Shitty Advice for Progressive Protestors

Seems like a lot of folks will be out protesting against monarchy this weekend. That’s super. It also seems like there’s a lot of bad advice for protestors floating around the socials. That’s not super. In fact, I spent a large part of yesterday Arguing with Strangers™ about one particular post. It’s by actor and activist Peter Coyote, and I still can’t believe that he wrote it because it looks like it was produced in a Russian bot farm for the sole purpose of sowing division on the left. Some of the conversation I had was productive, but I’m still thinking about that post today, and now I going to break it down for you. You can read the whole thing without my commentary at Peter Coyote’s Substack.

Peter Coyote: I’m watching the Los Angeles reaction to ICE raids with trepidation and regret. Three years ago I taught a class at Harvard on the “theater of protest”— designed to help people understand why so many protests turn out to be Republican campaign videos working directly against the interests of the original protest.

Me: At this very moment, people on the right are circulating photos and videos that are several years old and from all over the place saying that they are images of what’s happening in L.A. right now. They did the same thing with Portland. If I remember correctly, they did the same thing with some BLM protests. No one should be worried about providing the Republicans with damning optics because they will simply create the images they need to suit their narrative if they can’t find them.

A protest is an invitation to a better world. It’s a ceremony. No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at. More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is. The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, The Congress, etc. The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them. If you win them, you win power at the box office And power to make positive change. Everything else is a waste. There are a few ways to get there.

Stop right there, sir. What is happening in Los Angeles right now is not a planned demonstration. It is not a piece of performance art with a political message. People are in the streets because agents of the federal government are kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps in other countries without due process. People are in the streets because ICE is targeting people at work. People are in the streets because ICE is targeting people looking for work. People are in the streets because Donald Trump promised mass deportations and Stephen Miller is determined to deliver. This is an uprising. It is not theater.

[L]et women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do.

This right here is one of those places where the Venn diagram of Boomer hippies and the New Right or the Radical Right or whatever the fuck we’re calling any movement with which JD Vance is associated is a perfect circle. The difference is that the hippies think they’re complimenting women when they say this kind of shit and JD and Co. believe that Western Civilization will die in the longhouse. Just… No.

[A]ppoint monitors, give them yellow, vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protester sit down. Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement. [D]ress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum When you’re dressed in clean Presentable clothes. They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience.

Lots to unpack here! This is where I started to think, “Oh, this isn’t just Boomer foolery. This grew up in troll farm.” The words and phrases that caught my attention: real protestor[s], anarchists, provocateurs, hoodlum, clean. This is a potpourri of right-wing shibboleths, respectability politics, and white fragility. It is, in its way, kind of amazing, but… My take is that anyone who looks at what’s happening in L.A. and thinks, “I don’t love the idea of disappearing people who have lived and worked and raised families in this country for decades, but those protestors are rude and disheveled” is someone who was looking for a reason to check out. And that’s if such a person even exists.

As for the idea of appointing monitors, I don’t have enough movement experience to know if this is good practice but telling the “real” protestors to sit down so that police will focus their violence on the “anarchists” and “provocateurs” seems pretty sus to me.

[M]ake your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people. Let signs do the talking. [G]o home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at Dawn fresh and rested. 

I will allow that thousands of people gathered in silence would be awesome and terrifying—not as a show of “discipline,” but as an eerie battle cry. I also find myself wondering if Peter Coyote has ever organized or participated in or seen a silent protest of more than, like, a dozen people. When I attended a rather liberal women’s college in the early 90s, there was a lively debate about whether or not the dining halls should stop serving “Plantation Mint” tea. I can kind of imagine a silent protest blocking access to both coffee and tea at mealtimes making a difference, but I suspect that this would have had more to do with students wanting to regain easy access to coffee—mostly—and tea—to a lesser degree—as quickly as possible than students being impressed with the discipline of the protestors. This is just my very long way of saying that I think this idea is stupid.

As for the idea of going home at night… I find myself ill-equipped to offer a judgment about this but the “cops” vs. “killers” dichotomy, um, gives me pause. (See Peter Coyote’s use of the word “hoodlum” above.”)

I have great fear that Trump’s staging with the National Guard and maybe the Marines is designed to clash with anarchists who are playing into his hands and offering him the opportunity to declare an insurrection. It’s such a waste and it’s only because we haven’t thought things through strategically.

No kidding to the first sentence, except for the anarchist-bashing. As for the second sentence, I will refer to my earlier comments about the difference between a planned demonstration and an uprising.

Nothing I thought of is particularly original. It was all learned by watching the early civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s. And it was the discipline and courage of African-Americans that drew such a clear line in the American sand that people were forced to take sides and that produced the civil rights act. 

I am not the person to critique this presentation of the Civil Rights movement, but I’m pretty sure that this is a grossly simplistic presentation of the Civil Rights movement. What I can say with some authority as a progressive school board member who survived the first CRT Wars is that people actively opposed to racial justice love to quote Dr. King in support of a white supremacist status quo. (I will add that I am tired of Boomers flashing their 60s bona fides as if we have learned nothing in the intervening 60 years, and I say this knowing that I deserve the world’s tiniest violin because Gen X has turned out pretty bad!)

The American people are watching and once again if we behave in ways that can be misinterpreted, we’ll see this explained to the public in Republican campaign videos benefiting the very people who started this. Wake up. Vent at home. In public practice discipline and self control. It takes much more courage.

This is the intro with a twist. Seeing it reiterated, I notice the disconnect here between protestors and “the American people,” as if the people in the streets are somehow separate from the general citizenry. This feels to me like another relic of the 60s, when the people at home caught up with the hippies when they started seeing scenes from Vietnam on the evening news. I realize that I am almost certainly being reductive but let me stick with this for a moment. There is no “American people.” Even if we’re playing to an audience, there is no single audience. What plays well on Fox and OAN is very different from what you’ll see on MSNBC.

For what it’s worth, I think that protesting nicely probably does take discipline and self-control. I am honestly not sure about how much courage it takes, though. And maybe I should have said it sooner that Peter Coyote has been a Zen priest since 2015. I don’t know how this might influence his views about anarchists and hoodlums and how to dress for a protest, but I can imagine how it might shape his thinking about quiet and inaction. I am not the person to comment on the history of Buddhist political action. That said, I do know that there is such a thing and that it is not always quiet and polite.

I’m not trying to tell anyone how to protest, nor am I telling anyone how not to protest. What I’m saying is, if you’re thinking about protesting, think critically about the advice you’re getting and consider the source. Myself, I suspect that anyone who tells me that being quiet, small, and compliant is the way to make my voice heard is probably not an accomplice.

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