The ultimate goal of protest

They didn't like our election results, so they're trying to erase them.

If you wonder how I work, normally I prewrite a lot of my stuff the weekend before. (Just before this I did MER for Monday night, for example.) But in this instance, I waited until almost the last minute to write this so it’s relatively late-breaking.

In case you’ve been under a rock for the last two months since the last big protest stained our shores, the Astroturf left has been promoting another one I told you about a few weeks ago.

And I say Astroturf knowing that the Left often threw out that epithet at the TEA Party, which - it was true - had a handful of national sponsors that gave a little bit of assistance to the TEA Parties in larger cities. But in places like Salisbury? That was all home brewed and grassroots.

But check this out from an X account from a person called

DataRepublican

. She (I believe the person is a she, since there’s a feminine avatar) painstakingly followed the money and found that our government and left-leaning big money donors are watering the opposition’s “grassroots” big time. That’s not to say that there may not be 500-1,000 people darkening the doorstep of City Park or wherever they hold the Salisbury rally if they can deal with the chance of rain and thunderstorms, but you need to remember a few things:

• This rally will be on a Saturday and has been planned in advance for a couple months. The local activists certainly cleared their schedule for this. On the other hand, Salisbury’s first TEA Party came together in maybe 2-3 weeks and was on a Wednesday afternoon (as Tax Day was a Wednesday that year.) Some of the larger ones did hold off until the following Saturday, but most didn’t.

• I’d be happy to retract this if someone has the receipts, but I remember little to no advance news coverage of the Tax Day TEA Party - meanwhile, local and national news has been beating the drum of the June 14 rallies for at least a week. They also did this with previous renditions, which of course will increase the crowd.

• With the recent protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere, despite having a somewhat different cause and desired outcome, we’re back to a mindset last seen during the George Floyd riots. However, one big difference is that we’re not under COVID restrictions this time.

This, however, isn’t to say that there’s not an overarching strategy involved. It’s one reason I stay on the Indivisible mailing list, since I’m a student of the TEA Party and initially, in the weeks after the 2016 election, they wanted to compare their movement to that. (This was way back, during the maybe three weeks before it became viral and was co-opted by the Left to became Astroturf. They actually figured out the TEA Party’s success before I did, since it was in the person of Donald Trump.)

Straight from the hand of Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg, she wrote:

Protest is a tactic. And with any tactic, there’s a danger of tactical freeze, of it getting stale, of deploying it without a real strategy in mind. And it’s easy to look at any single protest and ask, “what did that even accomplish? What was the point?”

That was the TEA Party after Obamacare was passed. They did recover in time for the 2010 midterms, but after the reality of how those they supported went right back to the old ways hit them squarely in the head, they were back to that stage.

Continuing…

So I want to take a step back and talk about the role of a peaceful mass mobilization like No Kings in the context of our strategic analysis.

If you’ve been listening to us over the last few months, you’ve heard us talk about the idea of autocratic breakthrough -- a period when a would-be dictator basically sprints to consolidate their power, crush the institutions and people who could push back, and create a chilling climate for everyone else.

For the would-be dictator, success depends on projecting power and creating an aura of inevitability. They need you to believe that Trump is the new normal, that the MAGA movement will be in power for the long haul, that the only rational move is to go along, keep your head down, and protect your own interests.

Crushing the institutions that can push back? I wonder who that reminds you of? Does the IRS targeting groups with “Tea Party” in their name ring a bell?

Anyway, let’s push further:

We’ve seen over the last six months what happens when this aura of inevitability goes unchallenged. Institutions -- from state governments to businesses to civil society to higher education to media -- start to fall in line, do what Trump tells them, and/or go silent.

Here’s the thing: The aura of inevitability is a lie. It’s all a lie. Power in American society doesn’t derive from the top down. Trump’s grasp is brittle, and he’s overreaching dramatically. He will only succeed if everyone agrees to believe the lie.

Or, as our friend Reverend Barber says: A king is only a king if we bow down.

Countering the aura of inevitability requires a hundred different tactics and strategies. It looks like making an example of Target for obeying in advance and getting rid of its DEI policies. It looks like protesting and toxifying Elon Musk until he bows out of government. It looks like students at Georgetown making a list of Big Law collaborators and organizing their peers to steer clear. It looks like federal workers refusing to obey illegal or unethical orders. It looks like building the muscles and the relationships for collective action.

In short, it requires a countless number of people in a countless number of places to do something that the Trump regime doesn’t want them to do, or to NOT do something the Trump regime wants them to do. That’s how we shake off the aura of inevitability and halt the autocratic breakthrough.

For that to happen, people need to feel like we’re part of something bigger. We need to understand that we’re part of a movement. We need to feel like we will win.

Let’s flip that on its head.

Indivisible doesn’t win if our side can equate it with anti-Americanism. Making America Great Again isn’t just a Donald Trump slogan, but an overall goal, and to do that the federal government needs to be put in its place.

Our message should be focused on that, as well as on the idea that, if anyone is overreaching on power, it’s unelected judges who are standing in the way of enforcing our laws and rightsizing our government.

Remember “We the People”? It’s all of us working stiffs and productive people, not “We the Elites” or “We the Unelected Judges with an inferiority complex.”

In truth, the Left only has an Indivisible movement because they have a nearly unlimited source of money and the backing of the mainstream media - two things the TEA Party never had.

(Remember the Coffee Party? That was the Left’s answer to the initial TEA Party, but it never really got off the ground because it didn’t have that far-left financial support, or a basis of opposition since they already had political control.)

Certainly there are a lot of people who can’t stand Donald Trump and have long since succumbed to TDS, but without the well-funded Astroturf of Indivisible they’re lone wolves screaming at their nightly news every time they see Donald Trump’s face - sort of like us when we saw that smug smirk of Barack Obama.

But as the protests in Los Angeles are showing us, people are being turned off because the fiction the media portrays is not the reality we see. “Peaceful protest” doesn’t involve burning cars or throwing rocks at police. The first hint of violence on their side puts Indivisible in that boat, which is why their initial idea of protesting the Army’s 250th anniversary parade came with a caution that they would schedule no events in the Washington, D.C. area. (However, they have over a dozen events in nearby suburbs.)

Now I imagine that the vast majority of the 1,800 or whatever number of protests they have planned will be nothing more than carrying signs saying “hooray for our side.” Perhaps if they’re like the TEA Party, the venue might be cleaner when they leave than when they got there. (One thing I remember about leaving the 9/12 rally in Washington, D.C. back in the day: the stacks of signs placed neatly near the garbage cans, since it was an overwhelming amount of debris. But it was considerately placed to make disposal as easy as possible.)

As the Indivisible Astroturfers protest, however, let me give you another reminder of what they stand for:

• They want government as it was during the administration of President Autopen: bloated and full of waste, fraud, and abuse.

• They want to keep the slush fund known as USAID going, even if it was working against America’s interests. As DataRepublican has found, that and other government money has been going into these very protests.

• They want an open border; more specifically, they wanted to enshrine into law allowing thousands of illegal aliens to cross the border every day.

• By that same token, they are fighting to keep criminal illegal aliens here through the “due process” they never received coming in, and oftentimes after ignoring orders to depart through a previous due process. And when law enforcement is attempted, they advocate for resistance.

• They are all for biological boys who think they are girls playing in (and dominating) girls’ sports.

• They’re just fine with unreliable and taxpayer-supported expensive solar and wind boondoggles in the name of combating “climate change” rather than reliable energy sources like natural gas and (eventually) a revived nuclear program.

I’m going to close by stating what Donald Trump said under different circumstances: there are good people on both sides. I’m not one to advocate bowling these peaceful protestors over with a firehose or anything like that. Just remind them what they’re standing for and ask them if that’s really what they believe in.

However, if you want to laugh at them, feel free. They’ve been poking fun at our expense for quite awhile, and you know what they say about payback.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.