No Kings Protest

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In this episode, we're inspired by No Kings Day to take a look at protests. We talk about the situation in the current moment, what the past can teach us, and what we need to do to ensure success in the future.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

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ANNA

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that our state could have a legislature that supports the needs of the 7 million of us who all live here and not the 1%. I threw that in there for today. So today we are going to talk about protests. We will talk about what makes them successful, what are they good for, how you can get useful things out of them, how can you get people to activate afterwards, as well as some research and resources for you to learn more. And so before we do talk about that, I'm going to have my co-hosts introduce themselves and I will start with Jordan.

JORDAN

Jordan Berg Powers, he/him. I am long-term. I live in Worcester, Massachusetts and I have been doing this a really long time and I'm really excited to talk about today's topic.

ANNA

And Jonathan.

JONATHAN

Jonathan Cohen, he/him/his, joining from Boston in the South End, have worked on progressive issue and electoral campaigns for over a decade now and always, always happy to be here.

ANNA

And I'm Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford where I am a city councilor. And you know, I'm going to kick this off by saying that in my twenties I was like I got such fomo, such fear of missing out when I couldn't make it to a protest. And I'm aging myself here by saying that like the 1999 protest in Seattle was this big one where I was like, oh my God. And my brother lived in Seattle at the time and I didn't know about it in time to go. And I was like, no. And so I made sure to go six months later to the A16 April 16 protest about the WTO and the World Bank that was in D.C. and then I protested the DNC for its rightward shift in 2000 and that was in Los Angeles. And then I got arrested and thrown in jail for three days for being at the protest, for doing nothing and simply being alive in that area of the protest. And then I stopped going to protests because it sucked being in jail in the Los Angeles County Jail, which is notoriously horrible and getting strip searched illegally multiple times and all this stuff. Sorry, is that a little too personal to go to the right.

JORDAN

That's exactly what it's like.

JONATHAN

Totally off topic, but a quick comment of mentioning that with jail from the which was like an excellent line from the a hearing earlier this week from the Public Safety Committee in the legislature where one of the bills I'm supporting is about like improving visitation rights because of the arbitrary restrictions that exist on them. And the opposition that always comes from the, from let's say the correctional officers, the prison guards is that, oh, that people are just going to get drugs coming in. And it was a great, like, ah. There was a great line from. I believe it was one of the incarcerated testifiers who noted about. He's like, I don't know, like, when, when one of the, the chairs asked, well, how do the drugs get in? And she's like, well, I don't, I don't want to cast blame on anybody, but I know that like, we as like the incarcerated folks there get strip searched everywhere that we go. And the guards are the ones who go come in and out every single day. And I'm not saying you need to strip search the guards, but, like, just look at what the difference is.

ANNA

Oh, my goodness.

JORDAN

I didn't know we were at the same protest, Anna. I was in D.C. as a student during the protests. The, yeah. Those weren't the WTO. Those were. It was WTO, but it was also, I forget the other sort of crappy international.

ANNA

The World Bank.

JORDAN

Right, that was the World Bank one. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a good movie, Battle in Seattle, about the protests. Yeah, I think I have been going to protests since I was a little kid and my parents brought me. My parents were not political activists, which is sort of weird to think about. But we went to the protest for Russian Jews in D.C. and that was my first protest. And I had a lunchbox that had a radio in it. And that was like, changed my life. So I remember about it. But yeah, I guess I'm a professional protester, like they say. But, you know, I don't know. I don't get. I don't really get the Soros money, despite.

ANNA

Darn. Sorry. Where is all that Soros money anyway? Why don't we get the Soros money?

JORDAN

Don't you think I know? Why doesn't the podcast get Soros money? We gotta, we gotta hit up the.

JONATHAN

About the source money.

JORDAN

There's at least two. You know, there's at least two people. Part of the Jewish conspiracy. At least we could do it.

JONATHAN

Right? It, like, reminds me of that. Great. Hold on a second.

JORDAN

Well, I guess we're getting up to.

ANNA

A great start here, guys.

JONATHAN

1997 Onion article of “Local Jew Feels Left out of Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy.”

JORDAN

Yes, we're. We're talking about the. We're. You are listening to this post, No Kings. And we're interested in how do you make protests successful. What is. Yeah, what is it about them? Why do people go to them? Um, what are they good for? What are they not good for? We have gotten off topic, but that is the purpose of this conversation, because I think a lot of people feel frustrated, especially if you're listening. You're probably a person who does more than just show up to a protest to the No Kings. You're probably doing stuff to. And you're. And it can. And people feel like, okay, well, what. What's the. Like, why can I get more things? Like, why. Why is it that this is the thing that people do? And so the thing I always tell people is it's actually really hard to get people to take what is a public event that's easy for people to go to, do things that are a little bit more work that maybe are sustained, but make a big difference in our community. It's like, that's actually really difficult. We're all struggling with those questions and there's no easy answer. But also there is something really important, like the No Kings is important. It is an important thing. We can both hold two things, which is that we want people to do things that are effective in our communities and that are sustained. And also one off visuals matter.

JONATHAN

And I will say with this, the one thing that's this increasingly bit of mine with like the No Kings rallies is the fact that Trump and like, Mike Johnson are as mad about them as they are is at least some indication of effectiveness that they know that the visuals of that and they kind of the way, especially when you have how so many people in, like, Trump's inner circle are trying to tell, probably trying to tell him that everybody loves him, his poll numbers are wonderful. And visuals like that here through that, that show actually a lot of people hate you. Yep.

ANNA

And I also want to take one step back and say that while it is difficult to get people to like, you know, be involved, engage them in like, electoral politics, like knocking on doors and making phone calls, which can be quite uncomfortable for people. I'm also going to say it ain't easy to get millions of people to show up to a protest. So that in itself is its own level of hard. And, you know, I'm really glad that we, you know, all the people who are organizing around the country to, to make this happen, because I think that, like you said, they all have different levels of. Of reason why they are helpful and there are reasons why these No Kings protests are in fact, like, they actually do do something.

JONATHAN

Yeah.

JORDAN

I mean, we should I, I guess I always want to temper it. Like I remember, you know, George W. Bush famously said about the then largest protests in the world against the Iraq war. He called them a focus group. Like, and he's not, he wasn't wrong. Like they were ineffectual in every way. I think about this all the time. You know, I recently somebody was hearkening back and was like, oh, isn't it great? Like we have all these large protests like we did in the Iraq war. And I was like, you mean the war we failed to stop and which we actually had zero impact on the outcome of? Like, that's not for me, who cares a lot about organizing and being successful and things and real world impact on real people who are really harmed. Those for me were formative because they were a complete failure for their aims to stop the war. That doesn't mean that there was nothing, that we didn't learn anything from them or there was no purpose to them. But I think a lot about how do we take things that are big like that and make them as, as helpful as possible? How do we go, how do we take the things that we can get from them to be effective? Because that for me was bad. We all knew the war was dumb. We all knew it had nothing to do with, with terrorism. We all knew it was just, he was mad that his dad, or something about his dad, like it was about war, it was about oil. Like it was transparent to everyone at the time that it was dumb and, and had no purpose. And we still, the media still went along with it and we still couldn't stop it.

ANNA

And I, and I also think about all of the many, like millions of people marching about guns in schools, like, you know, these horrible mass shootings in schools and like nothing ever changes, you know, So I don't disagree. I'm actually saying that it's hard to get millions of people to show up. Whether they're, it is hard or not is a different question. But it is quite difficult to get millions of people to show up at these protests. But it, but it also, like I know when, when I think back to my 20 something self, I, it was, it was just this moment where I could be with other people who agreed with me when the entire media and like everyone around me was, was, you know, all the sort of adults in the room were saying that my views didn't matter and that other people didn't feel like it.

JONATHAN

Yeah.

ANNA

And that to me culminated when, when Bernie ran in 2016. Because all the different protests that I went to were like different siloed groups of people. And I didn't know that the environmental people and the, you know, the pro human rights people and the, you know, pro women's rights and abortion people and the, you know, labor people, that all of them were the same people like that. We all agree that everybody, you know, there were many people like me who had basically the Green Party platform, which was Bernie's. Bernie came in as a Democrat and basically everything on the Green Party platform was what he believed in. And I had no idea that there were so many people who felt like that. And so to be in that space was incredibly attractive to me because I felt isolated. And I think especially in more purple or red states, it's really important. Not that we don't in our blue state also want to go to protests and appreciate going to these protests, but like when you are more isolated, I think it's easier, even more appealing to be able to go somewhere where you know that people share your, you know, values and your political beliefs.

JONATHAN

Yeah, I think that that speaks to the point how like there's, there's definitely like a community building element of that that can have value anywhere. What's and on, on top of that is if your protest is against is in a space where what the message you are sending is not universally shared by everybody there it is especially important way of signaling to people that like, that they aren't the only one who thinks that way because like, because of the. I'm the only one who thinks this way is a, is a thought process that can lead to people demobilizing themselves. And so taking that like kind of pushing back against that can have, have a lot of value in certain, in certain parts of the country.

ANNA

So I want to ask how can people. Yeah, go ahead, Jordan.

JORDAN

I want to say one. Oh, I'll answer that question. You ask it and I'll answer it and also link to the last thing.

ANNA

Great. My question is how do we get people who come to these protests, there's going to be millions of people. How do we get those people to engage afterward in stuff that might actually change the electoral landscape or the policy landscape?

JORDAN

Yeah. So I'll just say really quickly, we understood people misunderstand the purpose of a large protest because in a lot of countries they do lead to change in the government, like the government steps down or whatever. But we don't have that system. We don't have, we don't have a system of sort of coalitions with different.

JONATHAN

Government, not parliamentary possible.

JORDAN

We don't have parliamentary. And we are much bigger than those countries, so it's hard to feel the same as those. And also a lot of those places, if you think about, like Ukraine, that changes government that was sustained for months. But we as Americans see one day of it, maybe where it's culminating. We don't see the months and months of them being in the same place. So I want to say that, like, it's a different usage. And in America, largely, a purpose of a protest is to make people feel not alone, to get to, to, to gird them for the work that needs to happen. The march on Washington, which is maybe the most famous, like, big protest American history, that purpose was not to. It was, yes, to let the Kennedy and the government know, like, oh, we want, we want economic change. But it was really about getting people who were feeling isolated and hopeless and directionless about what was the next fight for civil rights, which was economic, economic equality. And to not feel alone. Right. They were talking to themselves, to each other. I have a Dream speech was about getting, getting people who were active to feel good about going back to where they were. Which is what he says when you go back. Right. That's his purpose. And so the purpose is to make people feel like they're not alone, like they can do this, like they can get together like you are together. And that's really important. People don't need. People cannot. If people feel alone, they feel demo/demo, demoralized and demobilized, as Jonathan said. So, like the purpose then is to get them mobilized. And so that's the thing that misses for a lot of protests and is they do a thing and then they don't have a plan for how to get people to then do things that are actually helpful, that are about communicating to people in power that they need to change or else. Or they need to change or will change or will. Or will vote you out. Right. Or we'll get more people involved or get local people. Right. It's about. You need to think about how are you going to make a change with power. And I know the Indivisible folks have loads of trainings after the No Kings about how to do it. But if you are going to approach, if you went to this protest or you are planning your own protest, you need to figure out how are you capturing some information and how are you using the information you capture to try to get some of those people, Because God knows it won't be most of those people to then do something else that can be helpful.

ANNA

Absolutely. That is the thing so anything that.

JONATHAN

Captured those large events are like they're part of a sequence of activities. For some people, it will be the only ones that they do in that sequence. But it, but it is like from. Or the organizers of particular large ones often view it as part of a sequence.

ANNA

Yeah. And if you are attending the protest, if you did attend the protest, clearly you have a next step. Right. And most, we think a lot of the listeners of this podcast are people who are reasonably well activated. But you really should, if you're not already plugged in, you should seek out a group that you can join, because I'll tell you, if it feels good to not be alone and to be with others, I will say one of the best things for any feelings of anxiety that you might have for the way that politics is going is to take action, is to be engaged and involved every day in a solution. And so I always recommend that when I hear people say that they're, you know, they're feeling so stressed out, they're so anxious about the Trump administration or about what's happening at the national level, and, you know, I'd say I feel less anxious. And I don't think it's because. I mean, there are many reasons, but, but I think one of the reasons that I feel less stressed is because almost everything I do all day long is, is doing something like involved in politics, educating people, engaging people in local politics, getting people involved. You know, I run teams of volunteers. I, you know, know, so, so I just have a lot of ways that I'm personally acting. And when you personally act, it, it helps to, to allow. Make you feel like things are more in control and your life is not out of your control.

JORDAN

Yes.

JONATHAN

This through. Through a series of kind of hops made me think of one of the other values that you can definitely get out of. Some of these, like, larger protests is, is through both. One, if you're somebody who's organizing other people to go with you, that's. That's again, like building up a muscle of being able to recruit people to do a thing, even though there are many other things you need to recruit them to do, but as well as the kind of sometimes small connections that end up being made that influence what people get involved with afterwards. That if you end up like, because I'll hear stories from people about when they go to protest and they end up actually chatting with somebody that they end up learning lives in the same neighborhood as they do or came from the same town as them, and that forms kind of connections that would not have spontaneously happened on their own.

ANNA

Yep. And I, I also love to throw in this like engagement in politics is not a zero-sum game idea because many people think, oh, let's not have people do this because it's not as effective as that. But that's not how people work. Right. People like you said with, it's a building a muscle. Right. People who do one thing are more likely to do the next thing, not less likely to do next thing. So if you can get people to do one thing, then you'll be able to get them to do the next thing. Because a lot of it is about feelings of community. You know, you meet somebody at this protest and you want to see them again. You do something, it feels good. You want to do something else, you want to do something more. And that's how you get people, is you, is by not telling them, oh wait, don't do it now, I have something better for you later or more effective for you later. It's like do the thing now because that if you enjoy it and you get something out of it, then you're more likely to do the another thing later.

JORDAN

Yeah. And the other things I think about, if you are planning it yourself, you always want to have like sign ups. You want to have volunteers who are going around signing people up. You want to try to get some emails, some phone numbers. These days you need to text and email people afterwards to be effective. If you're at a large protest and you didn't organize it, you know, set up a, and you can set up a booth. That's another way to get people to sign up. Self-select into some things that are interested. The ways that I find that people aren't effective is people will have, they'll say like, oh, we're have a meeting and then the meeting is to talk about the work that they may do at some point. And that's just a waste. And then people don't come back. Whenever I'm encouraging people to be at a protest or to be, or to, or to sign people up at an event, I always tell them, here's our next action. If you care about making a change this way, the next thing we're doing is actually going to affect that. It's not going to be just talking here, we're going to affect that and here's how we're going to affect that. So I think it's really important that people, people want to feel effective and they want to feel like their time is being used well. And a lot of the times people are wasting people's time by talking about doing, by talking about talking about doing. And it's just like, that's not effective. And so I will, I will. You know, it recently came out when the, with the Trump administration came in. The CIA is like how to slow walk a democracy, like how to basically be incompetent at your job. So that way things fall apart. And in it, it was like, it was this thing that I always tell people that like if I go to a meeting and somebody says, oh, like what about, what about the, what about the, what about a subcommittee? Or what about the bylaws? I'm like, they work for the FBI. They are like trying to derail. If somebody mentioned bylaws, they are derailing this meeting. Like, I am like, I don't believe that you're here honestly, because like that's all a waste of time. We don't have the right people here. Oh, okay, then you leave. Like, I just like, like, I guess.

JONATHAN

Jordan's like, oh, you want to talk about bylaws? Okay, Article one, section one, you're a fed.

ANNA

I will say, Jordan, when I, when you were running Mass Alliance and I one of the, I was on the board for a little bit, I remember being so impressed at how efficient, you know, you guys, it was like it was scheduled for two hours. It almost never went two hours. You went through the agenda, you got things done. Like, people really felt like that was a meeting that they could go to and their time was going to be used. Well, they, they're going to make the most of it.

JORDAN

Oh, that's lovely. I took a lot of pride in that. I tried really hard. Yeah, I think the other, the other thing, if you haven't heard recently Hahrie Han won the MacArthur, MacArthur Genius Award. If you don't know Hahrie Han, it's H-A-H-R-I-E H-A-N. Hahrie Han. She is a researcher and a writer in our movements about how to make our movements better. Her and Professor Elizabeth McKenna are just the people I read on how to be effective in our movements. They wrote a book, how Organizations Develop Activists, which I find to be an. Absolutely. If you are interested in being an effective organizer, you have to read this book, how Organizations Develop Activists. She also wrote a follow up book, Prisms of the People, which is fantastic. Again, how working it. And if you don't want to read the whole thing, there is a report, People Power, which interviewed people in movements who, who have varying degrees of success about what are the lessons that they've learned. That's with Elizabeth McKenna, Michelle Oyakawa, who is also a fantastic researcher and organizer. I read a lot of Michelle's work as well. Excuse me, Professor Oyakawa's work as well. I cannot suggest these people enough to dig into these things, to grow some of these things. And one of the things for those, like, I have changed a lot how I do things. And one of the things I learned from these reports is I used to think of food as an afterthought or fun as an afterthought. It's like, oh, we're gonna. We're gonna do a meeting and we'll have snacks. We'll have some food at the meeting. And one of the things I'm encouraging people more and more to do is to gather people for food, say, we're gonna get together to eat together, we're gonna get together to break bread together. Which is like, for an organizer, it's like telling people to breathe in water. Like, you're just like, what do you mean? You're telling people to not organize an event, but organize getting together to eat that. Like, what are you trying to tell me, Jordan? And what I tell people is if you gather people together and just have them eat together, they will talk about politics. And when they talk about politics, you can get them to sign that petition to think about coming to an action. But if you get people together to plan that action, fewer people will come and. And they'll eat a little cheese and they'll leave. And that's not actually what we want. So that's my advice. That's like, one of the things I've changed is I'm really encouraging people to gather people for food, to gather people for fun, and then have activism at it as the snack, as the thing. And people will. Because what's going to do. What are they talking about? They're talking about Trump. They're talking about their community. You're going to maybe have some of your volunteers seed some of that conversation, going to say, hey, make sure to talk about this thing, right? And then that way, they're already that way. They're having that conversation, but they're doing so and build a community. And they'll be like, I had so much fun. We went and ate together. We had a block party together. We did a thing, you know, so.

ANNA

Anyway, so this makes me. This makes me so happy because, like, as a city councilor, I've. I. Somebody, one of the other parents, like, after I'd been a city councilor for, like, a year. She was like, oh, I get it. You do the ice cream socials. You wrote a little ditty about the, you know, the Prop two and a half override, you know, ukulele song. You, you know, host these tree planting events. Like, you perform jazz. Like, I get it. You're the fun city counselor. And I was like, guilty as charged. And it is part of my, like, vibe is, I think, you know, you've got to have fun. It's got to be enjoyable, and it should be joyous. It should be joyous to change our world for the better. And so I do agree with this. And I. And I know that we want to have as soon as we can, like, get these folks on board. We are in the future going to have a podcast where we invite an artist and a musician to talk about protests and how art and music specifically are used at protests in political organizing. But I think this ties in nicely with our protest conversation because, you know, we just had Honk Fest in Somerville, and there's all these activist bands and there are all the puppets and the costumes and everything else in protests that I think make it something where people really aren't just there to, like, you know, for a dry political debate. They're there to show how joyous it is to be engaged and to try to create a better world.

JONATHAN

This is actually kind of a funny demonstration of something that Jordan was saying is, you know, it's a great place for doing signature collection for progressive causes. Honk it is because you have a bunch of, like, lefty street bands, like, in Somerville, which will attract people who might not all be there anyway, but now because they're there, you get to ask them to sign a petition for rent control or another valid question, so.

ANNA

Exactly. Exactly.

JORDAN

Yeah. And, you know, I think of Adrienne Maree Brown's seed that our movements have to be irresistible. Right. That it needs to be something that's fun for people and want to join. And currently, being on the left is tiresome often and not fun. And it should be fun. It should be fun. We'll talk more about it when we have. When we do the art podcast. But there's a great. We'll seed it with. You should research the Copenhagen experiment, which has a science experiment, but there's also one for social justice and protesting about how much more powerful art is than any other form of sort of engagement and, like, fun. Like, making. Like, making something fun funny is actually the most effective way. Right. So we're seeing this now with the Frogs. Like the. Yeah, there's a. There's a history. It's not just like, oh, isn't that fun? There's actually a hundreds and thousands of years, like all the way back to the Greeks that we have documented, I'm sure even before then, history of using laughter as a way to make political change. That actually it is about. It's a really important way to sort of show the ridiculousness of power, but in a way that's approachable for regular people. Right. There is in fact no better way to show how ridiculous. Right. The Portland thing. They're not even talking about Portland being a hellscape anymore on the right wing because it's. Because it's fallen on its face so much. Right. They've been mocked. Being mocked so incessantly by people in costumes, like dancing is the perfect answer to. There is a perfect anecdote because it makes a mockery of what we all know to be ridiculous, but in a way that if we said it's ridiculous, it would just not land right. When we say, oh, it's not, they're like, oh, maybe it is, whatever. But when you. But when people see visuals of frogs dancing, they can't help but laugh. And that is the power. So, you know, it really is important that we have fun. Like all of those signs that are going to show up, that are witty, that make us laugh, they actually are important. And when you share them on Facebook, they live in a way that, you know that right wingers have to look in the mirror at their own ridiculousness. And it is that there is a power in that. It's not, it's not the like, lasting thing. Like we are going to see, like they're going to immediately change what they're doing, but it does whittle away at their. At the sort of how they think about themselves, how they organize themselves. It's why it's powerful. Right. So I just want to encourage, like, make a funny sign. Like make people laugh, show up, do fun things. Yeah.

ANNA

Fantastic. Jonathan, any final words about protests?

JONATHAN

No, I think that Jordan's come. My comments just then. It was so good. There've been a lot of great articles about that in terms of like with the Portland protests. Like, I remember seeing like the interview with a guy who's in the chicken costume and just pointing out about how it's like Kristi Gnome is pointing down to this like, scary antifa army below and it's like a guy in a chicken costume. A few other, like a few old women and then like a bunch of journalists, like, that's. It kind of just helps to create a visual. Like a visual representation of the absurdity of the lies being said.

JORDAN

Yeah. If it was just regular people standing around, it actually might have looked menacing. But the chicken costume makes. Without the chicken costume, that video, that image might look pathetic, but not. But maybe menacing. Right, but like the chicken costume makes clear.

JONATHAN

Right, exactly.

JORDAN

It actually makes the visual. The ridiculous part. Without it, it's sort of just a regular photo. Right. Like it.

JONATHAN

Exactly.

ANNA

Yep. Well, we hope that everyone here had fun at the No Kings. And if you're involved in activism, look those people up, bring them into your stuff and celebrate and make things fun. If you aren't one of the organizers of a group already, go join one. And you know what, if you're joining a group that's not fun, you could just make it fun. You can bring the food, you could bring the party hats. You know, great. If there's any final words, let me know. But I think we have covered it. Thank you so much to everyone. You can always donate to this show. The link is below and we look forward to seeing you all next week.