Trapped Inside Free Speech Zones: How Americans Must Move Beyond Protest

Reflecting on the last 6 years of protest movements in the United States, and how to build sustained political power

Protesters during a 2020 racial justice rally in Ohio. Photo by Becker1999. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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The following piece was written by Kai Huschke, CELDF’s Executive Director, and was originally published in Counterpunch on July 22nd.

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By Kai Huschke

Protests over the last 6 years

The sheer number of protests in the first six months of 2025 resulting from unpopular actions taken by the federal government (and state and local governments) is getting difficult to track:

Legislation to cancel the non-profit status of organizations opposing U.S. foreign policy – The funding and supplying of weapons for ongoing escalation of the genocide in Palestine – The denial of racism through canceling DEI programs, humanities, and teaching critical race theory – The heavy-handed actions to impose global tariffs – The unleashing of federal immigration authorities (ICE) to perform snatch and grabs of people that lack documentation or appear to fit the profile – The expansion of privatization of public land- The unilateral action of the executive branch to carry out airstrikes against Iran in the so-called name of peace. And so on.

What’s next: The complete cancellation of Medicaid? The insistence of accelerating the burning of fossil fuels? Mandatory relinquishing of public utilities in your community for private profit? In fact, all of these are already underway. The overwhelming number and speed of these deplorable actions is part of the strategy. Shock and awe. Distraction and illusion. Induce a state of helplessness in the victims.

The to-do list for those in power is all about full steam ahead people and planet be damned. Maybe that’s the point from those in charge. Create as much chaos, threat, and destabilization as possible to keep people from uniting to not just call out the current injustices but organizing to change the rules of the game itself. Deep enough change that would stop these cruel actions from happening in the first place.

The net that the federal administration and supportive state and city governments are casting is not only snaring those who have opposed the current administration but even those who voted for it.

Protests have been on the rise since the mid 2010’s with the last six years recording some of the largest in recent times. Regardless of which party is in seats of power, the people are not happy and have a lot to say against the decisions and actions supposedly being done in our name. June’s “No Kings” protests were said to have drawn 5 million people.

In 2017 the Women’s March brought 500,000 people to D.C. with another 3 million gathered elsewhere across the country. The numbers are even more impressive when you look back to the 2020 George Floyd protests, with an estimated 20 million people taking to the streets to decry police violence. Americans are coming out in greater and greater numbers to show their dissent. But to what effect?

Critiquing Our Protests

Getting people on the streets is necessary. It is something to be applauded wholeheartedly. It is a necessary piece of the needed transformation. Nonetheless, there are some critiques that must be made of our protest actions.

The mobilizations over the last six months have been overwhelmingly peaceful. They’ve consisted of parades, sign waving, speeches, sit-ins, and demonstrations. On occasion, they’ve involved direct obstruction, including making it difficult for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to follow immoral orders to kidnapping people by official decree.

Never forget that the legal system is not the highest law. Our morality is. Another way to look at it is, just because it’s the law does not mean it should be obeyed or defended. Make no mistake, the oft repeated phrase by politicians that “we are a nation of laws” is not about order and harmony, it is meant to control and to subvert dissent.

I often see quotes on the news from elected officials or law enforcement officers saying they “fully support the right to assemble, but will not tolerate any disruption or law-breaking.” What they are actually saying is “go ahead and say what you want, so long as it doesn’t disrupt the status quo.” This is precisely why large events like political conventions, presidential inaugurations, or United Nations summits have designated free speech zones. We’ll let you have the so-called right to free speech, but only so long as we, the decision makers you are protesting against, don’t have to hear it. Yelling into a void is fine, but actual change? That won’t be tolerated.

May 25, 2025 marked the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The millions who mobilized to call out not just his senseless killing but an entire system of law enforcement that has allowed such violence to be inflicted on thousands of people over the years. Those protests shined a bright light on an issue often kept in the shadows. It even spurned some law and policy change. But ultimately that violent system of law enforcement is still intact. Since the murder of George Floyd, every year has seen more people killed by police than in 2020.

The definition of protest is to call attention. Protest can take different forms, but across all them generating awareness is a key goal. There is an inherent limitation to what protest alone can produce. Protest is merely the opening act. Our movements should never forget that.

What is often missed is what must follow or be worked on simultaneously; that is, the difficult work of changing the conditions that produced the event that caused the protest in the first place. Protest can throw open the door or clear the space of obstructions, but protest alone rarely changes anything.

In fact protest, in the way it’s most often deployed, has a defect: it is aimed at the decision-makers themselves, the very people who push the buttons and pull the levers who sparked the protests in the first place. The groupthink of protestors is that “if there are enough mobilized voices, this will alter the behavior of decision-makers to undo the harm.”

What we are seeing in the protests today is similar to when unpopular legislation is proposed or there is a permit to challenge. You often see or hear about a strong mobilization of oppositional voices speaking to the flaws of the legislative proposals or the harms that will occur if the project is allowed to happen, yet the system has no obligation to act in the manner that the people want. In other words: “you can yell all you want (this is usually the purpose of “public comment periods”), but we’re going to do what we want.”

Protest alone, disconnected from more substantive action, is akin to screaming in the wind. Protest is not resistance. Protest, whether conscious to it or not, often reinforces the belief that the system is fundamentally sound, and that with reform it can resolve the issue that sparked the protest. We must confront the truth: our system of governance is fundamentally flawed. It is corrupt, hierarchical, unfair, and thoroughly infiltrated by corporate power and special interests.

As more people mobilize to call out injustice — which definitely needs to happen — those in power will remove the means by which those objections can take place, whether it be by criminalizing protest, breaking strikes, cracking down on direct action with harsh penalties, or penalizing mutual aid. The aim is to silence dissent. Our response, of course, should be to protest anyway — and to do it on our own terms. Defiance and disobedience are the foundations for moral actions against injustice, legal or otherwise.

Protest can raise the alarm about the illegitimacy of the system, especially if we direct our voices towards the people, rather than those in power. However, protest alone is not enough.

What we also need to keep in mind is that the current realities are linked to a very long and dark past. Our work isn’t merely to protest current actions of today, but also to throw off the cruelty and destruction of the past. We need to develop our abilities not just to resist but to be resilient.

Movement Building

Protest is a tool that can help feed, grow, and drive forward movements for transformative change. But it is how we approach protest, and how it links to the larger movement orientation, that will dictate the impact of our protest moments. We should be seeing ourselves inside a movement context. A movement context is needed because the system is the problem. If we are able to do this, we will see the value of effective protest, as well as the ability to assess when protest falls short, such as when it is more spectacle than substance.

There are various movement models out there to check ourselves against. Two worth becoming familiar with come from Moyer and Goodwin. Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan or 8 Stages of a Social Movement comes out of the efforts of the Backbone Campaign.

Stage 5, or what Moyer calls Identify Crisis of Powerlessness, is most often where our movements die. The movement doubts its ability and believes the system is too powerful to transform. That growing lack of confidence or sense of futility sets in deep enough to extinguish the momentum that brought the movement to this point.

Lawrence Goodwyn, in his book “The Populist Moment,” structures movements in four stages: movement forming, movement recruiting, movement educating, and movement politicized. For Goodwyn, the warnings of movement failure are to be heeded throughout movement building. He makes this clear in the book’s introduction:

Many people may not be successfully “recruited,” many who are recruited may not become adequately “educated,” and many who are educated may fail the final test of moving into autonomous political action.

The forces of orthodoxy, occupying the most culturally sanctioned command posts in the society, can be counted upon, out of self-interest, to oppose each stage of the sequential process — particularly the latter stages, when the threat posed by the movement has become clear to all.

Keep At It. Don’t Get Lazy.

Silence is a killer. Calling things out for what they are is essential. For protests to break open the possibility for transformative change, we need to be willing to keep at it, keep up the pressure and become more of an organized resistance. In a movement context, we should not be convinced that protests alone are enough.

The harder work will be to sustain the kind of mobilization that breaks its allegiance to the dominant system, something that Henry Giroux describes as a “culture of cruelty”. In a 2018 interview with Truthout, Giroux says “This culture of cruelty has a long history in the United States and has to be connected with the intensifying and accelerating practices of a neoliberal fascism, which is more than willing to exercise cruel power in the interest of accumulating capital and profits without any consideration of social costs to humanity or the planet itself.”

That system controlled by the elites is not about left and right. Instead, it is about a micro fraction of the people on this globe holding all the wealth, political influence, and power over a legal system predisposed to promote cruel behavior. The Trump effect may have gotten more people off their couches to speak out, but we must not forget that Trump is merely the latest in a long line of homegrown authoritarians using a legal and governmental system that has been in place since the 1780’s, a system that has many times either ignored protests or put them down with violent force.

And whether protests are non-violent or violent, protest needs to connect to other viable movement actions and be structured in a manner that gets beyond single moments of mobilization and rallies the people to act — not place false hope in the hands of politicians and corporate powerbrokers.

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Kai Huschke is the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.