What Modern Protesters Can Learn From The American Revolution
If you watch Ken Burns’ The American Revolution documentary, it’s shocking how okay most early American colonists were with being ruled by the British.
Sure, there were protests in colonial America, but most colonists were willing to remain British subjects as long as they got representation in Parliament.
The broad push for independence only started after the British killed five American protesters in the Boston Massacre in 1770.
The biggest lesson from events like the Boston Massacre is that it’s not the number of people who are murdered that causes revolutions, it’s the unjustness of the killings that rallies a response.
Revolutions don’t begin when people are angry. They start when the state loses its moral authority with its base. That’s happening now with the killing of Alex Pretti.
The Minneapolis Massacre
ICE and CBP’s extrajudicial murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have roused similarly righteous anger among Americans who’d previously never protested against their government.
Republican leaders rushed to blame Good for her own death, going so far as to accuse the mother of three of being a domestic terrorist.
This may have worked in an era before ubiquitous cell phone videos shared instantly on social media.
But polls show over 80% of voters saw the video of Good being shot, and only 28% said the shooting was justified. Even the Republican base is split on this issue:
And then with protestors still in the streets for Good, CBP murdered Pretti on January 24th. Republicans leaders again tried to blame the victim, but this time it’s working even less.
Only 20% of Americans believe the shooting of Alex Pretti was justified, including just 44% of Republicans. Trump is even losing his base now.
The Perfect Plaintiff
Litigators and activists often dream about having a “perfect plaintiff”, the ideal, sympathetic character who can withstand vicious attacks and still hold public trust.
Mainstream America remembers Rosa Parks instead of Claudette Colvin because civil rights leaders decided that the 42-year-old married Parks was a more perfect plaintiff than the 15-year-old, unmarried, and pregnant Colvin.
Parks herself said that “If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They’d call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn’t have a chance.”
The perfect plaintiff strategy doesn’t condone these character attacks. It’s simply realistic about which victims’ stories will break through into public awareness.
Immediately following Renee Good’s murder, I and many other people considered her a perfect plaintiff. Mother of three, just dropped her kids off at school, who even in the ICE shooter’s own video can be seen turning away from him, whose last words were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you, dude.”
But Republican attacks on her did stick with 61% of their base. She was married to a woman, who despite being a disabled US military veteran, is also seen on the video trash talking the ICE agents right before her partner is murdered.
For those who hate queer liberal women, Renee Good wasn’t the perfect plaintiff.
But Alex Pretti is the perfect plaintiff even for MAGA. Now a white male ICU nurse who was just exercising his 1st and 2nd Amendment rights gets beat up, pepper sprayed, and shot in the back by a gang of 6+ CBP agents.
Like when Obama said “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”, MAGA men can now see that if they had a brother, he’d look like Alex. But this connection is even stronger because it crosses partisanship.
People’s movements rise when the establishment starts losing their base.
Fighting False Flags
In May 2020, George Floyd is murdered on the 25th, protests begin in Minneapolis on the 26th, and on the 27th, a man in a black gas mask known as “Umbrella Man” is filmed smashing windows at an AutoZone.
In July, Minneapolis police identified the man as a member of the “Aryan Cowboys,” a white supremacist gang suspected of inciting riots to discredit Black Lives Matters protests.
But Umbrella Man was never charged or arrested. And the damage was done in the court of public opinion.
The defining images of those protests were not the millions of peaceful protesters or Umbrella Man in a gas mask breaking windows. Instead, the media focused its cameras on black and brown kids watching buildings burn.
George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti were murdered in the same neighborhood of South Minneapolis, all within two miles of each other.
So this year, protesters were ready to fight back smarter.
When a masked agitator burned an American flag in front of TV cameras and then ran away from the Renee Good protest, real protestors immediately followed him and identified him as a false flag.
The usual fascist playbook of trying to portray protests as “riots” is no longer working.
The 3.5% Rule
Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth studied nonviolent protest movements around the world across history and observed that successful movements mobilize at least 3.5% of their population.
That doesn’t mean 3.5%+ of people voting. As Teddy Roosevelt would say, too many people “rather pride themselves on being good citizens if they even vote, the vote is still the least of their duties.”
Chenoweth focuses her research on people actively involved in resistance movements. She explains three key reasons why it takes so few people actively resisting to create change:
- Disruption: Protests put constant daily pressure on politicians to fix a crisis. As Samuel Adams said, our mission is to “keep the attention of [our] fellow-citizens awake to their grievances.”
- Public Sympathy: Percentages don’t march; people do. Millions of people in the streets signal to tens of millions of people at home that there is strength in numbers to fight corrupt power.
- Defections: Nonviolent movements convince political, cultural, and media elites to stop supporting the status quo. Think Joe Rogan calling ICE the Gestapo.
3.5% of America’s 343.1 million population now is 12,008,500. The latest No Kings protests in October 2025 hit a single-day total of 7,000,000.
What would it take to get over 12 million Americans in the streets in 2026? I think we just found out.
The Twelve Million March
“Never has anything been done on this earth without direct action… Buddha fearlessly carried the war into the enemy’s camp… Christ drove out the money-changers from the temple of Jerusalem… Both were for intensely direct action.” — Mahatma Gandhi
What could we get done with twelve million people actively participating in this movement?
Like the Million Man March, we should fight for fundamental issues like jobs, housing, education, healthcare, and transparency. We want our tax money invested in our people, not on spent on tanks and guns pointed at Americans.
The Temu Nazis in the White House want us fighting about immigration so we don’t notice that the real fraud is the $500+ billion PER YEAR increase in the defense budget sought by Trump by 2027.
Billions of that money will go to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Palantir, who are getting massive returns on their donations to fund Trump’s new $400 million White House Ballroom.
A new People’s Movement in America would fight this corruption directly and redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars in corrupt government spending towards positive-sum programs like universal healthcare and childcare.
We need to protest, organize, and take direct action to get the politics we want and deserve!
Here are three key actions you can do now:
- One thing today: Find your local protest organizers and plan to attend a protest.
- See with your own eyes. Feel the energy. Meet the other protesters. Don’t get all your information from a screen.
- One thing this month: Pick one politician who you want to influence and push them to act.
- Call their office. Write them an open letter. Publish it online. Attend a town hall. Meet them in person. Ask them how you can make their life easier. Pitch them on a bill they can pass easily.
- One thing this year: Help this movement hit 3.5%!
- 3.5% is one in every thirty people. Let’s say Dunbar’s number is true and you have 150 true social connections. Ask five of them to join you on a protest or pitch! You probably already know which five are most likely to do it!
And if you want to work with me to take direct political action, join Positive Politics!
- We’re launching our first hackathon and accelerator class this year!
- This is all in service of my mission to create the YC for Politics!