There are. Heaps of them.
The US is just a big place and very spread out. And the ruling government and its media conglomerates are trying to keep them out of the media.
There absolutely are not. There are anemic little marches scattered here and there.
Americans were protesting George Bush in 2004 more forcefully and in vastly larger numbers than they are protesting now.
Yes, the media is suppressing news of protests because most of the media companies are owned by billionaires who’ve kissed the ring.
The protests that are happening are also smaller and somewhat decentralized. The media likes a big show and these protests don’t get clicks or eyeballs on screens.
There are many smaller protests happening such as the ones outside Tesla dealerships literally everywhere. This is having an effect on Teslas stock but TBD if it’ll have a lasting effect.
People are also attending town halls with their congresspeople and getting confrontational. This has led to many representatives cancelling town halls or screening for only Republicans like fucking cowards. Chuck Schumer just canceled his book tour because he knows he’ll get run out of every city he shows up in after his capitulation.
Pro Palestine protests continue on campuses.
There’s a lot to dig into on why there isn’t a large mass protest like 2020 but my simple answer is that things aren’t bad enough yet.
The revolution will not be brought to you by xerox without commercial interruption, the revolution will not go better with coke, the revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath, the revolution will put you in the driver’s seat
I'm going to guess
A lot of people are angry but there's not really much organization. As much as I would love someone to take 50,000 of their closest friends, march down to DC, and shoot every republican in the head, without years of organizing that's just a fantasy. Unfortunately, the right wing has been doing years of organizing and it's now bearing fruit for them.
Wholly agree. Vast majority of US Americans cannot afford to lose what little is left. We are two to three paychecks away from homelessness. Economic subjugation has been in the works across political parties.
There have been but i suspect they may have slowed down.
I feel like one reason why trump has crashed the economy is to hurt people so they are too busy working and struggling to be able to protest his fascist policies.
It's hard to help your neighbor when you are drowning yourself
French Revolution happened while people were starving...
But people aren't starving, they are struggling. That's the difference.
They want us exhausted so we can't protest. But they don't want us so desperate we bring out the guillotines.
Ok so everyone wants one, right? Feels like it'll be dramatic and big and change and fix everything, even if it gets violent.
But there's problems with that, not only in execution but also results.
One problem is the US is massive. It would take almost as much planning as a moon landing to effectively organize a protest that large, even if you only do the continental 48 states. Some of those states alone are as large as some European countries, some are larger, so the size alone gets in the way of things.
Then you have the problem with getting all the people protesting to agree to a cohesive protest. Where to protest, what to protest specifically about, and to have a solid list of demands. Trying to get that amount of people to agree on anything alone would be huge. Like my mother says, it's like herding cats.
And then there's the matter of getting that info out there. Occupy wall Street and BLM did have a comprehensive list of demands but the media pretended they didn't. Almost all media is owned by like, six corporations, so even getting the instructions for that protest would be incredibly hard. And lest people forget, those media companies are final, so most of the media in other countries hearing about this will have just as much information surpression and do already. So it would be incredibly hard to get a comprehensive plan, demands, and instructions out el to everyone.
Also don't forget that we have the technological spying that didn't exist before. Cameras are everywhere. Not only in your phone, but on almost every street. People even put those Ring doorbells on their homes and that company sells it's video footage to the police, and doesn't turn off, so any protest could be monitored and nipped in the bud. We have whole agencies devoted to surpressing protests and entire handbooks in infiltrating them.
Then there's logistics and provisions. Most Americans can't afford to travel, much less take a week or two off of work, or a month, to protest long term. We can barely afford to keep ourselves fed with what we're getting paid, and if we were protesting in one specific location, most of us couldn't take the time to get there much less afford to. We have to feed the majority of almost an entire continent in one location for an extended period of time.
And if it was one specific location, the hospitals, hotels, grocery stores and restaurants would be so overwhelmed that they couldn't handle everyone.
Speaking of hospitals, if, as in when, the police and military attacked the protest, most people could never afford the medical treatment to be able to get patched up, much less their lives saved.
And speaking of the police and military, we have the most militarized police force on the planet. Our police don't have just batons, they have live rounds of ammunition and full on tanks. And they are more than willing to use them on civilians, especially in protesters. Look up Blair Mountain and the Kent State shooting. Not only could this crush a protest, but people would have to be ok with the idea they would very likely die.
And our prison system, being for profit, would salivate at the idea of getting more slave labor en masse, and the current administration is more than happy to detain people over trivial things. So everyone would have to be ok with life imprisonment if they didn't get shot.
On top of that, not everyone is on board. About a third to a half of the country is in favor of what's happening and have a cult around Trump and Musk. A lot of people voted for this and are in favor of it, because they really, really hate the liberals, Democrats, gays, minorities, etc. There's a whole media pipeline for this that they listen to, especially young people who normally are the type to protest this stuff. So there would be resistance from civilians on top of not everyone being in favor of the protest.
Then there's the problem of what that protest would actually accomplish. Even if you pulled it off, because of the supply issues, it would be short lived. Maybe a week or two, being surpressed by the military and police, and demonized in the media. The oligarchs would simply wait it out. It wouldn't enact long term change, even if everyone could agree with what they want changed in the first place. So it might not be effective even if it was pulled off.
And the primary opposition party, which should be doing anything, has adapted a strategy of self preservation. Concede to the fascists for now, bide your time, then come election season tell everyone that you are the better and only choice (because winner takes all so they are the only alternative) and hope for a blue wave in four years. Can't make any changes if you're not in power, so do what you can to keep it now and believe that if things get bad enough now people will come crawling back. So very little actual support for a protest would come from on top.
And then, if we look at history, a lot of rebellions needed other countries to support them in order to be successful. Most of them had outside influence from other major powers. The other major powers right now are either in favor of the government, turning fascist themselves, or if they did intervene would risk starting a war with the US which has the biggest military in the history of humanity. So not a lot of help would come from the outside, if any.
So while we also would like a massive protest, there are huge issues in the way of effectively pulling it off.
So what's been happening has been local efforts. You might not hear about town hall protests or stuff in individual state capitals in other countries, but those smaller fires are burning. There's been economic protests, like the backlash against Tesla and the no buying day, which apparently was started to get people to dip their toes into a national protest. There's been a lot of smaller community organizing, which hopefully adds up. I think and hope there will be more individual direct action, perhaps more Luigi strategies on specific individuals, as things get worse. Maybe more guerilla tactics, French resistance style efforts, are what is going to happen rather than a massive protest.
Tldr: We ARE doing stuff here. We hate this more than anyone. The change will have to come in less exciting ways than a big, national rebellion, so sorry you're not getting as much of a spectacle, we'd like that, too, but there's a lot of prep work that would need to be done to pull it off that needs to happen first. We aren't sitting by and letting this happen, and we are working towards fixing things.
Just remember, the media is owned by the rich.
Why do kids, who mainly get their news from Tik Tok, not get mad?
Maybe look at who controls the algorithms
Lol wut? There are. Where do you get your news?!?
They may happening, but they don't really make the news. You are still far below the MLK threshold.
Maybe you just aren't where it's happening?
"Protesters in Philadelphia and at state capitols in California, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana and beyond waved signs denouncing President Donald Trump; billionaire Elon Musk, the leader of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency; and Project 2025, a hard-right playbook for American government and society."
I guess I'm just shocked that they only waved signs. In France, the guillotine would have been out. Here in Canada we entirely shut down our capital for months, and both for way less. When will the real protests start?
I’m not a historian, but my guess is that we have lived too many generations without major political incident; the kind you’re supposed to make heads roll over.
We’ve been indoctrinated since birth to blindly love our country, to mind what we say; we have seen other countries and their political unrest, and we ignorantly convinced ourselves that it will never be like that here.
And despite the cop out response of “we vOtEd fOr it”, otherwise good, hardworking Americans were lied to by their friends, family, church, and beloved government for so long that they can’t know any better.
Make no mistake, we fucked up and let our hubris get the better of us. I hope we can see the error of our ways and fight back before it really is too late.
I’m not a historian, but my guess is that we have lived too many generations without major political incident; the kind you’re supposed to make heads roll over.
Really though? Just off the top of my head:
Eisenhower to Nixon
JFK
Nixon
Reagan
Clinton
Bush II
Obama
Trump
Biden
I'm surprised Nixon gets: "being Richard Nixon" but Reagan doesn't get: "being the sack of shit that took the massive clear steps to destroy your country through corruption"
How the fuck did they let Reaganomics slide?
Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW (or similar luxury car, I forget the exact make). "In Paris," he said, "That car would be burning."
Are we really comparing the French Revolution and the annoying-ass, snowflake trucker protest?
In Usa, "protesters" are not allowed to do anything further than waving a few signs.
Even when they start shouting too loudly, they go to jail immediately. And then they need a president who releases them (but he releases only the right ones).
Have you noticed how many, many police and national guard troops they can afford? Massa Musk does not cut down on police, only on schools and scientists and caregivers for the sick...
There are regular protests of thousands of people all across the country, but it never hits top headlines. There aren't nearly as many as there should be, but we're largely a broken people, a collective beaten dog cowed in the corner. We're burnt out. Literally every direction we turn, things are falling apart. The working class is almost entirely one or two paychecks from homelessness. Minimum wage hasn't increased in 15 years despite year after year of record earnings and productivity. A third of the country genuinely believes a rapist conman is their literal biblical savior.
We're fucking tired, man.
There are. And from what I know, apparently the media avoids reporting about them.
I'm not sure where these questions are coming from, there are tens of thousands of people conducting dozens of protests across every single state at every level of government, and multiple stories about those protests in this feed.
there's absolutely some media suppression since Trump is friends with the owners of some media outlets, but there is also a lot of media documenting the literally Nationwide protests.
there's a super popular post like a few tiles up about the dozens of ongoing Tesla protests going on that are tanking the company.
I dunno about you bro but there's a protest every other day in Denver. We're getting there.
The question is how Dumbfuck will respond. There's an unverified rumor the Insurrection Act may be invoked on April 20th owing to an executive order signed on January 20th. If it gets to that point, we will find out how far our military is willing to stretch its service to the Constitution.
Don't be afraid. Don't look away.
It's being suppressed, I can't find the graph I saw yesterday but cumulative daily protests this year have far outclassed the protests from 2017, yet there's very little coverage of it from the major outlets.
Because the Americans don't know how to protest.
To a Frenchman a protest is storming and taking control of the representation of authority in the country.
To a Greek a protest is filling the streets of many cities throughout the country with hundreds of thousands of people.
To an American a protest involves standing in a square by the few hundreds, holding signs with semi-sarcastic or passive aggressive messages written on them.
There have been dozens.
Loads of people in this thread saying they're happening but media not covering them...
I don't think that's really what is meant by "mass protests". In the not so distant past I would have thought every american man woman and child would be weeping in the streets at the corruption and despotism.
There are protests, and maybe they're not being covered, but it's not the type of civil unrest I would have expected honestly.
the media is definitely suppressing it….
They had that protest in every state did they not? But when I couldn't find much on it in the Canadian media, I went searching CNN and other American sites and found very little also, which was surprising to me. Here on lemmy, there were all sorts photos being posted from various cities, and it looked like a pretty big deal?
There are many, but nobody reports them.
You won't see much about protests until we're closer to the next election.
What next election?
It's going to take a unifying event that is unifyingly abhorrent.
Until that show drops, no movement will take enough momentum with it.
Wait until a Mayors daughter gets sent to gitmo for protesting at college. Wait until the social security checks bounce. Wait until the next viral George Floyd police killing.
The tension is simmering.
There have been protests in every single state for awhile now. At least that is what I have heard through the grapevine. I'm Danish so I haven't seen the protests with my own two eyes, but I have seen pictures, read posts and talked to Americans who are out protesting. From what I have been told, it is unheard of that there are protests for the same cause in all 50 states at the same time. It is historic, but I'm not surprised that the greatest president who ever lived wouldn't want that information to slip out in the media. It would hurt his fee-fees bigly.
Okay, I'm going to acknowledge that there are protests, yes, but probably what OP is thinking of something more like the BLM protests during COVID where shit started to get real. There's a few things going on here:
First: People don't have the time off like they did during COVID. They also aren't locked up and less able to ignore the news.
Third: Resignation. I think this is the bigger of the three parts. I know for my part, I consider this a complete loss of the federal government. Even if we somehow avoid a dictatorship and get control of the government back, the damage that's been done is so deep and complete that we'll likely never fully recover from it, we'll just have to move on with things as they are. My efforts are now focused on organizing balkanization. If Texas wants to be a fucking stupid theocracy with prosperity gospel televangelists and the antichrist at the top, who am I to get between them and a good time? Maybe without having to hear about what Daniel the terminally addicted Fox News viewer thinks about Critical Race Theory, we can get some shit done, fix healthcare, get some fucking trains and bike lanes put up.
Second: Lack of organization. The federal government has spent the last 100 years stomping any serious leftist movements both here and abroad. There is almost no living memory of what a real leftist movement looks like, or how to get one going, so we're all having to roll them from scratch, and there's still a lot of the old high-roading instincts that were implanted in us over the decades. It's just going to take time.
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