As a person of color I get the anger and the frustration at a Trump presidency, but there comes a point where you have to direct those feelings towards production. The media can go fuck itself too. I feel like at this point they are the ones being racist, sexist, and all the other -ism's. They are peddling this shit as if we are powerless to make change. The only message that the news should be peddling is: "if you don't feel safe, if you feel sad, angry, upset, fuck even disenfranchised go out and fight for your shit. There isn't any time to be sitting around moping, or doing some dumb shit like destroying property. Keep voting, go to a town hall meeting, call your senators, congressman, donate to local organization, volunteer" Instead the general public is being fed heaps of garbage about how the world is over, and we should just give up. Even I was overwhelmed by the election, but after a few days you gotta look at yourself in the mirror and say, "I'm fucking mad" then go do something about changing it. A large part of me is beginning to dislike these protests because I know for a fact this is how people are dealing with their anger, and once this has subsided they will return to the status quo.
A fundamental problem, as I see it: "Trump said this insensitive thing that many are interpreting as racist." = Journalism "Trump hasn't said this obvious, important thing that would allow people to interpret him as prepared for the presidency." = Editorializing I mean, those of us on the "hate Trump already" side recognize that expressing a love for taco salads does not negate a domestic policy with muslim bans and deportations as centerpieces but those who aren't committed to how much he sucks only heard about the muslim bans and deportations when he mentioned them, and he did that infrequently. Stick his foot in his mouth? regularly. Slag on the press? daily. A disinterested observer could readily determine that "the establishment" "had it in" for Trump but only an educated observer could readily list why. My worry is that the Republican party will use Trump to dismantle social programs, balloon deficit spending and do everything to drown government in the bathtub and that kind of wonky shit isn't going to get any attention from anybody because from an external perspective, Trump will be tweeting about Mexicans a lot less so he'll be "moderated" and "evolving" or some shit when in fact he's just a useful idiot for fucktards like Jason Chaffetz to hide behind while they make abortion ever harder across the heartland.
I couldn't quickly find the essay, but someone more insightful than me argued that protests were mostly a ritual at this point. They're tolerated because they can't change anything, the system has learned how to shrug them off or repress them if they become inconvenient, so they're mostly about group identity. But I don't think they're useless; Occupy brought the left back into the mainstream, and now socialism isn't beyond the pale anymore. Bernie Sanders isn't exactly Joe Hill, but you don't have to be very old to remember when "socialist" was a snarl word. Protest is more ritual than something that has a concrete effect at this point, but that doesn't make it useless. At the minimum it lets the participants and people who wish they were there know they aren't alone, and knowing I wasn't alone in being more afraid of Republicans than Al-Qaeda sure kept me sane in the early 00s.