Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:17 on 14 June 2025

There has been a lot of hand-wringing recently from many on the anti-Trump side of how the recent protests against ICE are doomed to be a disaster because they are not perfectly adhering to the ideals set forth by those wringing their hands.

Look, this is a stupid basis on how to judge things. No set of protests of any size and consequence is ever going to strictly adhere to any one individual’s pet set of standards for political protest. It’s just not going to happen.

This sort of unrealistically high standard is almost uniquely applied at home and nowhere else. Look at any other authoritarian country where open opposition emerges, and you will find incidents of, at the least, property destruction and retaliation in kind against police violence. Of course, the narrative is never about the property destruction or retaliation then. In fact, that stuff usually gets papered over in the mass media. But it’s fairly easy to find the images of burning vehicles and protesters throwing rocks at police if you look for them.

Almost never is there the “oh, dear, the protester’s tactics are going to alienate people from their cause” take for such protests abroad. Rather, the sign that protests are emerging at all is seen as a positive sign that the regime’s spell over its populace is breaking.

And yes, at this point, the USA is best understood as some form of a soft authoritarian regime. It’s really the only honest way to characterize a society where masked secret police go around disappearing people, with (up until the last week or so) very little resistance from the populace.

No, that doesn’t mean that optics are unimportant, or that there are not big issues on the American Left. I have written before on how much the American Left is an inward-looking subculture and of the necessity of any protest movement to break out of that subculture.

But that latter point cuts both ways. There is also a need for any protest movement to break out of the control of the Democratic Party and its allies. That crowd is so stunningly incompetent at the whole politics game that any leadership role on their part probably dooms opposition to ineffectiveness. What we don’t want is protests that can be turned on and off at the whims of the Democratic Party. We need the heat to stay turned up on Washington even after Trump is, one way or another, removed from office. The Democrats did very little to fight fascism under Biden and there is exactly zero reason to assume they will, absent a lot of pressure from below, do much about it again if they ever manage to regain power.

And this leads me to the really worrying thing about the planned No Kings protests. From what I have been able to determine, it’s all being run by a centralized leadership that is, in fact, closely linked to the Democratic Party.

We still have yet to see any sort of broad none-of-the-above movement emerge. This limits my optimism, although it is also true that in this sort of situation, any protests almost always beat no protests. So I am more optimistic than I was a month ago, but it will take significant changes in the nature of the opposition to Trump to raise that optimism to a truly significant level.