Democracy needs you!

I'd recommend you don't sign anything at a protest, ever. No petitions, no signing up for orgs, not even if a goth baddie asks you to sign their tits. Do that stuff offsite before or after a protest on your own time where's it's a lot less likely to be an informational gathering tactic. You don't want a record of which protests you've been to, especially if they're the spicier kind where direct action might be happening.

Mask up and bloc up.

Yes, this. Phone at home, mask up if you plan on doing ANYTHING other than being an absolute boy scout. If a goth baddie asks you to sign their tits, use a fake name.
- I might add that masking up is a good idea even if you plan on doing nothing but observing. Sometimes rightwing media personalities will photograph unmasked people at protests in an attempt to send online harassment their way regardless of whether they've done anything wrong. Additionally, there have been instances where innocent individuals have been charged with actions that other people in the crowd did, so even if you plan on being good, you could still get in trouble for the actions of others. A mask would add another layer of protection from identification and hopefully prevent you from getting wrongfully charged. I expect this administration to be particularly vindictive against protesters.
The goth baddie gets me every time.
Every serious American Leftist and member of a minority group needs to arm up yesterday.
- A lot of "serious leftists" put us in this mess by being stubborn children in November.

What a lot of people forget is that for the vast majority of people, this is a progression. The reason petitions work is because they get awareness out there, which leads to more people showing up to the protest. The reason protests work is because that's where you sign people up to the orgs. And the reason all of these things work is because the people on the other end understand that if there are enough people petitioning or protesting, some percentage of those people will, if pushed hard enough, resort to more direct action. A petition isn't a plea, it's a threat. A protest isn't a complaint, its a show of strength. If people show up, those people can then be called upon for the next step, and the next. And when things go right, the steps further down the chain aren't needed, because the threat is enough.

Please elaborate "direct action". What does that mean?

Costing relevant people money, basically. Strikes, sabotage, obstructions, that sort of thing
- I love this idea, but how would this be mass organized without having the leaders of this movement almost immediately placed into prison?
- You all can't be serious right now. Are you saying the same lame fucking actions that all businesses are already aware of and have multiple folders for every single one just waiting to be countered is the way we do things?
  I wouldn't doubt there's insurance for direct action.
  I have never understood why people think stuff like this works in modern times. They're organized and funded. They have PhD mentats producing action plans and optimizations for how to handle any direct action you can throw at them. To the degree that I bet some of them fund projects that market direct action to their detectors since they already paid for the counter plans.
  Anything that has been done in the past 50 years should be considered dead in the water. Need to adapt and find new ways to cost them.
  Hell shit posting is honestly one of the most effective. They pay millions to get their message out there. They're limited by funding and how ever many bot farms they can purchase. But we have numbers and free time. If organized and done right you could exponentially explode their costs just by shit posting and making them pay more to get eyes on their stuff.
He wants other people to commit violence and risk their lives while he stays safe behind his keyboard.
- This is what I assumed, and correctly I see.
  Most of this shit i see online is pacifist Democrats and leftists who dont own guns trying to instigate a mentally ill person to commit violence for them.
UHG and Blackstone.