Let protests be cringe

In an age of AI content and algorithmic feeds, protests work because they are in person, with all the messiness that comes with

You can always rely on a pundit to complain that today’s protests are disorganized - with vague demands, no real political targets, clashing slogans, incoherent arguments, too much violence, bad follow up, unserious hats, no leaders.

And they can be. When I arrived late to my local No Kings Day protest there were just three people left: a white guy in a skin-tight Superman suit, a Black woman around retirement age and a Mexican American teenager still in high school. Superman was yelling about Trump's draft dodging, the Black woman’s sign was on the Epstein files, and the high schooler was just dancing and vibing.

But they seemed content to stick around, so I joined them, because being correct is not really the point of these things. We stood there for under an hour, the demographic antithesis to Trump’s America, standing with signs on a street corner. We drew mostly supportive honks, but some people rolled down their windows to scream fuck you and give us the finger. Superman even had his cheek bloodied in a confrontation with a Trump protester before I arrived.

One couple locked eyes with us and drew their fingers across their necks as they zoomed by on matching Harley Davidsons. I’m sorry to say I laughed. I didn’t know people actually made throat-slashing gestures like that outside of movies, never mind with such cartoonishly violent sincerity.

I don’t mean to diminish the intensity or gravity of her anger. But just imagine a woman and her significant other on a beautiful Sunday afternoon cruise in matching cutoff denim vests, standing up on their bikes to mean-mug us like Deebo in “Friday.”

It was one of the funniest things I’ve seen this year. And it made my brain hurt to think about where she was coming from. If I had to guess, she was a Latina woman about 5 feet tall. The moment was scary and weird but it was also educational, bringing our little band of protesters together to try to figure out what that lady’s deal was. We could easily dismiss a post or comment as a troll or a bot. But this was politics in person, and that forced a deeper reaction from us.

And this is the very basic reason protests are still worthwhile, efficacy and organization aside: They are in person. And that makes them essential democratic infrastructure in an age when AI has polluted our feeds with so much unreality that every interaction that happens through a screen is suspect.

We need real because our online spaces have become these perfectly capitalistic, totally amoral wastelands inundated with unlabeled fake content. Images and narratives of protests, in particular, are so ruthlessly manipulated that you can’t truly trust anything but what your own eyes witness. Maybe that’s why there’s so much anti-protest sentiment; people are tired of protest content farming and fakery.

But protests are real. You can tell that they are real because they are cringe, profoundly so. By that I mean they are too earnest, too effortful, too loud - too unprofitably so - to be fake.

After my local protest ended, I drove to the Riverside gathering at the cultural center downtown named for Cheech Marin. The teenager asked me who that was, so we all complained about how the youths don’t know Cheech and Chong any more. Then we laughed like evil Boomers when she rolled her eyes at us.

The Riverside protest had a suburban picnic vibe worlds apart from the downtown Los Angeles protest I attended in June. There was hardly a police officer in sight. Everyone was having these crowd interactions that reminded me of nothing so much as a rowdy high school assembly. I felt buoyed by the knowledge that none of these people could mediate their interactions through AI. They reminded me of all these interpersonal dynamics that don’t exist online. All around me, the awkward mess of socializing with strangers in 2025 was on glorious display.

An old white guy carrying a poster was cheered by a group of diners at a Main street restaurant. Encouraged by the attention, he leans over the railing and asks them if they want to hear about the history of ICE, loud enough for the whole block to hear. I’m sure that the diners, a young, diverse group, probably cringed through at least some of that conversation, but he spit some real facts and some did listen.

Everyone is smiling and woo’ing each other for no particular reason. Some guy in frayed jeans fires up a Bob Dylan song on his hip-mounted bluetooth speaker. He’s doing way too much, but no one cares because you need those guys at a protest. Yes, there are a lot of people in inflatable dinosaur suits. And I don’t know why, exactly. But it makes plenty of sense once you notice how much fun the kids are having with the costumes.

Old white hippies are carrying signs that proudly identify their opinions as those belonging to old white hippies, Labor organizers are introducing themselves to each other and scanning the crowd with purposeful eyes. A middle-aged man is loudly rediscovering the joys of playing his high school tuba. A group of dudes with fanny packs and crossed arms lean against a railing discussing the Epstein files with grim expressions.

Protests may be a mess, but everyone who showed up plays a small role in figuring it out. Our politics mature when we have to write them on a poster board and march with them. The community that comes with trying to form comfort through discomfort; the way these interactions strengthen our relationships and make them more durable - none of that happens online.

We paraded in a square around the crosswalks, a thousands-strong crowd doing an admirable job of respecting the signal timing, all things considering.

Towards the end of the night, the bells at the Mission Inn began to toll. I looked over my right shoulder and I saw Jesus. It was a warm night and he was a bit sweaty in his robes.

“Jesus! I didn’t know you were coming,” I said to him.

He laughed, and in his best Morgan Freeman voice, he intoned, “I am always with you, my brother.”

I grew up in the South, so I've heard that alot and I'm not inclined to believe it. But for some reason this time I did. I walked with him for a while, past the tuba, the dancing dinosaurs, and the guys explaining U.S. empire, and the teenagers pitching the Communist party; past signs and slogans standing for a dozen different unrelated things. In the chaos I started to feel I could recognize the country I was born and raised in. These gatherings are one of the last places that all those different ideas about America can incubate, evolve and learn to coexist.

So let protests be cringe. Let them be corny, and clumsy and real, all these things we are forgetting how to be.