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Transcript:
I have great news to share today! One of my spicy hot takes that I have defended for years continues to be right: protest works, whether you like it or not.
Back in June of 2020, I talked about a study that found that the general public doesn’t like “extreme” protest tactics, which didn’t mean outright violence, but just chanting mean things about cops. In response, I pointed out that historical data shows us that the general public NEVER likes ANY kind of protest no matter how peaceful they are, with the majority of Americans saying in 1961 that sit-ins made them less likely to support civil rights. By 1964, three out of four Americans thought that Martin Luther King was too extreme and was hurting his own cause.
And yet, those tactics ultimately worked.
Even the actual violence of the LA riots in 1992 had a positive impact. In 2019, researchers found that both white and African American voters “were mobilized to register (to vote), that new registrants tended to affiliate as Democrats, and that voters shifted their policy support toward public schools, net of a general shift in support for education spending. This mobilization appears to have persisted: those mobilized by the riot remained regular participators over a decade later and remained more Democratic than the general population, even after accounting for demographics.”
I was discussing all of that at that time because that’s when the Black Lives Matter protests really kicked into high gear, following the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020. I saw a lot of people claiming that protestors were actually hurting their cause because of “extreme” tactics like blocking traffic, and I wanted to make sure people knew that there is a wealth of historical data suggesting that it wasn’t true.
I made a follow-up video in 2022 when people were saying the exact same thing about the tactics used by Just Stop Oil activists, calling attention to a particularly terribly designed survey done by climate scientist Michael Mann that he felt proved tactics like pretending to damage a piece of art were making people less likely to support climate activism.
And so here we are now in 2025, where fascists have taken over the US government and protests are popping up around the country. Whether or not you’ve seen it on your local news, there’s been a growing chorus of people gathering together and speaking out against the current administration, whether by showing up a town hall meetings and literally shouting at their representatives, or by protesting at Elon Musk’s Tesla dealerships, encouraging people to sell their Tesla vehicles or stock. There are even “extreme” examples, like people defacing Teslas or even lighting them and their charging stations on fire.
On that point, let me just pause to say that, mostly for legal reasons, I will never ever encourage any kind of violence in response to the political climate. But I really truly want to dissuade anyone from lighting a Tesla on fire. Seriously, not even a Cybertruck. Electric vehicles can burn for hours, they are much more dangerous for firefighters to deal with compared to gas cars, and they are much more likely to pollute the air, soil, and groundwater with dangerous chemicals. I don’t like to tell people how to protest their own oppression, but honestly there are so many more environmentally friendly ways to destroy a Cybertruck. I mean, the thing is held together with kindergarten paste, I’m sure you can figure something out that doesn’t pollute an entire city.
Anyway, as these protests gain steam, there are still many people wondering if it’s even worth doing anything. After all, didn’t we all protest Trump in his first term? Wearing silly little pussy hats and whatnot? And now here we are again, with Trump 2.0. What’s the point?
Last month, researchers from King’s College London and the London School of Economics and Political Science published a fascinating analysis of the effects of the Black Lives Matter protests on the 2020 election. They examined a metric fuck ton of data on where and when the protests occurred, existing racial attitudes and political leanings in those counties, and voting data for the election that November.
They found that during and immediately after the BLM protests, there WAS an opposing push that moved people to the right, most likely due to media portrayals of violence at the protests. But by the time the election rolled around, areas where the protests happened ended up further left than before the protests.
And here’s the big kicker: they have the data to suggest that this was causal. It’s not just that, for instance, Democrats were more likely to protest and of course also more likely to vote for Biden. The researchers found evidence that the leftward shift happened across all parties, getting Republicans and independents to start identifying as Democrats, and it was explicitly because of the Black Lives Matter protests.
They used several statistical methods to establish causality, the most interesting of which was rainfall data. When I first read that I thought, “Huh, that must be a metaphorical name for some sociological tool,” but nope! It’s actually rainfall. People are less likely to go out and protest when it rains, so they examined weather data to show that particularly bad rain storms resulted in fewer protests and then less of a shift towards the Democrats.
This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I learned that researchers now prefer to look at the weather conditional to how the weather usually is during that season in order to control for things like this: a 2019 study that found that a rainy voting day made people less likely to vote for a change to the status quo. Weird shit.
But yeah, in this recent paper they provide some compelling evidence that BLM protests were critical to Biden beating Trump in 2020, with protesting counties seeing an increase of 1.2 to 1.8 percentage points in favor of Democrats, and with the largest effect showing up in counties “with relatively small, white, and low-educated populations.” They also found that the protests significantly shifted people’s views to be more progressive about racial disparities.
In other words, Joe Biden won because of Black people. That’s not shocking if you’ve ever looked at who reliably shows up to vote for Democrats but in this case they did it by agitating for their own human rights and progressive policies that would benefit everyone, pushing even rural white dumbasses to be more likely to vote for Biden over Trump.
So if you’re wondering if it makes any sense to go out and protest your fascist overlords, the answer is “absolutely, yes.” Do not listen to the doomers who tell you it’s too late, that there’s nothing you can do, that no one will listen, that you’re too extreme, or that you’re just encouraging people to go out and buy more Cybertrucks. Show up, meet your fellow activists, and agitate for change.
