Protest, Disruption, and "Clean Chaos"

Politicians and pundits call for protest without disruption, but hasn't that always been the case?

           As the situation in Los Angeles continues to escalate due to federal overreach, a number of news agencies have provided live coverage of the protests in the Downtown area, and out of ABC7, KTLA, BBC, and AP the majority have also had pundits or experts (usually former prosecutors or law professors) who have talked about either the federal perspective to these demonstrations or the textbook perspective to federal actions. Typically, at some point soon after their introduction, they or an anchor will parrot a view that we have heard since time immaterial applied to resistance actions: 

Shouldn’t these people just be nice?

           L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, California Governor Gavin Newsom, L.A.P.D. Chief Jim McDonald, and dozens of other government or law enforcement officials have tended to gravitate to the same general point - that while they support the right of peaceful protest, disruption or violence is looked down upon. Interestingly, while protest is lauded as a Constitutional and historical good, it never seems to be a good idea whenever “now” is. 
           This kind of thought was expressed in 1999 during the Seattle WTO protests. It came up again in 2002 surrounding protests regarding Afghanistan; in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006 regarding Iraq; in 2008, 2009, and 2010 regarding Occupy Wall Street and other protests regarding the Global Financial Crisis; in 2016 over Donald Trump’s first term, and again that year regarding the Ferguson protests; in 2020 over the George Floyd protests; in 2022 surrounding Roe v. Wade protests; and yet again here, in 2025. 

Here we go again

           The reason this line of thinking comes up time and again, often from the state media apparatus or from the government itself, is because it does not actually work to address demands of aggrieved groups and does not upset the existing power structure. The very basis of protest is disruption. It relies on the fact that the existing channels of redress, such as the ballot box or the legislative branch, have not to this point been effective. It is an intermediate action between what Malcolm X called “the ballot or the bullet”. In his landmark speech in 1964, Malcolm X said in part that conditions had been reduced to a point where he believed that his community needed to let the government know that if the ballot box wouldn’t work, bullets would have to work. 
          Malcolm was one arm of the Civil Rights apparatus, and his approach did not work unassisted; on his other flank was Martin Luther King, Jr., who certainly did not ensure that his protests were non-disruptive — quite the opposite. The Montgomery, AL bus boycotts disrupted the economy. The Selma marches disrupted traffic. The Nashville sit-ins disrupted society. What this arm of protest gave the world was proof: proof that even if protesters (using their Constitutional guarantee to act) were asking for something reasonable, the State would respond unreasonably. In short, successful protests have done one of two things: either one, forced the State’s hand by goading their brutality; or two, caught the State in a pincer movement, wherein crackdowns on violent protest expanded nonviolent action and vice versa. 

          In the decades since, government officials and propagandists have done all they could (and things legally they couldn’t) to sterilize the message of the 1960s, the American imperial dais’s personal “Never Again”. In 1973, the FBI infiltrated leftist organizations like Weather Underground and ratcheted up their political violence to sour the public’s opinion of them, while Richard Nixon’s promised “law and order” politics themselves were under attack through the Watergate scandal. Regardless, the aftershock of COINTELPRO shattered the left while the FBI allowed white nationalist organizations through the 80s to the present to generally thrive without interference. Also in the 1980s came Ronald Reagan’s back-breaking approach to union labor and aggressive privatization of government, which (as Thatcherism in Britain did) has proven disastrous in the years since. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton took the helm of the Democratic Party and capitulated to conservative power brokers, embracing a Neo-liberal fever dream via NAFTA and paving the way for George W. Bush and Barack Obama to further demonize Constitutional rights and the fight for them. In this way, Malcolm X’s sixty-years’-past siren song is not just for the Black community anymore — it envelopes us all. 

We only have now to act.

          To protest is to disrupt. It is at its’ core to say “not only do I not like this, I demand action for it now”. It is a warning. MLK’s famous quotation, “And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard”, is as prescient now as it was when he wrote it. What we come to then is a tipping point. In 45 states, legislatures have enacted at least one bill which criminalizes protest since 2017 according to the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law. Many of those bills make various protest actions such as blocking traffic on a highway or occupying a public space a felony, which strips protesters of their voting rights, making these bills a collective theft of their subjects’ First Amendment rights. 

          The Trump regime, without precedent, has federalized the California National Guard against the wishes of California’s governor and L.A.’s mayor. We see other cities across the U.S. begin to play the same game that L.A. has attempted to, skirting the verbiage of honoring the Constitution, as long as you do nothing to defend yourself. Various cities in Texas and New York City officials have already responded violently to attempt to fearmonger protesters out of causing problems for their governments. It is time to show American fascism our teeth before they take them out by force.