I’m shocked that I haven’t seen one protest yet. Is the media suppressing them? If there aren’t any, why?
There are. Heaps of them.
The US is just a big place and very spread out. And the ruling government and its media conglomerates are trying to keep them out of the media.
There absolutely are not. There are anemic little marches scattered here and there.
Americans were protesting George Bush in 2004 more forcefully and in vastly larger numbers than they are protesting now.
I’m going to guess
- poor media coverage
- media is explicitly hostile to protests and pro trump/right-wing-extremism
- many people are living paycheck to paycheck + we have minimal labor protection
- years of left-wing organizations being kneecapped (eg: the murder of fred hampton)
A lot of people are angry but there’s not really much organization. As much as I would love someone to take 50,000 of their closest friends, march down to DC, and shoot every republican in the head, without years of organizing that’s just a fantasy. Unfortunately, the right wing has been doing years of organizing and it’s now bearing fruit for them.
Wholly agree. Vast majority of US Americans cannot afford to lose what little is left. We are two to three paychecks away from homelessness. Economic subjugation has been in the works across political parties.
In Luigi we trust.
I’m glad we have the freedom to say this shit here.
There’s no leader. Most people are followers.
I think the reason more people haven’t started to openly organize is mostly concerns about self preservation. This govt obviously doesn’t care about civil liberties and are openly calling anyone not with them “the enemy”. It becomes much harder to publicly and civily organize if there is a substantial chance you’ll be branded a terrorist organization. That’s obviously just my take from my perspective.
Unlike a lot of other countries where there’s been mass mobilization, there’s little recent memory of serious government oppression. Americans have generally had it pretty good when it comes to civil liberties over the last half century or so. They assume they can trust institutions like the courts to do the work of protecting democracy. So most people don’t realize how much worse things will get if they don’t actively resist now.
Ya… I think that’s a really good point, a scary one
Hmmm then we are deeper into this than the world has realized. I think the gilded sheen is still there—but the rot underneath is deeper than the outside thinks.
Meaning, the mass protests that broke out in the millions across the country from 2017 to 2020–that era was the “protest era.”
What are we in now? Sure as hell not a protest era. We are way beyond.
As someone who has closely studied the evolution of spycraft from Ancient Intelligence to the development of the modern Intelligence Community—I know that because of my knowledge—I feel exactly as you say here. If I am taken out now for being too open or too loud, the side of humanity loses me in the fight. And it is so god damn easy to misstep.
We are and have been under massive constant surveillance. The facial scanning at airports has expanded to the physical border if you’re crossing by land. They say they delete your photo—but I assume they’re instead storing the biometrics. This is and will be used against us.
The tech companies in control know most of us better than we know ourselves. We are tracked every second of every day. They don’t need warrants when they already have access to profiles of data on almost every human in America. Even if we were in a normal world—the constitution generally doesn’t apply to private corporations. This is and will be used against us.
There is no safety “protesting” or organizing unless it’s done in a tight, cell operations that have some communication in between but function so that if one goes down the network stays intact. Intelligence and resistance groups survive when they’re federated.
Master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. Organizing on a mass scale across the country without using any tech that touches our adversaries right now is not possible. So, first we must figure out how to share information quickly and easily in a way that excludes big tech capture and government capture.
Figuring this independent communication hurdle out is more important right now than getting out on the street with a geotagged phone and smiling for a drone who is sure to snag your biometric data. And I’m saying this as someone who believes in the people protesting (and who has been in full scale car tipping rubber bullets everything on fire riots).
Canada here. We see nothing about Murcan protests, if they exist. We just hear Canadians/politicians reacting negatively to pretty much everything coming out of the white house.
We ask each other how can Murcans be okay with being treated like this. Don’t they understand what’s happening?
Don’t they understand what’s happening?
No. Overwhelmingly, no, they don’t. The MAGA crowd is stuck to their pants with glee, the liberal crowd is going “oh well, we’ll get em in the midterms,” and about another third of the country is just brain-dead clueless about all of it. Maybe a few thousand people in the US actually understand just how close we are to cascading systemic collapse.
I really hope you’re right. I’m actually very scared that they’ll take over our social media this election season and we’ll get fucked as well.
I really hope our people are smart enough to know when they’re being manipulated as the MAGAts have been. It looks like our cons are waking up though, and realizing that it’s not the time for smöl PP
They already took over social media, that was the final push that put a literal conman back in the Whitehouse.
In Canada we see a lot less of that due to rules around news and reporting on social media, but there’s a push for better regulation still. I worry it’s not enough to keep us clear of the conservatives this election.
Now is the time to push for new privacy laws and limits on advertising and the use of public relations in media. The path of the US is an illustration on what not to do.
Thanks! This is the graph I was looking for
To be fair, this doesn’t make any statements about attendance.
Denver yesterday - 34,000 people:
Also:
March 25th: Tempe, AZ - 11,300 people
Feb 18th: Nationwide Presidents Day Protest - multiple locations
Feb 5th: First 50501 Protest - all 50 capitals
There wasn’t a unified protest movement at the beginning of Trump’s first term. It wasn’t until BLM started gaining traction that we started seeing real action on the streets. This time around, despite the total lack of leadership from the DNC, there were boots on the ground from day one.
It’s important to note that unlike Trump’s first term, the mass media now has a vested interest in not reporting the scale and size of the unrest, so they’re tamping down coverage wherever they can, and actively manufacturing consent by minimizing the impact of the protests.
Why the fuck is the media suppressing them?
Yes, the media is suppressing news of protests because most of the media companies are owned by billionaires who’ve kissed the ring.
The protests that are happening are also smaller and somewhat decentralized. The media likes a big show and these protests don’t get clicks or eyeballs on screens.
There are many smaller protests happening such as the ones outside Tesla dealerships literally everywhere. This is having an effect on Teslas stock but TBD if it’ll have a lasting effect.
People are also attending town halls with their congresspeople and getting confrontational. This has led to many representatives cancelling town halls or screening for only Republicans like fucking cowards. Chuck Schumer just canceled his book tour because he knows he’ll get run out of every city he shows up in after his capitulation.
Pro Palestine protests continue on campuses.
There’s a lot to dig into on why there isn’t a large mass protest like 2020 but my simple answer is that things aren’t bad enough yet.
The revolution will not be brought to you by xerox without commercial interruption, the revolution will not go better with coke, the revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath, the revolution will put you in the driver’s seat
Who watches the news these days?
No one.
The retired and thats about it
It’s being suppressed, I can’t find the graph I saw yesterday but cumulative daily protests this year have far outclassed the protests from 2017, yet there’s very little coverage of it from the major outlets.
The revolution will not be televised.
Not when the class that controls the media is the one being revolted against.
It will however be recorded and streamed and shared peer to peer.
You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.
Kenfolk found
There are regular protests of thousands of people all across the country, but it never hits top headlines. There aren’t nearly as many as there should be, but we’re largely a broken people, a collective beaten dog cowed in the corner. We’re burnt out. Literally every direction we turn, things are falling apart. The working class is almost entirely one or two paychecks from homelessness. Minimum wage hasn’t increased in 15 years despite year after year of record earnings and productivity. A third of the country genuinely believes a rapist conman is their literal biblical savior.
We’re fucking tired, man.
This is the fucking answers.
Estimates show 65-75% of households live paycheck to paycheck. We financially can’t miss a day of work, let alone long stretches. Or we are allowed so little time off that it has to be saved for sick/emergency days (if you get any at all!).
That’s setting aside things like long hours, multiple jobs, unaffordable daycare, lack of medical care on top of hard hitting inflation without any wage changes.
It’s by design. It’s like intentionally under feeding slaves so they don’t have the energy to run away.
Hang on, that doesn’t sound like the American dream I’ve been told about !
The American dream was the freedom to pursue your goals, not those rewards being handed to you. Common misconception. You had a bunch of kids before financially ready or didn’t go to the right school, picked up a felony young, whatver you did, that was on you, by the old timers logic. Literal royalty just wasn’t preventing you anymore.
Oh I thought the American dream was having crony capitalism destroy your small business and send you to work at the Walmart that replaced you. Only to have to rely on government benefits because its the only job in 50 miles and it pays $7.50 an hour.
Thats the rural american dream baby. Sprinkle some opioids on it. It’s glorious.
It’s fucking amazing how people that populate these sites are incapable of having a simple, historical fact explained to them without whining about how bad they have it, from their own choices.
I just described rural America. From sea to shining sea. Did you actually have a historical fact? It sounded like you were just were just speculating without conculsion and casting judgement like that was the only intent you had.
fucking pathetic whiner.
Oh so you don’t care about actual americans. Thats all i needed to know. I’m not whining, im doing fine myself. Clearly i didn’t die from Oxy overdose and im happily retired forcused on gardening. I just care about the people who’s lives were ruined, i forgot empathy offends you fucking snowflakes so next time i’ll tone it down. Good luck feeding your welfare dependant family memebers this year!
50501 is very active, we’re hitting the streets all the time. I’ve been at a demonstration almost every week for the past month and a half. Please, join us!
Edit: From one of my other comments in case you’re uneasy about getting involved:
I don’t even like talking to people in the first place.
SAME SAME SAME. When I started confronting these [Trump supporters] people in my life my anxiety would flare up to the point my voice would shake lol. And I never in my life thought I’d be out marching in the streets.
It gets easier, but it takes practice (Prozac helps too). Now the anxiety has become anger. But not anger at them, rather anger at the system. Anger at what we let this country become. Anger at how lazy and complacent I’ve become.
Do your best, stay safe, and most important of all don’t get scared. Get angry.
There are. I’ve been to a few. They don’t get covered by the media.
Ok so everyone wants one, right? Feels like it’ll be dramatic and big and change and fix everything, even if it gets violent.
But there’s problems with that, not only in execution but also results.
One problem is the US is massive. It would take almost as much planning as a moon landing to effectively organize a protest that large, even if you only do the continental 48 states. Some of those states alone are as large as some European countries, some are larger, so the size alone gets in the way of things.
Then you have the problem with getting all the people protesting to agree to a cohesive protest. Where to protest, what to protest specifically about, and to have a solid list of demands. Trying to get that amount of people to agree on anything alone would be huge. Like my mother says, it’s like herding cats.
And then there’s the matter of getting that info out there. Occupy wall Street and BLM did have a comprehensive list of demands but the media pretended they didn’t. Almost all media is owned by like, six corporations, so even getting the instructions for that protest would be incredibly hard. And lest people forget, those media companies are final, so most of the media in other countries hearing about this will have just as much information surpression and do already. So it would be incredibly hard to get a comprehensive plan, demands, and instructions out el to everyone.
Also don’t forget that we have the technological spying that didn’t exist before. Cameras are everywhere. Not only in your phone, but on almost every street. People even put those Ring doorbells on their homes and that company sells it’s video footage to the police, and doesn’t turn off, so any protest could be monitored and nipped in the bud. We have whole agencies devoted to surpressing protests and entire handbooks in infiltrating them.
Then there’s logistics and provisions. Most Americans can’t afford to travel, much less take a week or two off of work, or a month, to protest long term. We can barely afford to keep ourselves fed with what we’re getting paid, and if we were protesting in one specific location, most of us couldn’t take the time to get there much less afford to. We have to feed the majority of almost an entire continent in one location for an extended period of time.
And if it was one specific location, the hospitals, hotels, grocery stores and restaurants would be so overwhelmed that they couldn’t handle everyone.
Speaking of hospitals, if, as in when, the police and military attacked the protest, most people could never afford the medical treatment to be able to get patched up, much less their lives saved.
And speaking of the police and military, we have the most militarized police force on the planet. Our police don’t have just batons, they have live rounds of ammunition and full on tanks. And they are more than willing to use them on civilians, especially in protesters. Look up Blair Mountain and the Kent State shooting. Not only could this crush a protest, but people would have to be ok with the idea they would very likely die.
And our prison system, being for profit, would salivate at the idea of getting more slave labor en masse, and the current administration is more than happy to detain people over trivial things. So everyone would have to be ok with life imprisonment if they didn’t get shot.
On top of that, not everyone is on board. About a third to a half of the country is in favor of what’s happening and have a cult around Trump and Musk. A lot of people voted for this and are in favor of it, because they really, really hate the liberals, Democrats, gays, minorities, etc. There’s a whole media pipeline for this that they listen to, especially young people who normally are the type to protest this stuff. So there would be resistance from civilians on top of not everyone being in favor of the protest.
Then there’s the problem of what that protest would actually accomplish. Even if you pulled it off, because of the supply issues, it would be short lived. Maybe a week or two, being surpressed by the military and police, and demonized in the media. The oligarchs would simply wait it out. It wouldn’t enact long term change, even if everyone could agree with what they want changed in the first place. So it might not be effective even if it was pulled off.
And the primary opposition party, which should be doing anything, has adapted a strategy of self preservation. Concede to the fascists for now, bide your time, then come election season tell everyone that you are the better and only choice (because winner takes all so they are the only alternative) and hope for a blue wave in four years. Can’t make any changes if you’re not in power, so do what you can to keep it now and believe that if things get bad enough now people will come crawling back. So very little actual support for a protest would come from on top.
And then, if we look at history, a lot of rebellions needed other countries to support them in order to be successful. Most of them had outside influence from other major powers. The other major powers right now are either in favor of the government, turning fascist themselves, or if they did intervene would risk starting a war with the US which has the biggest military in the history of humanity. So not a lot of help would come from the outside, if any.
So while we also would like a massive protest, there are huge issues in the way of effectively pulling it off.
So what’s been happening has been local efforts. You might not hear about town hall protests or stuff in individual state capitals in other countries, but those smaller fires are burning. There’s been economic protests, like the backlash against Tesla and the no buying day, which apparently was started to get people to dip their toes into a national protest. There’s been a lot of smaller community organizing, which hopefully adds up. I think and hope there will be more individual direct action, perhaps more Luigi strategies on specific individuals, as things get worse. Maybe more guerilla tactics, French resistance style efforts, are what is going to happen rather than a massive protest.
Tldr: We ARE doing stuff here. We hate this more than anyone. The change will have to come in less exciting ways than a big, national rebellion, so sorry you’re not getting as much of a spectacle, we’d like that, too, but there’s a lot of prep work that would need to be done to pull it off that needs to happen first. We aren’t sitting by and letting this happen, and we are working towards fixing things.
You’re describing a fascist government in many ways.
Yeah my guy I’m pretty sure we’re one “this election was cancelled Trump is president for life” legislation away from it being official.
Boy, I sure hope another country doesn’t take advantage of our nations turmoil
There are. And from what I know, apparently the media avoids reporting about them.
Well yes, media was one of the first pillars of democracy to be captured.
Some states also have laws that allow drivers to run over protesters
What the fuck America?!?
Whenever I attend a protest, there is 0 media stations in attendance or covering it.
By design. They’re under control.
Honestly, I think everyone’s waiting for the masses to be just pissed off enough to kick it up a notch.
There have been but i suspect they may have slowed down.
I feel like one reason why trump has crashed the economy is to hurt people so they are too busy working and struggling to be able to protest his fascist policies.
It’s hard to help your neighbor when you are drowning yourself
Heh … massive unemployment is going to be like Covid all over again. The crazy shit is coming for sure.
There are, they are being reported. I couldn’t speculate as to why you are missing them.
Can you provide 3 links to different protests?
Not being snarky. Just haven’t seen any reporting on it.
Ahh… THAT is the difference.
In the US, most of the media is complicit in what’s being protested. And online social media coverage is being contained to small bubbles.
Check out @usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml posts. They are posting pictures of grassroots protests across the country every day. Like has been said, there hasn’t been THE big mass protest, but there is constant local activism and protest, just mostly ignored by media.
Glad to hear my posts are going noticed. Indeed, there are lot more than you might think. I’ll repost one of my long comments with details about protests here. Wrote this five days ago so mentally subtract 5 days from all the times
They are being suppressed in media coverage, but there are people protesting. Media coverage paints a false picture that no one in the US is fighting back
Here’s one from today [meaning five days ago] with 1000 people in Boise, Idaho
Here’s a super incomplete timeline with just a handful of the nationwide protests. I’m missing a lot, I’m just showing your the photos I had from recent memory
8 days ago there were national protest for science funding cuts. Here’s the main one in DC
11 days ago there were nationwide protests in all 50 US state capitols + DC + Many cities within those states. This was part of the 50501 movement
Portland, Oregon
Monroe, Wisconsin
San Fransisco, California
Albany, New York
Raleigh, North Carolina
Richmond, Virginia
Austin, Texas
Protests Outside Fox News in New York City
16 days ago there were large protest in the Iowa Statehouse
19 days ago, a protest in Cherry Hill, New Jersy outside Tesla Showroom as part of a nationwide movement protesting Telsas. There have been tons more than just this one and these happen basically every day
21 days ago, large protests in DC for Ukraine aid
And so on. There’s a lot more going on than just this
Thanks for documenting and posting all these. Keep at it. I appreciate your coverage.
What are they doing that isn’t easily ignored?
50501
Represent baby!
Just remember, the media is owned by the rich.
These days i get quite a lot of US news off Lemmy, and aside from Tesla torchings (great start) I mostly just hear about people going to rallies. Are there actually americans out there obstructing something? If so, why aren’t they sharing their own news for solidarity and motivation of masses? How is capitalist media causing fediverse content to be censored?
