In recent weeks, it’s become clear that the Trump/Musk takeover does not need to be well-executed to accomplish its goals. But now, it’s also becoming clear that protesters have adapted to the seemingly unending number of attacks, on an ever-expanding number of targets—the emerging theme in whatever kind of fascism this is.
Last week, the words “transgender” and “queer” were deleted from the National Parks Service website for the Stonewall National Monument, to demonstrate compliance with one of Trump’s executive orders. A biographical note about legendary activist Sylvia Rivera was nonsensically edited to read “At a young age Sylvia began fighting for gay and rights,” with no effort to even replace the deleted, dreaded word “transgender” from where it had originally appeared (following “and”). Historic descriptions about why Stonewall mattered were hastily truncated to read: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal”—missing the two letters that made up what had been “LGBTQ+.”
Within hours, queer and trans groups and activists organized a protest at Stonewall to condemn the erasure, with hundreds of people rallying to condemn the administration’s attempts to edit trans people out of the nation’s history. These sorts of protests are now following each new Trump decree, every agency Musk has ravaged. The sites are expanding: from DC sidewalks to Congressional offices, from Stonewall to Tesla dealerships. The day after the protest against trans erasure, a small group picketed the Manhattan Tesla dealership, one of a number of actions across the country that day, each organized autonomously to locate the fight with Musk in any city or town where Teslas were sold. The signs and chants varied, but all illustrated the collapse of Musk’s business interests into his government takeover, tying his “Swasticars” to the “broligarchy.” On Monday, they were still popping up outside Tesla properties. In San Francisco, a sign was spotted in the dealership’s upper window: “We Hate Him Too.”
Building on the first weeks of protest, which focused on the budget freezes and staff firings at federal agencies, now protest is intentionally distributed. The Women’s Marches of 2017 took place in hundreds of cities and towns across the country, but only once and on one day. Eight years later, in a sense, the scene of the crime is everywhere: each hospital that has denied care to trans kids; each neighborhood ICE has tried to terrorize. From close up, this may seem diffuse or non-strategic. But it reflects the multi-faceted nature of the crisis (and the seemingly random volley of executive actions driving it): Those who are feeling rightfully overwhelmed are reasonably not limiting themselves to just one target in their response.
The Stonewall riots of 1969 were against the police, who wielded vice laws to suppress queer and trans life; the protest at Stonewall last Friday was a demonstration that the history made on that spot was alive, even if the opponents in that story had shifted. Throwing a brick or handfuls of pennies at the cops worked in 1969. But where do you make a stand against whoever has the password to the content management system running the website of a national park? Where do you protest the gangs of Elon Youth accessing government servers containing our private data? Why not Tesla?
The protests in Washington continue, some very small. But the more that some people—even a handful—remain visible, the more others seem inclined to join them. On February 7, outside the building where the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency Musk had pledged to kill, the small crowd included a woman who had spent 36 hours traveling by bus so she could be there and do something. “She was sleeping in a cheap motel and going to any protest she could find,” journalist Hamilton Nolan reported in his newsletter last week, “She’d been homeless before, so this didn’t feel like a great hardship. She was holding a hand-drawn poster that read ‘HONK FOR DEMOCRACY,’ but getting little traction with passing drivers.” It’s earnest, but it’s what’s happening.
On Monday, also known as President’s Day, another wave of the Reddit-organized 50501 protests hit dozens of cities. 50501 seems to be drawing out some people who have never organized a protest before. “I decided to pick the ball up and do it myself. And I learned a lot extremely quickly,” said one organizer in Pennsylvania. Indivisible is now running with the Tesla protest idea, urging people to plan their own “Tesla Town Halls” wherever they are. “If you’re in Texas or California,” their guide suggests, “consider a SpaceX facility or X (formerly Twitter) headquarters.”
Mere weeks ago, media outlets were still publishing pieces asking where the “resistance” was. It seems we are now well past that: Possibly, that’s because “the resistance” is bubbling up in too many places to track. When we look back on these weeks, we may see a broader narrative was emerging: The rolling protests everywhere may turn out to be more sustainable than the mass one-day turnouts by which many judge the strength of a movement.
