It's not working anymore. The old slogans just aren't cutting it. The protesters are grayer; the signs are all professionally done now, with few obscenities. What's on them has been tested in focus groups and carefully manufactured for maximum impact — not to move people but to catch the all-seeing, voracious eye of the camera.
The protesters are props now. The business of protests takes place off camera, with activists pleading, begging, threatening, and lying to get the attention of news media. In the case of the DNC anti-Israel/pro-Hamas protests, the hype started early. In the weeks leading up to the convention, the March on the DNC claimed 30-40,000 protesters would descend on the convention.
Another protest group, Behind Enemy Lines, refused to get permits and promised to "Make it Great Like '68," referring to the 1968 convention where riots disrupted the proceedings. Some Muslim organizers claimed there would be 100,000 people marching in an orgy of anti-Israeli hate.
In the end, it was a spectacular bust. The Behind Enemy Lines protest drew about 75 people in front of the Israeli embassy—twice that many news media and four times as many cops. For the main March on the DNC, just 3,500 people bothered to show up.
What happened? It certainly wasn't a lack of publicity. Social media sites were filled with appeals to come and make their voices heard.
Reason's Nancy Rommelmann has covered protests at home and abroad for many years and can't remember attending one like the DNC protests.
"Is this a little boring?" asked a cameraman. An Irish journalist agreed, and the three of us—having covered more incendiary events in France, Minneapolis, and Portland, respectively—chatted about the days when protests were not announced weeks in advance, but formed spontaneously or were made known through literal samizdat or its digital equivalent. We might have gotten a little nostalgic for times when chats like this were impossible, when you were too busy ducking projectiles, avoiding a stampeding crowd, or covering your face from the tear gas.
There was none of those things here—almost none. The protesters were, if you'll excuse my vulgarity, what my late ex used to call "young, dumb, and full of cum." They were horny for confrontation, and if that meant getting in the faces of some of the cops, they'd do it. Which they did, creating a maybe three-minute scuffle during which several protesters were arrested before everybody went back to their places.
"It was utterly bizarre," claimed Rommelmann, "an over-orchestrated rebellion where nothing new happened." The reason nothing new happened is because they've done it all before, said it all before, chanted it all before, and marched for it all before. The whole left-wing activism schtick has grown tired and stale.
Some of the leaders of Behind Enemy Lines realized that. They wanted a little blood to "water the tree of liberty" and supercharge the protests. At least it would have followed television's axiom of being in "the boredom-killing business."
“We’re not calling for violence or planning on anything illegal, but we think that there’s ways for people to protest that do go beyond business as usual,” said the spokesperson for Behind Enemy Lines.
Rommelmann asks, "Had social justice protesting jumped the shark?"
I think maybe so, and while young people protesting injustice may be evergreen, the current form has gotten tired. The protests that started in 2020 were a form of release, a way to get out of lockdown and maraud in the streets with your friends while concurrently believing you were making the world a better place. The causes could change—Black Lives Matter, Ukraine, Roe v. Wade—so long as they provided the requisite rage calories. And boy did October 7 hit so many notes—racial, historical, and religious. We would fight in the streets to prevent another Nakba or Holocaust, trusting no data unless it aligned with our values.
Michael Boyte, one of the founders of Behind Enemy Lines, told me that the Israel Defense Forces had so far murdered 168,000 Palestinians, including children by amputation. If this were true, I could understand how a protest in front of the Israeli consulate would be a "get-your-message-heard-by-any-means-possible" emergency. But it is not true, and while one might imagine an inflated number would give the protest more fire, on this night it did not. Maybe people smelled a rat. Maybe they have activism exhaustion, which turned out to be the case this past Monday, when an expected 30,000 people for a March on the DNC resulted in only 1,500 participants—an advent that can leave leaders a bit sore, even combative.
Out of those 75 protesters who were in front of the Israeli embassy, 72 were arrested later after trying to provoke the Chicago police to violence. The police acted professionally and firmly. The protesters just acted.
The left will change its tactics. Next time, they will make the protests much more interesting, and that should worry us.
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