The brain power of a protester

“ I went to a protest last weekend. Not as a participant. As a tourist. I just wanted to see the wildlife in its natural habitat.

And here’s what I learned. A protest is the only event in America where the people running it would be furious if it actually worked. Because then what? Then they’d have to go home. Then they’d have to get a hobby that doesn’t involve a Sharpie and a foldable easel.

Because the thing about protesters is they always say, “We’re here to change minds.”
No, you’re not.
Nobody is driving home from work, gets stuck behind twelve people blocking traffic with handmade signs, and says, “You know what? I was wrong about foreign policy.”
That has never happened.

Nobody is sitting in their car, missing a dentist appointment, watching a guy named Skyler scream through a bullhorn, and suddenly thinks, “This man has opened my eyes. Also, I respect the bongos now.”

A protest is not persuasion. It’s a group therapy session with poster board.
You ever look closely at the crowd? It’s the same five people at every protest. I don’t care what the cause is — save the bees, free a country I can’t pronounce, ban a chemical I’ve never heard of — it is the exact same guy in the back. Gray ponytail. Cargo shorts in February. A shirt that says something was wrong in 1987 and he’s still mad about it. This man is not an activist. He is a subscriber. He has a punch card. Ten protests, the eleventh one’s free.

And there’s always one guy with the megaphone who clearly waited his whole life for that moment. You can see it in his eyes. He didn’t come to change society. He came because, finally, people have to listen to him. The bullhorn is doing what his personality never could.

And the chants. Who is writing these chants? Because somewhere there is a committee. There has to be. A small group of people sat in a room and decided that the most effective way to communicate a complex geopolitical position was to make it rhyme with “go.” Hey hey, ho ho, something something has got to go. That’s the template. That’s been the template since 1968. We put a man on the moon, we sequenced the genome, we cannot come up with a second rhyming structure.

And the signs. The signs are a competition. Nobody admits this, but it’s a competition. There’s the earnest sign — three paragraphs of text in eight-point font, no human being has ever read it, it’s basically a Wikipedia article on a stick. There’s the witty sign, where someone made a pun about the president and they are thrilled with themselves, they have been waiting six weeks to deploy this pun, they will be photographed with it, it will go on a tote bag. And then there’s the sign that just says a curse word in glitter. No context. Just rage and craft supplies.

You can tell they’re not really trying to persuade anyone, because the slogans are always written for people who already agree with them. That’s not activism. That’s a bumper sticker convention with chanting.
Because psychologically, a certain kind of protester isn’t really trying to change your mind. They’re trying to announce that they already have the correct mind. That’s the whole point. It’s not “Join us.” It’s “Look at me, I joined first.”

It’s moral karaoke. They’re not writing the song. They’re just up there loudly performing the version everyone in their little club already knows.

The protester brain has three departments.
One: outrage.
Two: costume planning.
Three: checking if anyone filmed the outrage and costume planning.
That’s it. That’s the whole headquarters.

And the funny thing is, they call it “raising awareness.”
Everybody is aware. That’s the problem. We are too aware. I have awareness fatigue. I wake up every morning and my phone hands me seventeen global catastrophes before I’ve brushed my teeth.
So when protesters yell, “Wake up!” I’m like, “I am awake. That’s why I’m angry you’re blocking the road.”

And here’s the deeper thing. This is a friend group with a theme. That’s the whole psychology. They are not bonded by shared values, they are bonded by shared enemies, which is a much easier club to run because you don’t have to agree on anything except who to be mad at this week. Last month it was one country, this month it’s a different country, next month it’ll be a cereal mascot. The cause rotates. The group chat doesn’t. They’re not an organization. They’re a book club that stopped reading.

And they all dress the same, chant the same, use the same phrases, hate the same people, and then accuse everyone else of being brainwashed.

Really?

You’re in a parking lot with matching signs chanting in unison, but I’m the one in a cult?

At some point it stops looking like political courage and starts looking like adult recess for people who miss having a school principal to rebel against.

And the second the protest ends, where do they go? Brunch. Every time. They march for the workers and then they tip eleven percent on a mimosa.

They scream about late-stage capitalism and then they Venmo each other for a shared appetizer with a little fist emoji in the memo line.

I’m not saying their hearts aren’t in it. I’m saying their hearts are in it for about ninety minutes, and then their hearts want eggs Benedict.

But I will give them credit. They do bring people together.

Not to their cause.

Against them.

That’s their real achievement. They may not change one mind in their favor, but they can unite an entire traffic jam in shared hatred faster than any politician in America.

That’s not a movement. That’s a brunch reservation with extra steps.”

Author unknown