Also they completely stopped once the new anti-ICE thing became popular. Where are all the new organic No Kings protests? Everyone wrote about it in all the major publications and now we forgot(?) and the Tesla dealership protests? No normal person engages in this stuff, it’s hyper activists part of organized groups with real financing
I think you are making assumptions that are not correct. And as a ‘normal person’ surrounded by ‘normal people’ at the last No Kings protest, I very much object to your framing.
There’s a big difference between funding organizing groups like Indivisible (which, yes, foundations linked to Soros do - although I suspect not at the magnitude you’re imagining), and directly paying protestors (which doesn’t happen to any notable degree)
Want to understand this? Go to a local Indivisible or Democratic Party meetup and you will see the normal people with your own eyes. Go to a big protest like ‘No Kings’, or a rally during campaign season and you’ll be surrounded by ‘normal people’.
I’d personally be fine with restrictions on where funding for political organizations comes from (although I’m not sure how you make that compatible with the 1st amendment) - but what you’re saying is ridiculous, and it’s a worrying symptom of our current political climate that people can be so out of touch as to believe it.
>I’d personally be fine with restrictions on where funding for political organizations comes from (although I’m not sure how you make that compatible with the 1st amendment)
Despite what the proponents of Citizen's United might have us believe, money != speech, and adding restrictions to political donations is perfectly compatible with the first amendment.
Would-be donors are allowed to advocate for political positions just the same as anybody else. Nobody is stopping them. That would still be the case with donation limits. They can still get on TV and argue their case.
There is already a precedent for limiting donations. Try donating money to ISIS or Hezbollah and see if the government considers that an exercise of your first amendment rights.
On top of being false, that's kind of a non-statement. You probably don't see average people around you protesting because if the average person was engaging in this then that'd imply close to half the country protesting. But they're definitely out there even if a small minority.
The average person doesn't have the time to protest (because how do you protest when you need to go to a job to put food on the table and keep health insurance). Or they're doing fine with the current state of affairs even if they don't like what's happening. Protesting is naturally always going to be a fringe thing and you better hope for everyone's sake that it stays that way or else you end up with a coup or revolution like in less developed nations.
Well at least be honest that these things are organized professionally and funded with tens of millions of dollars. When major news sources easily refute statements like “the right believes it’s all funded and fake” and then literally they are funded it’s not a small step to believing it’s fake
who cares if there are professional organizers? the accusations of fake/paid protests are about the crowds and participants, not the people that paid to print the posters and get some permits.
both sides have paid activists because it's a full time job. but those paid activists aren't the crowd.
> Well at least be honest that these things are organized professionally and funded with tens of millions of dollars
source? best I see from the linked fox news article is less than $8M. Note, we have customers sending marketing email and sms spending more than this and they are not getting the same attention No Kings did.
> though Soros' foundations have awarded grants to Indivisible every year since the organization's conception in 2017. In total, the Open Society Foundations have awarded $7.61 million in grants to the group behind the "No Kings" protest [1]
Of course there are people who are professional activists. I'm well aware that at a large protest with a stage and sound equipment it had tp be organized and paid for. I've done that sort of work myself.
I was specifically referring to the idea of 'paid protestors'. The extremely online right (which includes many people in the administration) sees a crowd of 10 or 20 or 50,000 people and immediately starts dismissing them all as 'paid protesters', denying the possibility that those thousands of people might have given up their free time to come together and express a political opinion. I think you understand the difference very well.
As someone who really hates what this unlawful administration is doing, I went to my local progressive club meeting for the first time expecting at least a fraction of what MAGA folks fantasize about - elite schemers developing an actual strategy to fight back.
Instead what I found were a bunch of kind mostly elderly people sharing news that I had read online a week before, and some folks gathering signatures for positions running for office.
You are doing a huge disservice to yourself by staying indoors and making assumptions about stuff that you aren't investigating in person.
When people say the protests are organized and operated by paid groups backed by the richest Democrats in the country, it’s 100% true. I pointed out how it’s false to deny it. It’s inconvenient to mention but it’s no use lying about, trivial to fact check the validity
No you didn't. Here's what I wrote originally: One current example of messaging can be seen in the reflexive dismissal by the current US government and its propagandists of any popular opposition as 'paid protesters'.
You went and beat up on a straw man that no professional organizing or funding takes place at all, a claim nobody made.
> No normal person engages in this stuff, it’s hyper activists part of organized groups with real financing
I guess I'm not a normal person then. I didn't realize that I was a hyper activist because I drew on some cardboard and that my group of friends was being financed. I better go demand for my Soros-check from them.
Are you planning on going to a Tesla dealership again to protest? This was top of my Reddit algorithm for several months, no one even mentions it anymore
Doesn’t Musk own the “Nazi social media” website now? Shocking that people literally destroyed Tesla dealerships out of anger and now no one even bothers to show up anymore
Is it possible that you did not fully understand the reasons people were protesting at Tesla dealerships?
Perhaps the protests were less about Twitter than you may be assuming, and more about something else that happened much later than the Twitter acquisition?
They protested un-elected president Musk who will stay in power forever.
Then he left his position exactly like communicated from the very start and people now think that they won, even tho they only annoyed tesla dealership employees and tesla owners.
Many things do, mostly people on Twitter seem to get under his skin quite a lot lol.
If the goal was to "trigger" him I don't think the protests succeed in any meaningful way. Innocent Tesla owner where the primary victims followed by share holder, (damaged) property owners and people affected by insurances premiums due to the vandalism.
And then of course there are still a handful of people in jail for crimes committed in relation to the Tesla protest. Arguably not victims but still a negative effects that clear outweigh any perceived positive effect it all had on Musk.
They didn't care about Tesla they wanted to "hurt" Musk
Musks net worth is about $270 billion more today compared to when the protests began. Does this look like winning?
Conveniently you left out Musk's DOGE effort to take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy that people were protesting. And those protest did have the effect of making Elon unpopular enough that the administration didn't want to keep him around.
I didn't leave it out, it doesn't matter to my point. I refute the part about "winning" because clearly the protest did nothing to Musk it only had severe negative effects on thousands of other people.
He left his position as planned from the beginning, the protest had zero effect on what he did trough DOGE.
You are moving the goal post. I never said DOGE did achieve anything.
You said the protest lead to him no longer be part of the administration which is factually incorrect. His position was limited from the start and he left as planned.
It is accurate to state that we don’t know if the protests had any influence on how things went down with DOGE. It is equally accurate to state that we don’t know if they didn’t have any influence on it. It is not accurate to state that he left as planned since the announcements of the USG change by the minute and don’t mean a thing.
I never made such statements, I refuted the parent posts statement that the protest against musk "won" that's all I did before the goal post moving replies came talking about DOGE.
Elon Musk's role in DOGE was limited because he was designated as a "special government employee", a federal employment category defined under 18 U.S.C. § 202 that restricts service to no more than 130 days in any 365-day period.
This was publicly know back in February. The exact date wasn't know since it was not public when he because such a "special government employee".
It turns out they started counting days straight from the inauguration date or rather the Executive Order 14158 (Creation of DOGE) date which was on the same day.
It is totally accurate to say he left as planned and thus also totally accurate to say that one of the statements above claiming the protest "won" by pushing him out of the administration is factually incorrect.
To claim that his role at DOGE was clear is incorrect. Musk’s position was unclear.
Even the DOGE was opaque and its status unclear. Having him with a black eye and chainsaw organising anything was madness. Even Trump eventually saw it.
yes, there's a group still goes once a week on Monday and I go when I can.
There's also one on Wednesday at the main Social Security office
Totally normal people there, not being paid a dime
What does it mean to "fund protests"? I'm also a "normal" person who has been to a couple No Kings protests, and no one paid me. Someone spent some money on fliers, I suppose.
The major No Kings events were in June and October last year. January is not a great time for outdoors protests in much of the country. Does it somehow make the protests inauthentic if focus has now shifted towards ICE?
No really, I'm a normal person, and I went to the most recent No Kings protest. I've never protested anything before in my life, but now I've gone to two protests against Trump because he's just that bad and dangerous and my country is important to me.
I wasn't paid anything. I rode the bus downtown, thinking it'd be easier than driving / parking, which wasn't quite the brilliant strategy I thought it'd be. I marched down the street with literally tens of thousands of people.
There were definitely some people there who seemed to be the activist type (who find something to protest every weekend), but it was mostly normal people. I saw at least three people I know. I saw regular-looking men in cargo shorts and women in straw hats. It was during the football game, and I saw many people wearing team colors and one sign that said, "It's gotten so bad I'm missing football to protest." One guy was wearing a "Jesus is King" t-shirt. A woman was carrying a "Hicks Against Facism" sign. Another guy was carrying his vinyl copy of Rush's "A Farewell to Kings" as a protest sign.
So, not paid protesters carrying boilerplate signs supplied to them by some organization. Just regular people who are not OK with what's going on.
I've never been paid to attend a protest nor has anyone I've talked to at those protests. Most people make their own signs. No Kings was a bunch of regular citizens expressing their concern for the state of US Democracy. Why is that so hard to understand?
Many years of taking care in protests against rightwing politics and I haven’t received a single penny; meanwhile everyone else is getting paid, I really fucked up I guess…
Who are “they”?
Of course people organise, that is the whole point of politics.
Making it out that George Soros or Bilderberg or some shadow cabal is running the show was a meme already 30 years ago when I went to my first public protest
(Not from the us btw)
Everyone who has money to spend to influencing politics this way.
I personally don't think its some kind of shadow cabal. Its many people/groups/organizations with aligned interests doing these things.
Organization isn't the issue that is of course perfectly normal.
But stuff like handing out printed signs, protestors posing for photos in a way that makes it look like the crowd is much larger than it actually is. These kind of things aren't necessary if there is a real significant % of people unhappy enough to go protests. There are also faces known that travel from protest to protest. It's of course their right to do so but it seem strange nonetheless. Maybe they are just filthy rich and have no hobbies or maybe they do in fact get paid and are part of an organization that lets them jet around for free to be a protest groupie.
Also they completely stopped once the new anti-ICE thing became popular. Where are all the new organic No Kings protests? Everyone wrote about it in all the major publications and now we forgot(?) and the Tesla dealership protests? No normal person engages in this stuff, it’s hyper activists part of organized groups with real financing