I’m shocked that I haven’t seen one protest yet. Is the media suppressing them? If there aren’t any, why?
Why aren't there mass protests in the USA?
Submitted 5 days ago by Yazer@lemmy.ca to [deleted]
Comments
arotrios@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Raiderkev@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Not only mass media, but social media algorithms as well. Big tech is complacent in the coup
60d@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
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?
salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 4 days ago
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.
garbagebagel@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
vfsh@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Thanks! This is the graph I was looking for
amorpheus@lemmy.world 3 days ago
To be fair, this doesn’t make any statements about attendance.
arotrios@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
MolecularCactus1324@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Why the fuck is the media suppressing them?
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 5 days ago
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.
factotumus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
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.
HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 5 days ago
In Luigi we trust.
unconsciousvoidling@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I’m glad we have the freedom to say this shit here.
mke_geek@lemm.ee 5 days ago
There’s no leader. Most people are followers.
AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
Tezzerets_Tea_Time@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website 3 days ago
This is the fucking answers.
jontree255@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
bestagon@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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
Wooki@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Who watches the news these days?
No one.
The retired and thats about it
vfsh@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
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.
Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The revolution will not be televised.
vfsh@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
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.
onyxjet@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.
ElleOhh@lemm.ee 4 days ago
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.
smeenz@lemmy.nz 4 days ago
Hang on, that doesn’t sound like the American dream I’ve been told about !
Jamablaya@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
agent_nycto@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
misteloct@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You’re describing a fascist government in many ways.
agent_nycto@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Boy, I sure hope another country doesn’t take advantage of our nations turmoil
Maggoty@lemmy.world 4 days ago
There are. I’ve been to a few. They don’t get covered by the media.
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 4 days ago
They only get coverage if police get to act a fool.
hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
There are. And from what I know, apparently the media avoids reporting about them.
InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Well yes, media was one of the first pillars of democracy to be captured.
PanArab@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Some states also have laws that allow drivers to run over protesters
hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
What the fuck America?!?
salena@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Bernie and AOC just got 34,000 people at a protest they did. Check out 50501… They seem to be rallying point. You might need to check them out here or on Blue Sky though, tik tok is deleting comments about them and Facebook will soon also probably. But yeah, for some reason the protests are not hitting the media
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
The revolution will not be televised
VanillaFrosty@lemmy.world 4 days ago
jordanlund@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Maybe you just aren’t where it’s happening?
apnews.com/…/50501-protests-project-2025-trump-st…
“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.”
Yazer@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
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?
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our 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.”
jordanlund@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
Tm12@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Are we really comparing the French Revolution and the annoying-ass, snowflake trucker protest?
Iampossiblyatwork@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
Tyfud@lemmy.world 4 days ago
We met have the level of social safety nets that France does to allow people the freedom to pretest without starving or becoming homeless. It is by design. They keep everyone just on the verge of poverty so nobody can afford to be disruptive.
match@pawb.social 3 days ago
if you haven’t seeb the news, some protestors and professors have been taken captive by ICE in the US and that’s had a chilling effect. however, that also builds some tension - as soon as some major property destruction breaks out and it becomes obvious that ICE can’t disappear them all, people will be bringing police precincts and declaring autonomous zones again like they did in the BLM protests (did your news sources report those?)
Bz1sen@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Sorry but there are like 100 people at each protest. There should be a million marching through Washington… What are we talking about here
jordanlund@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
Nangijala@feddit.dk 3 days ago
There have been protests in every single state for awhile now. At least that is what I have heard through the grapevine. I’m Danish so I haven’t seen the protests with my own two eyes, but I have seen pictures, read posts and talked to Americans who are out protesting. From what I have been told, it is unheard of that there are protests for the same cause in all 50 states at the same time. It is historic, but I’m not surprised that the greatest president who ever lived wouldn’t want that information to slip out in the media. It would hurt his fee-fees bigly.
BreadAndThread@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Next Saturday is a massive country wide protest at 500 Tesla dealerships and charging stations all across the country. I’m hoping that’s too hard for the media to hide.
SenorBlanco@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
And then there’s another massive protest on April 5th! Get your friends and come out, we need everyone who isn’t willing to live under authoritarianism!
Triasha@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah all 50 states is crazy. New York and Cali have enough people to get a protest going at the drop of a pin.
Texas has Austin, you get protests there. East coast cities, Chicago, you can get protests.
But there are dozens of states that just don’t have that kind of energy or population density, but they do now.
Triasha@lemmy.world 3 days ago
There have been dozens.
Godofdirt@lemmy.world 4 days ago
35k in Denver today
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 4 days ago
Yes. The media is suppressing them. See c/50501
Chip_Rat@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Explain this?
Katana314@lemmy.world 4 days ago
50501 refers to “Fifty States, Fifty Protests, One Movement” (originally “One Day”). While some states have more presence than others, it has 50 chapters for the 50 states.
I don’t think there’s as much presence on Lemmy, but lots of media gets posted to Reddit at www.reddit.com/r/50501/.
Their website also links to social media accounts covering more of it: www.fiftyfifty.one
asg101@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Millions protested against the invasion of Iraq, the USA invaded Iraq anyway. Mass protests are ignored by the oligarchs.
Now if the USians grew spines and organized a general strike, that might get the ruling class’s attention.
SendPrudes@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Can’t get a general strike to work when the majority of utility workers are magats.
The algos target the blue collar industry for this very reason.
Transportation, construction, farming, police force all fine if we try a general strike tomorrow. Most upper middle class also are magats. So bank services, accounting and financial CIO / CEO teams all also are not participating.
mrodri89@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
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.
friendlysoviet@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Low density and car based infrastructure neuters protests. I usually work from home but I had jury duty a few weeks ago in the courthouse in my downtown area. There were several protests daily the entire time I was there.
bluegreenwookie@bookwormstory.social 5 days ago
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
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
French Revolution happened while people were starving…
bluegreenwookie@bookwormstory.social 5 days ago
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.
unconsciousvoidling@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Heh … massive unemployment is going to be like Covid all over again. The crazy shit is coming for sure.
Cantaloupe877@lemmy.world 3 days ago
There are many, but nobody reports them.
ramenshaman@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I live in the SF Bay Area. There’s a website that was set up to track protests (www.actiontogetherbayarea.org/calendar). There are more than a dozen today and more than two dozen tomorrow. I think generally the larger protests are at state capitols and Washington DC, which are simply too far for many people to go to. Sacramento is our state capitol and that’s about a 1.5 hour drive from here. CA is a big state, Sacramento would probably be an 8-hour drive from Los Angeles.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Tens of millions of Americans can’t afford a sudden $400.00 expense without going further into debt.
That means they can’t afford to miss a day of work.
And that’s by design.
riyehn@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Which just means mass protests aren’t big enough. It’ll take a while, but eventually they’ll realize that with enough mass mobilization missing work and going into debt become irrelevant.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 3 days ago
There’s been a lot of protests. How massive is mass is up to you though.
Although, a lot of people really like the way things are going, and a lot of anger is just terminally online bozos who don’t even live in America.
Varyk@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I’m not sure where these questions are coming from, there are tens of thousands of people conducting dozens of protests across every single state at every level of government, and multiple stories about those protests in this feed.
there’s absolutely some media suppression since Trump is friends with the owners of some media outlets, but there is also a lot of media documenting the literally Nationwide protests.
there’s a super popular post like a few tiles up about the dozens of ongoing Tesla protests going on that are tanking the company.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 5 days ago
There are, they are being reported. I couldn’t speculate as to why you are missing them.
andrewta@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Can you provide 3 links to different protests?
Not being snarky. Just haven’t seen any reporting on it.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
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.
los_chill@programming.dev 5 days ago
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.
Habahnow@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
randombullet@programming.dev 4 days ago
Just remember, the media is owned by the rich.
socialjusticewizard@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
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?
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Because the Americans don’t know how to protest.
To a Frenchman a protest is storming and taking control of the representation of authority in the country.
To a Greek a protest is filling the streets of many cities throughout the countries with hundreds of thousands of people.
To an American a protest involves standing in a square by the few hundreds, holding signs with semi-sarcastic or passive aggressive messages written on them.
Holeshot75@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m pretty shocked by this as well.
I always thought that America was on the ready to stand up against fascism and tyranny.
I guess they aren’t.
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
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.
whodrankarnoldpalmer@startrek.website 5 days ago
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.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
steal_your_face@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
wagingnonviolence.org/…/resistance-alive-well-us/