- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
Outside of typical remarks from Donald Trump, JD Vance and Mike Johnson and a Fox News report, party stayed mum
Republican voices were mostly silent as No Kings rallies and marches against Trump administration policies unfurled on Saturday, many in the spirit of a street party that countered the “hate America” depiction advanced by senior members of the party.
Instead of provocation, there were marching bands, huge banners with “we the people” references to the US constitution, and protesters wearing inflatable costumes, particularly frogs, which have emerged as a sign of resistance.
It was the third mass mobilization since Trump’s return to the White House and came against the backdrop of a government shutdown that not only has closed federal programs and services but is testing the core balance of power, as an aggressive executive confronts Congress and the courts in ways that protest organizers warn are a slide toward authoritarianism.
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Republicans mostly silent
good, it was time they shut the fuck up for once
First of all, stop calling them Republicans. The Republican party is dead, replaced by the MAGA Party.
The Republican foundation of Smaller Government, Lower Taxes, Responsible Economic/Fiscal Policy, Family Values, etc. has been replaced by the MAGA foundation of Treason, Corruption, Racism, White Supremacy, Rape, Pedophilia, Violence, Cowardice, Ignorance, Incompetence, and Intolerance.
The Democrats get crazy when a MAGA calls them the “Democrat Party,” so hit them back, and make it official that the Democratic Party no longer recognizes the Republican Party, and will never refer to it again in speeches, interviews, campaign literature, etc. As far as the Democratic Party is concerned, it is now the MAGA Party.
Then stick by it, and watch them melt down. They LOVE being Republicans, they are proud of it, after building it up in the Conservative Propaganda Machine for decades as an honorable institution. Many of them have to be uncomfortable with being sidelined by MAGA, and getting lip service from them. They already know that the Republican Party is dead, but they are afraid to say it out loud.
So the Dems should do it, and give them their worst nightmare - they allowed the MAGAs to destroy the “Party of Lincoln.”
While I love the idea, they’d probably just come back and always refer to the dems as the Woke Socialist Party.
it really only works if the media also gets onboard, and i doubt they’d get onboard with either of those.
To be honest, we shouldn’t even need Republicans to turn the tide. We just need to get people off their asses and stop pushing both sides bullshit.
Democratic primaries will be fast approaching and now is the best time ever to support Democratic candidates like AOC (likely to primary Schumer), Mamdani, Talarico, Chakrabarti, etc. and get out the AIPAC crap.
No shit about staying silent. Even the media is silent. The only references I can find in my news feed regarding the No Kings rallies, is local reports from small local stations. Things like this make it obvious which side the mass media is on.
I am guessing Monday will have more dedicated articles coming out from larger orgs. It is usually the way of these weekend events.
Red state navy town here. There were tons of former Republicans at my local protest.
I think AP covered it.
NPR too!!
You all left social media. What the fuck did you all expect?
It’s so funny you have one of the largest protests in history but it’s like you all are starting to realize you forgot a key part of any of this.
It’s almost like “peaceful protest” is something that fascists can simply ignore.
Protesting is peaceful, but honestly, it’s a show of potential capacity for violence. I went to the protest, but I went with eye protection, respirator, and ear protection. I wouldn’t put it past trump to order the military to deploy LRADs against protestors. Also brought medical supplies, multi-tool and a sign.
Also, for comparison, the largest right-wing protest I could find in the US was a mere ~650,000 people. We just put over 10x that amount on the streets in a single day.
It’s almost like peaceful protest is a building block, not a final outcome.
You don’t understand how dictatorship works. Something as small as a busted escalator can bring down regime. You can’t afford to look foolish.
Trump has looked foolish for literally the entire time and nothing has changed. Maybe you don’t understand how dictatorship works.
That’s why he can’t seem to quite grasp power like he wants. He even lost his re-election the first time.
My boy vlad in Russia locked that shit down quick.
Yea, he really got SLAMMED by the escalator fiasco. Or literally anything else in the last [his entire life].
What rock you livin’ under?
You clearly don’t know how dictators work.
You ever see Vladimir Putin get stuck on an elevator? No he’d have tha footage scrubbed and everyone who saw it shot.
You have to maintain a certain image if you want to be king.
Buddy open your eyes. You literally brought up the busted escalator that very clearly did not bring down Trump. Neither have his myriad of other on-air disasters and the party obssessed with screaming about child abuse has done nothing about his obvious attachement to Epstein.
We have loads of pictures on the internet of Putin in his stupid high-heels because he’s insecure about his height. I wouldn’t go around waving that shit around in the Red Square, obviously, but it’s not like they’re going around shooting everyone who might have seen a meme.
The evidence is right their in front of your eyes. You ignoring it is not a gotcha.
Buddy open your eyes!
Trump has been struggling as much as can to be a king. He’s been trying since day one!
Despite his mind controlled cult member following him blindly…. He still can’t make it happen. He keeps hitting roadblocks from us.
Yes, he’s making more progress than we’d like but you are a damn fool if you think things like the broken escalator aren’t hurting him. You’re a fool to not see he lost a lot of people already over Epstein.
You are a fool if you don’t see how someone like trump looks like a silly little baby compared to Putin or any other strong man dictator.
Looking foolish even for a moment hurts him very badly. It slows him down considerably.
The book “power broker”. The most powerful man in all of New York City (probably ever) was taken down by some moms standing in a park and blocking his bulldozer. That mother fucker battle sitting presidents and won, that guy walked all over mayors and governors, he wiped out entire neighborhoods and permentally blocked beach access to most of New York. He was a titan! He was defeated by looking foolish. He was destroyed by moms in a park. YOU CLEARLY DONT UNDERSTAND HOW DICTATORSHIPS WORK!
Sorry I can’t snap my fingers and make the world perfect for you. We are fighting against tyranny. It’s a long slow battle. Don’t discredit our wins as an attempt to stop us. We don’t buy what you’re selling.
Speed bumps, maybe, but they keep on being able to do stuff without consequence. People are still disappearing, there’s some tepid resistance from a couple centrist governors, and your economy is doing terribly yet he’s still very free to fuck around and post AI shit-bomb videos.
The only thing keeping him from anything is his own disastrous health and the “elite”, the real kings in the US are still allowed to do whatever the hell they want without any major pushback.
Let’s not get too far from the comment I replied to which was about something small being what brings it all down despite that not at all being the case. People aren’t afraid Trump, they’re afraid of the goons armed with guns that will do whatever the fuck he says and don’t give a shit that he’s a child rapist so long as they get a paycheck to go hurt people. We can post all the memes we want but at some point something has to happen about it.
Ya’ll’re acting so frickin’ tough for people that are generally regarded these days as being largely spineless. Farmers in France dumped shit on the roads when they were pissed, it doesn’t have to be violent but you better start causing problems.
I’ll leave you with the words of the group “immortal technique “ in their song “4th branch”
“Turn off the news and read nigga. READ. Read.”
Fascism on a national scale requires the consent or fear of the people in order to maintain power. They have to look strong. Anything that disturbs their voting bloc or contradicts the official narrative, especially on a broad stage, is going to cause them exponential problems because it looks like weakness. That’s part of why fascism is inherently weak. Being able to ignore dissent is a luxury afforded only to the truly strong.
The fact that they aren’t saying anything in this case means that they’ve calculated that the erosion of their base is preferable to letting the news cycle keep running with this.
My teenage pot head kid wrote this.
Sorry about that, let me know what you don’t understand and I’ll be happy to explain it to you.
It’s not true. Nobody outside of leftist groups or media care about this. It’s not out of trying to maintain fear or concern about erosion.
There’s nothing that comes from these protests anymore. We’re in a digital world. These analog solutions don’t work anymore. You need digital solutions. You need a network and digital presence to spread anything you do like this. But we all removed ourselves from any digital spaces so there’s no need for the right to prevent anything. They know this even 24hrs ago. We’re all back to work. A lot of people didn’t even realize this was going on.
Nobody outside of leftist groups or media care about this.
Eight million people disagreed with you on Saturday. That’s a significant fraction of the adult population.
More to the point, history disagrees with you. No fascist regime has ever survived large-scale protests by a significant percentage of their population.
We’re in a digital world. These analog solutions don’t work anymore. You need digital solutions.
In an increasingly digital world, the only thing that does work is analog solutions.
Know what happens if you email a senator? Even a state senator? You get a canned auto-reply. For a while, the workaround was faxes. I’m not kidding, that got through. But then they stopped acknowledging those, too. The only things that work anymore are analog: phone calls and showing up in their office.
This applies to almost every political action, too. Digital marketing barely moves the needle; a lot of campaigns don’t even bother anymore. But door-knocking sure does. Phone banking sure does. Digital spaces are great for organizing and for dissemination of information, but the spaces are too siloed for any reasonable hope of changing anyone’s mind, even before you get to the astroturfing and foreign actors.
Even better, analog action demonstrably gets under Trump’s skin. And the more he shows himself to be bothered by it, the more he looks weak and impotent.
We’re all back to work.
Yeah, I mean, we still have to eat. But nobody’s under the illusion that one protest is going to do this; it’s about the long game, about the conservatives on the ground seeing that it’s not actually a “hate America” rally, and if the GOP is lying about that, what else might they be lying about?
So we’ll capture a news cycle here and there. And we’ll keep doing it until something changes, for better or for worse.
A lot of people didn’t even realize this was going on.
But a lot of people did. People who only believed the Fox talking points saw that they were wrong this weekend. And the fact that the people at the top are quiet about it means that they know they can’t fight it. Which means that at least they know it could work.
Sure, we’ll see.
I’ve said this after every major protest the past ten years. But yes, I’ll say it again and again and again.
Sounds like you raised a better man than yourself.
The Woman’s March, BLM, Occupy Wallstreet, and the first No Kings were all successfully ignored. Millions of Americans marching is clearly not enough for us to be heard.
7 million people is roughly 2% of the population. It’s 10% of the people in this country that couldn’t be bothered to vote. There’s also no threat or demands to accompany this protest. Like what are the people in power supposed to think. An easily ignorable voting block is slightly agitated enough to spend a few hours holding a sign? Are they going to stop working or consuming? Are they going to gather votes and banish the two parties that have failed us? No lmao they’re just gonna get together once every couple of months, there’s absolutely no pressure to a public gathering.
Then nobody better tell me that protests don’t accomplish anything. Besides all the things you aren’t admitting they accomplish, getting republicans to shut up for a day is a damn miracle in itself.
It was supposed to be this dark, violent uprising of slavering feral ANTIFA Commies, and instead, it was a just a huge national street party/ MAGA Roast that MAGAs weren’t invited to.
Now they have to explain to their cult how wrong they were about the left being violent and hating America, without looking like their feeling are hurt for not being included in the fun.
The right wing media is just waiting for the handful of police reports to come in from the weekend to fixate upon, and talk about non stop, so they can make that “violent uprising” a reality for their viewers.
It’s looking like every single arrest was a MAGA.
I just heard an ABC reporter saying that the protests were non-violent, “for the most part.”
“FOR THE MOST PART?” He said that without pointing out a single instance of it, and I haven’t heard of any reports of violence. So why does he have to suggest, on national TV, that there was at least some violence, somewhere? All that does is feed MAGA lies. Now that can say that the protests were violent, they heard it on ABC, and they’d be accurate.
News organizations, whether left or right, should be required to be accurate.
Apparently, the LAPD and a few other California municipalities did choose violence at the end of the day. Not the protesters, but the police.
“I came here to bust some heads, and goddammit, I’m gonna bust some heads!”
“She said that she was working for the ABC News. It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use.”
There was a bomb threat at a nearby Walmart that day.
Unfortunately the major outlets that claim to be more left are really just right wing lite, and at the end of the day they are still part of the propaganda machine.
The “left wing media” is only as left as their right wing owners will allow them to be.
it pisses me off the way they are trying to paint newz nation as the reasonable middle.
It’s worth noting that there was an instance of a hit and run driver injuring a protestor, but this sort of violence is hardly what is implied by the ABC reporter’s statement. Of course, this is all on top of the unprovoked use of force by the feds.
The truth hasn’t stopped them before, why do you think they’ll wait for it this time?!
the whol anti anti facist thing is a pretty daring stance for trump and johnson. So funny they act like they are the real americans.
They may actually be scared to mention it at this point.
Mostly silent?! Except for the video King Trunp posted of him literally shitting on Americans. Presidential enough for you??
I had to find it for myself because I couldn’t believe what you wrote. But its true! He’s not even hiding how much he hates Americans anymore.
God, I can’t believe you went even exagurating: https://youtu.be/ugrn6DNAYEU
what in the actual fuck
No exaggeration at all.
I guess it was meant to be a bomb but they didn’t dare add that much violence to their propaganda, yet.
Poopaganda - and magats lap it up
It’s part of the propaganda strategy to pick their battles. They never speak on your terms. They only speak when they have the upper hand. Keep in mind in general they never directly acknowledge any of your talking points. Not unless they have an avenue to interject logical fallacies and pivot the dialog to their terms.
The moment they start talking about this they lend credence to your side. It carves open space in public discourse. This is the exact same tactic they use against you. And people fall for it every time. You’re never supposed to lend credence to their trolling. You’re not supposed to feed the trolls. Yet here we are. A decade into this era of internet troll right wing politics. People started feeding the trolls and cannot help themselves.
I go into republican forums and post stuff I read on Lemmy to troll the shit out of them.
Can’t believe how many people haven’t even heard of it when it’s one of the biggest protests in US history. Those left-leaning news channels sure doing their job by covering it for 5 minutes I guess. None of my friends nor 3 other people I talked to today even knew what the protest was or that it was happening until I told them about it.
All media are complicit. Don’t just look at one side. Both sides are causing division where there isn’t any. Hate for dollars is quite a lucrative trade in this fucked up world.
A lot of media outlets worldwide are ignoring these protests or covering them very briefly when nobody’s watching. Most likely due to influence from the US.
MeidasTouch baby!
Most likely because the world has given up on the USA and is moving on. Your problems are well-deserved, they figure.
First of all, I’m not an American. As much as I despise the American Empire, I hold no ill feelings towards the American people. They are as much victims here as the rest of us.
Sadly we can’t be that disengaged from the US because when your economy goes under from all of this, so will most of the worlds.
If the situation is anything like Canada in many nations, most media outlets are owned by US corps. Over half of our outlets are being controlled the same as US media.
Yeah that’s it. Excellent input. 👍
The more I use this place the more I’m convinced it’s 95% edgy teens.
Most people live their lives wholly unaware of reality. If their entertainment programming doesn’t consist of anything informational, they will never know about events except second hand from others, like your case. The silent majority doesn’t vote in elections, not because they don’t see the point, it’s because they likely had know idea there were elections.
I had to explain to my friends what “mid-terms” were. They vote in presidential elections…
Uninformed and disinterested people are a very useful demographic to those in power. It’s also notable that even when they encounter information regarding important events, they won’t be aware of what actions they can take in response to it. Not being informed on important events and their progression also impacts how they perceive those who are taking action to change or influence those events. This can easily lead to the perception of justified responses being excessive or alarmist.
Always has been…
And this is the threat posed by consolidating communication and media. Even if we want to organize a movement, we can’t communicate with each other to organize it or share it.
And it’s such an obviously organic and grass roots movement too.
They’re silent because they know all the protestors will go back to work tomorrow. If you want to force them to acknowledge it you need to show up the next day as well.
The tricky part about a general strike is that you dont have much room for do-overs if it turns out you don’t have the numbers you need. Protests are largely symbolic, but are also a good way for organizers to gauge how willing/able folks are to engage in more drastic action.
If a general strike is what you think the movement should go towards, I recommend your next steps be strengthening community support systems - food banks, free clinics, shelters, etc - since these things will be needed to support a general strike (folks will choose feeding their children over political action, so make sure they can accomplish both). In the mean time, it also helps out folks who have been hit the hardest by republican and trump cuts to services.
I highly recommend folks read up on some of ICNC’s stuff, since they focus on the practical side of nonviolent conflict.
This 💯. No kings was a protest, it is not a movement and is not trying to be a movement.
If these parades are ever to work, they need to stop being predictable. Stop giving the enemy info about them like how long they’ll last of where they’re being held. Find ways to spread the word without them finding out and make it a continuous thing that has no end in sight until demands are met. Make sure you showcase you will escalate if they feel they can safely ignore you.
When the enemy goes low, you kick them in the face as hard as you can.
I went to one and it had pretty good turnout for a town in the middle of nowhere in Maine
Two small towns in Ohio also had a surprising turnout considering they’re both pretty damn red.
Dude, it’s insane. I live in the middle of nowhere. Hundreds of people showed up.
Ours coincided with our Pride, they actually marched with us in the parade up to the capitol and then joined us. It was incredible, unlike anything I’ve seen in this city. Do I think Trump is going to magically be unseated? No. But let’s make a habit of this, since I am not sure voting will actually happen in 28, and we need mob size forces to be easily called up.
A lot of these protests, especially in bigger cities, have all kinds of booths at them too. The one near me had like 6 for just one congressional candidate, one for a mayoral candidate, and multiple for revolutionary socialists/communists, along with people walking all over the rally handing out fliers about a general strike.
Tons of people sign up for these things, or even if they don’t sign up to strike/canvass, end up changing their voting habits accordingly. A lot of local stuff can be really impactful, since a lot of the policies most directly felt by people are local policies (e.g. is the pothole in front of your house fixed? Is your rent expensive? Is there visible poverty on the streets? Are the buses slow?) rather than federal ones (e.g. “we cut billions in research grants but you’ll only really start noticing the overall effects yourself many years from now”)
I do wish we could just get all the people going to things like this to head over to ICE facilities and block 'em day and night, but it’s a good consolation that they’re taking some other actions regardless.
Glad to hear your protests had some local political activism attached! Great place to platform and remind people that qualified candidates are everywhere!
I was at a rally all day today. I saw two noteworthy attempts to counter protest the HUNDREDS of “no king” protesters that showed up in my city.
One was a guy who wrote couchfucker propaganda on his car in chalk paint. “JD Vance 2028” or something like that. He flipped us off at 50mph. Few saw it.
The second was a guy that brought his Charlie Kirk flag to the last 25 minutes of the protest, after 2/3rds of the no kings folks went home.
So, one was a coward that drove by one time. One time. I think he yelled something, but since Trump supporters don’t believe in science, he didn’t realize we can’t hear shit when he’s speeding by at 50 in a 35.
The second guy… Man, what do you even say? How about ‘what the fuck even is a Charlie Kirk flag?’ These people are mentally fucking ill. They will villainize and glorify anyone and anything. If Trump told them douchebags were a hallowed object tomorrow, they’d be lovingly calling themselves ‘douchies’ by next week.
Point and laugh. Those types of people hate being the joke (that they are)
If they didn’t want to be the butt of a joke they would never try to park their pickup trucks in public.
a guy that brought his Charlie Kirk flag
‘what the fuck even is a Charlie Kirk flag?’Well…can you tell us? You’re the one who saw it, lol.
Douchie McDouchefaces for long
Are there many Republicans in the USA? I thought they won elections because they won the areas where votes are more valuable i.e. those places with very low population density. Same with American governance in general, like how California (pop. 39 MM & 732,189 people per electoral vote) has the same amount of Senators in Congress as Wyoming (pop. 587,000 & 192,284 people per electoral vote).
Would you say 1 out of 4 American adults are Republicans? 1 out of 3?
340 million Americans and 80 million ish voted for trump. That’s barely 25% so yes 1:4 consent, 1:4 apathetic, 1:4 against, and 1:4 kids immigrants etc
Tough to estimate. There are definitely fewer Republicans than the GOP would like you to believe; probably far below 50%. Many more people in the US are independent and will vote for a person over a party, or at least were. Republicans win due to a combination of the Electoral College (as you noted), coordinated misinformation campaigns (including by hostile nations), voter suppression, gerrymandering, low turnout, and the fact that older people both (1) skew conservative and (2) are more likely to be politically engaged than younger people.
So, actual Republicans? Yes, almost certainly closer to 25%. Probably fewer. People who say they’re independent but functionally vote conservative in every election due to the aforementioned misinformation campaigns? Maybe another 10-15% at most. Remember, “did not vote” has run the board in every election for the past 40+ years, winning practically every state by a landslide.
But this article isn’t about the rank-and-file Republican citizens. It’s about the grifters in elected office.
But this article isn’t about the rank-and-file Republican citizens. It’s about the grifters in elected office.
Haha yes, it just got me thinking, that’s all. Excellent points, thank you.
According to Pew research 49% lean democrat and 48% lean republican. From 2024
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/
Thanks for the link. That’s an interesting way of measuring it.
About two-thirds of registered voters identify as a partisan, and they are roughly evenly split between those who say they are Republicans (32% of voters) and those who say they are Democrats (33%). Roughly a third instead say they are independents or something else (35%), with most of these voters leaning toward one of the parties.
Of course we can’t know about adults who are not registered voters, but I would suspect they lean Democrat. I don’t really buy the 50/50 split though because that would be a blowout for Republicans in terms of electoral votes due to FPTP voting. There are also other forms of corruption like gerrymandering that allow Republicans to win elections with a minority of votes.
They know they are guilty.
