There's a division in left-leaning groups regarding protests like No Kings. The division is a bad thing,
TL;DR: If you think non-disruptive protests do nothing, then let them happen; they're harmless. If you think they harm resistance efforts, prove it.
There are many Very Online people criticizing the No Kings (and similar) protests because they are not strongly disruptive. Fair. They are likely to be much less effective than something that truly disrupts stuff (e.g., #GeneralStrike, which seems like a potentially excellent thing if we could get this to happen). However, the criticisms rarely stop at "useless." They often say or imply that such protests actually harm resistance efforts.
Then they tend not to present any convincing evidence of this claim. If you're going to make a strong claim like this, you need to do the hard work: Provide evidence (or at least clear reasoning) that non-disruptive protests have a negative cost-benefit ratio. That means you need to
a. List the costs/risks/damage with specifics (not simply "it does harm")
b. List or at least acknowledge the benefits of non-disruptive protests, such as awareness-raising, solidarity-building, message-sending, hope-inspiring, network-building, etc.
c. Make a clear, **head-to-head comparison **of some kind between (a) and (b)
Anything else, including a claim that there are no benefits, or listing a nerfed list of positives, is likely more propaganda than reasoned argumentation.
Also worth noting:
If you claim non-disruptive protests "do nothing," then don't say or imply anything to dissuade people from attending. Are you telling people to stay home from their book clubs, their basketball leagues, or their D&D sessions because those also do not change the political situation? Something that "does nothing" also does no harm, so it's fine.
If you think non-disruptive protests are a net negative--i.e., they actually harm resistance efforts--then you need to be willing to tell people to stay home and do NOTHING instead of going to the protests. Of course doing "something better" would be, you know, better, but apply some critical thinking: If something is harmful, then simply not doing anything is better than doing that thing. If you can't honestly tell people that staying home and doing nothing is better than going to a No Kings-type protest, then there's something not computing in your logic.
It seems like a no-brainer that disruptive protests are more effective, but that needs to be spelled out, too. Disruptive protests do not always help; sometimes they provoke a backlash, for example, resulting in even more oppression, fewer rights, and reduced ability of anyone to protest in any way. Those risks need to be acknowledged along with the potential benefits.
Comparing two courses of action like this has at least eight(ish) moving pieces. A reasonable comparison framework is:
Benefits (and probability of benefits) vs costs (and probability of costs) of Option A (e.g., disruptive protests)
Benefits (and probability of benefits) vs costs (and probability of costs) of Option B (e.g., non-disruptive protests)
Compare A to B
If any of those pieces are not specified, or specified badly, it's not a good comparison and is likely to result in bad decisions. It's also likely that ideology, personality, etc. drive the comparison, placing it farther up on the Propaganda Scale (which I just made up, but I think you can understand the concept).
One of the built-in problems here is that it can be hard to predict the probability of unknowns... i.e., to predict the future, which is what we are necessarily doing when we recommend various actions, hoping those result in certain outcomes.
Final thoughts: Given our recent history in the #USA, I think it's highly likely that good-faith "this is useless" positions are enhanced and pushed by MAGA trolls in disguise. The MAGA regime does not like these protests and spends a lot of energy bashing them in national media, so they are probably also doing what they always do: infiltrating progressive networks to send the same message.
I believe any message about activism that presents only one side of a comparison, or leaves out important pieces, ends up as some combination of #tribalism, self-soothing, #gatekeeping, and/or #PurityTest dynamics, even if it was not intended this way.
EDIT: Added this graphic, which might or might not be helpful. I'm not a "math person" so this might not be the right format or might make no sense.
EDIT 2: I should not post stuff like this until at least draft 5, because I keep needing to fix typos and other issues.
#NoKings #protest #disruptive #activism #resistance #influencers #CriticalThinking #comparison #uspol
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