"Trumpism, as the activists Vox spoke to see it, is bigger than Trump — it encompasses everything from racial hate crimes to state immigration laws in Arizona to North Carolina's "bathroom law." And while the activists behind the "White Rage" call and the #Time2Escalate hashtag are disrupting Trump rallies as an intrinsic "moral imperative," they also see anti-Trump protests as a way to harness some of the progressive energy that's risen against Trump and turn it to the bigger fight against Trumpism in its less theatrical forms...
Sometimes protesters slip into treating protest as something that's intrinsically good, regardless of its strategic effects — a "moral imperative." And for many of the anti-Trump protesters, especially the ones not affiliated with activist organizations, that's probably true.
But the people who are actively working to knit together anti-Trump actions around the country are doing it because they see direct action as a particular part of their broader strategy to mobilize against Trump: a tactic that forces people to confront what's happening...
there is a target to the rally protests: galvanizing white progressive allies."
Not yet feeling the anti-Trump protest thing... In my mind, it's white Bernie Bros frustrated about the attention that Trump is getting and sort of passed that he and his supporters are triggering feelings of white shame that they don't understand.
And so, with that motivation, the protests aren't really doing anything on a national stage... They aren't making more people aware of a problem (like in Ferguson, when protests brought attention to an under-recognized issue), and they also aren't changing hearts + minds (like these high school kids in LA changing policing policies in their school district).
I'm probably wrong, and I'm glad to have read some of the words of these protesters expressing their vision of their strategy, and to see that local issues have been highlighted St some of these protests, but I feel like I want them to be hooked into something more...
(Like, maybe a campaign to get white people to share pictures and videos on social media that call out racism and address other white people's fears)
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