this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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Um, all BLM has to do is wear merch and hold up a sign and the police start lobbing CS grenades.
The point of protest isn't to riot, but to get the state to over-respond, brutally. Its why the entire world knows about and sympathizes with the BLM cause.
At least that's the game, according to COIN. Hearts and minds. Though in the Civil Rights movement, we added lawsuits.
And Trump and the red states are quick with their riot squads. Left wing movements just have to represent and make booga-booga faces to trigger anti-riot shooting civilians with rubber bullets. (They're plastic and steel, actually.)
And then two years later, the victims are awarded millions from the districts or the US treasury, depending on the department of the officer who decided it was time to bust heads.
Law enforcement in the US has already lost its legitimacy in the public eye, worldwide. We know they're just thugs of the state, and their response to protest, especially minority protest, especially black protest, figures largely into that paradigm shift.
So, just because protesters in the US still carry signs instead of molotovs, doesn't mean the protests are weak. It means the state's responsers are incredibly easily trolled into initiating violence while camers are watching.
The point of protesting is not to provoke the state to kill you so that people will watch it.
There are many points to protesting. Provoking the opposition is one of them. We see this in civil disobedience protests and noncooperation actions.
Provocation of state responders is one of the effects of protest, regardless of whether it is intended. But it's so consistent, especially in authoritarian regimes, that it is absolutely figured into the calculations of organizers. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, staged actions expecting casualties, but knowing they would ultimately further the cause by orders of magnitude.
It's unlikely you (a specific person) will get killed at a protest, but we see casualties at protests all the time, and they are often honored, such as the Kent State victims, who have a folk song written about them. It also sparked a student strike four million strong, and helped to speed the end of the war.
Not all antagonistic responses have to be lethal or even injurious to to create a backlash in support of the cause. The No Kings Snapchat account shutdown by Meta is already resulting in backlash against the Trump regime, against Zuckerberg, and against the tech bro coalition in general.
But again, all a state really needs to do is manage a protest with grace. Authoritarian regimes just jave a tendency to take visible dissent personally (or any criticism, really), and then more liberal states often fail to instill in their law enforcement a predisposition of deescalation. I suspect right-wingers just enjoy the notion of cracking dissenter heads so much they can't help themselves.