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The Pointlessness of Protest Culture
Days after President Trump called a reporter “piggy,” a group of women boarded a bus in Ohio for a 36-hour “turn and burn” trip to Washington DC to fight for “regime change.” At least a half dozen protesters were dressed as Miss Piggy. They carried handmade “Impeach, Convict, Remove” signs, transgender pride flags, and others wore the red hooded cloaks and white bonnets made famous by The Handmaid’s Tale. A mother of three teenagers, one of them transgender, explained “Something has to change, and we have to start somewhere.”
I feel bad for her, and the others. They just don’t understand how naive they sound, wanting to believe some signs and a long bus ride might affect anything, never mind something as extreme as forced regime change in a democracy. They are not alone in their naivety; elsewhere, colorful ribbons in the red and green of the Mexican flag weaved into twin braids have emerged as a new symbol of “resistance” among Latinas.
Part of the perceived pointlessness of such protests comes from how institutionalized protest culture has become. In the Midwest labor demonstrations and coal mine strikes of the 19th century, protesters risked their lives to hold up signs while hired Wells Fargo thugs beat them. In New York and elsewhere, draft protests during the Civil War were put down by having the regular U.S. Army fire indiscriminately into the crowd. Anti-war protests during the Vietnam era often turned violent, most notably in Chicago 1968, with phalanxes of helmeted cops breaking up crowds with batons and tear gas. And there was the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guardsmen used their service rifles to gun down four and wound nine unarmed college students in 1970. All those at any protest risked rough arrest.
For the women now seeking regime change, what once carried genuine risk turned into political pageantry. Cities now issue permits for marches, police escort crowds along predetermined routes, and the media broadcasts images of the wittiest signs and t-shirts. Everyone takes pictures and the whole typically dissolves into a carnival atmosphere. Bring your kids and the t-shirted dog.
Old protests were dangerous because they seriously threatened entrenched economic or governmental power. New protests are safe because they do not threaten power at all, because power does not take them seriously. Ask the Pink Pussy Hat marchers of 2017, whose efforts failed to stop Trump across multiple administrations. The question is if these actions (along with petitions, social media blasts, hashtags) never deliver outcomes, why do people continue to pour time and moral purpose into them? “This will probably end up in history books, if we have real history books,” said one of the Ohio protestors, dressed as a handmaiden. “I’m glad I was able to be a part of it instead of watching it on TV.”
They are united in a visceral hatred of Trump, and see him as a stand-in for everything they dislike or disagree with. It is not like they adore illegal immigrants, it is just that Trump is opposed to them. They protest seeking nothing short of “regime change” because calls for regime change are easier than the long, unglamorous work of civic participation. People feel they have done something, but the machinery they are pushing against barely notices. Sincerity alone is not a strategy. There is a brutal mismatch the protesters do not see between the scale of their efforts and the scale of actual power.
For example, when Marine One flew over the Ohio women as Trump returned to the White House, fists and middle fingers rose into the air. Though signing your name, holding a sign, or shouting in the street feels good, legislation, budgets, and institutions rarely move by feelings alone. The protest thus becomes not a strategy but group therapy. It is catharsis disguised as activism. The social reinforcement of gathering, even if it is just 36 women from Ohio, validates their own sense of moral vision, that they are part of something meaningful instead of residents in a decayed industrial wasteland.
Notice what the protesters are asking for: regime change here, “No Kings” before that, “End the Patriarchy,” amorphous issues like that. There is little anyone can do about those things, if they are even real. The pointlessness of the act of protest is built into the act itself. So when the next end-of-democracy event arrives, such as a Supreme Court ruling that goes against someone’s wishes, protest becomes a way of reconciling oneself to the absence of change and the reality of failure. Faced with no tools other than a vote statistically very few of them ever exercise, and that only available every few years, protests are a psychological palliative to nihilism. Like calling to make up new rules if a presidential election goes the wrong way, like the Electoral College should be done away with, or that the president should be chosen by the popular vote so Democratic Southern California will decide every election for Ohio women, it is all an alternative to doing truly nothing about the status quo.
The women protestors from Ohio have good reason to dislike the status quo, one enforced on them for the last several decades as the Heartland became the Rust Belt. One protestor, a 36-year-old from Georgia, said the president’s treatment of women was a big factor in drawing her to Washington for her first-ever protest. Yet she described herself as the wife of a disabled veteran and a mother of six who relies on SNAP. Another protester in the group was described as “currently unemployed after spending years on an assembly line building steering wheels for Ford vehicles. Her husband is a fully disabled Navy veteran dependent on benefits from Veterans Affairs. She said she is protesting for him and also for other women like her, for her LGBTQ+ family members, for immigrants in her community and for her 69-year-old mother, who relies on subsidized housing. A constant question that runs through her mind, she said, is, “When is it going to come for me?” Answer: it is already here.
Their socioeconomic precarity makes them vulnerable to political fear, while protest offers them some shred of meaning in a world where they feel little control. Their personal struggles only serve to highlight the unclosable distance between their needs and what symbolic activism can deliver. In the age of Trump, the real engine behind protest culture is not hope but fear. Some hope that their voices matter, sure, but with fear of discovering they do not at its heart. It was a 36 hour bus ride back to Ohio. Maybe they had time to think about some of these things on the way back, before the next protest.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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John Poole said...
1These pathetic protesting women are incapable of understanding they’ve been played but by their revered inherited Deity who in my opinion is a vain most likely gay misogynist rogue single male (OK, gender is a touchy subject). They are stupid women who are angry at terrestrial males but their clueless minds still cling to a single male creator. It’s sort of funny but then pretty depressing.
12/9/25 4:31 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
2PVB: I assume you don’t fancy this current musing to be picked up by the NYTimes since their current subscribers are not open unsettling introspection. The NYTimes’s current motto: “Agitating clueless readers for profit”.
12/9/25 4:54 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
3The only thing that matters is voting. Eight million thought their votes didn’t matter, so they didn’t. Latinos who voted for Donnie Dementia can’t forget they are responsible for his depraved deportation developments. If you want change, protest is a nice diversion, but it doesn’t change the status quo. Vote the shitbags out before they turn their sights on you.
12/9/25 7:15 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
4Donnie Dementia shows his demented decline by crying about his dementia coverage:
After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean ‘THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,'” he added. “They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it. They have inaccurately reported on all of my Election Results and, in fact, were forced to apologize on much of what they wrote.”
“The best thing that could happen to this Country would be if The New York Times would cease publication because they are a horrible, biased, and untruthful ‘source’ of information,” he continued.”
12/9/25 10:05 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
5The Pointlessness of the MAGA Cult
As Donnie Dementia literally drifts off on his failing Preziduncy, MAGA is left with no way out of the mess of its own making. What are DD’s solutions to the election problems the MAGA Cult face in 2026 and 2028?
Affordability: BUY LESS
Endless Wars: Ukraine? Venezuela? Bueller, Bueller?
Farm aid: Cause $100 billion damage, offer $12 billion.
Deportation: RUNNING OUT OF VICTIMS, GET LEAVITT’s relative out.
Clown car crashing: Noem, HeadUPHisAss, Patel, Bongino, and a cast of hundred morons making Bozo look more stupid by the day.
The Repugs are jumping the stinking ship. In 2029, MAGA will be the one making useless protests. All the TrumpSupremes will regret all the power they have provided Pres. Newsom.
12/10/25 8:11 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
6Donnie Dementia’s Pathetic Protest
“After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean “THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
And for any others that report it. TREASON! OMG, Peter is so screwed.
12/10/25 8:25 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
7Sinking small boats sinking the stinking MAGA ship
It is ironic the MAGA CULT efforts to hide the DOUBLE TAP MURDER VIDEO in the sinking of small boats is sinking any chances of its survival. These murders are distracting away from MAGA message to address affordability, health insurance premiums, TRUMP TARIFF INFLATION, etc etc. As most American voters have the attention span of fruit flies, they are attracted to the most stimulating news item. So you go right ahead, HeadUpyourASS. Keep murdering people off South America. You are sinking MAGA too.
12/10/25 8:36 AM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
8Bauer: Voting? Surely you jest. “Meet the new shitbags-same as the old shitbags.” (paraphrasing Pete Townsend.
12/10/25 11:12 AM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
9Bauer- I guess you are giddy at all the “trumped up” news about Trump’s reign imploding. You should know MSN is all about advocacy and highly partisan.
Will you be happy when a creepy empty suit guy like Gavin Newsom regals the White House? If so be prepared to meet the new/old boss running things.
12/10/25 5:06 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
10JP,
Same shitbags. You got that right. Donnie Dementia is following the MIC Neoconjob playbook that lost Iraq. Now the “anti war guy” is threatening regime change in Venezuela. But Maduro isn’t Saddam.
Lest we forget, the government is the entertainment division of the MIC. Donnie is just following its orders. Same shitbag.
12/10/25 5:33 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
11Fear is contagious. Estimated 25 Repugs will be calling it quits out of fear the Party of Grifters is gonna get crushed in 2026. Peter just doesn’t realize how naive he sounds to expect the status quo.
12/11/25 10:04 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
12The Pointlessness of murdering those survivors leads to death
It the end it will be ironic that the murder of those two survivors will be the death of HeadUPHIS ASS and Madman Mitch’s careers. The videos will be shown at their ICC trials in 2029.
As for conspirator Donnie Dementia, he will claim incapacity to stand trial. Prez Newsom should still hold his own Nuremberg Trials to hold every DEEP STATE REPUG who is also responsible for these murders.
12/11/25 10:29 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
13Thou doth protest too much, Peter:
“They are united in a visceral hatred of Trump, and see him as a stand-in for everything they dislike or disagree with.”
You mean like the racist vomit from your lunatic prezidunce?
Somalis today, perhaps Jews and Koreans tomorrow. Give it a go:
“ I don’t want ’em in our country,” the POS said of Koreans and Jews. “Their country’s no good for a reason.” The comments echoed recent posts from the president’s powerful adviser Stephen Himmler, who has largely taken over immigration policy. Referring to what he called “the lie of mass migration” in a November 27 post on X, Himmler cast doubt on the possibility of assimilation, and suggested that immigrants from troubled countries would contaminate America with a kind of genetic or ontological incapacity for democratic governance. “At scale, migrants and their descendants represent the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” Himmler wrote.
“These are people,” the POS said, “who do nothing but complain … When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in their country. Let them go back to where they come from and fix it,” the POS said. He added, inaccurately, that “these aren’t people who work”.
And yet for all the seriousness of his rhetoric and actions, the POS racist outburst may be yet another sign of his weakness. The POS has frequently returned to racism at moments when he is on the political back foot, as he has been in recent months following persistently bad economic news, the repeated release of new information from formerly classified documents that highlights THE POS DISGUSTING closeness with the dead child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and the emergence of fractures within his own coalition as alliances break down and ambitious underlings begin calculating how to best secure their own futures after the end of his term.
PROTEST,POS, SQUEAKING LIKE A CORNERED RAT.
12/11/25 2:41 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
14“In the age of Trump, the real engine behind protest culture is not hope but fear. “
Yes, the 90 % fear they will go broke as the RICH get richer under the PARTY OF GRIFTERS so-called health insurance plan.
Why do we waste our limited health care resources on rich people like Donnie Dementia, a guy in failing health who is headed to the graveyard in a few years? That’s what is wrong with the Repug so-called plan for health insurance. Spend it wisely on improving the health of the under-65 poor people. FOR EXAMPLE, Don’t spend hundreds of thousands on treating malfunctioning heart valve of some old rich guy who can afford the best insurance. Those hundreds of thousands can be better used to help improve the health of hundreds of poor people who will contribute to the US economy.
So RICH PEOPLE, take one for the team.
12/15/25 11:32 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
15Don’t need to protest to achieve regime change at home
Venezuela is Iraq 2.0. Over 70% of dumbass Amerikans who supported the failed wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc etc, don’t want to waste another trillion dollars on Venezuela regime change. Give these idiots enough rope and The WAG THE DOG Trumpists WILL HANG themselves.
12/17/25 9:26 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
16Is they all incompetent or just stupid?
While everybody agrees Keystone Kops Kash is incompetent AND stupid, the jury has been out on MURDER INC…UNTIL NOW:
CONGRESS peoples now say Murder Inc had no legal justification for these boat strikes, and had no national security justification for these strikes. Also it admitted there was no fentanyl. And it admitted Venezuela is mainly exporting cocaine, and sending it to Europe.
Why is Donnie Dementia trying to protect Europe, which he hates more than Melania’s divorce lawyers? They are really spending poor American tax dollars to stop cocaine from going to EUROPE?
At least KKK KASH is happy for HeadUpHis Ass to take the spotlight off his incompetence.
12/17/25 9:51 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
17The more things change…
Saudis destroy the World Trade Center, Repug Bush attacks Iraq.
Repug Donnie Dementia calls fentanyl a WMD that is manufactured in Mexico and smuggled across the border as justification for murdering Venezuelans.
…The more they end the same.
12/17/25 10:14 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
18“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
12/17/25 3:45 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
19Let me add to the pot of pointless protesting:
America sells? leases? loans? military munitions to Ukraine with the fine print of getting first dibs on repairing the damage those monstrous weapons will engender. I consider that double dipping. Zelenskyy will throw in some precious natural resources eventual payback to keep the munitions coming but his own people may turn on him. Those who giddily planted I STAND WITH UKRAINE placards in their lawns had no clue that Ukraine was considered the second most corrupt nation in all of Europe.The USA does have a hankering to exploit distant civil wars and gets the sheeple taxpayers to go along.
12/17/25 7:19 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
20JP,
Talk about pointless protesting, consider the Russian Oilygarchs.
They are losing trillions. Their businesses are crippled by RazPutin’s Folly. Are the Russkies thirsting Ukraine’s natural resources? It certainly doesn’t need the lebensraum.
12/18/25 8:40 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
21The Pointlessness of Peter’s WE haha Meant Well
Boy, poor Peter AND AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE must really feel naive they swallowed Donnie Dementia’s neocon lies and that he was anti-regime change that resulted in trillions and lives lost. Of course, if Peter dares to write a word that DD is just another Deep State creature supporting the MIC for money, then AmCon job would divorce him faster than DD divorced his wives.
12/19/25 9:36 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
22Prezidunce Donald Dementia has suspended a diversity green-card lottery program after authorities said that the suspected gunman in the Brown University and MIT shootings used the program to gain entrance to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Dog killer Kristi Noem announced the move Thursday on social media. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said on X. “I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
Everybody should have known this guy would commit a crime 20 years in the future.
Following that logic, DHS, citing the thousand of Trump morons who attacked the Capitol, has entered the entire Republican voter database in the TSA NO Fly LIST. Killer Kristy said on X, “I am directing TSA to ban these potential terrorists from flying, like those 9-11 terrorists. No more Americans should be harmed by these possible terrorists.
In other news, a bill designed to reduce the national debt has been promoted by Marge Green. She proposed a $100 fee for anyone wishing to fertilize Donnie Dementia’s grave at the recently renamed Trump Arlington Cemetery.
12/19/25 4:22 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
23Bauer: more photos from the suppressed Epstein files have been released. What will not be released are the photos of the parents who failed those young girls. Hell, I could have been hired to play an event hosted by Epstein and he could have grabbed me aside during a break for a photo opportunity. Would I have been inadvertently considered an enabler? Maybe. I did play events where the creepy James Biden and his wife were honored guests.
What I find more compelling and relevant in a recent Netflix documentary are the tapes of Nixon and Kissinger talking about how to survive for a second term with damning and embarrassing info of how the Vietnam War was actually going. Why wasn’t Kissinger imprisoned by being Nixon’s accomplice in a monstrous conspiracy of deception? Anyone?
12/19/25 6:27 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
24JP,
You won’t find anyone today who will admit they supported the illegal Vietnam War, just as it is rare someone admits they supported the illegal Iraq War. Of course, they are silent about Trump’s illegal Venezuela War.
Fuck ‘em.
12/20/25 6:56 AM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
25Why is a government allowed to redact anything in a public release? Oops, I forgot- the old national security thingee. Let me try to redact stuff on a requested 1040 audit clarification from the IRS. Maybe the founding fathers put in: the right to redact and hide along with the right to pardon.
12/20/25 9:20 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
26Suggestions for other venues to be renamed for the demented one:
The Trump Dump aka Maralongo
Trump Home for Abused Teenage Girls aka Jeff Epstein’s NYC townhouse
Trump Russia House aka the RNC national headquarters
Trump Crypto Bank aka Pardons Are US
Trump Supreme Court —oops, that already exists
Trump Sexual Apprentice Show- the younger they are, nobody knows fired
Trump Execution of the Week Show – expanding from small boats off South America, coming to a city near you
12/20/25 10:34 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
27The Pointlessness of MAGA
MAGA – morons are gonna argue- Erika Kirk and Candace Owens are in a big fight against -wait for it – Owens’ relentless trafficking of conspiracy theories about the murder of Kirk’s husband, TPUSA founder and leader Charlie. When did you think MAGA would poopoo any conspiracy was nuts?
Owens has declared antisemitism conspiracy involved by suggesting that Charlie’s assassination was orchestrated by the Israeli state, as well as suggesting that Egyptian military planes and France also may have been involved, before eventually tweeting that it’s “likely” that “the same people who killed JFK killed Charlie.”
Well, hell yeah, how about Turning Point staff WERE IN IT too? Oh yeah…
“I now can say with full confidence that I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage.”
Every cult turns on itself. Hitler turned on the Brownshirts. It’s war, bitches.
Now this conspiratorial truth has put Owens in the midst of an all-out war with right-wing media. Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool spoke loudly for the group when he dubbed her a “fucking evil scumbag” and a “degenerate cunt.” Pot calling kettle…
MAGA is addicted to looney conspiracies, the only way to ignore the biggest conspiracy the Rich are eating them poor morons alive.
Kirk tried to beam Owens up to her “real world” that the DEEP STATE investigation of her husband’s death worked. Suspicious as ever, Owens emerged, dismissing evidence in the Kirk shooting “fake and gay.” If she meant MAGA was a circle jerk firing squad, perhaps she has a point.
12/20/25 12:22 PM | Comment Link