On April 5, thousands of people nationwide rallied in over 1,400 “Hands Off!” protests. The mass mobilization was centered around opposing U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration and its moves to target marginalized communities, strip people of healthcare and social security, impose tariffs, and many more attacks on democracy and individual freedom. While it was moving to see people out in droves during a time of general hopelessness and fears about the future, I think it’s important to critically engage with this moment, methods of organizing, and the messages of the protests.

I believe rallies and large demonstrations like the ones we saw two weekends ago have their purpose. They are a public display of dissent that makes visible the sheer number of people who are upset by the current administration’s actions. They remind people that they are not alone in the fight for a better world, which is a potent tool in a time of such isolation and separation. They can even sometimes help recruit people into a cause or expose people to a new way of thinking. However, they are not a catalyst for material change. I fear that we sometimes treat these sorts of mobilizations as the end of what dissent can look like, forgetting the necessity of further and lasting action. 

The difference between mass mobilization and organizing is a critical one, and one that I think is often lost in discussions of resistance. Again, mobilizations like the “Hands Off!” rallies are a key piece of bringing people to a movement and holding people’s attention. However, it cannot sustain it. You have thousands of people across the country coming together at these rallies — where do we go from here? That is the role of organizing. It is taking people who have shown up in these ways and creating networks of collective resistance and community support that can sustain a movement and target material change. We must build next steps into our mobilization efforts so people do not begin to feel discouraged or that their activism ends there. 

Part of this lack of next steps comes from the fact that the “Hands Off!” rallies and similar mass mobilizations often fail to present an explicit political alignment or critically engage with U.S. systems of oppression. I recognize the value in this on the grounds of community building and recognizing our shared stake in an issue, regardless of political beliefs, but also think it is dangerous. The “Hands Off!” messaging was anti-Trump and his policies, but what exactly does that mean? Organizers provided a list of areas they want Trump and those affiliated with him, such as Elon Musk, to take their “hands off” of, such as Medicaid and Medicare, access to employment, cancer research, LGBTQ+ rights, and more. However, one stood out among this list of dangers of having a movement with no grounding other than being anti-Trump: the demand for “hands off NATO.” NATO is a force of mass destruction, death, and militarization in the world. Just this January, the Secretary General of NATO urged nations in the EU to increase their defense budgets, moving money away from healthcare and social security benefits and toward warfare. Not only does this demonstrate NATO’s role as an arbiter and promoter of the military-industrial complex and global violence, but it also highlights how this specific demand of “hands off NATO” contradicts many of the other demands that these rallies were organized around. We must be intentional with the vision we build of “freedom” and aware of the ways that it can perpetuate ideas of American exceptionalism and obscure the violence and destruction inherent to the U.S. empire.

In this same vein, “Hands Off!” organizers made it very clear that they were organizing “nonviolent action[s]” and said that they “expect[ed] all participants to seek to de-escalate” and “act lawfully.” If you are organizing a protest that is about how those in power are criminalizing communities and pushing legislation that is inherently violent, demanding nonviolence and lawfulness is out of touch. I sympathize with the complexities of trying to keep people safe at protests, but people are not safe. Why is violence at a protest a concern when we are there to oppose the horrific violence being committed against our communities and people we love? What is more important is that we learn with one another how we can support people and the choices they make at events. Demanding pacificity from people actively having their livelihoods stripped away in a system that has demonstrated it does not care about legality or respectability is ignorant to the society we live in and the action required to change it. Nonviolent action does have a place, as history has shown us with examples like the Greensboro diner sit-ins and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. But there is a great difference between engaging in nonviolence while you are being brutally beaten and berated by police versus dispersing when cops show up or having a rally approved by the police and city permits. The rhetoric of “nonviolence” is often used to demonize those, particularly Black and Brown resistance fighters, who challenge power structures through forms of action deemed too radical or destructive. This shifts blame to the individual or group instead of focusing on the root of the issue, which is the systemic violence that necessitates such action. 

While I understand and also feel the fear of this moment, presenting demands like the U.S. remaining in NATO is not the answer. Neither is instructing one another to de-escalate people we should be seeing ourselves in shared struggle and community with. We should instead be fighting the very systems of militarism and imperialism that facilitate and are built by institutions like NATO, which seek to protect the interests of a few nations — mostly Western countries — through warfare and expanding military budgets. We should be learning how to shift our collective emotions, anger, fear, and grief from these mass mobilizations into substantial and sustained organizing efforts. We must be clear about what we oppose, what we want, and the root of the issues we are protesting against, which is the U.S. empire itself. If we don’t, we risk movements fizzling out, leaving people behind, or perpetuating the systems we seek to destroy.