERIOUSLY fuck off.
Fuck you too buddy.
You guys wanna walk off the job don’t let anyone stop you. But maybe spend some fucking time preparing?
Are we mad about being prepared to walk off the job now?
Ok but it’s crazy that the George Floyd protests were 5x bigger than this, even with COVID in full swing.
Nobody had anything better to do back then
ah good point. COVID may have boosted the numbers.
3rd largest so far.
Seriously, there will be more, I don’t think we’ve seen the biggest ones yet either.
This makes me really hopeful.
Less to me. There are families being kidnapped, seperated, and sent to death camps, and the respinding protests outside of LA were a two hour march on a weekend.
What is good enough for you?
Quiet everyone, Mustakrakish is about to tell us the acceptable number for a protest.
Go ahead, the floor is yours.
A general strike?
Funded by?
Looting and mutual aid
looting will not be supported by the majority
Oligarchy is not supported by the majority. Yet it exists nonetheless
Maybe a protest that goes longer than 2 hours, on a weekend, where everyone dispereses and goes back home to watch the game? Maybe one that causes actual resistence and pushback? Not one that amounts to a community day in the park?
Look at the LA protests. More akin to this:
So your mad that protesters in other cities aren’t being attacked by local police and federal agents, got it.
Pass the word everyone, if you’re not getting hit with tear gas and rubber bullets your protest doesn’t matter. Might as well not even try.
Law enforcement will only target protests that are a threat to the oligarchy.
If a planned public protest is not targeted by law enforcement then it has been determined to be a toothless protest
I’m not sure if you forgot a /s or if you’re being serious. If serious this is some ridiculous logic.
What I said would be true of Russia. This is because Russia is an oligarchy and this is how oligarchies operate.
The United States is an oligarchy as well.
Therefore what I said applies to the United States.
The goal of law enforcement is to preserve the existing social structure. American social structure is that of oligarchy. Therefore law enforcement exists to preserve oligarchy.
American law enforcement is immensely well funded. These protests did not all encounter law enforcement opposition. Therefore, law enforcement must have determined that these protests did not represent a threat to oligarchy. Therefore the protests were toothless because they did not represent a threat to the existing social structure
He’s saying that if the police don’t bother then the protest has no teeth.
Not that poster, but judging by what the largest protests in the US ever - the George Floyd protests - achieved when it comes to police violence in the US (it’s the same or worse now), in the present age in the US merelly coming out and walking for a bit in your own time while holding a board up doesn’t seem to achieve anything.
Think of it from the point of view of the Political and Money “elites” in the US: they get zero direct negative impact from the riff-raff in their own time doing a big march against the elite’s puppet mango emperor, and there is no single Historical instance in the US were the lower classes rebelled against the upper classes and properly fucked them up, so the masses marching isn’t even a warning of increasing risk for them - they control the entire political system in the US and make sure whomever is in a position to get elected for a position of political power is always in their pocket, and do not fear the desinfranchised population because they never ever moved against them.
The murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare by a single person seems to have achieved more in terms of scaring the powerful than even the millions that came out demonstrating against the police killing of George Floyd.
(I bet that in a place like France, still today the masses coming out even if doing nothing but marching and holding some boards, are cause for concern amongst the “elites”)
I actually saw something quite similar in the UK when I lived there: the powerful just didn’t care because even large numbers of people doing some polite marching did not damage the interest of the elites and because they had no reason to be concerned with their personal safety because the plebes had never actually rebelled against the upper classes.
That said this situation in the US is even less concerning for the elites because the crowds are so firmly focused in the puppet and disregarding the puppet masters, that even very indirectly there is zero risk for the true powers.
Maybe as some other poster suggested, a general strike would be more effective.
Protests aren’t about the Political and Money “elites” as you put it because they don’t care no matter what.
You think they’d give a shit if what is happening in LA is happening everywhere? They’re like cockroaches that will skitter into hiding until it’s safe to come out and monopolize on the ruin.
Protests are about galvanizing support and building unity among the populace. The US has been so divided for so long and that division has been manipulated and grown to benefits those “elites”.
I do think a general strike may be effective but it’s unrealistic. A nationwide general strike would require massive financial and material support. Where will that come from?
They work on a smaller, union scale because they’re supported by the union and outside supporters that are not on strike. They work in other countries that have the social programs in place to support the people which is something the US does not have.
I keep seeing this repeated comparison to France but let’s look at that. France is a country a little smaller than the state of Texas with an adult population only slightly more than the total population of California.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s a little easier to coordinate a general strike in a country with 1/6 the population of the US spread across an area 1/15 the size of the US.
Protests in the US are getting bigger and more widespread but it’s like a slow wave, it takes time to build.
Look, it can totally seen how the protests give hope to others by showing them that “they’re far from alone in their concerns” and doing so in a way which is independent of mainstream political parties (which is good, since in my experience when political parties capture protests, they use such movements for their own personal good, in the process weakening the original movement).
In fact I totally approve of the protests and (even though I’m not American) I’m happy with just how big they were because maybe American has enough good people to make it a better country in the World stage (plus, frankly, I have some American acquaintances from minorities and don’t want to see them suffer).
What I fear is that people here in Lemmy are crazily over-celebrating the protest as some kind of ending in itself when it’s at best a beginning, and not even the beginning of the end but the beginning of the beginning.
If these protests aren’t leveraged to organize grassroots movements to start doing things like guerrilla (in the marketing sense, rather than violent sense) campaigns to oust the crooked politicians no matter what their party is and weaken the influence of Money in politics, they’re worthless, same as the George Floyd protests ended up being worthless because they didn’t led to any organized follow through to force politicians to restructure policing in America.
So my point is that people need to keep their eye on the long term solution for America’s problems, and that doesn’t stop with kicking Trump out, it requires a far deeper cleanup of the American political system and addressing the problems of common Americans so that another guy like Trump (or, more likely, worse) doesn’t get eventually get in power after Trump is out.
Trump is not the disease, he’s a symptom, so merely Trump out isn’t going to cure it.
So my point is that people need to keep their eye on the long term solution for America’s problems, and that doesn’t stop with kicking Trump out, it requires a far deeper cleanup of the American political system and addressing the problems of common Americans so that another guy like Trump (or, more likely, worse) doesn’t get eventually get in power after Trump is out.
Denigrating the effort to date doesn’t do anything to further your point. Instead it serves to quell support and push a negative outlook and view of protesting.
Offering support, encouragement and advocating for sustained effort would.
You mentioned the George Floyd protests and said, in relation to that, “merelly coming out and walking for a bit in your own time while holding a board up doesn’t seem to achieve anything” but that’s not true.
During and immediately after George Floyd the protest effected a lot of change but then the protests stopped, complacency set in.
Trump is not the disease, he’s a symptom, so merely Trump out isn’t going to cure it.
No, the cure is sustained effort. The problems in the US have been building and evolving for decades, if not longer, and they’ll take at least that long to get a handle on.
Notice the merelly starting the very sentence sentence you quote from me about the George Floyd protests.
The pigs are still often holding people down by putting their knee on that person’s neck, so how exactly has the largest demonstration in America changed anything?!
Again, my point is that demonstrations have to be more than walking whilst holding a board up - at the very least they have to be opportunities to get contacts from other people with a view of joining grassroots groups for change.
If all that people do is walk and shout with lots of other people and then at the end of it go home with a feeling of achievement and do nothing further, all you get out of it is what you got with the George Floyd ones - empty promises from politicians and no actual change - when what all those millions of American should have gotten was a restructuring of policing in the US.
People here are way over-celebrating something which means very little unless we see that it has led to many following it with getting involved in politics and/or grassroots movements - it’s premature and it makes me suspect that for many who participated this one demonstration was it and they aren’t following it through with next steps.
Read this if you’re having difficulty understanding the purpose of the recent protests within the greater resistance.
Match the energy during election day ballot yeah?? Thanks
When multiple biggest protests are against your presidency, then you seriously fucked up.
News flash, neither Trump nor his Republican allies care. Literally at all.
It feels good to know that lots of other Americans care about what’s going on. I don’t know if we’re going to make it but I felt like part of a country out there and I hope we figure it out.
That’s great news. The other 9 of the 10 biggest protests were were extremely successful at affecting change.
Since we made such massive progress on all the others, this is clearly a harbinger of social and political progress.
- George Floyd (Police Brutality)
- Earth Day 1970 (Environmental Protection)
- No Kings (Trump)
- Hands Across America (Poverty)
- Women’s March 2017 (Feminism)
- Hands Off (Trump)
- March for Our Lives (Gun Violence)
- Women’s March 2018 (Feminism)
- #RickyRenuncia (Puerto Rico, Resignation of Ricardo Rosselló)
- Great American Boycott (Immigrant Rights)
Only #9 actually accomplished what they wanted.
Earth day did a lot of good
Until we start seeing general strikes, or other action, they will continue to ignore the people.
A week of general strikes, and the stock exchange tanking acordingly, would actually have an effect.
I keep seeing this, and I don’t disagree, but what exactly is gonna change? Some rich people get slightly less rich, they’ll still own most of our government. Our current admin clearly doesn’t care about public opinion.
They care about money.
Day long general strikes have changed policy. A week would bring the government to the table on anything short of dissolving the government.
The US government is terrified of general strikes, and has gone to extraordinary measures to ensure they don’t happen.
Oh, nuh-uh! FOX News said it was a lightly attended failure. Who am I gonna believe, FOX:News or every local news sorce, that actually was there, in the country?
Eats another paint chip: Foxsch Newsgh
They’ve got news in the title. They wouldn’t lie.
not to rain on the parade or nothing, but a protest that hasn’t the implicit threat of “…or else” is just a hang
All the other benefits of a non-violent protest aside, there’s also immense value is reminding people that they’re not as singular in their viewpoint as they feel.
For a lot of people, it’s been very easy to feel like everyone else must be in board with this.
I’m not sure what you’re looking for to codify the implicit threat. A couple million people calling you a king at an event called “no kings day” in a country whose founding narrative is “violently rebel against kings” seems pretty implicit to me.
Also, I just realized that there’s a red coat/red hat parallel I haven’t seen leveraged yet that has a lot of potential.
there’s also immense value is reminding people that they’re not as singular in their viewpoint as they feel.
This destroys the narrative of the protested party. They cannot convincingly talk about ‘a few misguided people disagreeing’ when you see so many others who feel like you. Even if nothing would be achieved by the protest, this is an immensely powerful confirmation of an individuals beliefs. 100% agree.
They don’t have “a” narrative that can be refuted. Any narrative that they present is facile and can be changed in mid sentence. Addressing the things they say is a waste of effort, even as counter-propaganda. It costs them orders of magnitude less to spread bullshit than it costs you to spread the antidote. This is just another way that they get you.
I don’t mean to devalue organizing and peaceful protest, but the benefits are what it does to us, not what it does to them.
Showing up isn’t arguing against them, it’s sending a message to other people (amongst other things).
Arguing with fascists is pointless. Showing that not everyone agrees with them is different though, and has value. They may not have a singular static narrative, but they rely on the perception that dissent is a minority position.
I was trying to say that. Seeing others puts a ‘narrative’ that is different from theirs in your own head, because you see with your own eyes. Everybody still needs to adress all incoming information, it’s not always apparent it is a false story.
Would be MUCH more effective if all the protesters were armed.
The lesson from A Handmaid’s Tale is don’t protest without the arms to back it up.
Getting millions of Americans to go out and essentially shout “F U Donald” is a little bit more than a hang. And is potentially much more effective than a riot or occupy wall street.
America is still a democracy, in that all the roads to power require you to get folk to show up and vote for you.
America is still a democracy,
Not much longer if americans dont fight harder.
That is exactly why the midterms will be so important, not to mention the next presidential election. We need to keep the momentum going for a blue wave, and this protest may have helped with that.
When that fails, when Democrats lose voting rights, when Trump pardons the Minnesota assassin to effectively legalize political violence against MAGA’s enemies, when all peaceful options for democracy have been exhausted, then let’s talk about the violent revolution. Until then, there’s no reason to be a buzzkill about this protest.
The fact that No Kings was nonviolent was perfect, for now, because trying to riot or a coup would have just enabled MAGA to justify state-sanctioned violence of their own.
Cute to think there will be midterms. You need to act now.
Can I ask what you’re doing to act? I don’t mean it as a gotcha question, I’m actually curious. Because I don’t know what the heck to do other than protest and vote.
Well, good thing that the Minnesota assassin is currently being held on state-level murder charges because Trump can’t pardon non-federal charges.
Oh, thank goodness.
I see so many videos with people saying “I support you” and none saying “I’m going to take action.” Everyone is dawdling, nobody is doing anything
5 million people are doing something, your comment is shitting on their effort.
They are holding signs and walking along streets for a day or 2. That is not stopping fascism.
Tell me, what have you done so far?
It’s incredible that millions of people showed up and pretty much none of them feel for Donald Trump’s trap that would have, to the MAGA Republicans, justified martial law and the suspension of liberties.
I’m pretty solidly convinced the protest was a good thing and that we won this battle.
And 2-3 million were doing something a few months ago with the earlier protests. With any luck this trajectory continues
They are saying the effort was toothless, no need to take it so personal.
I would argue that it already isn’t. we kinda waited a bit too long, that’s why the protests happened.
Truth will be in the form of how they respond to the protests. If we end up with military occupation or martial law, we’re already not a democracy.
that said, tomato, tomaaato, same fix.
Alright, so let’s say trump is gone, what replaces him? Business as usual republicans who were all on board with his policies but didn’t like how boisterous he was. Democrats are all too happy to play along, fellating war criminals like dick cheney and george bush. America is a representative democracy where you vote on which representative will represent billionaires for you.
I hope these protests develop into something more, but realistically I can only anticipate them being used as political points for democrats during their donation drives to raise tons of money to promote billionaire ass-kissers. Things will continue to get worse and then the next villain of the week will appear as the conduit to do all the bad things billionaires want. We’ll be told again all we need to do is get rid of this next villain too and then things will be fine, but then the cycle repeats as things continue to just get worse.
Yeah!
Now knock off all that fascism - or we WILL go back out there and do another lap!
You guys think that merely walking around in your own time holding up a board and shouting a bit, all focused on the mango puppet instead of the puppet masters, is going to change anything given that there is no single Historical event in the US ever of the lower classes rebelling against and deposit the upper classes (even the Revolution was literally the American plebs led by the American upper class fighting against the English plebs controlled by the English upper class)?!
The murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare had more impact, if only temporary because it wasn’t followed by more similar murders.
Even millions of people marching and shouting a bit (and so polite that they do it in their own time) will cause no fear for the elites because that’s in no way a warning that the heads of the elites will soon start getting separated from their shoulders if nothing changes.
You need at the very least a General Strike and/or targetting the economic and propaganda interests of the elites (trashing the TV studios of certain channels or certain newspapers would send a powerful message).
I mean, just notice the impact on police violence of the greatest demonstrations in the US - the George Floyd protests: nothing or even worse than nothing as the pigs have never been this violent.
Come over and lead the revolution then, if you think you’ve got what it takes. Otherwise, you’re also doing nothing of note.
“Why isn’t anyone doing the obviously much better thing?” - someone not doing that thing
I’m not American. If I went there to lead the revolution I would end up in El Salvador.
I did, however, got involved in politics in two countries I live in and did a lot of campaigning for them, so I’ve actually done the deed as far as I could rather than merely talk about it, and did so further than just demonstrations.
Demonstrations are nice as a way for people to know that they’re far from alone in their concerns, but they’re worthless if not leveraged into helping make or grow grassroots organization to change the actual underlying problems that results in somebody like Trump getting elected again and again (and I’m pretty sure that if that doesn’t change, when Trump is out somebody else like him or worse will eventually get elected).
The Georgy Floyd demonstrations are a great example of what happens if demonstrations aren’t leveraged to grow civic-society movements for change: you get some vague promises from politicians and then nothing actually changes.
I just feel that people here are treating these demonstrations as some kind on getting near the finish line when they’re at best (and hopefully) a beginning, and not even a beginning of the end but and beginning of the beginning, and they should be treated as opportunities to get the ball rolling on things that can actually snowball into real change.
If all you do after a demonstration is pat yourself on the back for having “done something” whilst you don’t even have some contacts for groups of people you’re thinking of joining for further actions, you’ve just done exactly what the actual powers that control the country wanted you to do: defused your anger whilst not starting the ball rolling on real change.
Getting average people to the point that they are ready to do something like a general strike is a process.
Most people don’t even want to have to go to a protest.
But going to a protests is like anteing up in poker – it is mentally anchoring people as in the game and publicly taking a side.
And yeah - the fucks in power are going to say “bet”.
So now millions of people who are not where we already are, who have not wrestles with this and avoided it as long as they can - they are starting to ask, “ok, what do we actually have to risk to change this? What am I willing to do?”
Will we get enough people actually engaged enough for a general strike? I have no idea.
But I know it won’t happen without giving people a ramp-up that includes things like the protest this weekend.
Murdering ceos didnt do jack shit, real change only happens like this
These protests, while better than nothing, will not produce real change.
Just as the George Floyd protests did not produce real change (Pelosi kneeling and raising a fist is not “real change”)
UnitedHealth reduced claim denials following the murder. So at least that is some tangible positive result
Just as the George Floyd protests did not produce real change
That’s just not true though. You’re just spouting bullshit on the internet.
That link states that no federal reform occurred. Which supports my point.
Of the state level changes, they are all aesthetic and surface level changes - and even those are now being undone.
So I’m not seeing the real change. Which demonstrates that the protests were not effective
