Outrage flooded social media after a video showed an activist being arrested mid-interview at a pro-Venezuela protest, fuelling questions about the state of free speech in the United States.
In the now-viral clip taken from Grand Rapids, Michigan, 22-year-old teacher and activist Jessica Plichta can be heard criticising US foreign policy towards Venezuela, arguing that American involvement abroad is inseparable from domestic accountability.
“This isn’t just a foreign issue,” she said moments before her arrest. “It’s our tax dollars being used to commit war crimes, and it’s the responsibility of the people to resist a Trump administration committing crimes both at home and against people in Venezuela.”
Seconds later, local police move in. As she is escorted to a patrol vehicle, Plichta repeatedly states, “I am not resisting arrest.”
Local outlet WZZM, the city’s ABC affiliate, later reported that police said Plichta was arrested for obstructing a roadway and failing to obey a lawful command. In footage from the scene, an officer tells a bystander that demonstrators had been instructed to relocate their protest to the sidewalk, and alleged that the group instead blocked intersections until the march concluded.
Outrage flooded social media
This isn’t where the outrage needs to be flooding.
US have never been the land of the free. It’s been a land of the rich is free to do what they want, including killing the people, poisoning the air, soil and water… Everyone else, is free to be exploited…
Nah, that’s it. They can go ahead, declare war on Europe, and we will have our throne of skulls, ready for the blood god!
What? The “land of the free”? Whoever told you that is your enemy
ALL OF WHICH ARE AMERICAN DREAMS ALL OF WHICH ARE AMERICAN DREAMS ALL OF WHICH ARE AMERICAN DREAMS ALL OF WHICH ARE AMERICAN DREAMS
The worst part is they themselves believed it.
America is not even in the top 50 most free countries.
I’ve got no patience now.
So sick of complacence now
Shouldn’t we demand it
checking twitter comments
there’s more to this story
also she deserved it
she should be deporteddead-dove.png
Obviously there’s more.
She has a picture of her waving a Palestine flag on facebook!
She’s Khamaaazz I tell you!!!
I know people want to say that protests work. I want to believe they work. But only being able to protest in certain areas at certain times doesn’t really feel like it’ll change anything. I know people hate protests that cause traffic congestion, and the drivers that are made late to their jobs probably incur some penalties. But those protests actually seem to do something. No Kings was a great turnout, but rather than several million people walking around, waving flags, having a good time, what did it actually do? The regime doesn’t care how unpopular their decisions are. They’re just gonna keep escalating, poking bigger and bigger bears, and the rest of us are going to be the ones to suffer. Apologies for the rant. Just feeling very defeated right now, what with the…gestures broadly
Yeah protesting only how the rich and powerful will allow you to will get you nowhere.
Civil disobedience can work to an extent when the enemy has a conscience or is supported by subsections of the population with a conscience, but it requires breaking unjust laws. I am beginning to think liberals would rather die than do so. Further, the enemy has no conscience.
Protest are not for changing something with a protest. They are about building, organizing, and recruiting.
Not every protest is a “no kings” event that everyone feels good about and goes home and does nothing for the next 6 months. But even those are opportunities for recruiting and radicalizing people.
It takes time. The decades where nothing happens are what build us to the weeks where decades happen.
If protest are not your thing find another way to get involved.
The issue with this line of reasoning, which is correct and the only reasonable way to approach protests, is that protests are sold to participants as if they are actions that do something in the world, because at some point in history, they did. The people attracted by protests are people who want to protest. Even if you attract them into your org, they will still carry that mindset that politics is about words, expression and dissent, rather than power, leverage, change, and impact.
Probably most potential good organizers avoid protests actively because they do understand intuitivelyy they don’t work and why they don’t work.
the no kings march itself is fostered by the american oligarchy (specifically walmart heirs) so it’s silly to assume that they will let you change anything and its only goal is to expend leftward energy as a ratcheting effect, similar to the democrat’s caving to republicans all the time.
look at Mexico circa 2017 to see how to protest effectively; it let to the first leftist government they’ve ever had and Shienbaum.
the global north’s ruling class learned the hard way during the american civil rights era that protesting can be effective when done correctly; so they’ve made those laws like you’ve described and neutered the legacies of people like MLK jr and Gandhi to make non-violence the key part.
💯 with you.
I mean, it was a large factor in the Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights movements.
ARMED protest specifically in the civil rights movement. The Black Panthers were strategically competent in taking advantage of open carry laws. Those laws still exist in certain areas of the country and absolutely should be taken advantage of if any protest movement is to be taken seriously. I mean, this is still baby talk. It does not even rise to civil disobedience since it is within the law.
But were these protests organized, planned and approved by officials?
And mostly was it peaceful protests?
I mean, yes and no. One of the if not THE most prominent figures, Dr MLK Jr was adamantly peaceful. Suffrage was pretty peaceful too.
There were certainly others that weren’t and they still had net positive gains.
But I get your point. It certainly seems like the only way out of this is more violence. But we could do this nicely through extreme collective action. That’s a hard thing to hope for though.
“We can do this nicely” reeks of the “negative peace which is the absence of tension” which MLK wrote about in the Birmingham jail letter. If by “doing this nicely” you mean unarmed, nonviolent protest, then the jury is still very much out on whether that can achieve meaningful change. Also, do you believe in civil disobedience? That is, does your version of “doing this nicely” preclude breaking unjust laws? If so, you will achieve nothing.
I wish you are right, but they try very hard to make people snap !
The cruel irony of our situation is that we have:
- An anti-democracy faction, that claims to believe that majority rule and bureaucracy are ineffective, and need to be replaced by a powerful dictator… but has only been able to gain as much ground as it has, because of a multi-decade effort to persuade regular people, build consensus and coalitions, and dive deep into procedure and obscure case law in order to move their agenda forward, one sub-sub-sub-clause at a time
- A pro-democracy faction, that seems to believe that it’s impossible (or immoral) to try to change people’s minds, and that if an action won’t result in radical, comprehensive, overnight revolution all at once then it’s basically not worth doing
Majority rule? What the hell is that? In the us? WHAT?! Most people are working class, so majority rule would be socialism by definition. Your comment is a very strange false dilemma. Reform or revolution is an interesting question, but you’ve basically dismissed it outright in your second bullet point by misrepresenting revolutionary theory.
What a difference a day makes
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Retaliatory arrests are generally not considered violations of the first amendment according to Nieves v. Bartlett (and you can thank Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer for that). However, even under that broad rule, she might have a case:
a plaintiff can succeed on a Section 1983 claim if they can present objective evidence that other similarly situated individuals who were not engaged in protected speech had not been arrested
and according to the article,
“I was the only person arrested out of roughly 200 people - and it happened immediately after I finished speaking about Venezuela,” she said.
so let’s hope she does.
The problem isn’t necessarily standing.
The problem is that she got arrested in the first place. So now she has to pay an attorney to represent her, defend her from the shit charges, then countersue the police and the government, appeal it as necessary. It might be years before she sees a penny of any lawsuit.
Meanwhile the officer continues to be an officer. Politicians involved are usually gone.
This is a situation where justice is denied not once, not twice, but many times over.
I totally agree
From one of my favorite songs, Bothered by Jer
As I understand, it is a free country
A man can live wherever he wants (what? Free country)
Free country?
Man (oh, my God), I should f*ck you up for saying that stupid shit aloneAt this point I just appreciate the US’s honesty.
It was always a fascist state, the mask’s just off now.
