Tag: Protest

No Kings Protest – March 28, 2026

In big cities and small towns across the world, protesters gathered for thousands of rallies against President Trump and his policies and actions, with the self-stated goal of fighting dictatorship.
…

Chicagoans gathered at Grant Park, where Saira Bensett, 60, a retired zoological worker, described the turnout as cathartic.

“When I watch the news it’s often too much — the emotions I feel make me feel like I’m alone,” she said. “So I wanted to be here to feel like I’m not by myself.”

A Show of Defiance Across the Nation
It’s the third time that the coalition behind the “No Kings” movement has organized events to protest President Trump and his policies. In the United States, more than 3,000 demonstrations were planned.

A protest is an invitation to a better world – Peter Coyote on Effective Demonstration

I’m watching the Los Angeles reaction to ICE raids with trepidation and regret. Three years ago I taught a class at Harvard on the “theater of protest”— designed to help people understand why so many protests turn out to be Republican campaign videos working directly against the interests of the original protest.

A protest is an invitation to a better world. It’s a ceremony. No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at. More important you have to know who the real audience Of the protestis. The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, The Congress,etc. The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them. If you win them, you win power at the box office And power to make positive change.Everything else is a waste. There are a few ways to get there.

Number 1 let women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do. 2 appoint monitors, give them yellow, vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protester sit down. Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement. Number 3 dress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum When you’re dressed in clean Presentable clothes. They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience.Number 4, make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people.Let signs do the talking. Number 5 go home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at Dawn fresh and rested. I have great fear that Trump’s staging with the National Guard and maybe the Marines is designed to clash with anarchists who are playing into his hands and offering him the opportunity to declare an insurrection. It’s such a waste and it’s only because we haven’t thought things through strategically. Nothing I thought of is particularly original. It was all learned by watching the early civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s. And it was the discipline and courage of African-Americans that drew such a clear line in the American sand that people were forced to take sides and that produced the civil rights act. .The American people are watching and once again if we behave in ways that can be misinterpreted, we’ll see this explained to the public in Republican campaign videos benefiting the very people who started this. Wake up. Vent at home. In public practice discipline and self control. It takes much more courage.

https://substack.com/@petercoyote1

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Coyote

Protests Denver – April 19, 2025 – Random Pics

Another round of protests kicked off Saturday across the United States as part of the 50501 Movement’s “National Day of Action.” Crowds rallied outside the Colorado Capitol building to oppose actions taken by President Trump’s administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-trump-rallies-hands-off-administration-washington-new-york-boston/

see also: https://www.reddit.com/r/DenverProtests/

Mexico Protests Electoral Law Changes

MEXICO CITY — Tens of thousands of people filled Mexico City’s vast main plaza Sunday to protest electoral law reforms that they say threaten democracy. The plaza is normally thought to hold nearly 100,000 people, but many more protesters couldn’t fit in.

The marchers were clad mostly in white and pink — the color of the National Electoral Institute — and shouted slogans like “Don’t Touch my Vote!”

The reforms proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador were passed last week. They would cut salaries, funding for local election offices and training for citizens who operate and oversee polling stations. They would also reduce sanctions for candidates who fail to report campaign spending.

“He wants to return to the past” when “the government controlled elections,” said protester Enrique Bastien, 64, a veterinarian, recalling the 1970s and 80s when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ruled Mexico with fraud and handouts. “It was a life with no independence.”

Tens of thousands protest Mexico electoral reforms
Tens of thousands of people filled Mexico City’s vast main plaza to protest electoral law reforms that they say threaten democracy

London Pride March – 50th Anniversary

More than a million people have taken part in the 50th anniversary of the UK’s first Pride parade in London.

Hundreds of LGBTQ+ community groups attended the march from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall Palace earlier.

Revellers wearing face paint, glitter, jewels and sequins joined the celebrations as Pride returned for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The event, hailed as the most inclusive in history, included performances from Ava Max and Emeli Sande.

The parade paid homage to the original 1972 march, organised by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), and saw revellers pass significant sites from the UK’s LGBTQ+ movement.

BBC

Related historical note, here’s how things were in the early 70’s, in New York:
“Arthur Bell, culture writer for The Village Voice, was arrested for holding another man’s hand as they crossed the street. You read that correctly. It was 1973, and you could still be arrested for holding another man’s hand in public.”

I Was Better Last Night
Harvey Fierstein

Abortion Rallies Across United States – May 14, 2022

WASHINGTON, May 14 (Reuters) – Thousands of abortion rights supporters rallied across the United States on Saturday, angered by the prospect that the Supreme Court may soon overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide a half century ago.

The protests kicked off what organizers predict will be a “summer of rage” ignited by the May 2 disclosure of a draft opinion showing the court’s conservative majority ready to reverse the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy.

The court’s final ruling, which could return the power to ban abortion to state legislatures, is expected in June. About half of the 50 states are poised to ban or severely restrict abortion almost immediately should Roe be struck down. read more

“If you can’t choose whether you want to have a baby, if that’s not a fundamental right, then I don’t know what is,” said Brita Van Rossum, 62, a landscape designer who traveled from suburban Philadelphia to join the abortion-rights rally in the nation’s capital, her first ever.

Reuters

Tigray Protest – Denver – April 2, 2022

Haven’t heard as much about this in the news. Here’s some info from the NYTIMES:

A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine-like conditions.

Forces under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — the Ethiopian military, ethnic militias and troops from neighboring Eritrea — are fighting to oust the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., from its stronghold in the northern region of Tigray.

The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.

Why Is Ethiopia at War With Itself?
Sixteen months after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed began a military campaign in the Tigray region, fighting has slowed but Ethiopians are bitterly divided and their country is wracked by suffering.
March 16, 2022

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War

Scene from Anti Vietnam War Protest – April 1971

The veterans’ presence in Washington today is deeply confusing to the American mood. A police sergeant on duty at the Capitol says, ‘Hell, I’d throw in my badge before I touch these guys.’ A businessman, who was just passing by, now fussily clears a path for Bill Loivie, who has spent two years in military hospitals and will always need crutches. An old couple, he in red baseball cap, she in blue rinse, have come up from Georgia to see Washington in the spring and now they march with a woman who lost a son over there. Even a party of enormous ladies from the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization that would gleefully detonate the world tomorrow and which happened to be meeting in Washington today, stand transfixed and almost crying, almost, as the carnage passes them by, including Jack Saul from California wearing a grotesque mask of Richard Nixon smiling. And when someone asks Jack, jokingly, what he himself looks like, he takes it off and reveals a face that looks as though he has just finished pouring acid on it. ‘Peace,’ he says.

Eyewitness to History
Civilization’s most momentous events come vibrantly alive in this magnificent collection of over three hundred eyewitness accounts spanning twenty-four turbulent centuries — remarkable recollections of battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Veterans_Against_the_War

Revolution for the Hell of It, Two References


From this post – https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/pg2wj5/students_in_denver_walk_out_over_masks/

…
From Amazon’s page for Abbie Hoffman’s book, Revolution for the Hell of it:

Revolution for the Hell of It: The Book That Earned Abbie Hoffman a Five-Year Prison Term at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial

Abbie Hoffman

From one of America’s most renowned dissidents and the author of Steal This Book — a new edition of the counterculture manifesto that helped stir up a revolution in the 1960s

While the supremely popular Steal This Book is a guide to living outside the establishment, Revolution for the Hell of It is a chronicle of Abbie Hoffman’s radical escapades that doubles as a guidebook for today’s social and political activist.

Hoffman pioneered the use of humor, theater, and surprise to change the world for the better. In Revolution for the Hell of It he gives firsthand accounts of his legendary adventures, from the activism that led to the founding of the Youth International Party (“Yippies!) to the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests (“a perfect mess”) that resulted in his conviction as part of the Chicago Seven.

Also chronicled is the the mass antiwar demonstration he helped lead in which over 50,000 people attempted to levitate the Pentagon using psychic energy and the time he threw fistfuls of dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and watched the traders scramble. With antiwar sentiment once again on the rise and an incendiary political climate not seen since the book’s original printing, Abbie Hoffman’s voice is more essential than ever.

Includes a facsimile edition of Hoffman’s rare first book, Fuck the System