The No Kings protests was paid by Walmart
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31730469
To redirect revolutionary energy from destroying to the system to just criticizing Trump. It is a way for them to gain popular support and show themselves as anti-establishment instead of the bourgeoisie that they are who need to be overthrown
Walmart was also one of the sponsors of the military parade
iplaybothsides.tar
As I have said before, the service and finance sector are growing worried by the incoherence and audacious nature of the military industrial complex. We will see much more of this in the future as the waning geopolitical might of the U.S. is eroded.
Capitalist in-fightings is an opportunity for us!
That remains to be seen. I personally think one side or the other must win out, and that will be when the opportunity presents itself, because they both need to exist for the empire to continue running. If one side wins, it will destabilize the entire project, and that is where opportunity lies.
It's not the in-fighting that benefits us, it is the assumed total victory against their greatest challenger that will leave them open.
This looked like a shop to me, but Snopes verfied as true with sources: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-walmart-heiress-nyt-protest-ad/
Fuck me, I was convinced it was a shop
I hate to break it to you all but PSL and Young Communists league both participated and co-sponsored the event
where do i get my Walton check for protesting?
The libs going to these protests aren't joining the left anytime soon.
They're most likely a scratch away from going full fascist vs. comrades in waiting. Think about it: these protests are on a weekend midday attended by a whole lot of well-off-enough white people with their "brunch" signs and costumes. This is a performance that they can say they did to their coworkers in their comfy office jobs on Monday.
You know who wasn't there? All the service workers who had to work during the weekend. All the people working 2+ jobs to survive. People without childcare. Neurodiverse people who get overloaded by the sensory input. People experiencing homelessness. Those people are potential comrades because they are the ones most exploited by Capital right now. The people serving brunch to these libs are the people to talk to, start slipping flyers, having those 1:1 organizing conversations with.
I'm a neurodivergent who was working from home and taking care of my 2 kids while my wife was working an extra shift. I would've slipped out for a bit and brought the kids if the air wasn't litterally toxic yesterday where I am due to an ongoing forest fire burning down one of my favorite local state parks.
I saw PSL recruiting at my local event, but they didn't really try to coopt the thing as a whole. Basically, they seemed to talk, kept their speeches mostly to stuff everyone agreed about (Wallstreet and Trump is bad), inserted some anti-imperialist talking points, and then used that to find receptive people, and sign them up or hand them flyers.
So, they were selective about it, but it doesn't mean the protests weren't useful to them. It's a chance to grow the movement and get people who wouldn't have otherwise heard of them. I'm sure other communist movements did a similar thing.
Co-opt the events themselves? Unlikely. Recruit from them and agitate within those spaces? Possible, but I'm not gonna do it cause I can't stand libs and would just end up yelling at them
This is the way. Had and HVAC tech come up to a protest I was at that was mostly just anti-Trump/republican policy. When others told him that, he mentioned how local businesses and properties are getting gobbled up by private equity and that there's more going on behind the scenes. There are workers waking up with no direction to aim their frustration. Get out there and show them the way comrades.
You go and talk to people to find people who might join your org, make connections between orgs, etc. But on the whole, these protests are absolutely not productive
Probably not. Your average Westerner is incapable of changing their minds via someone presenting evidence or a well thought out argument. They have to come across it organically and it has to be their idea. It looks weak if you change your opinion in the face of new evidence, so it has to be something they bump into on their own, like when your aunt "discovers" this hip new restaurant called chilis
A good rule of thumb is to assume that your average American is Mac from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, in that the fact that science makes you look like a bitch sometimes is evidence that it doesn't actually know things. Or they are Dennis in that they assume that the science is right because that makes them feel superior to others, not because they are actually interested in the truth-value, or why and how we understand the science.
Honey-Chipotle Chicken Crisp the CEOs
Our local group of anarchist and Marxist hooligans are in early talks on how to start educating and radicalizing the group of radlibs that we were helping run cop watch, scanner duties, and jail support for. There is a lot of confused and scared libs that the little optimist in me thinks we can work with and help them start to understand things from an actual leftist perspective. If we can see even a few new comrades come out of this with the smaller turnout we had at the protest, I think it will be worth it. We won't counter-coopt the org, but I think it's a good place to develop networks and go from there.
Yes, it happens all the time.
What "revolutionary energy"
To be completely fair, it's not Walmart the corporation. That framing is a bit disingenuous.
How is that being "fair" or the original framing "disingenuous"? She's the Walmart heiress! So what if it wasn't the actual direct corporate funds that the money was shelled out from, it was still a top member of the Walton Family who owns the corporation. No one is saying "Ew look, Walmart funded this" we're saying "Ew look, some of the filthiest and most notorious of the bourgeoisie funded this."
Walmart heiress Christy Walton promoted a planned nationwide protest against President Trump by placing a full-page advertisement that ran in the New York Times on Sunday. The ad, which the billionaire heiress paid for, calls on people to participate in the "No Kings" protest.
Pretending that because the Walmart board of trustees weren't directly the ones funding it, this criticism is some kind of misdirection, that is what's disingenuous.
It's not misdirection to be more specific. I do think it's a bit disingenuous to imply the entire corp sponsored the protest lol
distinction without a difference
Yeah that's fair.
2025 No Kings
2010 Tea PartyAstroturfed by billionaires
Packed with boomers
\ Larping as 1776 colonial minutemen
Does not fundamentally challenge capitalism
Obsessed with opposing the current president only
2025 libs are literally just 2010 tea party people now. Embarrassing. in 6 years they'll be 2016 Trump republicans.
Honestly pretty optimistic of you to say these dipshits are on a trajectory that will lead to them storming the white house in 11 years.
They would never, it has no brunch cafes
But it would be funny