Tag Archives: civil disobedience

news coverage of protests in the U.S.

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I’m still thinking about Charlie Stross’s concern about U.S. protestors being targeted. I don’t doubt that there was surveillance present at the recent protests, and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the technology exists to track people. But the news coverage of the event was very muted here in the U.S. compared to what people might have seen abroad. The BBC headline was Anti-Trump protests held in cities across the US. But here in the U.S., many people I spoke to were not even aware they were happening. I happened to be aware because I am on a text list for Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign supporters, which still seems to exist and get used by mainstream Democrats from time to time. (So if there is in fact a cross hairs, I am most likely already in it.) But anyway, I turned on the local news that day in my city, which is a big city and definitely one of the protests sites, and the local protest was not only not the lead story, it was never mentioned in the first 20 minutes of the news broadcast (which was much more local TV news than I normally subject myself to.) Sure enough, leading news outlets in the U.S. including the New York Times, Washington Post, and ABC News seem to have intentionally minimized the event.

So either it was a small event not worthy of much coverage, or there was some censorship here. It was not a tiny event. In my city (Philadelphia), I know they closed off four blocks of a major downtown street, and I heard eyewitness accounts of people who were there. (I would have liked to be there but I can plead child care issues. Lack of child care is a pretty effective way to suppress political energy among working parents.) Anyway, this article from Fair.org, which is a left-leaning organization, offers some facts and figures:

  • 1400 cities
  • “At a conservative minimum, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to resist the Trump administration’s many assaults on democracy; organizers estimate the total reached into the millions.”

500,000 people spread over 1400 locations works out to an average of 400 per location. So say you had a few thousand at the larger protests. A few thousand people sounds like a lot, but spread over a few city blocks it is not exactly going to go un-noticed but it may not attract a huge amount of attention. The 2020 George Floyd protests in Philadelphia were estimated at 50,000 – 80,000 people, and those were impressive. I tend to think we may have spent a generation’s political energy on those, and it is questionable what we got. Besides more awareness of police violence, an important but narrow issue in my view in terms of the number of people affected, we possibly got some tangible reductions in the prison population, which is something.

The Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl parade crowd this year was estimated at 1 million people. That is a big, borderline dangerous crowd and gives a sense of how packed with people it is possible for the city streets to get.

don’t block the road

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Matt Taibbi on what forms of protest work:

Any reporter who’s covered street activism knows there are rules of successful demonstrations. One, numbers matter. More is usually better, and much more even better than that (although even one individual can make a powerful statement). Two, have a clear message. Three, have just one message. Four, logistics matter. Five, only annoy the right people.

Declare Emergency runs the gamut in Washington. The chaining-ourselves-to-the-White-House gambit seems to go well, but highway-blocking exercises, not so much.

Matt Taibbi

I remember this sentiment from family members during Occupy Wall Street. The argument was that people have a right to protest, but the second they step off the sidewalk and block motor vehicles, they should be arrested if not beaten and then arrested. During the Black Lives Matter protests in Philadelphia, police were pretty hands off when it came to protests on city streets and looting, but when they stepped on an interstate highway the tear gas came out.

I don’t like it, but people just feel extremely entitled when it comes to driving and parking. Interfering with cars is a great way to get the wrong sort of attention, and a bad way to build general public support.

I’m generally against capital punishment, but I wonder if maybe one way to get attention would be to go back to gallows and gibbet cages for motorists who kill pedestrians and children with their cars. String them up in the spot where they killed an innocent person through their reckless disregard for a human life, and other entitled motorists might take notice. (In case there is any doubt – this is sarcasm people. We don’t need more violence on top of the violence in our society, we need less. We do need laws that clearly put the responsibility on drivers to protect people on foot and non-motorized vehicles, even when the latter do silly or irresponsible things. And we need much better street designs in the United States in line with international best practices. Relatively easy solutions exist to save lives, and it is mostly just our ignorant not-invented-here attitude and falling for car-industry propaganda that hold us back.)