Inside the Left’s Permanent Protest Machine

How activists manipulate public policy through mob violence

A permanent fixture of Donald Trump’s presidency, in both his first and second terms, has been the Left’s permanent protest machine. The protests seem to wax and wane with the news cycle, but whatever the issue of the day—opposing Tesla, DOGE, ICE, or Trump himself—the Left has demonstrated the ability to put masses of their people into the streets.

It is important to understand how this permanent protest machine is maintained, and how the Right might counter it.

The Origins of the Left’s Protest Machine

The Left has been building its protest architecture for a hundred years and, in its modern form, it traces back to the 1960s. One thread that you see woven through the infrastructure’s development is that while some of the older groups that were started in the Sixties went defunct, many have re-emerged, with new people at the ground level but the same people at the top. One salient example came during the BLM riots of 2020, when Angela Davis would occasionally show up in a convertible and do the Black Power fist. So, there’s certainly continuity.

The structural element that conservatives often obsess over, but which is not the key detail, is how the infrastructure is funded. Conservatives will often try to trace nonprofit tax forms of left-wing organizations until they find George Soros, Open Society Foundations, or other big names. They feel like it’s a game of whack-a-mole where once you figure out George Soros has contributed some amount of money, you’ve won.