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.
Apparently there were about 375,000 people protesting the Iraq War in New York in 2003 compared to about a million people marching for women’s safety in 2004 in DC
In the years since there have been about 5 protests the same or much larger than that. In 2017 2.3 Million people protested the Trump inauguration, and protestors also showed up for Trump’s 2025 inauguration which was held indoors for reasons including harsh snow. The exact number estimates for the 2025 inauguration protest and the 50501 protests are unknown at the moment, but it is occurring in all 50 states which is comparable to the George Floyd protests.
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.
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.
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.
They already took over social media, that was the final push that put a literal conman back in the Whitehouse.
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.
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.
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.
