The Protest Dilemma

Are the anti-ICE protests a good thing?

A protester waves the Mexican flag in front of a burning Waymo vehicle during an anti-ICE protest in downtown Los Angeles, California, on June 8, 2025. The protest erupted after a wave of federal immigration raids began on June 7, with National Guard troops deployed to the city despite objections from local officials. Demonstrators called for an end to deportations and the dismantling of ICE. (Photo by BENJAMIN HANSON/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Taking It to the Streets

We did an emergency newsletter last night because I wanted to set the table for what I think will be a consequential week. Now we’re going to get to work trying to sort out What To Do About Everything.

Specifically: protests.

Warning: I have many more questions than answers. If that’s going to frustrate you, maybe skip this one. But if you’re okay with uncertainty, you’ve come to the right place.

We’re going to talk about all of this, and work through it together in the comments. But wait on that. I want you to read the whole thing and pause a beat before you engage.

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Let’s start with the things we know, rundown style.

(1) Protest can be powerful tools. You don’t need examples but: the American Civil Rights movement; the Eastern European color revolutions; the Tesla takedown.

(2) Not all protests are productive. Did the Occupy Wall Street protests accomplish anything concrete? How about the Black Lives Matter protests? Or the Gaza protests?¹

Some protests are powerful enough to topple regimes. Some protests accomplish little. Some protests create a counterproductive backlash. When evaluating a protest movement you must be cognizant that all three outcomes are possible.

(3) We can’t know ahead of time which will be which. Many books have been written trying to understand commonalities that lead to successful (or failed) protest movements. You might want to start here with Zeynep Tufekci. But the received wisdom is roughly: Protests should be nonviolent, massive, with clearly articulated and achievable goals.

Civil rights for black people. Independence for India. Depose a corrupt undemocratic leader. Stop buying Teslas.

The more diffuse and theoretical the goals are, the harder they are to achieve.²

(4) Sometimes a ruling regime wants a protest movement as a foil. It is sometimes the case that a regime does not realize it has gone too far and created a societal backlash. In such cases, the regimes are often caught flat-footed by the popular rebellion.

But in other cases the government will summon a protest movement into being on purpose in order to polarize actions that might otherwise be broadly unpopular.

At this moment, we are clearly in the latter scenario.

(5) Protests cannot go on indefinitely. They have a shelf life. A protest movement—even a peaceful one—creates turmoil; the equivalent of a psychological breakdown at the societal level.

Which means that they either come to a head, at which point there is a catharsis—for good or ill—or they dissipate.

The pathway they take is determined by a multitude of exogenous factors, but a big one is the geography of time and events. A protest leading up to—just to pick one possibility—an election can be a powerful thing because it is aimed at a focal point. It promises a finite, predictable endpoint.

Protests lasting longer than a year or three are relatively rare.³

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2. Questions

Now let’s be real about what we don’t know.

Give them what they want? Just because a regime wants a protest movement to fight against doesn’t mean their calculations are correct.

It is probably true that Trump chose to escalate deportation arrests in Los Angeles in the most confrontational way possible in the hopes that the city’s residents would object. It is absolutely true that he needlessly mobilized the National Guard in the hopes of provoking a confrontation between protesters and the military that he could use as a pretext for his next escalation.

But do you think he needs a pretext? Trump has proven, over and over, that he will escalate no matter what. Denying him a pretext isn’t going to stop the next escalation.

To put it simply: Just because Trump wants protesters in the streets doesn’t mean that protesters shouldn’t take to the streets. The calculations here have to be made at a higher level.

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There is no perfect protest movement. Many people are generally in favor of protests so long as they remain nonviolent. But that’s impossible to promise. Put a large number of people together and some bad thing will happen, somewhere. If 10,000 people peacefully assemble in L.A. and one person throws a frozen water bottle at a cop, the protests will be characterized as “violent.”

Here’s the part where I want to say that the best a movement can do is aggressively police its own side and disavow violence completely if it wants to be effective.

But is that necessarily true?

Trump’s Stop the Steal movement was expressly violent. In the most confrontational and documented way possible. Trump’s cause did not suffer because of it. On the contrary: The pro forma initial disavowals of violence gave way to winking acceptance of it—which eventually became lionization of the violent protesters as patriots and martyrs.

I don’t know how to square this circle. And I mean really square it. I understand that squishes like me will say that nonviolence is the key while more militant people will talk about direct action. But put aside your priors and try to explain to me: Why do some protest movements benefit from violence while others are hobbled by it?

I would be grateful if you guys had an eyes-wide-open discussion about this in the comments. Put aside the question of should and explain to me the question of why?

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3. It Doesn’t Matter What You Think

There is a lot of prescriptive discussion about protest going on right now. Much of it is useful. I’m certainly learning from it.

But at the end of the day it’s important to realize how powerless these conversations are except as tools for deepening our understanding.

Look: This is a country with a population of 330 million. People care about what they care about.

If it turns out that some percentage of this country cares deeply about what mass deportation looks like in practice, then they are going to protest. And it doesn’t matter if you or I think it is unwise, or being done suboptimally. Protest is, almost by definition, an organic construct. And our ability to stoke it or stop it, to mold it or influence it, is limited.

Protest is like culture, or society, or a chemical reaction. It has a life of its own.

So please, be honorable. Be kind. And be careful.

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1. I’m not passing moral judgment on any of this. Just talking about practicality and results.

2. This may be why Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter failed to achieve many practical results.

3. Counterexample: The civil rights movement went on for fourteen years and yet achieved massive success.