5/17/25 Protest Report

No amount of protest is lost.

Getting her sign made.

EDIT: I apparently turned off post engagement at some point accidentally. Thanks to @Al3x for letting me know. Hopefully it is fixed now.

ICE melts, democracy doesn’t.

That was our theme for this protest. Unfortunately, ICE has managed to scare off a lot of people. We had a peak attendance today of about 150. I’m a little bummed out, but as I’ve said before, no amount of protest is lost. I chalk up the small numbers to the ICE raids making people afraid and the fact that there were other protests locally for other things.

As an example this has had on our community: There are currently 15 houses being built in my subdivision. There has been NO ONE working on any of them since Thursday until today, and that was a single white man by himself. The immigrant workers are afraid after multiple raids in our county this week.

Side note: Florida is allowing black bear hunts again, and there was a protest against that scheduled for the same time as our protest. About five of them showed up. Ok, good for them and all, but really? Our country is on life support but a bear is what gets you into the streets?

This is about 40 minutes in, and my second count which had us at about 80 on the different corners.

With a small crowd, you would think that we wouldn’t have agitators, but we did.

Early in the protest, a black pickup was driving by and “rolling coal” on us. He did it several times. At this point he had been by three times. The previous times he was on the inside lane and hitting those protestors with lots of black smoke.

If you don’t know what that is - “rolling coal” is when these assholes have their trucks modified to spit out a large cloud of black smoke on you when they accelerate past you. It is a favorite past time of those with micro-penises here. He did it four times total, and the cops stationed on the square and patrolling the area again did exactly dick about it, because OPD sucks.

Here is our encounter. He stopped at the light and sat there, giving us hard looks. Lol. No one was intimidated. Then he spit out on the pavement like some tough guy, giving us hard looks again, but didn’t say a word. For someone trying to pick a fight, he is going about it wrong. I took his picture and a picture of his plate. The camera didn’t pick it up, but as I was walking away, he asks me, “Why you taking pictures of my shit?” You hear my response.

He doesn’t flip us off until after he is driving through the intersection, and he didn’t come back after that either. So after almost 30 minutes of harassing us, I got him to leave without violence. Again, it’s always these assholes starting something. And of course he had that low-key racist bullshit in his window.

We had several veterans (veteran plates or hats) drive by giving us the finger. Sigh. Veterans. They ought to know better. Everyone has a right to free speech, and they served for that. But no, they’ve sworn allegiance to their orange god now.

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There was one Army veteran there who I spoke with a couple of times. He was flying an upside down American flag. Then this happened.

This dude (sorry the camera didn’t catch a lot of him) was hollering about the upside down flag. Poor baby. The respect for the American flag that conservatives display is performative nonsense. They do not respect the flag AT ALL. They wear the flag on their clothes, fly it to tatters on their little dick trucks, fly modified versions with Trumps face on it, etc. All of that is against US Flag Code, which is federal law, even if it isn’t enforced due to free speech. It goes again to show you they only obey the laws they believe in. (Personally, I don’t care how you fly the flag, but don’t call us the bad guys for flying it upside down when you do much worse.) We ended up with at least four upside down flags that I saw.

Then this encounter. He pissed me off, and you will see why. This guy had driven through the intersection and flipped me off, calling me an idiot. Then he went into the coffee shop for about 30 minutes, then came out to hassle protestors. Nope. Not on my watch. (Also, Symmetry Coffee seems to be pretty decent.)

You can hear the protestors telling him to “go away” as I approach. So I do what I always do - insert myself between the agitator and the protestors. Also, just to mention why - we are not interested in having a conversation. We don’t have a “change my mind” table set up. We are PROTESTING. The last thing we can do besides mass strikes to warn the government this is not OK. The time for talking and debating with people is over.

He starts off by making some nonsensical statement about Custer. I guess I missed it, but he was saying he is Native American. Then he loses his mind over my tattoos. Lol. Fucking snowflake.

Then I admit it, I made a mistake. I assumed his race, because I was keyed up and didn’t catch on that he was saying he was Native American at first.

I decide to get into with him. We go back and forth, when he says “It’s over” in regard to the genocide committed against Native Americans. He says those still living on the reserverations are “self-confining” - just wow. Talk about a self-hating person. I suppose systemic racism had nothing to do with it. Genocide had nothing to do with it. Fuck this guy. I served with more than one Native American when I was in who grew up on the reservations in Arizona and Oklahoma - they would have kicked this guys ass for sure.

Blaming his fellow Natives for living on the reservation….wow. That reminds of “ladder pullers” from Cuba - they come here, get their citizenship, then bitch about the Cubans that are coming here. Self-hating assholes.

We are taking a break until June as an organization. It’s been a lot, and people are getting burned out. Our next official protest is 6/14, but I may be going to Gainesville for the Tesla Takedown protests in the meantime. Who knows. I do know I love this shit.

I will continue to protest for those of you that can’t or won’t right now. You can help by amplfying my voice - please share my Substack posts on this matter (and even my others if you enjoy them). Until then, be good y’all.

#OneLove #22ADay Slava Ukraini! Heróyam sláva!