How to Protest

Black Panthers open-carry protest, 2 May 1967 (Image Credit: CIR Online/Wikimedia Commons)

For today’s installment in my ruminations on how to wage war against fascism, I’ll turn to some more recent examples of successful (and some less-successful) public actions offering support for resistance movements. In the example that the initial photo illustrates, members of the Black Panther Party rally on the steps of the California State Capitol in Sacramento to protest a gun-control bill before the legislature that made open carry illegal in California. (The bill passed with overwhelming support from the governing Republican party and was signed by noted liberal squish, Governor Ronald Reagan.) The Panthers, I would argue, were doing pretty much everything right except that the identity they were rallying people around was Black identity, as their name suggests. And Black people are a minority in America, so they were never able to gather the mass support that a revolutionary movement needs to make real change. Nevertheless, they did provide important support for the – apparently temporary – relaxation of White supremacy that happened in this country in the 1960s-70s, and the tactics that their movement used deserve our attention.

Racism is the founding sin of America, said the 1619 project a few years ago. Like the Irish conflict that I discussed in the last few essays, we often think about American conflict in racial terms, particularly since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Like the Irish, whom we think of as divided into warring Catholic and Protestant tribes, many see America as divided into warring Black, White, and a variety of other tribes, and each person’s identity is fixed by their race. I would argue that America’s racial climate is not as polarized as it was in the 1960s, as witness the number of Black and Brown people who voted for the president in the 2024 election. Nevertheless, it is clear that racial prejudice motivates our enemies, especially in their immigration policies. After all, the current president’s grandfather and mother were immigrants, as were two of his three wives. Both the grandfather and his current wife spent at least some time in the United States in violation of immigration laws – were “criminal aliens” in the language of the current administration. There’s been immigration enforcement against all sorts of people, including nice White ladies and their little kids from New Zealand, but somehow the images you see all feature anonymous thugs beating down brown people outside Home Depot. So it isn’t like race is going to disappear, or, obviously, has disappeared, but revolutionaries in America are going to need a different lens to view identity if we want mass support, and our demonstrations are going to have to foreground that lens.

Beginning of the Occupy Portland march, 10 October 2011 (Image credit: By Davydog at English Wikipedia, CCL)

My candidate for this lens is class – unsurprisingly, since I am the tenured radical of this blog’s title. I’m thinking about the Occupy movement of the 2010s. I went to the original Occupy Portland protest in 2011, and was part of a multi-ethnic crowd of tens of thousands of people marching through the streets of our overwhelmingly White city chanting “we are the 99%”. The protests eventually fizzled out as the occupation part was poorly managed, at least in our city, but the concept of class solidarity over ethnic solidarity had legs. The Bernie Sanders campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020, and his ongoing series of rallies since the 2024 election, alongside rising Democratic Socialist Member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have shown their ability to gain support in working-class districts that generally vote very strongly Republican. Sanders won working class districts overwhelmingly in his campaigns, even districts that ended up going for Trump in the general. The normie Democrats stopped him from winning the nomination in 2016 and 2020, using their control of the party structure to keep the nomination in the hands of candidates who wouldn’t threaten (nominally) pro-Democratic oligarchs. Today, Bernie and AOC are going into congressional districts held by fascist MAGA Republicans and gathering crowds in the tens of thousands. They have policy goals, obviously, but they are foregrounding the idea that they stand for working people’s power and against the oligarchs. Americans know, on the whole, that the system is strongly skewed in favor of wealth. Rich people get what they want: admission to elite colleges for their kids that will assure their class privilege is inherited, control over the political system to ensure the flow of public money to their businesses, a tax, regulatory, and public benefit system that protects their wealth, and cultural institutions that validate their identity as the smartest and best people among us. The public rage at this, cleverly misdirected by the oligarchs, created the fascist autocracy that is now growing in our midst. We can also use this rage to create a system that actually returns power to the people. Then, we can try to convince the people that socialism is a system that will allow all of us to flourish. But first, we have to take down our enemies the oligarchs, along with those among the broader public who have foolishly signed up as their lackeys whom we can’t draw away with good arguments.

So, let’s return to the question of how to go about this, and to our historical example of the Black Panthers. What did they do to organize Black communities for self-defense and self-government under a racist government in the 1960s? What were the strengths and weaknesses of their tactics? First, although we often think of them today as a violent resistance movement, they did not take aggressive action, unlike a group that attacked an ICE facility in Texas last month. Their principal activity in the public safety/armed resistance realm was what they called “copwatching”, where patrols of armed BPP members would follow police moving through majority Black neighborhoods in Oakland. If the cops had an interaction with a citizen, the Panthers would dismount and observe the situation, guns in hand. This led to many violent confrontations with police, after which the Panthers argued they were defending themselves and their constitutional right to bear arms against police attacks. They also provided armed security for Black activists visiting their communities and did open carry protests such as the one in the photo at the top of the essay. A strength of this tactic was that they were appealing to a widely-held belief among Americans that the Second Amendment to the Constitution grants individuals a right to “keep and bear arms” in their own defense, even defense against a tyrannical government (a right not probably intended by the framers of the 2^nd Amendment in the 1790s but conferred by the Supremes in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen). The principal weakness was that the government of California was able to “other” them as “radical Negro activists” and convince many White Californians that it was alright to take their 2^nd Amendment rights away, and also that as dangerous radicals, any confrontations they got into with the cops were their fault and not that of the cops.

This has proven to be a harder job for today’s fascists faced with similar tactics from resistance groups. The IceBlock app for iPhone crowd-sources copwatching in the immigration context. The app author has been warned to “watch out” by Attorney General “Barbie” Bondi, but there doesn’t seem to be wide agreement by the general public that what he is doing is wrong. Southern California’s Union del Barrio is doing the Panther thing, except without the guns, and has provoked violent response from the cops but not the broad rejection of their tactics that the Panthers did, even though they (unlike the app guy) are mostly Brown people. Portland activists have besieged the ICE facility without interference from the Portland cops. A local resident complained about the noise the nightly struggle creates, but when they sued, Portland city lawyers defended the demonstrators’ right to make noise. There have been several arrests of protesters accused of interfering with ICE and other enforcement actions in LA and, recently, Washington DC, but either DoJ attorneys drop the charges or federal judges laugh them out of court. Presumably, if they get to a trial, DoJ would have trouble finding a jury willing to convict in these jurisdictions, especially if our activism has done its job. So, in short, forms of non-violent direct action intended to interfere with government aggression against the public appear to be broadly acceptable to the public and have had an impact. Immigration arrests are down 13% nationwide in July despite enormous pressure to ramp up numbers from presidential Domestic Policy Advisor Stephen “Dracula” Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi “dog-slaughterer” Noem.

What are some other forms of direct action that might bear fruit? There have been numerous reports of tow truck drivers picking up ICE vehicles during raids. A few verified incidents do not appear to be the fruit of collective politically motivated direct action but instead the result of property owners calling tow trucks when vehicles are parked illegally for extended periods. However, this is a good idea: ICE is not using officially-marked vehicles, and there are reports they are changing license plates to avoid detection. If those plates are not registered with state motor vehicles departments, the vehicles are being operated unlawfully, and the people who change the plates are committing a felony. State and local governments could tow them and perhaps arrest the people inside. In any case, if the vehicle is parked on private property, the owner could call for a tow as soon as the officers leave their car. We should make this routine; more fruits of federalism. Another resistance tactic has been to have motor vehicle “accidents” with ICE vehicles. If they are blocking traffic or doing something unlawful – driving in an oncoming lane or running a stop sign – then the car that hits them is probably not at fault in any accident, since the ICE vehicles are not marked as official or flashing lights. Even if they are, an “accident” will cause the officers to have to stop and exchange insurance information, delaying their nefarious activities and making them vulnerable to a flash protest. And that’s if they are even carrying insurance for that vehicle; if they are swapping plates and using off the books cars, maybe they are also violating mandatory insurance laws found in most states and this would provide local law enforcement a good pretext to tow their cars and stop their activities for a day (and maybe even suspend the driver’s right to drive in that state). Of course, local law enforcement is generally friendly to their supposed colleagues at the federal level; it will take some pressure from us to get them to enforce the law. But we can also sue and tie them up that way; every day a fascist spends in court is one day they aren’t out beating or kidnapping people on the streets. Another idea: ICE and other officers carrying out immigration enforcement have often been seen with masks and frequently refuse to identify themselves when asked. A fruitful tactic for insurgents would be to use the electronic tools at our disposal to overcome that anonymity: use facial recognition software, create a database where names and photos can be uploaded for comparison, go through old announcements of graduations and promotions on DHS/DoJ websites, If we can find the names of these officers, a combination of threats and blandishments might encourage some to take other jobs or at least to limit the amount of violence they do. Maybe, knowing who they are, we can identify individuals who could be targeted for recruitment and give us information on regime activity. Having the intelligence advantage is a key goal for insurgents.

Once the movement begins to catch on with large numbers of people, the goal should be a general strike against regime-aligned or governmental entities. An early step could be strikes against businesses that have bowed down to the autocrat. It might be hard to organize SpaceX or Tesla employees, but what about truckers who move goods to their facilities? The scattered protests against Tesla effectively forced Musk out of his temporary DOGE gig earlier this year; a real strike would show all the other oligarchs the cost of backing this tyrant. Shutting down the air transport system through strikes by airline and airport workers would strike a deadly blow against the system. Shutting down highways during a trucker’s strike would have a similar effect. The Great Railway Strike in 1877 and the Pullman Strike of 1894 both nearly brought down the Gilded Age capitalist structure. Federal reaction to the Pullman strike brought Eugene V. Debs to the socialist camp and built support for the Progressive movement in the major parties; the 1900 presidential election saw a progressive, Teddy Roosevelt, elected as VP on the Republican ticket, who then succeed to the presidency when the very capitalist McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. Big national strikes are clear attacks on the government and the federal government will surely respond to anything that looks like it is really taking hold; I can’t see Trump responding to anything like this with even the restraint that Hayes showed in 1877 or Harrison in 1894.

Another thing the Panthers did right was take those other steps I talked about a few weeks back to establish alternative institutions in their neighborhood and thus stake a claim to an alternative sovereignty. They provided food for hungry schoolkids, transportation to jail visits and court appearances, support for people facing eviction (including direct action, but also loans and representation in negotiations with landlords), community health clinics, and schools. In this they were taking advantage of the fact that government provided very little support to community members; the ghetto was essentially an ungoverned space with the exception of police patrols, which the Panther “copwatch” patrols were undermining. If the current federal government gets its way, immigrant and minority communities will one again receive very little government support, with the closure of the Department of Education and cancellation of many community development grants. This offers an opportunity for resistance groups to provide those services in the federal government’s place and gain the support of the public they serve. Since federal support for education, for example, goes in large measure to rural schools, this offers an opportunity for revolutionaries to reach out to rural working class populations who have overwhelmingly supported Trump and the fascists up to this point. Important in this regard is that this is something a concerned citizen can do with very little risk of being shot by the fascists. I went out earlier in the summer supporting Western Farm Workers’ Association members with food distribution after immigration raids caused many members to skip work. WFWA, like the Wobblies, UFW and other industrial unions, offer a wide range of services to their members. These sorts of activities could be defined as some sort of felony conspiracy to immigrant smuggling, I guess, but that would be the sort of overreaction that all this is intended to produce. If they want to come after me for handing sacks of masa and cans of lard and beans to ladies in Hillsboro, marvelous!

The goal of all this is three-fold, as discussed in previous essays. First, we want to define our coalition broadly and our enemies narrowly. We are about working people, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation/gender, nationality, immigration status, or any other characteristic other than the fact they work for a living. The enemy are the employing class, especially the big business elites and their chief minions in the professional managerial class. There’s an intermediate class, small business people, lackeys like cops and middle managers, who are gettable and should not be needlessly antagonized. The more we can truly be an organization of the 99%, the easier it will be to defeat fascism. Next, we want to interfere with the operation of the authoritarian state as much as we can, both by direct action and through politics, as discussed last week. Finally, we want to provoke the authoritarian state to overreaction. It would be good if nobody died in this process, but wars are inherently tragic. We didn’t ask for this war, the enemy forced it on us, and now we are in it and the only way out is through. So our direct action should be as provocative as possible without giving the enemy a really good excuse to shoot us. It’s when they shoot without a good excuse, if we’ve done the other things, that we get a broadly based national uprising, support for an armed struggle, and a chance to restore democracy with victory in that struggle.

So, in response to my wife as mentioned in the first essay, and other nay-sayers: protests by themselves, maybe not so effective, but the right kind of protest, combined with the right kind of politics, and a willingness to match the enemy’s violence if necessary, could lead to a good outcome. Sitting around and complaining, or waiting for the institutions and elections to save us, is not.

Next week, I’ll discuss some of the measures I’d like to see us take as a country if we can win. Revolutionaries need hope for the future.

Oh, and by the way, no doubt in response to last week’s essay, Maryland governor Wes Moore pointed out that he is the commander in chief of the Maryland National Guard, not the president, and he will not authorize its use to support an authoritarian takeover. Take the next step, Wes, and commit your forces to defend democracy!