this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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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.