Jesus Christ I don’t think I’ve ever seen a posts comments so full of reasons this won’t work.
You guys don’t even need your media to dissuade you, you just convince each other not to do anything.
I wonder why a bunch of people might be jumping onto social media, spreading pessimism and suspicion about protests and discouraging people from attending.
Edit: I asked every single person who said that their protest-aware friends told them this was a “false flag” or something, what protest their friends would recommend attending instead. I’m curious to see what the responses are.
Edit: One of the accounts which is expressing well-intentioned nail-biting concern that something really bad might happen to the people who go to these protests, and urging people to stay safe if they do decide to go… is the same account that has been telling me about how Ukraine is the bad guys, and the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans, and other interesting things.
The thing is if everyone said “fantastic! This will be huge” and the actual protests are underwhelming, well that serves to confirm the false narrative that a very small minority of people are upset.
Declaring high expectations and delivering low is a path to undermine your cause. Waiting until after the fact to explain why sounds like making excuses rather.
The protest in my region was like maybe 50 people. I don’t think this is because people are broadly happy, it’s because as many many people pointed out, this was poor planning. The optics of pulling off a huge protest in only a week would have been amazing, but just impossible in the real world.
Even if it was a huge protest, the psychopaths in charge will walk over their backs and casually walk into the capitol.
Protests don’t do shit because you cannot convince people who don’t feel emotion to suddenly care about your situation. They only care about self-enrichment, power, and self-preservation. Do you have enough political capital or leverage to influence a politician?
Maybe if you threaten their sense of self-preservation, you might cause them to notice.
Maybe if you threaten their sense of self-preservation, you might cause them to notice.
I think that’s really the unstated point of large protests. You get hundreds of thousands of people being present and obviously angry, but “peaceful”, you have to be doing the calculation of how many of those are on the brink of something more if their voices are not heard and things proceed or even accelerate.
Of course, on the other hand we are dealing with an administration that thinks an ethnic cleanse of Palestinians to set up a resort city sounds like a safe idea, so not sure there’s anyone really thinking about the risks.
we are dealing with an administration that thinks an ethnic cleanse of Palestinians to set up a resort city sounds like a safe idea
Right. Psychopaths.
How do you force psychopaths to care about somebody else’s POV? You can’t!
The instant anything is posted on here it’s already been scraped. Know this. Act accordingly.
Some tips to help you out
- don’t take your phones to the protest
- if you take a burner, don’t take it home. buy it, and trash it at the protest.
- don’t take anything that could identify you as you
- superglue and baking soda on your fingerprints. don’t go crazy, just enough to make printing you impossible/difficult
- write any important phone numbers on your arm or ankle in permanent marker if you can’t remember them
- stuff a couple hundred dollars for bail in your shoe
- don’t give ANYONE your real name. don’t care how hot they are or how impassioned they are, just fucking don’t
- designate one trusted individual to come get you from jail. they are not to bring their phone, they should park at least 1/4 mile away and walk to get you(long enough to realize you’re being tailed by police).
Pay attention to your surroundings, specifically the movement of officers/agents. if they’re running you should be too. if there’s a large group marching or a wall marching, leave immediately and regroup.
ICE will be there. they will be picking people up. many of them not illegal. if you’re not white, wear makeup if you can get away with it. paint your face with state colors if need be. not a mask, so it shouldn’t be covered by “no-mask” states.
Know your rights. Bring the proof of your rights. Force them to acknowledge your rights.
Stream everything.
If you are picked up you will;
- go on a list
- be unlawfully monitored
- become a link in a larger web to ensnare organizers
You will now go dark for at least a month. No social media posts about the protests, no discussions about the protests, nothing. After that, it should be difficult to pair your online activity with your real world activities.
If you can’t make it to the protests, record the streams, share them online, pressure the public to demand answers for the crimes committed by the officers/agents.
One last thing.
There will undoubtedly be people there to provoke the protests. do not let them. once one incident of violence is determined all bets off and the police will become physically involved.
Trust no one, question everything, power to the people. 🫵
This message from a colleague will live here until the death of Lemmy
For further research here’s a great video on mutual aid.
This was Colorado. I agree that the timing sucks for people with regular jobs, but we also need to get the attention of our representatives and disrupt the peace.
I feel like the enemy started this so they then say “see nobody cares, nobody showed up” because we saw through their bullshit.
The lack of organizer info after a whole bunch of people have tried to find it is a huge red flag to me.
I was wrong. At least for my state. There was a huge protest in Denver yesterday.
We may have just hit the point where enough people are pissed off that a lot of organizing/motivating isn’t needed.
I’ll be at the next one, and I’m already planning how to comply and assist with a general strike in March. I have the teeniest hope that some momentum might be starting to resist these fuckers now in charge.
I was going to go but after spending almost an entire evening trying to find organizing information, I gave up and decided to sit this out.
There was no information on who was organizing this, who is backing it, and most importantly, who to contact. From an OPSEC standpoint, without a clear contact on who was organizing, it read like a false flag.
- website had no information outside of the event
- all POCs were “to be announced”
- website for my area was on carrd with only the image of the flyer
- all social media accounts are on techbro websites with no presence on mastodon or lemmy. Their bluesky account never directly answered the question of who was behind the account
I hope to God I’m wrong and hope that organizers are well intentioned but given our current political climate, I need to know who is putting this out there. I’m not the only one worried. Many others on Bluesky, reddit, Facebook, etc all raised concerns. One reply I read was “contact us on discord”.
Fuck. That.
There wasn’t even a link to their discord!!!
Edit: compare this to the protest happening in front of the Treasury
- clear organizer (Elizabeth Warren iirc – I stumbled across this yesterday and can’t seem to find the source) and promoted by other prominent Democrats
- shared publicly along Democrat official channels and accounts
- press notified and documented the event
Which upcoming protests would your friends recommend going to instead? Assuming that someone can’t travel to DC.
I hope to God I’m wrong and hope that organizers are well intentioned but given our current political climate, I need to know who is putting this out there
What might happen to someone who attended a not “well intentioned” protest, that wouldn’t happen to someone who attended a normal one?
Which upcoming protests would your friends recommend going to instead? Assuming that someone can’t travel to DC.
One that:
- organized by people you know or by organizations you trust
- organized by people who have “skin in the game” (i… people of color, LGBTQ+)
- organized by someone with a name that is searchable
- promoted by organizations within the opposition (e.g. Democrats, DNC, etc.)
As many of the above that can apply.
What might happen to someone who attended a not “well intentioned” protest, that wouldn’t happen to someone who attended a normal one?
If you end up going to a protest because “I want to do something” without doing any due diligence, you are placing your faith and trust to someone you do not know. If you arrive there, they may pretend to be a part of a leftist organization. You may end up trusting them more than you should, giving them more information than you should. If they are running the protest as a false flag and in bad faith, then you’ve given your private information to someone who intends you harm.
Best case scenario, the organizers don’t know what they are doing and are running the protest in good faith, but it also means they are new to this and don’t have good operational security.
Which upcoming protests would your friends recommend going to instead? Assuming that someone can’t travel to DC.
One that:
- organized by people you know or by organizations you trust
- organized by people who have “skin in the game” (i… people of color, LGBTQ+)
- organized by someone with a name that is searchable
- promoted by organizations within the opposition (e.g. Democrats, DNC, etc.)
As many of the above that can apply.
Such as? I’ve actually been looking for information on protests that are coming up, so that I can publicize them here, and have more than one day’s notice. What are some that are upcoming that I could spread the word about, that are good and trusted ones?
If you end up going to a protest because “I want to do something” without doing any due diligence, you are placing your faith and trust to someone you do not know. If you arrive there, they may pretend to be a part of a leftist organization. You may end up trusting them more than you should, giving them more information than you should. If they are running the protest as a false flag and in bad faith, then you’ve given your private information to someone who intends you harm.
Is it common for you that when you show up to a protest, people to start asking for your name and information about you? I have been to some protests and I have literally never had this happen or heard of this happening. Has it ever happened to you? Are you suggesting that the feds or somebody who doesn’t like protests, is creating new protests, so that they can then collect the information of anybody that shows up, and that they are not collecting the same information (or somehow unable to collect the same information) at real protests that happen, that they don’t like and want to punish people for taking part in?
I’m skeptical of this one. On one hand, I am glad that this is going to be visible and let other people know that they aren’t alone and a resistance is there. However, this is unorganized as hell. You’re going to have a lot of first time protestors who don’t know the basics of protesting against an active police state. I think this protest is a net positive, but not a massive one. The best we can hope for is for organizers to make use of this enthusiasm in the future or we get very visible tension escalation.
Everyone gets their start somewhere.
And you can be sure that the old hats are making sure to record and broadcast everything. So when the jackboots inevitably see a black person and start unloading with “rubber bullets” and tear gas, people will see.
This event would have faired a lot better if it had any sort of actual organization and a core team of organizers to answer questions and provide solid information. All of my friends who would have been interested in an event like this decided to avoid it because there just wasn’t enough information for it to not seem “sketchy,” and something so poorly organized was likely to only draw small groups of supporters, thus reducing the “safety in numbers” that protesters would greatly benefit from against a crowd of fascist police and anti-protesters.
Also… at noon during the work week? 😒
Its crazy to think if I weren’t a US citizen and was reading this, I’d think “man that’s 50 individual locations for everyone to be able to participate if they want.”
When the reality is, if I wanted to attend my New York Stare protest in Albany, id be looking at a 5-6ish one way trip, 10-12hrs round trip just driving. I’m totally guessing tho. Ive never gone from my house to Albany before. Only ever went there from either the adks or NYC coming back to Buffalo with other stops on the way home. I’ve always used 7 1/2hrs as the time it takes to get to NYC so that’s where I’m getting 5-6hrs Buffalo to Albany.
Tldr: Yo, America’s big as fuck.
Nah, 50 locations is rookie numbers. Like, Germany has 715 cities over 20k pop and I just checked and yep the smallest one did have a protest in 2024 when the AfD “remigration” plans became public.
Protest where you live. Protest where people are. Wait that doesn’t work in the US. Protest on the Walmart parking lot. Fuck trying to hit individual record numbers on prime time news noone cares noone watches that shit if it even gets reported, be visible to your neighbours they can’t censor that. Think globally, act locally. Have grandmas and cookies.
Lol homie, where are you getting 715 cities in Germany from? According to Wikipedia, Germany has 11 cities.
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Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region
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Central German Metropolitan Region
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Frankfurt/Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region
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Hamburg Metropolitan Region
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Hannover-Braunschweig-Göttingen-Wolfsburg Metropolitan Region
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Munich Metropolitan Region
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Northwest Metropolitan Region
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Nuremberg Metropolitan Region
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Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region
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Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region (also covers the Cologne Bonn Region)
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Stuttgart Metropolitan Region
Is this a translation thing where you are calling every municipality a “city?” If that’s the case then the comparison would be 715 towns/villages/cities for Germany vs approximately 30,000 towns/villages/cities in the USA.
The organized protests are only happening in each state’s capital. Which is one city per state that someone a long time ago in a galaxy far far away decided would be called that State’s Capital City.
The German directly translates to “Large and medium cities”. Small ones are smaller, and yes in English at some point you’d use “town”, German doesn’t make that distinction. I think “over 20k people” makes it very clear what I was talking about, though. They’re all individual municipalities, and if you look at large ones, e.g. Berlin: They have multiple protests about the same topic all the time. “Stadt”, “city”, doesn’t even have legal meaning in German it originally refers to special privileges (trading etc) that some places had over others, and those places tended to grow bigger.
What you’re listing is Metropolitan areas and no, that’s not anywhere close to a city. I understand that it’s often used that way in English, and there’s some parallels in Germany e.g. the Bay Area can be in some way considered one city, and so can the Ruhr Area, but when you look at Berlin-Brandenburg it’s literally the two states: Berlin and Brandenburg. That’s like… imagine Chicago being its own, independent, state, and then considering it and the whole of Illinois to be “the same city”, the smallest municipality (that’s the actual legal term) with the title “Stadt” is Arnis. 300 people, down from a maximum of 1000. Quirk of history.
20k pop is large enough to be a medium centre, meaning that the municipality provides things such as hospitals, specialised doctors, secondary education etc. to the municipalities around it because it’s the big kid on the block. About 7k pop would be a subordinate centre where you can get stuff like groceries and a hair cut, there’s a primary school, a pharmacy, such things. Even smaller places may have some of those things but do it for themselves, they aren’t set up to serve the surrounding area a complete package.
The organized protests are only happening in each state’s capital.
And that’s stupid. People won’t come because it’s not something just about anyone can work into their schedule, and you won’t be seen because only people living in the capital will randomly drop by. Differently put: Protests should be in commute distance, ideally on that very commute. Hence why I mentioned Walmart.
If we did that in Germany there’d be 16 protests, and population-wise btw the average German state is just about as large as the average US state: You have a few gigantic ones like California, and also some that are smaller than our smallest state, but mostly you simply have more states. And a lot more area.
Going by “A protest in every 20k pop place” Minnesota alone would have about 60, then add the county seats over 7k to that.
As said: Rookie numbers. That was my point. You’re not doing a protest wave, you’re doing rookie numbers.
Totally not wasting my time reading this. Hope you’re glad you spent so much time writing something noone will read.
Someone else read it, judging by the upvote. Your loss.
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Fake news, not american
