Warning about April 5th protests
For many years billionaire George Soros has been painted as a villain by the far-right and made the target of numerous conspiracy theories. These include the claim that Soros funded the Black Lives Matter protests beginning in May of 2020. The idea that one person could pay hundreds of thousands of people to go into the streets and protest and not get caught is silly on its face, and is supported by magical thinkers and other fantasists, of course.
No one could mount a remuneration scheme on that scale and not get caught. For example, on a much smaller scale, Trump routinely advertised for attractive paid supporters to come to his Nuremberg-style rallies and stand behind him in camera range — and was instantly caught. You simply cannot pay people in numbers of any consequence to do something underhanded like that without that fact leaking. It’s nothing short of insane to think you can. But millions of Americans nevertheless believe such things go on.
This is all preamble by way of a caution about Saturday’s coming nationwide “Hands Off” protests. There will be pushback, and it is useful that we all know what form that pushback will take. MAGA is going to downplay the force and scale of the protests by claiming that crowd sizes were exaggerated and largely funded by George Soros. Fortunately this nonsense will only be believed by the stupidest among them. Unfortunately there are a lot of them who really are that stupid.
One thing we must make absolutely certain that we never do. We must make sure the protests never become violent. It is said by some in social media, including the otherwise alway sensible David Pakman, that a single broken window in a Starbucks will be the ruin of the Hands Off protest. I disagree. I hope no windows get broken, but you can’t have protests of the size anticipated without a certain amount of property damage.
What must be avoided is runaway mob violence and rampant destruction of property of the kind that will show up on local news channels. That news footage would be used against us, and rightly so. The word must go forth that the protests remain peaceful. We can be loud, we can be angry, but the best way to destroy this movement from the inside is for us to turn into a violent mob.
Another danger is that Trump will use any violence to invoke the insurrection act. Republican Governors will call out National Guards to put down the protests for the smallest pretext. We must not give them that pretext.
Of course those measures might be taken against us anyway. But they will backfire if the protests are peaceful, just as Trump’s use of teargas and rubber bullets to clear peaceful protesters so he could make a photo op holding an upside down Bible in front of St John’s Church backfired.
Of course, just as Republicans can turn the violence of the January 6th insurrection into a peaceful protest of “tourists,” they can and will try to turn the Hands Off protest into a bloody uprising worthy of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. They tried as much with the Black Lives Matter movement. But the more peaceful we are the more absurd they will look. So a little advice from the 60s is in order, brothers and sisters: PEACE.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.