What Drives Protest Culture?
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 656 Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Daniel Di Martino, Tal Fortgang, and Rafael Mangual explore the generational divides in activism and what fuels people to mobilize. They share personal stories of political awakening, reflect on how social issues have shaped their worldviews, and question the coherence and direction of contemporary protest movements. It's a candid conversation about governance, resistance, and American attitudes toward power.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast. |
| 0:12.7 | My name is Ralph McGaul. |
| 0:14.0 | I will be your host for the day, and I am joined by my brilliant and well-fit Manhattan Institute colleagues, Tile Fortgang, and Daniel D. Mortino. |
| 0:23.1 | Welcome to the show, boys. |
| 0:24.8 | Thanks for having us. |
| 0:25.8 | First time in person for me. |
| 0:27.4 | Oh, wow. |
| 0:28.1 | I didn't know that. |
| 0:28.9 | Yeah. |
| 0:29.2 | Well, it's nice to, you know, not see you guys in two dimensions and be in the same room. |
| 0:35.1 | So weekend had some pretty interesting news. We had the No King's |
| 0:39.6 | protest, the what people are calling the largest protest in modern history, which, you know, |
| 0:46.1 | interesting, I guess. But it got me thinking just about, you know, protest culture and, you know, |
| 0:52.3 | what the kind of grievances were. And I'm just looking at, you know, |
| 0:55.6 | photos and coverage and, you know, the signs and some of the interviews. And it's like, |
| 0:59.6 | it seems like the main issues that people were upset about were the war in Gaza, the ICE immigration |
| 1:05.7 | raids, the lawfare allegations I'm thinking here of the cases against James Comey and Letitia James and |
| 1:12.8 | John Bolton. Of course, these people were not very concerned with the lawfare against Donald |
| 1:17.7 | Trump and his allies. It seemed like trans activism was one of the big kind of issues and, you know, |
| 1:24.3 | the use of the National Guard being deployed to cities to keep order. |
| 1:28.3 | And it just got me thinking because one of the things that a lot of people have been talking about with this protest, |
| 1:33.1 | is that you didn't see a ton of young people there. |
... |
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