There certainly is a possibility, but if either or both of us are paid shills this conversation won't go anywhere so let's go ahead and discount that possibility.

What do you mean "continue" to ignore these direct questions? So far you've just been accusing me of being maga for some reason, you haven't been asking any questions.

And yes, so far I'm quite happy with what no kings (and other protests) have achieved. There's still a long way to go but we are slowly waking people up to the fact that things are not ok and that they need to do something.

Yes more people need to be doing more, but great masses of people are slow to mobilize. If we can't even get most people to show up to a protest that is more of a party than anything, how the hell do you think you're going to get people to go from 0-100, from doing nothing to taking more direct action? You're certainly not going to get them to do it by browbeating them over not doing enough, they have to want to do more.

Every new person who shows up to a protest is someone who's taking that first step towards more action than they were the day before. Some of them may never be convinced to take more direct action, that's just the way the world is, but some of them will and they have to learn to crawl before they can walk and eventually run.

And people like you are doing nothing to encourage them, in fact you scare them away.

And even if they don't take direct action themselves, since they're more aware of what's going on and what's at stake, it means they might be more likely to lend support to those who are when they're able, or at least turn a blind eye to them.

Do not split.

And I think your premise is flawed. There really isn't much if any space between peaceful and killing. There's a lot that you can do under the category of peaceful protest, including a lot that we haven't started doing in any great scale and need to start, but once violence is introduced, killing is not far off. It doesn't take much to kill a person, people die all the time from stupid accidents tripping over their own feet, one shove or thrown punch and some bad luck could be all it takes, so the moment you've decided to escalate from peaceful protest to violent action, you have opened the door for killing, and once you've set that precedent, you had better have the numbers behind you to continue down that road and win if the other side decides to respond the same way.