I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.

I think people have a model in their head of the civil rights movement, and they think that protest alone will be successful just like it once was. It's not clear to me that protest, in and of itself, actually does much these days. Trump seems to enjoy seeing his ideological opponents outraged, and his supporters are either cowed towards him, if not far more vindictive than the man himself. Maybe it's just because I keep seeing the mindless noise from the internet, but real push-back here requires a centralized and most importantly, a focused movement. One that doesn't just incorporate the most extreme policy positions from its wings, and understands how to build a broad coalition. It's something people have forgotten how to do. It might be trite to blame social media, but no one seems to understand how to build a broad coalition in the way that Dr. King did during the civil rights movement. Movements these days tend to exclude, rather than include, and tend to be led by radicals and extremists, which defeat the cause they claim to fight for.