So, I'm mostly sharing this because reporting has been very spotty and if I didn't know better, I'd suggest a media class more afraid of people power than fascists are not particularly interested in sharing the news that millions (with an m) of Americans were out protesting the Trump Regime yesterday.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/hands-off-protests-april-5

Millions March Against Trump-Musk in Nationwide 'Hands Off' Protests

"Indivisible, one of the key organizing groups behind the day's protests, said millions participated in more than 1,300 individual rallies as they demanded "an end to Trump's authoritarian power grab" and condemning all those aiding and abetting it.

"We expected hundreds of thousands. But at virtually every single event, the crowds eclipsed our estimates," the group said in a statement Saturday evening.

"This is the largest day of protest since Trump retook office," the group added. "And in many small towns and cities, activists are reporting the biggest protests their communities have ever seen as everyday people send a clear, unmistakable message to Trump and Musk: Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy."

Look, are millions of people politely marching with witty protest signs going to topple the fascist Trump regime? No, probably not. Is it a problem that a lot of the people who marched yesterday are still wedded to capitalism and a free market fundamentalist worldview that's precisely how we ended up in a place where we're staring down a fascist dictatorship in progress? Yes, it probably is. Some of these people definitely aren't good at protesting, and don't have particularly good politics; some of them are even diehard Democratic Party partisans who intend to direct all this energy into elections in 2026 and 2028 that I've already said I don't think we have time to wait for, and I don't think are guaranteed to be real, unrigged elections anyway. It's not all gumdrops and lollipops; we're a very long way away from "shutting it down" or "becoming ungovernable" and I think realistically we're not going to see the end of fascism, let alone the capitalist order that's boiling our children like soup so rich nazis can keep extracting profit from our shared planet, until we see a lot more "be ungovernable" and "shut it down."

By that same measure however, putting millions of people in the streets to oppose the fascist regime and the billionaire white Afrikaner nazi who bought it, is certainly better than not doing that. Clearly some portions of the (upper class) media are spooked enough to minimize what happened here, and you know the regime is scared because their propagandists are already out here saying the (again, millions) of protestors were a paid psy-op and also working for Hamas, somehow. There is exploitable and extendable political capital here, and it would in my opinion be a bad idea for antifascists and anticapitalists to help the machine tamp down enthusiasm for taking the streets back from nazis. If this is just one day of protest, with the very narrow objectives of protecting social security and ending Musk's DOGE project to install what some call a "technofeudalist" order, then it's just a collection of nice memories. If however this is a beginning of something larger, just as the initial George Floyd protests against police violence were the beginning of something larger back in 2020, then there's a lot of work to be done here and an opportunity to help people getting ground up by the fuck barrel find solutions that actually work; both to remove the fascist regime, and change the fuck barrel world that birthed it. I can't predict the future of course, but I'd prefer to have the opportunity to see where this goes, than to sit quietly in my house waiting for the nazis to come and kill us one by one.

"It can't rain all the time, Eric...'

#Fascism #Trump #HandsOff #Protest #Antifascism #ElonMusk #GlobalProtests