Yes, and you raise an interesting side effect of protests I hadn't considered when I wrote. When you actually go to a protest yourself, you feel the camaraderie and energy in the air, you hear the supportive honks, you see the signs and the smiles and the tears on cheeks and the real passion of the strangers around you, all feeling the same way, all different in their own ways but really just wanting the same things you do for yourself.

And then after you get home and you see with refreshed eyes exactly how that protest you just attended was downplayed and misrepresented and undercounted in the media, the complicit media never again gets to "both sides" you as effectively as they did before.

Media narratives just doesn't matter like they did, because now you know they lie, and lie a lot. You've been there. You've seen what others believe with your own eyes and heard it with your own ears and felt it deep down, in even the most cynical parts of your soul, how there really is resistance, there really is the possibility of righting this if you all band together, and you realize you're part of a much bigger group than you ever knew you were. After that the media has to work vastly harder to take that new understanding away from you and make you feel isolated again, if they even can.

This alone, the immunizing effect that attending a protest has against further media manipulation, is another reason protests are just so important. Everyone who goes now knows for a fact, with the evidence of their own eyes, that mainstream media is complicit, and lies, which in turn creates more challenging voices in rebuttal wherever people do have a voice, like here.