What Protests of the Past Can Teach Us About Protests of Today
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The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. With the anti-ice protests in L.A. and locally and the upcoming No Kings events this weekend, we're talking about protest this morning.

What purposes do they serve? What can we learn from the history of protest in America? And how is modern technology transforming what happens on the ground? We'll be joined by journalists and activists as we sort through the past, present and future of getting in the streets. That's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. The Bay Area has a rich, rich tradition of protest. Nobody takes to the streets as often or with as much gusto as the Bay Area. Civil rights, the Vietnam War, gay rights, the Iraq War, Oscar Grant, the Muslim travel ban, Black Lives Matter, Gaza, Bay Area activists are often early on the scene and loud.

The first few months of the Trump administration, though, have been unusually quiet here. That could be changing. Catalyzed by the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and the Trump administration's continuing attacks on the norms of democracy, the protests have begun and more are planned. What might they accomplish? Up first, we're joined by Omar Wasow, assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. Welcome.

Thank you so much for having me. So Omar, you study the history of protest movements, particularly of the civil rights era. Let's just start with something that might seem kind of obvious, which is what is the purpose of protests?

So I think every protest is a kind of complex mix of goals. There are some people who are there out of anger or grief. For example, when George Floyd was murdered, people were just had kind of rage and grief and wanted to express that. But there also are more strategic ends, like trying to persuade the larger public that there is some kind of injustice. And in the 1960s, that was sort of the core logic

articulated by people like John Lewis or Martin Luther King was we're trying to dramatize injustice. Yeah. And so, I mean, one of the things that's complex about this, right, is that there are protests that are designed kind of to build solidarity within the group of people who are in the streets. And there are protests maybe that are more designed for external reasons.

viewing. You know, there's a lot of research on the way that the civil rights movement used television in particular to get their message out. But both protests, many protests are trying to do both things at the same time, sometimes at cross purposes. Yeah.

Exactly. And so there's almost a contest in my mind between expression and persuasion. And sometimes expressing rage is not going to be what's persuasive. And conversely, sometimes what's persuasive feels very kind of instrumental or inadequate to people's sense of profound anger. Mm hmm.

So watching these protests in Los Angeles, you know, from the distance that we are from them, you know, we're not on the ground. How are you seeing these kind of dynamics come together? I think what's been really striking to me is how quickly we've sort of settled into certain kinds of

scripts almost, where there's a protest, a burning car, the media focuses heavily on, you know, fire. We have what appears in many ways to be an excess police response, but also a very kind of chaotic protester response. And that those dynamics have just played out

repeatedly across American history, particularly in L.A. And so I'm struck first in some ways by how familiar this is. You could look at 1965 or 1992, and there are some of these very same dynamics. And of course, there are these new dynamics, the Internet, cell phones that change how we, as the people not there, observe experience and relate to them.

Yeah, I mean one of the things that seems really tricky and we're talking about this with the team is that we're kind of judging the media performance of these protests or however we want to phrase that by local newspapers, by cable television shows that very few people actually watch and by

local television news, which also has a very specific and smaller audience. And yet there's this entire other layer that's much more difficult for us to see, which is what's being shared in these social networks about what's happening at these protests.

Yeah, that's right. And I and that's both new to a degree. But I think it's also important to keep in mind that we had a fragmented media in the 1960s. There was a pro segregation Southern press, a kind of pro liberation black press and a largely indifferent national press.

And and so you could depending on which media you were consuming, you could get a very different perspective on the civil rights movement. Was it violations of law and order or was it a call for rights? And so there's that similar dynamic now even refracted across this kind of kaleidoscopic media that we live in now.

And I think what some research shows is that protests can be both polarizing in the sense that people can, if you went to Fox News on Saturday, you saw riots are gripping LA. But on other media, it was about a military style response by the state against a relatively small protest and relatively, you know, a few blocks of downtown LA. And so there's just, there was in the past and continues to be a kind of polarization

way in which people will get very different stories about what's happening depending on the media ecosystem they're in. You know, do you think, given what you said about sort of the fragmentation of media, even the 1960s, do you think people have an accurate view of

how violence and nonviolence played out during the civil rights movement. I mean, I'm thinking of a classic right wing political cartoon showing, you know, devastation and cars burning and stuff. And and Martin Luther King Jr. is presented there saying, I'm going to have another peaceful protest tomorrow. Right. I mean, public opinion swung against Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s. And yet, of course, now that's not

how those things are remembered, generally speaking.

Yeah, it's a great question. And it's, I think, not just a kind of right wing critique of the civil rights movement, but it's also a left wing critique of the power of nonviolence. Like if you're going to be tarred with a brush of violence, no matter what you do, then why commit to nonviolence? Why sort of unilaterally disarm against some kind of repressive force? And I looked at thousands of protest events in the 1960s, in the civil rights era, some of which included protests

protester violence, some of which many of which were nonviolent and looked at 270,000 newspaper headlines in eight different newspapers. And what I found was, in fact, that when events were nonviolent, the headline the next day, you could predict with a high degree of accuracy the next day, a newspaper headline that would mention civil rights. And if there was protester violence, that headline the next day was more likely to mention riots.

All to say that what protesters did on the ground, like the tactics that activists used, did in fact shape media coverage. And so, yes, there's bias in the media. Yes, there's bias against marginalized groups like African-Americans. But the kinds of tactics people use can overcome those biases to shape the coverage. And I find not only did it shape the coverage, but it influenced public opinion and voting. Mm hmm.

What about the way the National Guard or other police groups, you know, now in kind of a new development, the Marines, how does that influence the way that people view protests? So,

I think it's very important to say we're still very early in this and it's I suspect we will have many more of these kinds of conflicts between activists on the ground opposing deportation or ice and and a kind of increasingly militarized police, National Guard, literally Marine or military response. And so

That's a super combustible mix. And it could go, I think, in a lot of different directions. In the 1960s, when the state engaged in these spectacles of violence, think Bull Connor sinking dogs on young people or shooting fire hoses at young people, that moved public opinion toward the protesters. And to be clear, the civil rights movement understood this and sought out

to protest like where they thought there might be these police chiefs who engage in exceedingly repressive tactics. And so Trump and the administration and their policies run a genuine risk of being a kind of modern day Bull Connor. And at the same time,

If the police, National Guard, Marines are relatively restrained and it's a summer of images of burning cars and vandalism, that is likely to I mean, what we saw in the 1960s is that produces that moves the public in favor of more law and order, more repression.

And so there's, there's, it's, it's really, I think an open question, which way it will go right now. It depends in part on what, what kinds of tactics activists use, but also what kinds of tactics the state uses. And so there was a, the LA press council put out a report today that more than 35 journalists have been shot by these or experienced some kind of injury at the hands of the police. And that's the kind of story that might produce more of a, this is,

an excess state response is too much police force and might move the public in sympathy towards the activists. And we do see some initial polling that suggests that may be the direction things are going, but it's still very early. You know, one of the kind of ideas that I've seen bounce around in my time of following protests over the last 10 or 15 years in the Bay Area is the

changes in the way that protests are organized or that, you know, the level of organization and discipline that sort of displayed at different protests. Where do you see these protests kind of fitting into the model of kind of completely decentralized kind of movements like maybe we saw an anti-WTO protest versus a very centralized times during the civil rights movement?

Yeah, one of the gifts and curses of organizing in the modern era and the present is that cell phones, the internet radically lower the cost of coordinating people, right? You can

very easily get out, we're meeting at this intersection to thousands or even millions of people at essentially no cost, right? And in the 1960s, people had to do all kinds of on the ground work to organize. And that meant that there often was a central organizing body and that that organizing body could help, you know, train people, impose some kind of discipline in terms of message discipline. And in the present context,

The sort of ability to rapidly converge a bunch of people in protest means you can get a rapid response to, say, ICE raiding a Home Depot parking lot. But it also means there is no response.

buddy in charge and it makes it much harder to impose something like message discipline. And we see cross nationally, even that sometimes, you know, the state wants to negotiate with a social movement and there's no leader to negotiate with. So in the Black Lives Matter era, people talked about it not being leaderless, but being leaderful. Right. But I think it's really complicated because we do have this. It could also be chaotic. Yeah.

We're talking about protests, what's happening locally, what we can learn from history with Omar Wasso, assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. We'll be back with more guests right after the break. Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about protests, what's happening locally, what we can learn from history, and what might be changing about protests as well. Joined by Omar Wasow, who is assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. We would love to hear from you as well. Have you been part of the recent protests? What brought you out? What were they like? What's kept you away? Do you have concerns about the

the current protests or your own risk levels, give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. We're KQED Forum, or you can join the Discord.

I want to bring in another voice here. Valeria Ochoa is a community organizer with Faith in Action East Bay and one of the organizers of Oakland's Tuesday night interfaith vigil to protest ICE raids. Welcome, Valeria. Thank you for having me. So tell us about the vigil. Like, what was the message that you wanted to send?

Yeah, thank you. We just wanted to send a peaceful message out to everyone and in a solidarity message from the Bay to LA, we wanted to also create a safe space for the community and just show everyone at this point, all of everyone's constitutional rights right now are not being met and protected. And so we wanted to show everyone that we're also out there fighting. Yeah.

Were you responding to a specific incident like in the Bay Area or was it more, yeah, as you said, wanting to show solidarity with what's happening in Los Angeles?

It was both. I mean, we've seen a ramped up ice activity in the Bay Area as well. And we are aware that more is coming. So earlier that morning, Tuesday morning, we also sent out, we are part of the ASILEP hotline as well. So we did send out a mass mobilization message to our folks that are trained and know how to proceed with these, with ice raids and ice sightings to the Concord area.

ice raids that were happening and also to San Francisco. So this vigil was already planned prior to that, but it also just encouraged us to move forward with it as well. What was involved in sort of the planning of it? Like, how did you try and bring people together? And, you know, like we heard Omar saying earlier, you know, like make sure that the message would get through, but also that the message would get out to a large enough number of people.

Yeah, no. So we have been working all weekend nonstop since Friday, since what we...

were hearing since LA. So we had a couple of emergency meetings and got together with the other organizations that are part of this movement, part of this coalition to put something together. We were very strategic and to who was in the room, how did we want to get our message across? And also the speakers, we, we

We know everyone that was part of the agenda for the interfaith vigil. We know them personally, one way or another. And as Faith in Action East Bay, we are a faith-based organization.

multi-issue, multi-language, multi-other multis. And so we have a lot of these relationships with clergy and we're all pretty much on the same page all the time because we organize, not just right now, but this is what we do. Why did you want to call it a vigil?

Yeah, so we know that there is an agenda being pushed. We know that there are tactics being used and we don't want to give in to that. So we are very well. And we also, like I said, go back to our faith, right? We are faith based. So we wanted to do something faith based, whatever that shape looks like, whatever that looks like for anyone to come out and and also spread some hope.

and joy, because that is what is being trying to take away from us. And we don't want that to happen. So we wanted to do a peaceful, disciplined vigil for folks. How do you see that as different or related to, you know, where people are going to immigration court and actually trying to shut down with direct action ICE officers?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's all the same. I feel like the images that are being pushed is not really what is the reality of what's really happening. Like I said, I keep going back to there's tactics and agendas trying to be pushed. And they're also trying to criminalize us and justify what's happening. And we just know that.

Right now, we have to protect our community and we are doing it peacefully. That's just not what's being shown in the media. Yeah, yeah.

Hey, thank you so much. Valeria Ochoa, community organizer with Faith in Action East Bay. Oh, actually, before you go, I wanted to ask you one last thing, which is how are you thinking about the risk to the people who are coming out to these protests, whether it's a vigil or some other kind of action, particularly those who may have uncertain documentation status themselves or their families do?

Yeah, we're taking all the precautions necessary. And the message we're getting out there as well is everyone has their own role in this fight. And that's going to look different for different folks, no matter your status, no matter how you look. And that means for allies, it's time for them to show up and be in the front lines. And for folks

folks that may not have a status right now, your fight looks different right now, but you also have a role. Yeah. Valeria Ochoa, thank you so much again for joining us. Thank you. I wanted to bring in another voice here. Andrew Kautz is Senior Editor Overseeing Cybersecurity, Privacy Policy, National Security, and Surveillance Coverage. It's a big ambit at WIRED. Welcome, Andrew. Thanks so much for having me.

You guys have been covering a pretty big difference from protests in previous decades and maybe even from like five years ago, which is the kind of rise of police surveillance technology that's increasingly sophisticated. What are some of the changes that you've seen there?

Yeah, so most of the changes are not necessarily that the technologies are entirely new, but that they are just becoming more powerful and less expensive for police departments to obtain. And so we're just seeing widespread use of masks

social media surveillance, meaning everything people are posting online is being kind of sucked up and ran through algorithms and flagged for potential threats. We're seeing facial recognition just being far more widespread and really advanced in that, you know, even wearing a mask or sunglasses is

doesn't necessarily protect you from being identified by facial recognition technologies. And we're also just seeing a proliferation of surveillance all the time in both directions. You know, part of what we see from the protests is videos shot by, you know, people who are at the protests as well as traditional media. And so kind of the surveillance is going both ways and it's kind of it's creating an interesting dynamic there.

Yeah, I mean, it really strikes me that the facial recognition technology change is kind of enormous, right? Because at this point, it's not like police have to, like, go through a bunch of, you know, not even mugshots, but just photographs looking for people, right? I mean, they can just kind of search by face.

Yeah, exactly. That's one of the big changes. And this kind of was ushered in by a company called Clearview AI, which is used by hundreds of police departments, if not more. And one of the big changes there, as you mentioned, you know, it used to be that facial recognition systems would rely on government technology.

image databases, whether it's passport photos or license plate or driver's license photos or mugshots, as you mentioned. But now, you know, with Clearview and other technologies like it, they're just vacuuming up everything that's posted online. And so, you know, it doesn't you don't need these specialized siloed databases. You just kind of the Internet is being scraped to to fuel these technologies. Yeah.

You know, listener Matt writes in to say, "I live in Sonoma County where Indivisible has been very active in organizing local protests against Avilo and Tesla. For example, for the first time in my life, I'm afraid of showing up to one of these. Many of my friends are concerned that they will be recorded, identified, and persecuted for their public resistance.

What is the history of that kind of retaliation? And is this time different as the regime shows every intention of using the state to punish dissidents? Omar, I'm going to throw this one over to you.

So I think this is a different moment in a couple of key ways. Some of what we just heard from Andrew, the level of kind of recording and documentation. But I think most importantly, you know, the First Amendment is a protection of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly against the threat of state persecution. And what we're seeing is that people, particularly people who are not citizens, being discriminated

criminalized for speech. So I think it is a reasonable concern that that is something that this current administration may mobilize against a wide range of targets. And at the same time, I think, and I sort of draw on the legacy of my own parents and grandparents fight against various forms of repression and racism and think it's also a moment for us to sort of

Try to find courage where we can if we if we have the capacity. I want to bring one more voice into this discussion. Liliana Sorichano, sorry about that, an organizer with Indivisible San Francisco and one of the organizers of San Francisco's No Kings protest. Welcome, Liliana. Hi, thanks for having me.

As you hear Omar and Andrew talk about the possible risks people might have in showing up to protests, how are you thinking about these No Kings protests and making sure that people are protected insofar as they can as they come out?

Yes, thanks again for having me. So the No Kings protest is a nationwide mobilization. It's happening on June 14th, this Saturday. And the main message is to reject authoritarianism, the billionaire rule, and especially this assault on our constitutional rights, such as the First Amendment.

So in terms of protecting our communities, we think peaceful, nonviolent protest is the key. And as others have mentioned, those of us who feel safe will be out and representing all the community, including those more vulnerable members who may have concerns and who may have other ways of fighting this authoritarian takeover of our country. So...

To be clear, two things are true in this country at the same time. We have no kings, and at the same time, we can peacefully speak out. So that's what we hope to show on Saturday across the entire country. And how many no kings protests are currently planned right now? See, I've just seen a map, so I don't know the actual number. Yes, it's a very busy map. So far, we have around 2,000 registered protests.

There may be more. And what's important about them is that they happen everywhere except for Washington, D.C. In all small cities, big cities alike, blue, purple and red. We expect people to come out and speak for for our democracy and against this takeover by a wannabe king. Let's bring in some callers here. Mickey in Berkeley. Welcome.

Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, sure can, Mickey. Go ahead. Okay, great. Thank you. I've been active since Vietnam in the cities when there were 10,000, 15,000 people in a demonstration at a time, and through the wars in Central America and everything since. And I'm particularly concerned that I don't think...

we're adequate people, all people in opposition to what's going on right now, which is not fascism like it's really sort of fascist that we are not adequately trained in civil disobedience and peaceful civil disobedience. So it's understandable that millions of Americans are totally angry and furious and rageful at times at what's going on.

and sometimes our powerlessness of what to do about it. And I think the people that have those skills need to spread them very soon about what are the fundamentals of civil disobedience. It's a very long time. There's a lot of millions of Americans that know nothing about the civil rights movement or how disciplined they were in order to

you know, carry out the incredibly dignified, persistent, strong adversarial actions that they did that were successful because they did not turn violent. And so I think we have to talk about, you know,

walling off people that are violent, stepping away from them, making it clear that we're not with those people that are throwing rocks. But having wider education, not just in the moment, but beforehand about civil disobedience, what are the fundamentals, how to practice

When you're surrounded by police and potentially police on horseback and the National Guard and who knows the Marines, it's so easy to jump off. It's the same thing for me. It would be easy to get fully angry and just like want to blow up. And we can't do that. It's strategically not going to work. It turns off the millions and millions of middle Americans that are not MAGA Trumpers.

that we need to win over to have a massive movement because that's what we need to make. I think that's about it. Yeah, appreciate that, Mickey. Do you want to talk a little bit, Omar, about the Vietnam War protests? I mean, one of the things I always found so interesting about that era is that there is a diversity of tactics at play protesting the Vietnam War.

Yeah, I mean, I think I want to key in, actually, if I could tie the civil rights movement to that comment. And there really was, I mean, part of what the caller gets right is it's not human nature to

take a blow from a baton and not respond, right? And if you look at some of the most iconic images from the civil rights era, people are being attacked by vigilantes, by the police, by state troopers, and accepting the blows, right? And I think it's also really important to appreciate that that risks not just humiliation, but injury, and in some cases, death. But as the caller noted, it also can produce these

very powerful images and narratives that, again, coming back to the line from folks like John Lewis, that dramatize the underlying injustice. And so part of what a protest can do when it's effective is to shift the national kind of focus, shift the national discourse to a kind of, you know, it's almost like a camera lens focusing on a particular thing to that injustice, right? And so, but

The other part of what you just noted, and then the caller as well, is that there is this diversity of tactics. It's exceedingly hard. It takes enormous discipline to not...

fight, you know, to turn the other cheek. And in the 1960s, their people were trained, they practiced being beaten, so that when it happened in reality, they could, they, you know, draw on these inner wells of strength to not respond in kind. And we just, and the caller is right. And to be clear, it's not just 1960s groups like ACT UP did this. And there's, I think, maybe one other

sort of lesson that can be taken from groups like ACT UP and kind of the history of disability rights activism is that sometimes

If your activism is informed by the fact that not everybody can run because people may be ill or disabled in some way, there are things, very simple tactics like just sitting down when the police are charging or in the 1960s, everybody getting down and to the extent that it's appropriate, praying. Like those kinds of responses are both de-escalating and again, can produce very powerful contrasts between kind of repression and nonviolent civil disobedience.

We're talking about protests, what's happening locally, what we can learn from our own area and our nation's history. I'm joined by Omar Waso, who's assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. We've also got Andrew Kaut, senior editor overseeing separate security, privacy policy, national security, and surveillance coverage at Wired. Earlier, you heard from Valeria Ochoa, who's a community organizer with Faith in Action.

And we have Liliana Sorochano, who is an organizer with Indivisible San Francisco. Of course, we are taking your calls and comments on your experiences at the protests. The number is 866-733-6786. If you can't get through there, forum at kqed.org. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about the protest joined by Andrew Couch from Wired, Omar Wasso from UC Berkeley, and Liliana Sorichano, who's an organizer with Indivisible SF. Andrew, I wanted to bring you back into this conversation. You know, I saw some posting that Charlie Wartzel, you know,

The protests in L.A. are not only being shown using actual images from the ground, but also just AI slop that's been sort of generated to reinforce the idea that this is Wartzel saying, you know, reinforce the idea that downtown is a post-apocalyptic war zone. What is how are you thinking about this idea of.

That, you know, I mean, as Omar said earlier in the show, you know, a lot of what a protest is, is how it's presented in the media. And now we have these technologies that allow for the creation of entirely false images that are real enough seeming.

Well, it's certainly not conducive to helping people kind of believe anything differently than what they're already believing. It's, you know, as you mentioned, it's really kind of reinforcing the narratives that people are already pushing or already believing. And so it certainly makes things more complicated. I do think that people, at least people who are frequently online, are pretty well educated in thinking

capabilities of AI and just how rapidly that's advancing and how difficult it can be to discern reality from something that's fake. But, you know, it is becoming increasingly difficult even for experts. So, you know, it's definitely part of what people need to pay attention to and making sure that they have a good media hygiene, that they're not

Kind of just falling for anything that comes across their social media feeds, that they do additional research to make sure that what they're believing is actually real. But, you know, so it's a complicating factor. I don't think that I haven't seen evidence that it's the primary factor and certainly one that's being used consistently.

as propaganda, but it's not necessarily one that's necessarily shifting the narrative nationally, I'd say. Good point. Yeah. You know, one more future focus thing with you here too, or really present focus, I suppose now we talked a little bit about facial recognition. What about people's phones? Like, let's just say, for example, someone's going to a protest and,

Should they leave their phone at home? Are the phones and location data that's available through them going to be stored by police? Like, how would you think about that?

Yeah, the decision of whether to bring your phone with you to a protest is probably one of the biggest, most direct kind of decisions that you have to make in terms of your digital safety and your overall safety with regards to protest surveillance. So your phone is constantly recording all types of things all the time. This data is being sent to third party data brokers. It's being sent to Google, Apple,

every, you know, all of the above and police can gain access to that information. So if you really want to be careful in terms of your digital privacy and avoiding surveillance, it's best to either leave your phone at home or if that's not an option, you can keep your phone off or put it in a Faraday bag, which is it's a bag that will kind of prevent any signals going to or from the device.

You can also have a phone that's kind of wiped of everything, a second phone that you bring with you that doesn't have as much of your personal information on it. It doesn't have all your messaging, email, social media accounts on it. So if law enforcement gets access to it or forces you to give them access to your phone, it's not going to have as much revealing information on there. But I would say, you know,

one of the earlier listeners mentioned they're worried about being recorded. I think you have to assume that you are being recorded constantly. And so it's not just your phone, it's everybody else's phones. It's the videos and live streams and photos that everyone else around you is taking, in addition to police body cameras and any other kind of police surveillance that's happening.

So it's pretty much guaranteed that you are being surveilled in one way or another, and you can avoid personally surveilling yourself or giving the police the opportunity to access the data that you're creating by, you know, turning off your phone, leaving your phone at home, and or putting it in a Faraday bag. The other thing I would just say is that you have to really make your own personal risk assessment. You know, as we've mentioned earlier, you know, if you're undocumented, if you're otherwise in a vulnerable community, you really have to

make a wise decision for yourself about what the risk levels are about attending a protest. And that also pertains to how you're going to conduct yourself on social media and maybe whether you bring a phone or not. And the last thing I would say is as you do that risk assessment,

and make the decision whether to bring your phone or what to do with your phone is, you know, there are other risks other than surveillance. There's getting injured, there's separating from the people who you're there with through your support network, and you have to factor in those risk factors too. So you can do as much preparation as you can to kind of mitigate the need to communicate during a protest. But, you know, you may need to bring a phone and maybe your job to record the protest or otherwise have your phone available to you. And so

You really have to make that decision based on your own personal situation. Thanks, Fred. Let's go back to the phones. Jake in San Jose, welcome. Hi, sorry if that's a little loud there. I am calling to talk a little bit about the nature of the modern state surveillance and our First Amendment rights, I think, to a very...

I'll keep this brief, I promise. But there's a political philosopher named Michel Foucault who talks about something called the society of the panopticon. A panopticon is a theoretical type of prison where inmates are kept behind one-way mirrors so the guards can see them, but the individual prisoners don't know when they're watched. So they must act as though they are being watched at all times.

And that is what we're describing here. It is the ultimate removal of freedoms because now you don't even have to be on camera. The police are in your head.

They're functionally with us all the time. And we are left constantly second-guessing how we may be surveilled. I think many of us feel that way. That's where we're living right now, that for exercising your basic, peaceful First Amendment rights, you are going to probably be tracked and surveilled everywhere you go. And there's no way that you can even know to what extent you're being watched. And now, yesterday, Senator Josh Hawley's office sent

sent out requests for extremely detailed information on lists of members, donors, finances, internal communications, all other activities related to protests organizing for groups like the Union del Barrio, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who are groups who have been organizing and guiding protests

and who have been very careful about making their message peaceful and lawful. And so these are the people, these are the organizations in our decentralized movement that are maintaining that message control that we need in order to avoid the kind of crazy, chaotic incidents that might justify more of a state crackdown. And I guess I just want to point to this extremely dangerous point that we are at, where

Individuals are being targeted on a granular level such that they are never sure of whether or not they're being surveilled. And the organizations that are ostensibly guiding us in a way that is going to make these protest movements effective are now being directly targeted down to the individual member level of everything they've ever said. No, Jake, I appreciate you bringing this up. I mean, Omar, I wanted to go to you on this because, I mean, at least...

But my read of this history was that one reason that these decentralized movements kind of took off was this kind of learning from the civil rights movement that having one, two, three, a small number of sort of charismatic leaders that could be targeted by things like COINTELPRO or other means of state repression, that there were too many eggs in a single leader's basket. But of course, now with the kind of current levels of the surveillance state, it might be possible to just do that for a wide variety of organizations.

It's certainly a trend at the level of surveillance we're all subject to is sort of pervasive. And you now have to think, as the caller noted, right, like I'm traveling. Do I need to turn off my phone as an American citizen going through customs? Right. Because maybe I have said some disfavored speech there.

And of course that we are in databases everywhere, you know from Facebook on down to you know security cameras, right? Yeah, I mean it is it is unsettling and at the same time these technologies as Andrew noted can also allow for what's sometimes called surveillance, right that like we as Citizens can document state violence in a way that can be quite powerful. So you think of

You know, why do we why did the murder of George Floyd become an international issue? A teenager named Darnella Frazier had the presence of mind to document Officer Chauvin for, you know, just to stay with that shot for minutes. And that changed our politics quite dramatically. Right. And so so it's it is both disturbing and empowering simultaneously.

And I think the from the kind of the core story of how how might a social movement succeed is going to be a real challenge because groups like Indivisible and the others we've had on are providing some central organization. But it's just it's it's the distributed power is it's just a double edged sword. Yeah.

Um, bunch of kinda rich comments coming in. I wanna do a little block of them here. Steven Talbott writes in to say, "I'm the producer and director of The Movement and The Madman, a PBS American Experience documentary that will air on KQED this Friday at 9pm. It's about two of the largest anti-war demonstrations ever held in the United States.

Those demonstrations bear a striking resemblance to what the No Kings demonstrations are doing. At the time, there were great debates within the movement about what kind of tactics would be most effective. Also, at the time, people felt frustrated that the protests did not immediately stop the Vietnam War.

What we learned many years later is that the protests had a major impact on stopping massive escalations of the war, including the use of nuclear weapons. I was recently in Vietnam to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, and I was told over and over again by the Vietnamese, our protests mattered.

Michael writes, "It seems that the protest movements of the past depended on norms and rules of engagement which don't seem to apply at all in the Trump era. In general, it feels the left is operating more as if some version of the old rules applies, as if civic common ground is somewhere to be found if we're all just determined and disciplined enough

But the air Megabreeze appears to leave them groundless, free from moral considerations and thus all-powerful in this environment. All actions taken with consideration for the admirable, disciplined rules of the past feel like unilateral disarmament. Do we need a new form of protest? I'm at a loss.

Todd writes in to say, "In a world where the media only covers burning cars and graffiti and where the people knowingly voted for a criminally prosecuted president who promised to be evil and cruel, how does peacefully protesting do anything? I am tired of going to protests like a good little citizen and losing. Power only cares when there is a credible threat of losing its power."

Liliana, I wanted to come to you on this actually because you're organizing a big tent, you know, No Kings is kind of a big tent protest movement when we've got people feeling very differently about the value of these kinds of protests. How do you signal to or organize people to know sort of what you're about versus, you know, a broader set of considerations and tactics?

Yes, I recognize the frustration from the caller and others as to why the effects of our protests are not more immediate. But we remain committed to nonviolent, peaceful protests. And we think that only a large number of people will succeed. And by showing up repeatedly and everywhere around the country, this is the only way to oppose this authoritarian regime.

So we're not giving up. We have been trained by ACLU and others in methods of de-escalation and how to separate ourselves, as another caller said, from potential infiltrators who want to inflame the situation. So we are committed to doing this again and again and again until our voices are heard. Let's bring in another caller here. Let's bring in Barbara in San Francisco. Welcome.

Thank you. I'm, of course, mainly concerned about the nationalization of authoritarianism. And I don't like the overreaching of the governor's jurisdiction by the president. One of my main concerns is it's unnecessary to call in the forces of the Marines. They're being misused. And this whole force that's occurring is wasting our national money. Hmm.

So I have many, many levels of concern about this terrible, terrible development. Thanks so much for that comment, Barbara. I want to note, too, that we're going to be covering some of these things in the 10 o'clock hour with Mina Kim, which is now just a couple minutes away. Let me bring in one more caller. Sally in Mountain View, welcome.

Thank you. I'm one of the organizers of the 7x7K, 7 Miles and 7,000 Protesters, stretching from Tesla Palo Alto to Tesla Sunnyvale. And as an organizer, working closely with Ida Rose Sylvester, who's another organizer here locally,

We find that a challenge for us is to give people a good experience at protesting where they feel effective. So far, we've been able to do that and also create enough different events

to satisfy the demand and to get people into the cycle of being involved. It's clear that we have to come out of this national nightmare with a sense of radical solidarity across communities,

across ethnic groups, across different ways of organizing. And so we're very heartened by seeing so many first-time demonstrators, protesters coming out. And we just have to continually up our game to present things that people with disabilities can participate in, that people of all ages will find interesting and where they're able to be effective.

Sally, appreciate your perspective. Thanks for giving us a call. Omar, as we get to the end of the hour here, I did want to ask you about the comment that came in about whether the rules have changed, whether in this particular moment the history of protests in this country has relevance still. What do you think?

I think it's an important point and certainly there are moments where I'm somebody who loves to study protests, get a little tired of hey, hey, ho, ho, whatever it is has got to go. And at the same time, I think there is a core truth that is present from the early days of the founding of the United States to the present, which is that people make sense of the world in stories.

And that protests can be powerful acts of narrative construction in the public mind. And what I mean by that is that protests can help elevate a particular issue in the public consciousness.

And sometimes that's just an image, sometimes it's just a headline. But whether it's the 1960s or it's the images of George Floyd being murdered or it's some of the images that we're seeing today, like these very simple kind of morality plays, a single individual, you know, in one case lighting a car on fire or another case being shot by a cop, like those stories shape public opinion and the

And I think that that still remains very true today. And I think the last thing I would want to say is there was one other point that Collar made, which is a kind of almost sadness or a kind of loss of efficacy. And we just have study after study showing that protests do work, right? It's a little bit like voting. Your vote individually may not feel like much, but collectively,

Civic engagement, taking to the streets does in fact change our politics, does in fact change the way the public understands issues. And so I wouldn't want people to think things have changed so much that protests doesn't matter. It does.

Last note here, there are a couple of events even just happening today at noon. Interfaith Council Unity Gathering is gathering on the steps of City Hall. Apparently Mayor Lurie is going to be there and also some faith leaders, immigrants, and community members are going to be gathering for a vigil outside the San Francisco ICE office.

A lot going on in through the weekend as well. We have been joined by Omar Wasso, assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. Andrew Kauta, senior editor at Wired. Liliana Soriano, an organizer with Invisible SF. And earlier we heard from Valeria Ochoa, community organizer with Faith in Action East Bay. Thank you so much to all of you, as well as to all of our listeners. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

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