The “No Kings” protests in every state may have been the biggest day of demonstrations in American history, a data analyst has suggested.
“Based on hundreds of crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don’t have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6m people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday,” independent data journalist G Elliott posted to X Sunday.
For reference, that’d mean Saturday’s demonstrations featured 1-2% of the total population of 340 million taking to the streets in more than 2,000 cities to voice their opposition to the increasingly authoritarian, far-right policies the president has pursued since assuming office for the second time.
Historically, a regime falls when around 3.5 percent of the general population protest. You can do it, US, I believe in you!
I think the statistic of 3.5 is more of a symptom rather than the cause of a regime’s fall. For 3.5% to protest means that:
Probably other reasons.
Protest by itself achieves exactly jack shit. It’s a tool, effective in conjunction with all the others, but you can’t expect any change if you just put 3.5% of people on the streets. They will fuck around aimlessly, and then go home.
Yes - it’s a signal that a large fraction of the population is mad, it’s not the protest that does it but rather the fact that there’s so many people involved in opposing the regime that it becomes difficult for the regime to act and easier for the population to find like-minded to fight back.
It’s the willingness to act that makes a difference.
it’s at best a warning sign and a way to organise and prepare actual riots
once movement starts hurting the economy, regimes will collapse.
BS stat.
Correct stat, but it’s not like you get to 3.5% and then the regime magically falls. There’s context around that. It requires keeping up the pressure.
We can’t fizzle out the way the George Floyd protests did.