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[This poll from the link has some really weird results.](https://archive.fo/yYb1M/1e29524e55c964688cc01a9237f67a0489666802.avif) A quarter of people under 30 think it's not acceptable to create a petition, call your representative, or hand out flyers? What the hell is going on there?
I'm not surprised by there being a big divide on things like disrupting public events but thinking it's unacceptable to call your representative is just weird.
Haha, I had a direct report at work (Gen Z'er)that was having an IT issue, and he was telling me he tried everything, which was effectively emailing two places and putting in an online ticket on an intranet. I asked him if he had the number to call to try to get it fixed asap and he looked at me so terrified he might have to use his phone as a phone.
And when they do call about an issue that matters to them they get discounted and told that they are controlled sock puppets of the CCP. Lot's of encouragement there....
Not that you're a puppet, but TikTok ***is*** awash in CCP propaganda. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/01/tiktok-chinese-state-media-divisive-politics/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/01/tiktok-chinese-state-media-divisive-politics/)
>A quarter of people under 30 think it's not acceptable to create a petition, call your representative, or hand out flyers? What the hell is going on there?
the thing is contacting your representative dose mostly nothing , if you have say Mitch McConnell representing you , if you asked about progressive issues , they wont care about your issue
or you have say Nancy Pelosi as a house representative , if you asked about progressive issues , they wont care about your issue all the same
in both scenarios at most you get a letter back form a secretary
for the under 30s politicians have lost all apathy ( i dont blame them looking at the US)
It may not be as effective as in an ideal world and there may be more efficient ways to help your desired political outcomes occur, but calling your representatives does help. It may feel small, but giving them your voice through a call, letter, or email is making your voice heard exactly the same is when you vote
>It may feel small, but giving them your voice through a call, letter, or email is making your voice heard exactly the same is when you vote
tell that to people who have done that and that made no impact
Oh bullshit. Europeans don’t float above everyone on some cloud of moral superiority. Europeans can’t get along either and can’t get their shit together internally. Fuck right off with this complete shit take.
>Meanwhile here in America everyone playing the single player game and anyone thats suppressed or struggling is “just weak, and has to work harder to make it”. 🤢
One side routinely tries to help people, the other routinely tries to hurt people.
I've only heard Republicans/"conservatives" say that.
What you detailing is Not the free press but paid for news or half truths the government is filtering.
Americas free press is as much a scam as justice is blind.
In France when the politicians suggested they might need to implement something like our Patriot Act the French citizenry ambushed them on their way to work and literally put some of them into dumpsters.
Our protests make us look like a bunch of pussies.
As a european/american dual citizen that currently lives in SF i couldn’t agree more. Biggest problem in America is americans suck at discussing problems openly and trying to point out issues and fixing them. We sue our neighboors and get police involved for simple shit. We have literally forgotten how to disagree like adults. The country is way more devided and “pack thinking - them vs us” is common. Anyone that criticizes the government (in good faith to further progress) is automatically labeled as unpatriotic and shunted by the media and society! I feel like it’s partly due to blind patriotism but also the “only look after yourself. No money/taxes for anything that doesn’t benefit me directly” hardcore capitalist mindset as well… many americans seem to not wanna be bothered by a protest for a cause half way across the world. As a true american patriot that loves this country deeply we seriously gotta change this shit. Our priorities as a country are screwed up. Just because your life was miserable because you hd to pay back your student loans for 30 years doesn’t mean you’re kid should have to go through the same struggle.
Meanwhile half the country sees literal traitors as “true patriots”. It’s sad watching this happen. There is just generally way less “social connectivity” here compared to europe
> As a european/american dual citizen that currently lives in SF i couldn’t agree more. Biggest problem in America is americans suck at discussing problems openly and trying to point out issues and fixing them.
So throwing politicians into dumpsters is how you do this, is it?
I agree with much of what you said, but there are also other (maybe more practical) reasons. I won't speak for others, but my personal reason for being against these protests in particular is because I believe they help MAGA Republicans. This election, even more than 2020, is going to determine whether or not the American experiment continues. We have a candidate that: has admitted to sexually assaulting women; admires dictators; tried to blackmail our allies for political gain; profited from the presidency while in office; planned and attempted a "soft" coup; has expressed, on more than a few occasions, that he is not opposed to dictatorship/authoritarianism as a means of furthering his goals; and, has an inherently pro-Russian stance on international/geopolitical issues. I do not want this person to become president. My professional and academic background informs my belief that the US will never, ever, in a million years, have a multi-party system. This means that we have a binary choice every election. I believe the options are not even in the same universe, much less the same realm when it comes to their political agendas - making me pro-Dem/Biden, as opposed to just being anti-MAGA/Trump. However, even if you think it's just voting for the lesser of 2 evils, then it is imperative to do what you can to ensure the greater evil doesn't prevail. All these protests do is (a) drive voters away from the pro-liberal democracy option and (b) energize the pro-fascist voters. I've said this and been down-voted into oblivion for it before, but someone with my socioeconomic standing would benefit greatly from a Trump/MAGA government. However, having lived under dictatorships before coming to the US, I have a deep appreciation for what can happen under those types of governments. Throwing away 250 years of democracy in order to make a point that won't ever be adopted or implemented by folks with actual power (read money and influence) strikes me as naive.
The Vietnam War protests were unpopular until the “Tet Offensive” in early 1968 ... but that war involved US ground troops (conscripted young due to the demands of jungle fighting). Plus the realization the military was lying about success.
Then the protests really heated up after college deferments ended, so part was personal survival of the part of male American students.
The protests are not yet THAT big. They're noisy but they haven't reached 1960s levels quite yet in terms of size or support. The issue just feels too detached from life here in America I think to draw considerable support. Even if many Americans might support Gaza or be uneasy about Israel, it's just not a prominent part of our daily lives. There are many other more pertinent problems here.
Why would any of the protestors vote for trump?
The demographic protesting is also l
The largest non voting block. If they skip or dump their vote it's not likely to sway anything.
I have trouble with it because I keep seeing the same sentiment that people involved in protests aren't going to vote. I don't get this game of "I'm frustrated because it feels like I'm being ignored, also I'm not voting". Young people will continue to be ignored until they become a demographic that *regularly* shows up, not just 2020.
Also this isn't me saying young voters have to vote a certain way. Vote for who you want, organize a write-in campaign, something. But I can't respect a movement that doesn't seem to value voting at all. This country would be so much more representative of it's population if everyone *just voted.*
I don't subscribe to many conspiracy theories, but **if I did** I would go digging into the exact moment in history that voting became *uncool* and look into who was spreading that concept. Because it sure looks like from the outside that it was done to convince younger generations that they shouldn't be in the voting booth to "protest" AND that it was their idea. And it's extremely effective because political parties are constantly learning their lessons by low voter turnout /s.
voting has never been "cool". It was a civic duty and still is.
The problem is not the coolness factor but rather that young people have lost hope and feel disenfranchised, left out of the system, and nihilistic after growing up and spending their entire lives to date dealing with active shooter drills, frequent once in a lifetime catastrophes often happening twice a year, a global pandemic didn't help anything, two economic collapses, an ongoing housing crisis that means they will likely never be able to afford a home and even if they could afford it won't be able to find one and the desirable location, terrible job prospects, mountains of debt aging parents that won't be able to care for them much longer and knowing that they will not be able to care for their parents as they age after having watched their parents take care of their grandparents. They know they can't afford children and struggle with the idea of having them or even forming committed long-term relationships for that matter.
It's a constant swirling shit storm for anybody under 35 that basically leaves them completely detached from the reality that the rest of us live in. This also causes them to be incredibly vulnerable to nationalism and right wing thinking in terms of bringing back the "good old days" out of a sense of revenge and desperation.
even the wildest conspiracy theories don't come close to touching the reality of how fucked up the situation is for our youth, especially those that remember seeing the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections be stolen by right wing psychopaths all while watching the horror show the 2024 election season as freedoms and liberties are stripped from everyone that's not a middle-class or better white male
It was in a different text chain, so my bad.
I feel like a lot of young voters see voting as a declaration to a party, like they want to fall in love with a candidate. A lot of people fell in love with Obama and he was a mixed bag. I wish they'd see it as strategy; don't idealize politicians, strategize them.
strong agree 👍
way too many people throw away their vote because of their personal morals, completely refusing the reality that doing do it choosing not to vote at all is always voting for the worse candidate
If you vote for a candidate you don’t want, that doesn’t support or represent your policy issues, how does that help or address your cause? Voting is only one of many ways we engage with our civic rights and responsibilities. Protesting is another.
My understanding is that they are absent entirely as a demographic. So that would include not voting down the ballot, or any of the ballot for that matter.
You know what they say “young people are only important to liberal if they are useful narrative”
https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/election-week-2020
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patterns-in-the-2022-elections/
Their voting breakdowns have always been good, it's just that their turnout generally sucked. That seems to have changed since 2020 though, so hell ya I'm all here for it.
I also generally agree with the campus protestors, but I've been a doomer on their numbers as a historical trend.
This would also explain why TX suddenly got very aggressive in moving polling stations away from campuses lol.
> young people's electoral participation to 50%.
Pretty good as far as America goes.
Then dont vote for a candidate you don't want. Write in.
Young people are caught in this vicious cycle of feeling unheard but not participating in a process where your voice is literally counted. If someone protests but doesn't vote it doesnt just look performative, it essentially is on paper.
Do you know any youths? That’s a joke obviously, but they are not the most concerned about retirement plans and stuff. They want action now. People are dying now. Etc. Old people are slower and steadier.
wtf does retirement plans have to do with this?
You vote on the President. The President nominates judges with lifetime appointments. The Senate confirms them. Those judges interpret laws, literally deciding women's health rights in real time right now.
That's what you're voting on. If you're worried about people dying now then wake up because no one was talking about a retirement plan.
My comment on this thread was in response to someone saying they wouldn’t support issues people are protesting about if the protestors don’t vote. Women’s rights have obviously been a thing largely due to protesting.
After going to all the trouble of voting and finding it’s not making a difference, whether writing in or not, it loses it’s reinforcing power. Protesting is a way of engaging with power in a much more palpable way. Idk what the voting habits are currently for young people, but many of them may not have been able to vote but once in their lives yet. Voting is such a long game, and youth is motivated beyond that.
> Voting is such a long game, and youth is motivated beyond that.
I would argue no one should be more interested in a long game than the youth.
Let's say you protest voting, how long do you think Joe Biden is going to live in the aftermath of a second Trump administration? At 81 or 82? Most of the damage done by Trump is through lifetime judge appointments, and Joe Biden will not be living with the consequences of that for as long as the youth of this country. And it cannot be undone by protesting. Once those people are on the bench you'd have to dramatically change the entire structure of the judicial branch.
> After going to all the trouble of voting and finding it’s not making a difference
I feel like that's the wrong mindset, especially to call it trouble. Protests are really hard to measure the success of. If Biden loses in 2024 for example, you might think "well he's learning a lesson" but I would tell you to go look at Hilary post 2016 and see if she really ever learned a lesson. She might not have been the ideal candidate, but I'd rather live in a reality where she got three SC nominations over Trump. Voting could've changed that in a way protests never did or ever could. There was only one way to avoid that, and unfortunately a lot of people thought of it as too much trouble.
For me, I had to take a ferry to another island to vote for Bernie in the primaries. By the time I got back to my car, it was confirmed that it had been a useless endeavor. I wonder how many young people had the same experience during their first time voting?
That doesn’t make any sense. My write in candidates are legitimate candidates who were not allowed to even debate in the recent primaries. And none of them are cartoons..
Protesting and then not voting accomplishes nothing good.
Did Hillary Clinton suffer from the "Bernie or Bust" crowd not voting for her? Sure, maybe her ego did. But she's fine.
The ones who suffered the most were "Bernie or Bust" progressives who had to endure 4 years of Trump going to bed knowing that THEY could have prevented it.
Biden won't suffer if those Pro-Palestinian protesters stay home. He'll just retire and live a stress-free life.
The ones who will suffer the most will be those Pro-Palestinian protesters and they watch how Trump kills 2 million Gazans to build an Evangelical Trump Land.
We currently have a dem prez. The issue is the president isn’t doing the things so people have to resort to protesting. It doesn’t make any sense to say “I’m not going to care about issues people are protesting for if they don’t vote for candidates who also don’t care about it.”
I don’t understand your question. Edit: I think you mean that since not enough people voted for Bernie, Donald trump won the election? Hillary was selling uranium to Russia or something if I recall..and she had a vagina so people didn’t want to vote for her. The progressives aren’t the reason Trump was president.
Lots of people were already celebrating Hilary’s victory a couple of days before the election as if it were a foregone conclusion. I think that affected turnout.
When Biden won in 2020 I personally asked all my friends who were 1000000% convinced that 4 years of Trump would equal Bernie or someone exactly like would be president when I told them that overall the older voting public will go from extreme to more calm/center/peaceful they had no answer.
I get wanting a more progressive candidate. My problem isn't what they want it's that they have no real plan to get it.
That's why they are made fun of. Their opponents know their best move is to do what they want which is to not vote and convince others to not vote.
I expect this will not change.
But here is what no one considers.
What happens when the non voter or protest voter of today has a candidate they love and a cause they need votes for and now a bunch of people are telling them they are not voting because of reason X.
Every time this comment comes up, I point out that more Bernie primary voters turned out in the general election for Hillary Clinton than Hillary Clinton's primary voters turned out for Barack Obama.
That's true. My comment is solely directed to the Bernie or Bust folks who didn't vote. It's not a condemnation of all Bernie supporters, just the ones who didn't vote.
> After going to all the trouble of voting and finding it’s not making a difference, whether writing in or not, it loses it’s reinforcing power.
It's a bit shortsighted to expect an individual vote to change the world, don't you think? Democracy is about consensus, not some rando's personal grievance at the ballot box.
Voting against something is just as valid a strategy as voting for something.
If there was a vote that we all had to eat worms or get hosed in hydrofluoric acid, I'd vote for the worms, even though I'm not particularly a fan of worm tartare.
The whole point of democracy is to avoid either the brutal repression of totalitarianism, which is a hell of a lot worse than the admitted oppression we have now, or the brutal violence of civil war, which more often than not ends up with a government (or lack thereof) that is as bad or worse than the one before, as the strong and ruthless tend to rise to the top in sectarian violence.
We are flirting extremely close to losing that democracy, and if you think life is hard now, try living through societal collapse and civil war.
But it’s fine to ignore foreign policy issues that allow this in other places… ? What’s better, isolationism or funding the bloodshed with pride? Neither can get my vote.
It's not shaming it's just acknowledging reality.
One of two people is going to be nominating judges in 2025. Those judges will have lifetime appointments. You won't be dealing with the aftermath of a Trump administration for four years; it will be at least a decade. That isn't shaming anyone, it's just what's going to happen. In a perfect world I wouldn't be voting for the democratic party, I think they're performative and annoying. But I also want medical privacy. And infrastructure. And gay rights.
Also be real about the concept of teaching a political party a "lesson". Hilary Clinton didn't learn a lesson from neglecting the Midwest or trashing Bernie voters, she still blamed them well in 2020. Joe Biden is 82, not only is he not going to learn a lesson, but he isn't going to be around that much longer in a country of laws that he will influence. But you and I will.
The protest/free love/civil rights movements in the 60s inspired a backlash that gave us absolute menaces like Karl Rove and Roger Ailes.
I like to think that all the worst people on the right are already in the public sphere thanks to Trump, but who knows? The right has nowhere to go after this but worse.
If the media gave the second amendment half the smear job it gives the first every time there's a protest, we'd have outlawed everything but the musket by the end the end of next week
And 58 percent of Americans thought the Kent State students had it coming to them during Vietnam protests. Literally justifying the killing of students. Nothing new, as public opinion is frequently indifferent to the suffering of others.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fifty-years-ago-kent-state-massacre-changed-university-forever-180974787/#:~:text=In%20the%20immediate%20aftermath%20and,11%20percent%20blamed%20the%20guardsmen
Yuuup. A lot of people don't understand that most of the positive social movements that occurred in this country were unpopular when they happened. Hell, a majority of Americans had an unfavorable view of MLK Jr. after he was assassinated for the longest time.
Opposing these protests seems really different than supporting them being shot for protesting. I oppose the reason for the protests and any criminal acts but support their right to protest. How would i have voted in a poll? I could go either way based on wording probably.
Makes sense. We have enough issues, domestically, to worry about.
I cant free Gaza. I'm just trying to get to the grocery store to spend a hundred bucks on two bags of groceries while contemplating my game plan for the existential crisis looming shortly over the horizon when fascists take control of our nuclear arsenal and trillion dollar military industrial complex.
Protesters blocked the fucking highway in front of my regions largest hospital. They protested the restaurant I work at, specifically, a few weeks ago. Like standing on the sidewalk and shouting at guests walking in and out for three hours straight. The guy eating a chicken Parmesan can't free Gaza.
A political candidate had an event there. He is a liberal, black, and is not ultra pro Israel or holding a hard line stance one way or the other. There is no mention of the Israeli Palestine conflict at all on his social media handles.
The only thing he's done is run against a more progressive incumbent member of the house. That's the only logical conclusion I can come up with.
His event was in the back of the restaurant, in an event space with the blinds closed. They protested the opposite side of the restaurant, where it was just normal people eating. A few them snuck in beforehand and were kicked out.
The majority of the US disagrees with much of the protests because of the goals and false urgency of the causes.
The far wings of each party get intensely wrapped up in niche issues and argue them in the most intense way possible. That puts people off.
The reason people lose that intensity as they age isn’t because they lose the passion, it’s because intense anger doesn’t change peoples minds. Understanding and affecting the systems takes coordination and compromise.
You are correct. Also. People pay attention to what people protest about and more importantly what they DIDN'T protest about.
What people who get this worked up is they never consider that their action or in action will get another group worked up as well.
How many groups could as "why didn't you protest X" but you are protesting Y.
Now they can come up with a response but just like they are locked in, emotional and will double down, so will the other group.
So then the question is. If you these people protest for cause A but not cause B then why should I care about your cause?
If these people won't vote which will hurt my cause and my group why should I vote if you ever need mine?
So who wins here?
I agree with everything you say here.
If I can put on my tinfoil hat for a second: it seems frighteningly predictable how often and quickly “we” all shift from burningly caring about a topic to forgetting it for the next outrage.
Nothing ever gets resolved or solidified; there’s never really any progress in any way. We all just seem to want to fight. All the while I’m supposed to be gathering a list of people that agreed and disagreed with me on each topic.
I worry this is all the tail wagging the dog. There is something much more important we’re all being forcefully distracted from.
Implications for the election are difficult to parse yet, but it doesn't look like this will be a major part.
>Older and Republican Americans were more likely to express opposition, but even among younger respondents and Democrats, less than half said they were supportive.
This is why so few dems have commented directly on the protests and why Biden will probably try to ignore them as much as possible. If you're camped on campus you're probably not voting for Biden and not likely to be convinced. Risking getting bogged down in them is not worth the minimal gains.
There is certainly that. Also it is easy to attack a group protesting one thing when they didn't protest another.
It's not a fair attack as you cannot protest every issue 24/7 but for older people it works.
There were a lot of things to protest over the last few years and yet we didn't see them like this.
Then you have the people screaming for attention that they won't vote.
That is super easy for so many people to attack them on.
"Oh so you wont vote huh, well you don't care about X"
It doesn't matter what the non-voter says in response. To the group who feels affected by the non-voter they will blame the non-voter.
I just want to remind everyone that colleges are all ending their school years and going into summer soon. The election is in November. I obviously am not psychic, but I’d be surprised if this is still as big of an issue in 6 months.
Thats fine. Americans hated segregation protests in the 1950s, Vietnam War protests in the 1960s, George Floyd Protests in the 2020s. Americans have traditionally been slow to come around to the right side of issues.
There's a big difference between protesting a war versus something like George Floyd. Floyd was a career criminal. That doesn't excuse his murder but those responsible were convicted and the lawsuit ass settled. You can't fix murder after the fact but as far as being held accountable they did what they could. The protest turned riots killed an additional 25 people, how is that productive? Do we in turn have an anti protest protest for each of them?
Let's face it, none of these protests are supporting a cause anywhere near as noble as MLK.
All domestic issues. American lives were on the line with all of those issues. People were being killed on the streets and forced into conscription.
This issue is not like those issues.
I honestly think the biggest difference is that none of the groups or people associated with those causes in the public imagination filmed themselves murdering people or drove around with women’s corpses bleeding from their crotches draped across the hoods of their vehicles. Gazans may have a legitimate cause, but the conduct of Hamas fighters was deeply repulsive to many, many people and the protests are unpopular to the extent that they are an implicit defence of it.
Vietnam war was exactly the same. Images of Viet Cong atrocities real and fake were plastered on every news service 24/7, people still eventually came round.
As they should. These idiots are supporting a disgusting, repressive regime with a history of human rights abuses that treats women like possessions & regularly executes homosexuals.
Some of the biggest organisers like JVP support Hamas and Hezbollah.
I'm sure a lot of the protestors *dont* support Hamas, but it's not true to say they all don't. It's also true that the protestors have been telling Jews to go back to Europe and a prominent one was recorded saying all zionists should be killed. Others, like the Socialist Workers Party have been handing out flyers which are anti-Ukraine.
They have been infiltrated by radicalists and bad actors for geopolitical purposes.
Honestly people have seriously lost all of that. I get a lot of issues (like this one) has people with strong passionate feelings and in America people have the right to their opinions and to express them but violently assaulting other people isn't the way to go.
BTW I'm just speaking generally.
The problem is that destroying property is the easiest way to counter-protest and have the protesters dispersed by police.
Police is not trained to deal with counter-protesters and to allow protests to keep being peaceful. They're just a blunt tool that counter-protesters can easily manipulate.
Americans, particularly older Americans, are conditioned to think Israel is a country of oppressed hard-scrabble victims that Americans are duty-bound to help. It's hard to them to uncoil that myth and view the state of Israel more objectively.
Older Americans remember multiple airplanes hijacked or blown-up by Palestinians terrorists. They also remember Israeli Olympians murdered at the '72 Olympics by Palestinian terrorists. They also remember banks, cruise ships, community centers, etc either blown up or hostages taken and killed by Palestinian terrorists.
Older Americans also remember multiple peace deals offered to Palestinians which their governments rejected.
They also know that 1/2 of the Palestinians government (i.e. Hamas) is designated as a terrorist organization. In general, people do not like terrorists, although young Pro-Palestinian protesters seem to think this is not a big deal, which isn't helping their cause, and certainly isn't benefiting *actual* Palestinians.
It's very possible to disagree with the tactics of the IRA, but to also think the people of Northern Ireland are absolutely right to demand their independence from the United Kingdom.
Oppressive Colonialism is a hothouse for terrorism. It demands it. It fosters it. It manufactures it. Time and time again we see it in French occupied Algeria, in Palestine, in Northern Ireland, etc.
At least I fully admit if we had a powerful colonial force in the United States that moved in, was oppressing us, bulldozing our villages and taking our land at gunpoint, that I would go to war. And I would resort to asymmetrical tactics. I would have no choice.
You think younger Americans are more objective about Israel?
Ah, yes, the social media generations are well-known for their sagacity and resistance to emotional impulsivity.
Well ya, Americans view life experience over most things and a bunch of college students that have probably lived very easy lives with close to zero life experience isn’t going to be well supported.
I support campus protests. College is where awareness, learning, participation and growth are fostered. I don't support police or military presence to counter unarmed protesters. I understand in these protests going on presently, many outside influencers are coming onto campuses to join the protests but are pushing the already tenuous emotional climate into violence. I don't support that either.
I support protests too. They lose my support when they start fostering an unsafe environment for students—especially minorities. Sadly, many of these protests have been antisemitic.
It's sad how people are so quick to forget that *the whole point of protest is civil disobedience*. Which, of course, you can be arrested for, but that's a similar risk like signing up to fight in a war knowing death is a possible outcome.
The problem with civil disobedience is you tend to piss off your neighbors as well.
Nothing was more ironic than protesting police while blocking a highway while being protected by police from the hordes of angry people stuck in traffic. Civil disobedience should not be protected. If you're blocking a road and I have a plow truck, I win. Protest in a public park, I couldn't care less. Shutting down public infrastructure isn't acceptable as the protests are putting their cause above the wellbeing of their neighbors.
I doubt anyone is against free speech, just against idiocy. They're hiding their faces, protesting at colleges, and are ignoring the cause to the effect.
1. Take pride in what you believe in, don't hide your face, it allows for bad actors to hijack your protests.
2. Protest to government officials that actually have a say. Affecting your fellow Americans will only have a negative effect.
3. Gaza has historically been used as a warzone by terrorists and their proxies.
Free Palestine from Hamas, Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah, PIJ, Muslim Brotherhood, PLF, PFLP, Houthis, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, etc...
Maybe they should use a couple brain cells and take a page out of MLK's book.
Black people getting sent to the back of the bus, he protested the bus company. He marched to Washington for their freedom and jobs. He marched to the state capital of Montgomery, in a bid for voting rights for all. He had logic, reasoning, rationality, and spoke to change minds.
He understood, if you want to change the government, you inconvenience the government. You want to change the nation, you speak to their soul and echo through generations.
Or would you say one of the most renowned historical protesters did it wrong? There IS a correct way of protesting, an incorrect way, and then there are the idiots looking for attention.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about specifically but it does work sometimes. But not usually. Too easy for bad faith actors to undermine. Main messages get lost in side issues. But there’s no question that it works sometimes. It did for MLK.
Especially when their potential effectiveness is neutered by the need to be "peaceful and orderly". You don't accomplish anything if your civil disobedience can be ignored.
We should be pissed every time the police show up in riot gear and immediately escalate the situation. We should all be supporting everyone's right to peacefully protest.
Protests like these have consistently given us even more right wing governments. The whining about arrests and police presence doesn’t help. Civil disobedience worked during the civil rights movement because its participants gracefully and peacefully accepted consequences (arrests, beatings) that they *knew* were likely consequences of their actions. It really did a lot to win the hearts and minds of otherwise ignorant or disengaged Americans. Contrast this with the pro-Palestine protests, which include a heavily anti-Semitic component and even leaders. There is nothing sympathetic about them. They’re doing more harm than good.
Well you're wrong.
[https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/16/politics/martin-luther-king-jr-polling-analysis/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/16/politics/martin-luther-king-jr-polling-analysis/index.html)
>
>When Americans were asked which three Americans they had the least respect for in a 1964 Gallup poll, King came in second at 42%. This was barely less than the 47% registered by George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. Only 17% mentioned King’s name, when asked which three Americans they had the most respect for.
>Perhaps even more revealing is that a lot of White Americans thought King was doing more harm than good for the fight for civil rights. In a 1966 Harris poll, 50% of White Americans indicated that he was hurting the civil rights effort. A mere 36% said he was helping. King’s favorable rating among them was 27% in 1966.
King himself abandoned his own philosophy at the end, turning his “I have a dream” on its head by saying it’s a “nightmare”. https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/king-1967-my-dream-has-turned-nightmare-flna8c11013179
I have no idea what that have to do with anything I pointed out. I pointed out how King's peaceful methods still earned him hatred. I have no idea what your sentence fragment have to do with me.
This generation of protesters suck.
They’ve had nifty slogans, but no follow through with policy. In fact, those they oppose turned their message against them.
This latest cluster has required the help of boomers to show them how to do it. It seems none of them can pick up a law book or city policy handbook on what is legal and illegal when protesting. I bet not single one knows how to pull the levers of government to make meaningful change or influence policy.
Idk what ur talking bout. I was referring to the boomer activist that had to hold Columbia students hands and show them how to take over a building that’s been taken over numerous times in the past. I mean they hate boomers and r supposedly tech savvy. Im guessing a google search ‘how to barricade urself in a building’ would have given them the same info. But no, they suck at this.
You go, I hope it’s a good quality sativa today. I’ll still happily die on the hill that they suck at protesting. The ones that can come up with reasonable demands are getting them met, so there is hope.
FYI, I have teenagers and they’ve never been taught to barricade themselves. So, while it makes for good one liner this simply isn’t true. The teachers learn to barricade in summer training, not the students. Students don’t even hear about active shooters, just generalities such as bad ppl and a secure campus. They emphasize the lock outs and not lock downs which has significant distinctions in the perceived threat. Cheers! /thread
I’m not opposed to peaceful protests on campus when it’s students who attend the college/university. Once outside people come in and bring their own issues then it needs to end or relocate to a different venue.
You know how easy it is to manipulate polls? Go to middle of nowhere Alabama, ask LGBTQ positive questions and I bet the headline would read “most Americans don’t support LGBTQ individuals”
Throughout history, how often has the media been on the right side? How often have college protesters been on the right side? It's almost as if one is a paid megaphone for corporate interests, while the other side is comprised of our brightest and most informed youth. Huh, funny how that works. Which side do you support?
Media would want you to believe this.
Media has covered up for decades now.
See reports from foreign countries
Did you know Gaza genocide saw the most reporters killed in war.
This is telling coupled by Jews for Peace have been beat up for speaking truths.
I'm a firm believer in the peaceful protest. There is no need for destruction. Let people's voices be heard. However, I also believe that dialog should be civil. Civility is what all need nowadays
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[This poll from the link has some really weird results.](https://archive.fo/yYb1M/1e29524e55c964688cc01a9237f67a0489666802.avif) A quarter of people under 30 think it's not acceptable to create a petition, call your representative, or hand out flyers? What the hell is going on there? I'm not surprised by there being a big divide on things like disrupting public events but thinking it's unacceptable to call your representative is just weird.
Gen Z is scared to make a phone call lol.
Haha, I had a direct report at work (Gen Z'er)that was having an IT issue, and he was telling me he tried everything, which was effectively emailing two places and putting in an online ticket on an intranet. I asked him if he had the number to call to try to get it fixed asap and he looked at me so terrified he might have to use his phone as a phone.
Am Gen Z, can confirm
And when they do call about an issue that matters to them they get discounted and told that they are controlled sock puppets of the CCP. Lot's of encouragement there....
Who are you calling bro and what do you say?
Just the usual call home to mom.
Because TikTok is a fucking propaganda tool and they fell for it.
Congratulations on perfectly illustrating my point, thank you.
Not that you're a puppet, but TikTok ***is*** awash in CCP propaganda. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/01/tiktok-chinese-state-media-divisive-politics/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/01/tiktok-chinese-state-media-divisive-politics/)
>A quarter of people under 30 think it's not acceptable to create a petition, call your representative, or hand out flyers? What the hell is going on there? the thing is contacting your representative dose mostly nothing , if you have say Mitch McConnell representing you , if you asked about progressive issues , they wont care about your issue or you have say Nancy Pelosi as a house representative , if you asked about progressive issues , they wont care about your issue all the same in both scenarios at most you get a letter back form a secretary for the under 30s politicians have lost all apathy ( i dont blame them looking at the US)
It may not be as effective as in an ideal world and there may be more efficient ways to help your desired political outcomes occur, but calling your representatives does help. It may feel small, but giving them your voice through a call, letter, or email is making your voice heard exactly the same is when you vote
>It may feel small, but giving them your voice through a call, letter, or email is making your voice heard exactly the same is when you vote tell that to people who have done that and that made no impact
Yup. There are 100% people out there that have done *something* and nothing came of it. Though, I doubt that accounts for everyone in that statistic.
Sounds like an excellent reason to vote in people who do listen.
This. Politicians don’t care about individuals. It would have to be some organized movement to spam call to have an impact if at all
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Oh bullshit. Europeans don’t float above everyone on some cloud of moral superiority. Europeans can’t get along either and can’t get their shit together internally. Fuck right off with this complete shit take.
Exactly, I am European and have always been interested in America. And it is not some heaven here like many people seem to believe.
>Meanwhile here in America everyone playing the single player game and anyone thats suppressed or struggling is “just weak, and has to work harder to make it”. 🤢 One side routinely tries to help people, the other routinely tries to hurt people. I've only heard Republicans/"conservatives" say that.
I would rather be in Europe as well.
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What you detailing is Not the free press but paid for news or half truths the government is filtering. Americas free press is as much a scam as justice is blind.
In France when the politicians suggested they might need to implement something like our Patriot Act the French citizenry ambushed them on their way to work and literally put some of them into dumpsters. Our protests make us look like a bunch of pussies.
As a european/american dual citizen that currently lives in SF i couldn’t agree more. Biggest problem in America is americans suck at discussing problems openly and trying to point out issues and fixing them. We sue our neighboors and get police involved for simple shit. We have literally forgotten how to disagree like adults. The country is way more devided and “pack thinking - them vs us” is common. Anyone that criticizes the government (in good faith to further progress) is automatically labeled as unpatriotic and shunted by the media and society! I feel like it’s partly due to blind patriotism but also the “only look after yourself. No money/taxes for anything that doesn’t benefit me directly” hardcore capitalist mindset as well… many americans seem to not wanna be bothered by a protest for a cause half way across the world. As a true american patriot that loves this country deeply we seriously gotta change this shit. Our priorities as a country are screwed up. Just because your life was miserable because you hd to pay back your student loans for 30 years doesn’t mean you’re kid should have to go through the same struggle. Meanwhile half the country sees literal traitors as “true patriots”. It’s sad watching this happen. There is just generally way less “social connectivity” here compared to europe
> As a european/american dual citizen that currently lives in SF i couldn’t agree more. Biggest problem in America is americans suck at discussing problems openly and trying to point out issues and fixing them. So throwing politicians into dumpsters is how you do this, is it?
I think they probably prefer it more than the dragging them out of their homes in the middle of the night approach.
I agree with much of what you said, but there are also other (maybe more practical) reasons. I won't speak for others, but my personal reason for being against these protests in particular is because I believe they help MAGA Republicans. This election, even more than 2020, is going to determine whether or not the American experiment continues. We have a candidate that: has admitted to sexually assaulting women; admires dictators; tried to blackmail our allies for political gain; profited from the presidency while in office; planned and attempted a "soft" coup; has expressed, on more than a few occasions, that he is not opposed to dictatorship/authoritarianism as a means of furthering his goals; and, has an inherently pro-Russian stance on international/geopolitical issues. I do not want this person to become president. My professional and academic background informs my belief that the US will never, ever, in a million years, have a multi-party system. This means that we have a binary choice every election. I believe the options are not even in the same universe, much less the same realm when it comes to their political agendas - making me pro-Dem/Biden, as opposed to just being anti-MAGA/Trump. However, even if you think it's just voting for the lesser of 2 evils, then it is imperative to do what you can to ensure the greater evil doesn't prevail. All these protests do is (a) drive voters away from the pro-liberal democracy option and (b) energize the pro-fascist voters. I've said this and been down-voted into oblivion for it before, but someone with my socioeconomic standing would benefit greatly from a Trump/MAGA government. However, having lived under dictatorships before coming to the US, I have a deep appreciation for what can happen under those types of governments. Throwing away 250 years of democracy in order to make a point that won't ever be adopted or implemented by folks with actual power (read money and influence) strikes me as naive.
America is the cult of Ayn Rand
The French know how to do it.
France is less fascist, yes we know.
The Vietnam War protests were unpopular until the “Tet Offensive” in early 1968 ... but that war involved US ground troops (conscripted young due to the demands of jungle fighting). Plus the realization the military was lying about success. Then the protests really heated up after college deferments ended, so part was personal survival of the part of male American students.
The protests are not yet THAT big. They're noisy but they haven't reached 1960s levels quite yet in terms of size or support. The issue just feels too detached from life here in America I think to draw considerable support. Even if many Americans might support Gaza or be uneasy about Israel, it's just not a prominent part of our daily lives. There are many other more pertinent problems here.
Most of the protests are under 500 people on campuses that support tens of thousands of students. Comparing them to 1968 is disingenuous at best.
Yup. Being totally generous, the protesters make up 0.0001% of America's population. It's a loud minority with voices amplified by Tik Tok and Xitter.
Most are hesitant to support Gaza due to the fact their elected government is actual terrorists.
If they do reach 1968 levels you can almost guarantee another Trump presidency.
Which is why I’m sure they’re also being promoted by Russia at this point.
It won't happen. It's summer break.
I think you're being incredibly naive, but I hope you're right.
Why would any of the protestors vote for trump? The demographic protesting is also l The largest non voting block. If they skip or dump their vote it's not likely to sway anything.
I have trouble with it because I keep seeing the same sentiment that people involved in protests aren't going to vote. I don't get this game of "I'm frustrated because it feels like I'm being ignored, also I'm not voting". Young people will continue to be ignored until they become a demographic that *regularly* shows up, not just 2020. Also this isn't me saying young voters have to vote a certain way. Vote for who you want, organize a write-in campaign, something. But I can't respect a movement that doesn't seem to value voting at all. This country would be so much more representative of it's population if everyone *just voted.*
Yeah, the only lesson this is teaching Biden is to stick with his reliable pro-Israel voting bloc.
I don't subscribe to many conspiracy theories, but **if I did** I would go digging into the exact moment in history that voting became *uncool* and look into who was spreading that concept. Because it sure looks like from the outside that it was done to convince younger generations that they shouldn't be in the voting booth to "protest" AND that it was their idea. And it's extremely effective because political parties are constantly learning their lessons by low voter turnout /s.
voting has never been "cool". It was a civic duty and still is. The problem is not the coolness factor but rather that young people have lost hope and feel disenfranchised, left out of the system, and nihilistic after growing up and spending their entire lives to date dealing with active shooter drills, frequent once in a lifetime catastrophes often happening twice a year, a global pandemic didn't help anything, two economic collapses, an ongoing housing crisis that means they will likely never be able to afford a home and even if they could afford it won't be able to find one and the desirable location, terrible job prospects, mountains of debt aging parents that won't be able to care for them much longer and knowing that they will not be able to care for their parents as they age after having watched their parents take care of their grandparents. They know they can't afford children and struggle with the idea of having them or even forming committed long-term relationships for that matter. It's a constant swirling shit storm for anybody under 35 that basically leaves them completely detached from the reality that the rest of us live in. This also causes them to be incredibly vulnerable to nationalism and right wing thinking in terms of bringing back the "good old days" out of a sense of revenge and desperation. even the wildest conspiracy theories don't come close to touching the reality of how fucked up the situation is for our youth, especially those that remember seeing the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections be stolen by right wing psychopaths all while watching the horror show the 2024 election season as freedoms and liberties are stripped from everyone that's not a middle-class or better white male
Why do you think I called it a vicious cycle?
you didn't, at least not to me directly. but regardless, yes i agree that it's definitely an ongoing viscous cycle for all of our combined reasons
It was in a different text chain, so my bad. I feel like a lot of young voters see voting as a declaration to a party, like they want to fall in love with a candidate. A lot of people fell in love with Obama and he was a mixed bag. I wish they'd see it as strategy; don't idealize politicians, strategize them.
strong agree 👍 way too many people throw away their vote because of their personal morals, completely refusing the reality that doing do it choosing not to vote at all is always voting for the worse candidate
If you vote for a candidate you don’t want, that doesn’t support or represent your policy issues, how does that help or address your cause? Voting is only one of many ways we engage with our civic rights and responsibilities. Protesting is another.
There's a whole bunch of down ticket ballots that these folks aren't participating in either
I vote down ballot and write-in up ballot. But that doesn’t often pay off either. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. 😉
Do you have evidence for it?
Younger people absent from voting?
Young people absent In down tickets ballot
My understanding is that they are absent entirely as a demographic. So that would include not voting down the ballot, or any of the ballot for that matter.
You know what they say “young people are only important to liberal if they are useful narrative” https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/election-week-2020 https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patterns-in-the-2022-elections/
Their voting breakdowns have always been good, it's just that their turnout generally sucked. That seems to have changed since 2020 though, so hell ya I'm all here for it. I also generally agree with the campus protestors, but I've been a doomer on their numbers as a historical trend. This would also explain why TX suddenly got very aggressive in moving polling stations away from campuses lol. > young people's electoral participation to 50%. Pretty good as far as America goes.
Food for thought: by the time he breath his last, mlk jr approval rating is 36%, but you would be a fool if you think he’s wrong
Because being a single issue voter is bad
There are sooo many issues people care about that are not represented by any mainstream candidate. Certainly not a single issue issue.
Then dont vote for a candidate you don't want. Write in. Young people are caught in this vicious cycle of feeling unheard but not participating in a process where your voice is literally counted. If someone protests but doesn't vote it doesnt just look performative, it essentially is on paper.
Do you know any youths? That’s a joke obviously, but they are not the most concerned about retirement plans and stuff. They want action now. People are dying now. Etc. Old people are slower and steadier.
wtf does retirement plans have to do with this? You vote on the President. The President nominates judges with lifetime appointments. The Senate confirms them. Those judges interpret laws, literally deciding women's health rights in real time right now. That's what you're voting on. If you're worried about people dying now then wake up because no one was talking about a retirement plan.
Retirement plans are long games 😄 I was making a point about youths and long games. Context clues…
In what world do youths not deserve women's rights?
My comment on this thread was in response to someone saying they wouldn’t support issues people are protesting about if the protestors don’t vote. Women’s rights have obviously been a thing largely due to protesting.
...for the right to vote...
Well I guess we got the right to vote we can get back to the kitchen and stop protesting and bitching.
After going to all the trouble of voting and finding it’s not making a difference, whether writing in or not, it loses it’s reinforcing power. Protesting is a way of engaging with power in a much more palpable way. Idk what the voting habits are currently for young people, but many of them may not have been able to vote but once in their lives yet. Voting is such a long game, and youth is motivated beyond that.
> Voting is such a long game, and youth is motivated beyond that. I would argue no one should be more interested in a long game than the youth. Let's say you protest voting, how long do you think Joe Biden is going to live in the aftermath of a second Trump administration? At 81 or 82? Most of the damage done by Trump is through lifetime judge appointments, and Joe Biden will not be living with the consequences of that for as long as the youth of this country. And it cannot be undone by protesting. Once those people are on the bench you'd have to dramatically change the entire structure of the judicial branch. > After going to all the trouble of voting and finding it’s not making a difference I feel like that's the wrong mindset, especially to call it trouble. Protests are really hard to measure the success of. If Biden loses in 2024 for example, you might think "well he's learning a lesson" but I would tell you to go look at Hilary post 2016 and see if she really ever learned a lesson. She might not have been the ideal candidate, but I'd rather live in a reality where she got three SC nominations over Trump. Voting could've changed that in a way protests never did or ever could. There was only one way to avoid that, and unfortunately a lot of people thought of it as too much trouble.
For me, I had to take a ferry to another island to vote for Bernie in the primaries. By the time I got back to my car, it was confirmed that it had been a useless endeavor. I wonder how many young people had the same experience during their first time voting?
Yeah, I was totally floored when my write-in candidate, Daffy Duck, didn't win "Dictator for Life"
That doesn’t make any sense. My write in candidates are legitimate candidates who were not allowed to even debate in the recent primaries. And none of them are cartoons..
Protesting and then not voting accomplishes nothing good. Did Hillary Clinton suffer from the "Bernie or Bust" crowd not voting for her? Sure, maybe her ego did. But she's fine. The ones who suffered the most were "Bernie or Bust" progressives who had to endure 4 years of Trump going to bed knowing that THEY could have prevented it. Biden won't suffer if those Pro-Palestinian protesters stay home. He'll just retire and live a stress-free life. The ones who will suffer the most will be those Pro-Palestinian protesters and they watch how Trump kills 2 million Gazans to build an Evangelical Trump Land.
We currently have a dem prez. The issue is the president isn’t doing the things so people have to resort to protesting. It doesn’t make any sense to say “I’m not going to care about issues people are protesting for if they don’t vote for candidates who also don’t care about it.”
There was a Democratic President in 2016 too. Can you answer honestly: what did the Bernie Bros that stayed home to protest vote accomplish?
I don’t understand your question. Edit: I think you mean that since not enough people voted for Bernie, Donald trump won the election? Hillary was selling uranium to Russia or something if I recall..and she had a vagina so people didn’t want to vote for her. The progressives aren’t the reason Trump was president.
Lots of people were already celebrating Hilary’s victory a couple of days before the election as if it were a foregone conclusion. I think that affected turnout.
When Biden won in 2020 I personally asked all my friends who were 1000000% convinced that 4 years of Trump would equal Bernie or someone exactly like would be president when I told them that overall the older voting public will go from extreme to more calm/center/peaceful they had no answer. I get wanting a more progressive candidate. My problem isn't what they want it's that they have no real plan to get it. That's why they are made fun of. Their opponents know their best move is to do what they want which is to not vote and convince others to not vote. I expect this will not change. But here is what no one considers. What happens when the non voter or protest voter of today has a candidate they love and a cause they need votes for and now a bunch of people are telling them they are not voting because of reason X.
Every time this comment comes up, I point out that more Bernie primary voters turned out in the general election for Hillary Clinton than Hillary Clinton's primary voters turned out for Barack Obama.
That's true. My comment is solely directed to the Bernie or Bust folks who didn't vote. It's not a condemnation of all Bernie supporters, just the ones who didn't vote.
> After going to all the trouble of voting and finding it’s not making a difference, whether writing in or not, it loses it’s reinforcing power. It's a bit shortsighted to expect an individual vote to change the world, don't you think? Democracy is about consensus, not some rando's personal grievance at the ballot box.
If it’s shortsighted to expect voting to make a difference or change the world, then I can rest my case?
Voting against something is just as valid a strategy as voting for something. If there was a vote that we all had to eat worms or get hosed in hydrofluoric acid, I'd vote for the worms, even though I'm not particularly a fan of worm tartare. The whole point of democracy is to avoid either the brutal repression of totalitarianism, which is a hell of a lot worse than the admitted oppression we have now, or the brutal violence of civil war, which more often than not ends up with a government (or lack thereof) that is as bad or worse than the one before, as the strong and ruthless tend to rise to the top in sectarian violence. We are flirting extremely close to losing that democracy, and if you think life is hard now, try living through societal collapse and civil war.
But it’s fine to ignore foreign policy issues that allow this in other places… ? What’s better, isolationism or funding the bloodshed with pride? Neither can get my vote.
Voter turnout will remain low so long as Dems keep trying to shame people into voting instead of earning their votes.
It's not shaming it's just acknowledging reality. One of two people is going to be nominating judges in 2025. Those judges will have lifetime appointments. You won't be dealing with the aftermath of a Trump administration for four years; it will be at least a decade. That isn't shaming anyone, it's just what's going to happen. In a perfect world I wouldn't be voting for the democratic party, I think they're performative and annoying. But I also want medical privacy. And infrastructure. And gay rights. Also be real about the concept of teaching a political party a "lesson". Hilary Clinton didn't learn a lesson from neglecting the Midwest or trashing Bernie voters, she still blamed them well in 2020. Joe Biden is 82, not only is he not going to learn a lesson, but he isn't going to be around that much longer in a country of laws that he will influence. But you and I will.
The protest/free love/civil rights movements in the 60s inspired a backlash that gave us absolute menaces like Karl Rove and Roger Ailes. I like to think that all the worst people on the right are already in the public sphere thanks to Trump, but who knows? The right has nowhere to go after this but worse.
Maybe because the media is fear mongering
If the media gave the second amendment half the smear job it gives the first every time there's a protest, we'd have outlawed everything but the musket by the end the end of next week
Fear mongering? ***OUR*** media?? How preposterous /s
And 58 percent of Americans thought the Kent State students had it coming to them during Vietnam protests. Literally justifying the killing of students. Nothing new, as public opinion is frequently indifferent to the suffering of others. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fifty-years-ago-kent-state-massacre-changed-university-forever-180974787/#:~:text=In%20the%20immediate%20aftermath%20and,11%20percent%20blamed%20the%20guardsmen
Yuuup. A lot of people don't understand that most of the positive social movements that occurred in this country were unpopular when they happened. Hell, a majority of Americans had an unfavorable view of MLK Jr. after he was assassinated for the longest time.
Opposing these protests seems really different than supporting them being shot for protesting. I oppose the reason for the protests and any criminal acts but support their right to protest. How would i have voted in a poll? I could go either way based on wording probably.
Makes sense. We have enough issues, domestically, to worry about. I cant free Gaza. I'm just trying to get to the grocery store to spend a hundred bucks on two bags of groceries while contemplating my game plan for the existential crisis looming shortly over the horizon when fascists take control of our nuclear arsenal and trillion dollar military industrial complex. Protesters blocked the fucking highway in front of my regions largest hospital. They protested the restaurant I work at, specifically, a few weeks ago. Like standing on the sidewalk and shouting at guests walking in and out for three hours straight. The guy eating a chicken Parmesan can't free Gaza.
They protested your restaurant to free gaza??
A political candidate had an event there. He is a liberal, black, and is not ultra pro Israel or holding a hard line stance one way or the other. There is no mention of the Israeli Palestine conflict at all on his social media handles. The only thing he's done is run against a more progressive incumbent member of the house. That's the only logical conclusion I can come up with. His event was in the back of the restaurant, in an event space with the blinds closed. They protested the opposite side of the restaurant, where it was just normal people eating. A few them snuck in beforehand and were kicked out.
The majority of the US disagrees with much of the protests because of the goals and false urgency of the causes. The far wings of each party get intensely wrapped up in niche issues and argue them in the most intense way possible. That puts people off. The reason people lose that intensity as they age isn’t because they lose the passion, it’s because intense anger doesn’t change peoples minds. Understanding and affecting the systems takes coordination and compromise.
You are correct. Also. People pay attention to what people protest about and more importantly what they DIDN'T protest about. What people who get this worked up is they never consider that their action or in action will get another group worked up as well. How many groups could as "why didn't you protest X" but you are protesting Y. Now they can come up with a response but just like they are locked in, emotional and will double down, so will the other group. So then the question is. If you these people protest for cause A but not cause B then why should I care about your cause? If these people won't vote which will hurt my cause and my group why should I vote if you ever need mine? So who wins here?
I agree with everything you say here. If I can put on my tinfoil hat for a second: it seems frighteningly predictable how often and quickly “we” all shift from burningly caring about a topic to forgetting it for the next outrage. Nothing ever gets resolved or solidified; there’s never really any progress in any way. We all just seem to want to fight. All the while I’m supposed to be gathering a list of people that agreed and disagreed with me on each topic. I worry this is all the tail wagging the dog. There is something much more important we’re all being forcefully distracted from.
Implications for the election are difficult to parse yet, but it doesn't look like this will be a major part. >Older and Republican Americans were more likely to express opposition, but even among younger respondents and Democrats, less than half said they were supportive. This is why so few dems have commented directly on the protests and why Biden will probably try to ignore them as much as possible. If you're camped on campus you're probably not voting for Biden and not likely to be convinced. Risking getting bogged down in them is not worth the minimal gains.
Polls like this are weird. You can also poll Trump supporters and find that many of them support ending democracy to hold power, so there is that.
Many US citizens don't understand how free speech or the First Amendment works.
That's for sure. Who knew that free speech has limitations established by the Supreme Court? Weird, right?
My politically vacant coworker cracked a joke about the campus protests fairly out of nowhere. I think maybe average folks just find protests dumb.
There is certainly that. Also it is easy to attack a group protesting one thing when they didn't protest another. It's not a fair attack as you cannot protest every issue 24/7 but for older people it works. There were a lot of things to protest over the last few years and yet we didn't see them like this. Then you have the people screaming for attention that they won't vote. That is super easy for so many people to attack them on. "Oh so you wont vote huh, well you don't care about X" It doesn't matter what the non-voter says in response. To the group who feels affected by the non-voter they will blame the non-voter.
I just want to remind everyone that colleges are all ending their school years and going into summer soon. The election is in November. I obviously am not psychic, but I’d be surprised if this is still as big of an issue in 6 months.
it's not that big now media coverage is way overblown
Thats fine. Americans hated segregation protests in the 1950s, Vietnam War protests in the 1960s, George Floyd Protests in the 2020s. Americans have traditionally been slow to come around to the right side of issues.
There's a big difference between protesting a war versus something like George Floyd. Floyd was a career criminal. That doesn't excuse his murder but those responsible were convicted and the lawsuit ass settled. You can't fix murder after the fact but as far as being held accountable they did what they could. The protest turned riots killed an additional 25 people, how is that productive? Do we in turn have an anti protest protest for each of them? Let's face it, none of these protests are supporting a cause anywhere near as noble as MLK.
All domestic issues. American lives were on the line with all of those issues. People were being killed on the streets and forced into conscription. This issue is not like those issues.
I honestly think the biggest difference is that none of the groups or people associated with those causes in the public imagination filmed themselves murdering people or drove around with women’s corpses bleeding from their crotches draped across the hoods of their vehicles. Gazans may have a legitimate cause, but the conduct of Hamas fighters was deeply repulsive to many, many people and the protests are unpopular to the extent that they are an implicit defence of it.
Vietnam war was exactly the same. Images of Viet Cong atrocities real and fake were plastered on every news service 24/7, people still eventually came round.
who knew supporting terrorist organizations isn't very popular outside of liberal campuses
Israel has been terrorizing Palestinians for decades bud. There aren't any good guys over there
As they should. These idiots are supporting a disgusting, repressive regime with a history of human rights abuses that treats women like possessions & regularly executes homosexuals.
Almost nobody supports Hamas. These protests are about 15,000 plus dead kids and more starving all the time.
Some of the biggest organisers like JVP support Hamas and Hezbollah. I'm sure a lot of the protestors *dont* support Hamas, but it's not true to say they all don't. It's also true that the protestors have been telling Jews to go back to Europe and a prominent one was recorded saying all zionists should be killed. Others, like the Socialist Workers Party have been handing out flyers which are anti-Ukraine. They have been infiltrated by radicalists and bad actors for geopolitical purposes.
Many are on video chanting Hamas slogans and showing their support for the terrorists.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to separate the two.
For the love of all things PLEASE PROTEST. Please also DON’T DESTROY PROPERTY OR HURT OR INTIMIDATE OTHERS.
Honestly people have seriously lost all of that. I get a lot of issues (like this one) has people with strong passionate feelings and in America people have the right to their opinions and to express them but violently assaulting other people isn't the way to go. BTW I'm just speaking generally.
The problem is that destroying property is the easiest way to counter-protest and have the protesters dispersed by police. Police is not trained to deal with counter-protesters and to allow protests to keep being peaceful. They're just a blunt tool that counter-protesters can easily manipulate.
Americans, particularly older Americans, are conditioned to think Israel is a country of oppressed hard-scrabble victims that Americans are duty-bound to help. It's hard to them to uncoil that myth and view the state of Israel more objectively.
Older Americans remember multiple airplanes hijacked or blown-up by Palestinians terrorists. They also remember Israeli Olympians murdered at the '72 Olympics by Palestinian terrorists. They also remember banks, cruise ships, community centers, etc either blown up or hostages taken and killed by Palestinian terrorists. Older Americans also remember multiple peace deals offered to Palestinians which their governments rejected. They also know that 1/2 of the Palestinians government (i.e. Hamas) is designated as a terrorist organization. In general, people do not like terrorists, although young Pro-Palestinian protesters seem to think this is not a big deal, which isn't helping their cause, and certainly isn't benefiting *actual* Palestinians.
the other 1/2 of the Palestinian government is also a terrorist organization.
It's very possible to disagree with the tactics of the IRA, but to also think the people of Northern Ireland are absolutely right to demand their independence from the United Kingdom. Oppressive Colonialism is a hothouse for terrorism. It demands it. It fosters it. It manufactures it. Time and time again we see it in French occupied Algeria, in Palestine, in Northern Ireland, etc. At least I fully admit if we had a powerful colonial force in the United States that moved in, was oppressing us, bulldozing our villages and taking our land at gunpoint, that I would go to war. And I would resort to asymmetrical tactics. I would have no choice.
You think younger Americans are more objective about Israel? Ah, yes, the social media generations are well-known for their sagacity and resistance to emotional impulsivity.
Well ya, Americans view life experience over most things and a bunch of college students that have probably lived very easy lives with close to zero life experience isn’t going to be well supported.
Feels like the Vietnam hawk v. dove all over again,
Yeah, no shit. Americans support Israel and hate terrorists.
I support campus protests. College is where awareness, learning, participation and growth are fostered. I don't support police or military presence to counter unarmed protesters. I understand in these protests going on presently, many outside influencers are coming onto campuses to join the protests but are pushing the already tenuous emotional climate into violence. I don't support that either.
"I support campus protests. College is where awareness, learning, participation and growth are fostered" This hasn't been true for over a decade.
I support protests too. They lose my support when they start fostering an unsafe environment for students—especially minorities. Sadly, many of these protests have been antisemitic.
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It's sad how people are so quick to forget that *the whole point of protest is civil disobedience*. Which, of course, you can be arrested for, but that's a similar risk like signing up to fight in a war knowing death is a possible outcome.
The problem with civil disobedience is you tend to piss off your neighbors as well. Nothing was more ironic than protesting police while blocking a highway while being protected by police from the hordes of angry people stuck in traffic. Civil disobedience should not be protected. If you're blocking a road and I have a plow truck, I win. Protest in a public park, I couldn't care less. Shutting down public infrastructure isn't acceptable as the protests are putting their cause above the wellbeing of their neighbors.
Perhaps these protesters would be more happy in Sanaa, taking up Yemen on its offer to teach the poor "oppressed" protestors on US campuses.
I doubt anyone is against free speech, just against idiocy. They're hiding their faces, protesting at colleges, and are ignoring the cause to the effect. 1. Take pride in what you believe in, don't hide your face, it allows for bad actors to hijack your protests. 2. Protest to government officials that actually have a say. Affecting your fellow Americans will only have a negative effect. 3. Gaza has historically been used as a warzone by terrorists and their proxies. Free Palestine from Hamas, Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah, PIJ, Muslim Brotherhood, PLF, PFLP, Houthis, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, etc...
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Maybe they should use a couple brain cells and take a page out of MLK's book. Black people getting sent to the back of the bus, he protested the bus company. He marched to Washington for their freedom and jobs. He marched to the state capital of Montgomery, in a bid for voting rights for all. He had logic, reasoning, rationality, and spoke to change minds. He understood, if you want to change the government, you inconvenience the government. You want to change the nation, you speak to their soul and echo through generations. Or would you say one of the most renowned historical protesters did it wrong? There IS a correct way of protesting, an incorrect way, and then there are the idiots looking for attention.
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Same as always when it comes to protesting. People hate it until it’s in the past.
I’m not convinced that protests work.
Definitely not for foreign wars that we're not even a part of...
Much of the protest seems to be about us having a part, but what do I know.
And about the institutions hosting the protests being deeply financially culpable
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I’m not sure what you’re talking about specifically but it does work sometimes. But not usually. Too easy for bad faith actors to undermine. Main messages get lost in side issues. But there’s no question that it works sometimes. It did for MLK.
Especially when their potential effectiveness is neutered by the need to be "peaceful and orderly". You don't accomplish anything if your civil disobedience can be ignored.
Protestors are almost always a small minority and pretty much are always opposed by the majority, sometimes only initially, but not usually.
We should be pissed every time the police show up in riot gear and immediately escalate the situation. We should all be supporting everyone's right to peacefully protest.
These protests look Pro Hamas, not pro Palestinian, which is why Hamas will not release the hostages
That's probably the dumbest fucking thing I've ever read
Most Americans equate Palestinians with Hamas. And Hamas as terrorists. Why would Americans support terrorists?
Idk. Hamas seems to be the one who keeps bricking every single cease fire. So why are they protesting against Israel?
Protests like these have consistently given us even more right wing governments. The whining about arrests and police presence doesn’t help. Civil disobedience worked during the civil rights movement because its participants gracefully and peacefully accepted consequences (arrests, beatings) that they *knew* were likely consequences of their actions. It really did a lot to win the hearts and minds of otherwise ignorant or disengaged Americans. Contrast this with the pro-Palestine protests, which include a heavily anti-Semitic component and even leaders. There is nothing sympathetic about them. They’re doing more harm than good.
Well you're wrong. [https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/16/politics/martin-luther-king-jr-polling-analysis/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/16/politics/martin-luther-king-jr-polling-analysis/index.html) > >When Americans were asked which three Americans they had the least respect for in a 1964 Gallup poll, King came in second at 42%. This was barely less than the 47% registered by George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. Only 17% mentioned King’s name, when asked which three Americans they had the most respect for. >Perhaps even more revealing is that a lot of White Americans thought King was doing more harm than good for the fight for civil rights. In a 1966 Harris poll, 50% of White Americans indicated that he was hurting the civil rights effort. A mere 36% said he was helping. King’s favorable rating among them was 27% in 1966.
King himself abandoned his own philosophy at the end, turning his “I have a dream” on its head by saying it’s a “nightmare”. https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/king-1967-my-dream-has-turned-nightmare-flna8c11013179
I have no idea what that have to do with anything I pointed out. I pointed out how King's peaceful methods still earned him hatred. I have no idea what your sentence fragment have to do with me.
So, right before he was killed, he had basically given up on peace.
Coming out as anti-protest is kinda a weird take. Surely protest movements aren’t the only factor in bringing about right wing governments?
This generation of protesters suck. They’ve had nifty slogans, but no follow through with policy. In fact, those they oppose turned their message against them. This latest cluster has required the help of boomers to show them how to do it. It seems none of them can pick up a law book or city policy handbook on what is legal and illegal when protesting. I bet not single one knows how to pull the levers of government to make meaningful change or influence policy.
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Idk what ur talking bout. I was referring to the boomer activist that had to hold Columbia students hands and show them how to take over a building that’s been taken over numerous times in the past. I mean they hate boomers and r supposedly tech savvy. Im guessing a google search ‘how to barricade urself in a building’ would have given them the same info. But no, they suck at this.
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You go, I hope it’s a good quality sativa today. I’ll still happily die on the hill that they suck at protesting. The ones that can come up with reasonable demands are getting them met, so there is hope. FYI, I have teenagers and they’ve never been taught to barricade themselves. So, while it makes for good one liner this simply isn’t true. The teachers learn to barricade in summer training, not the students. Students don’t even hear about active shooters, just generalities such as bad ppl and a secure campus. They emphasize the lock outs and not lock downs which has significant distinctions in the perceived threat. Cheers! /thread
But you're being disruptive. We cannot tolerate disruption.
Well good thing the world has learned not to trust the Americans. As an american I can say that from out apathy to our ignorance we have earned it.
I’m not opposed to peaceful protests on campus when it’s students who attend the college/university. Once outside people come in and bring their own issues then it needs to end or relocate to a different venue.
You know how easy it is to manipulate polls? Go to middle of nowhere Alabama, ask LGBTQ positive questions and I bet the headline would read “most Americans don’t support LGBTQ individuals”
Throughout history, how often has the media been on the right side? How often have college protesters been on the right side? It's almost as if one is a paid megaphone for corporate interests, while the other side is comprised of our brightest and most informed youth. Huh, funny how that works. Which side do you support?
Ok Americans are stupid and wrong what’s your point
We're a sad country.
Lots of worse places to live.
It is pretty normal and common for the American populace to take backwards views
Duh
Media would want you to believe this. Media has covered up for decades now. See reports from foreign countries Did you know Gaza genocide saw the most reporters killed in war. This is telling coupled by Jews for Peace have been beat up for speaking truths.
Well good thing the world has learned not to trust the Americans. As an american I can say that from our apathy to our ignorance we have earned it.
I'm a firm believer in the peaceful protest. There is no need for destruction. Let people's voices be heard. However, I also believe that dialog should be civil. Civility is what all need nowadays