Being Annoying Is Not the Same As Being Wrong, and Mass Protest Means Normies Marching alongside Crazies

If the right wants to cover "The Resistance" with any degree of honesty, it should stop writing off the people on the streets as underfucked spinsters and underemployed losers

I’ve seen scant conservative commentary on those “Hands Off!” demonstrations earlier this month, for which hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest the Trump administration. 

So let’s give credit where it's due to Greg Gutfeld, who at least attempted an analysis of the movement on his Fox News comedy talk show, though the segment is mainly edifying for what it reveals about how the right might attempt to delegitimize mass protests against Trump. The tactic appears to be: pretend protesters are either being paid to be there or are too brainwashed and unattractive to take seriously.

Having covered the protest in New York, I am not sure what to make of the idea that I was attending a gathering of tens of thousands of paid protesters. Still, the “paid protesters” line appears to have gained currency, at least if the YouTube comments on my video are any indication—this despite the fact that anyone who’s paying New Yorkers to protest Donald Trump has a weak grasp of labor supply and demand. Not only do Gutfeld and his guests seem to think these protests are inorganic; they also believe the presence of identical signage points to “dark money” and not just, you know, a political campaign transparently trying to stay on message.

As for the content of that message, Gutfeld and company are content to play dumb. Guest Andrew Gruel, a moral visionary in the mold of Eric Cartman, asks, “Hands off what? Hands off my Ovaltine. Hands off my hard candies. Like, these are old, elderly people who have nothing to live for.” Gutfeld helpfully points out that, “It’s not ‘hands off my body,’ because no one’s going there,” I guess to draw a distinction between the baby boomers on the streets and the sex machines parked in front of Fox News. 

The sizable geriatric contingent at Hands Off seems to be a popular attack line in conservative outlets that did cover the protests—which makes me wonder: what is the acceptable age for a protester to be? Do angry elders command no moral authority in conservative circles?

There’s also the idea that the protesters don’t even know why they’re there. Despite Indivisible, the organizers of the marches, making plain what they would like the Trump administration to stop doing—even if they’ve chosen to express themselves with a slogan that sounds like something you might shout before issuing a time-out—it seems folks like Gutfeld can’t fathom why any thinking person might take part in them.

It’s all “progressive branding,” he explains, the very justification for the protests itself a lie because “no one’s touching” Social Security. (He then goes on to explain that DOGE very well better do something about Social Security: “Fact is, if we do nothing, Social Security goes broke.”) In fact, even if Trump hasn’t yet tried to cut funding for the checks themselves, DOGE has already cut SSA staff, leading to people being unable to access the benefits they’ve paid for. Can Gutfeld really not see why a person might wish to communicate to their government that they are unhappy about this (along with a host of other things) and do not wish to see further cuts? And might concern over Social Security also explain an overrepresentation of the olds at these things?

The gaslighting about Trump’s actual actions aside, it seems to have escaped all of these people that protesting is not an uncommon reaction to unpopular actions. I don’t mean among people who seem to always be protesting, for whom disruption seems to be a source of spiritual meaning. Those folks—the Hamasniks, the climate-change traffic-stoppers—were of course in attendance at Hands Off. But so was this guy. So were people like the 86-year-old refugee of the former Soviet Union I spoke to, who told me the US was feeling increasingly like the USSR. She did not strike me as a woke lunatic. Neither did her daughter, who told me she doubted the protests would have any effect, but that “we have to do something.”

I’d wager that “We have to do something” was a common justification for the thousands and thousands of New Yorkers who chose to march down Fifth Avenue rather than stay warm at home on that rainy Saturday. Most people, after all, have no way of “resisting” a government that’s not directly calling on them to cooperate. And while plenty of them may organize politically or campaign for Congressional candidates in an election a year and a half away, the Hands Off protest afforded them the opportunity to express immediate revulsion at a president they loathe for taking actions they hate.

Whether or not you agree with those actions, they are so innumerable that it’s hard to fathom how a guest as brilliant as Douglas Murray could with a straight face sum up the protesters as people merely tormented by their “resentments” and in search of “something to do,” as if they are all simpletons who have “been told for the last 15 years that there’s always a cause,” always one crisis or another about the climate, or rape, or race.

I enjoy shitting on the left’s histrionic messaging on weather, sex, and ethnicity as much as the next reactionary, but does Douglas Murray really think these protests had nothing to do with…anything real?

A more honest conversation might attempt to explain why these poor misguided leftists are wrong to object to DOGE’s spending cuts, wrong to object to the jettisoning of due process for the sake of speeding up deportations, wrong to object to the strong-arming of independent institutions under the banner of fighting antisemitism, wrong to object to intimidating Canada, wrong to object to the erection of trade tariffs on our allies and enemies alike, or wrong to ignore the rulings of federal judges.

Some of us, after all, are centrists, and many of us are skeptics. We read the mainstream coverage of Trump’s presidency and wonder what is being left out; we wonder if there is not something we are missing in our apprehension of President Trump. We are aware that there are people more knowledgeable than we are—Douglas Murray comes to mind—who support Trump, and we are at the very least interested in how such people make moral sense of his presidency.

That’s obviously a demand more highfalutin than Gutfeld! can satisfy, despite its host’s assertion that he “doesn’t want to crap on these protesters because it doesn’t persuade.” Anyway, it’s much easier to simply dismiss Trump’s critics as dumb wokesters.

I know because I could have done that myself. My video reporting could have featured only the most neurotic-seeming demonstrators. I could have sought interviews only with those holding the most niche signs. I could have leaned into my personal aversion to some of the protesters’ politics, or highlighted the cringe-inducing narcissism of some of their chants (what is the message behind This is what democracy looks like, I wonder, if not Look at me?).

In short, I could have pretended, like Gutfeld, that “the resistance” has nothing to do with policy and only to do with who’s on the side of the idiots. I could have produced something intended to “alienate” Democrats, as Gutfeld imagines, from their own party by forcing them to ask, “Is this who I identify with? The blue-haired they/them in a Hamas scarf shouting that Nazis are oppressing they and them?”

The vast majority of the people on the streets in New York did not fit that description. But the more relevant point is that finding common cause with people whose politics you abhor is a mundane fact of political life—just ask any homosexual who voted for George Bush in exchange for lower taxes.

And I would like to think that if America faced an external foe—or an internal one, for that matter—conservatives would fight alongside liberals, despite their ranks being full of queers, keffiyeh-wearers, and post-menopausal women.