Misuse Case
Non-USians wondering why Americans aren’t having mass protests should perhaps consider what happened *last* time we had a national protest movement here, all of - let me check my notes - 5 years ago.
Yes, I am referring to the George Floyd protests in 2020, by some measures the largest protest movement in American history.
/1
Misuse Case
Organizers were maliciously prosecuted, harassed, and had their lives ruined.
And what came out of this?
Cops got more money. Politicians made token gestures to protesters, licked the cops’ boots, and passed little or no legislation to curb police abuse (there were some positive counter examples in the years to follow but not much).
Some state and local leaders passed a bunch of anti-protest laws instead.
/3
Misuse Case
The George Floyd protests looked a lot like what Canadians and EU citizens (as well as some Americans) say they want to see now.
People from all walks of life came out for mass demonstrations: in a few cities, especially Minneapolis, people went toe-to-toe with police.
In, e.g., New York and San Francisco, police attacked crowds of peaceful protesters and did things like firing tear gas indiscriminately into people’s homes.
/2
Misuse Case
The point is that it was incredibly demoralizing for a lot of people who were involved and almost certainly dampened the appetite for mass protests.
That’s not so say mass protests don’t work or won’t work or that there won’t be any more in America for the foreseeable future. I think there will be, and soon.
But don’t memory-hole the George Floyd protests or minimize their downstream effects on organizing, the police state, etc.
/end
Misuse Case
Overall, we didn’t get nearly the amount of local or national change we were hoping for. Or even what we might have reasonably expected.
This has a lot to do with politicians being both dependent on and afraid of the law enforcement bodies that nominally answer to them but that’s kind of beside the point.
/6
Misuse Case
Now, there *have* been some positive outcomes at the local and state level in some places, like durable local organizing to unwind the power of the police state, more prosecutions and convictions for police misconduct, fewer people joining police forces, Colorado eliminating qualified immunity for cops, Baltimore getting local control of its police department, etc.
/5
Misuse Case
Police, politicians, and the media engaged in a whole lot of consensus manufacturing and outright lying about the protests, the protesters, crime rates, the effectiveness of police, what they could do, and what they actually did.
One could be forgiven for getting the impression that the whole endeavor resulted in nothing good whatsoever, and arguably in a lot of bad things.
/4
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