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.
Where are you getting these numbers from?
Various articles
Ah, the MAGA defense.
So you jut don’t believe that protests exist unless they all signed a sheet when they got there?
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
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.
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.
Maybe you just aren’t where it’s happening?
“Protesters in Philadelphia and at state capitols in California, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana and beyond waved signs denouncing President Donald Trump; billionaire Elon Musk, the leader of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency; and Project 2025, a hard-right playbook for American government and society.”
I guess I’m just shocked that they only waved signs. In France, the guillotine would have been out. Here in Canada we entirely shut down our capital for months, and both for way less. When will the real protests start?
I’m not a historian, but my guess is that we have lived too many generations without major political incident; the kind you’re supposed to make heads roll over.
We’ve been indoctrinated since birth to blindly love our country, to mind what we say; we have seen other countries and their political unrest, and we ignorantly convinced ourselves that it will never be like that here.
And despite the cop out response of “we vOtEd fOr it”, otherwise good, hardworking Americans were lied to by their friends, family, church, and beloved government for so long that they can’t know any better.
Make no mistake, we fucked up and let our hubris get the better of us. I hope we can see the error of our ways and fight back before it really is too late.
I’m not a historian, but my guess is that we have lived too many generations without major political incident; the kind you’re supposed to make heads roll over.
Really though? Just off the top of my head:
Eisenhower to Nixon
- Vietnam
JFK
- Rigged elections in Illinois with aid of the mafia.
- Bay of Pigs
Nixon
- Watergate
- Being Richard Nixon
Reagan
- Illegal invasion of Grenada
- Iran-Contra
Clinton
- Executing a developmentally-challenged man as a campaign stunt.
- Lewinsky Affair
- Many rape allegations over decades
- Whitewater
Bush II
- Illegal invasion of Iraq
Obama
- Bugging of Merkel’s phone
Trump
- Everything
Biden
- Medical incapacity
I’m surprised Nixon gets: “being Richard Nixon” but Reagan doesn’t get: “being the sack of shit that took the massive clear steps to destroy your country through corruption”
How the fuck did they let Reaganomics slide?
Are we really comparing the French Revolution and the annoying-ass, snowflake trucker protest?
In the US, protests are largely performative. People want to make a show of it do they can say “Look, I did something!” even if they’re doing nothing. They’ll break their own arms patting themselves on the back.
I live in Portland which is protest central. We had 100 days of Black Lives Matter protests which meant and did nothing as the city largely agreed with the sentiment.
You want a protest that matters? You take it where the action is happening. In the case of Trump, you can set EVERY Tesla dealer on fire, it means nothing.
Take that shit to D.C. and shut that city down for 100 days? Assuming the Feds don’t kill everyone, that’s a protest that would matter.
Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW. “In Paris,” he said, “That car would be burning.”
You gotta remember. The majority of voters wanted this. Trump won the popular vote. He still has almost a 50% approval. Half of Americans are good with what’s happening. Let that sink in.
Reminder that voter turnout was still only 63.7%. Half of voters didn’t vote for Trump, half of that 63.7% did. Still way too fucking many, but it’s not half of the US.
And that 63.7% is of eligible voters. The disenfranchised, teenagers, and noncitizens aren’t counted.
Great point, there are at least 77,284,118 people who are OK with the current state of affairs.
The half that didn’t vote are OK with other people deciding for them.
This is the part that made me give up. No amount of anything will make up for the fact that roughly 53% of voters wanted this, which is probably like 40% of the country. A country which has like 3.5 billionish people, and 40% want racism. They want to support the wealth gap because they’re too dumb to understand they’ll never be on the other side of the gap, and this is just renforcing it. They’re more than happy to hurt themselves if it means the OTHER people get dragged down with them. Which just makes them a tool for the rich to use the poor to destroy the poor.
We’re alienating our allys, we’re destroying our country. We’re destroying the global economy, and this is just the start. The next 4 years this asshole gets to sit on his throne, and KNOW he’ll face no consequences. He’ll face no reprecussions for his actions for him and his little asshole buddies.
I’m hurt. I’m tired. I’m in pain. I have no idea if I even HAVE medicaide anymore. They say it’s not cut off, but it was supposed to get cut off Feb 28th because of lack of state funding. I think the state itself doesn’t know. But worst of all, I have no hope. I have no logical plan for what comes next to work towards making a better tomorrow. Yesterday sucked. Today sucks. Tomorrow will suck by all indications. The GOP at this point are actively trying to destroy this country. I’m not proud to be american. I’m ashamed. I’m tired of appologizing to others for existing. And right now, if Canada decided to just atomic bomb us, I’d understand. Go ahead Canada. Take us out. We deserve it.
I don’t disagree with what you said but there’s not 3.5 billion people in the US. There’s like 340 million.
Half of Americans who cared/knew enough to vote.
Sorry but there are like 100 people at each protest. There should be a million marching through Washington… What are we talking about here
Getting a million people to Washington D.C. is a tall order when places like CA, OR, WA are 3,000 miles away, plus people have to, you know, work and stuff.
Yes I hear this all the time. So what you are saying is that 1)people in Europe don’t have jobs and 2)the population density in us is low. Regarding 2) yes it is lower in the US however Washington dc and surrounding area (maybe 2h drive by car or so) have several million inhabitants. Let’s assume 5, if only 1% of them are going we would be talking about at least 50.000 people joining a protest. I don’t have seen any reports about that, are those just not reported?
In Usa, “protesters” are not allowed to do anything further than waving a few signs.
Even when they start shouting too loudly, they go to jail immediately. And then they need a president who releases them (but he releases only the right ones).
Have you noticed how many, many police and national guard troops they can afford? Massa Musk does not cut down on police, only on schools and scientists and caregivers for the sick…
the media is definitely suppressing it….
They had that protest in every state did they not? But when I couldn’t find much on it in the Canadian media, I went searching CNN and other American sites and found very little also, which was surprising to me. Here on lemmy, there were all sorts photos being posted from various cities, and it looked like a pretty big deal?
There have been multiple protests like that one. And many more at Tesla dealerships, national parks, etc as well.
Why do kids, who mainly get their news from Tik Tok, not get mad?
Maybe look at who controls the algorithms
Loads of people in this thread saying they’re happening but media not covering them…
I don’t think that’s really what is meant by “mass protests”. In the not so distant past I would have thought every american man woman and child would be weeping in the streets at the corruption and despotism.
There are protests, and maybe they’re not being covered, but it’s not the type of civil unrest I would have expected honestly.
The media is definitely covering it. If your media sites don’t cover it, block that media site and follow one that does.
You won’t see much about protests until we’re closer to the next election.
What next election?
I dunno about you bro but there’s a protest every other day in Denver. We’re getting there.
The question is how Dumbfuck will respond. There’s an unverified rumor the Insurrection Act may be invoked on April 20th owing to an executive order signed on January 20th. If it gets to that point, we will find out how far our military is willing to stretch its service to the Constitution.
Don’t be afraid. Don’t look away.
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
French Revolution happened while people were starving…
But people aren’t starving, they are struggling. That’s the difference.
They want us exhausted so we can’t protest. But they don’t want us so desperate we bring out the guillotines.
There have been dozens.
Okay, I’m going to acknowledge that there are protests, yes, but probably what OP is thinking of something more like the BLM protests during COVID where shit started to get real. There’s a few things going on here:
First: People don’t have the time off like they did during COVID. They also aren’t locked up and less able to ignore the news.
Third: Resignation. I think this is the bigger of the three parts. I know for my part, I consider this a complete loss of the federal government. Even if we somehow avoid a dictatorship and get control of the government back, the damage that’s been done is so deep and complete that we’ll likely never fully recover from it, we’ll just have to move on with things as they are. My efforts are now focused on organizing balkanization. If Texas wants to be a fucking stupid theocracy with prosperity gospel televangelists and the antichrist at the top, who am I to get between them and a good time? Maybe without having to hear about what Daniel the terminally addicted Fox News viewer thinks about Critical Race Theory, we can get some shit done, fix healthcare, get some fucking trains and bike lanes put up.
Second: Lack of organization. The federal government has spent the last 100 years stomping any serious leftist movements both here and abroad. There is almost no living memory of what a real leftist movement looks like, or how to get one going, so we’re all having to roll them from scratch, and there’s still a lot of the old high-roading instincts that were implanted in us over the decades. It’s just going to take time.
