Did the normie protest day
I love going to these big "no kings" protest days because they are a) incredible people-watching opportunities, and b) often full of extremely activated normies. They are full of the kind of people who would call themselves a "liberal" completely seriously - center-left or even center-right types.
I don't interact with much of these people in my day-to-day life because if your whole life is videogames or cycling, it is extremely easy to spend all your time in spaces where the politically vocal people are so online, their politics would be terrifying to the majority of grandmas nationally. This goes for grandams of any political alignment.
But I think it is very important to stay grounded about who participates in "normie politics," particularly if you ever plan to doorknock, do local activism, or do like, labor organization and shit, so I find these experiences valuable and I am genuinely glad to go to them and enjoy them. I am so immersed in communities with a more radical perspective that I consider going to this kind of thing to be like eating a vitamin.
I went to the Santa Monica protest because I'm genuinely worried about being arrested with type 1 diabetes. I am the kind of person who can bike up a mountain with adequate prep... but would become extremely medically fragile if I didn't have the freedom to eat or replace my insulin whenever I need to. I am differently disabled in different contexts, and I've chosen to avoid cop contexts as best I can because of this. Santa Monica was very heavy on the rich white liberals, and they pretty much all dispersed when asked at the end of the event. It was even more law-abiding than the Culver City one I went to earlier in the summer, which had a lot more young and visibly marginalized people attending.
Anyway, here are some pictures I took at the event. I was particularly interested in hunting weird, misspelled, highly normie signs, including ones expressing sentiments that I don't understand or even appreciate. I saw a lot of signs that seemed to be AI-generated. I haven't posted all of the best ones I found here, because I don't want to spend forever disclaiming anything, or carefully articulating my exact stance on the kind of centrist person who brings a genuinely offensive sign to a big-tent protest and thinks they're helping. But here's a selection that I think serves as an accurate cross-section of the sentiments of the day, and the tone with which they were expressed:
Every once in a while you'd see something with a little more teeth. I was genuinely surprised to not see more pedophilia signs... there were only a couple.
Most of the signs were very general, and addressed a sense of broad discontent with "the way things are going" rather than discontent with specific policies or moral injuries done to the nation.
A tiny minority of signs mentioned specific policies, marginalized groups, or even specific characters in the Trump administration. Signs that mentioned trans people, Mexican identity, etc. were uncommon. Signs about gay identity were a little more common. I believe I saw a lot more of these signs about specific marginalizations or specific policies at the Culver protest earlier in the year, which occurred right around the same time that ICE started hassling Los Angeles.
And here are some of the signs I suspect were AI-generated. Apologies to the artists if they were not, lmao:
At the end of the event, everyone cleared up pretty obediently and went home.
I'm glad that LA has a number of these more local protests, but I remember seeing that the ones in SM in particular were a lot more intense in 2020. You can't know everyone's politics by the signs they choose to carry, but this did strike me as a much more centrist crowd than the one I saw earlier this year. I think that local progressive orgs should be working hard to reach these people still, though... and I suspect that in a town like LA, a lot of them are already in entertainment unions. I am no big expert, and most of the organizing I have done has been workplace related, so I have no idea what it takes to turn a Santa Monica liberal into a radical. But I refuse to be doomer, so I gotta hope it can be done.