First, my goal here is not to answer this question. I think this is a question we should all be asking, and I think we should be giving it serious consideration, rather than knee jerk responses based on emotion. My goal here is to explore the information so that the reader can developed their own informed position on this matter.
Let's start with the law. Does the law legally protect protests? It is generally accepted in the U.S. that the First Amendment to the Constitution protects the right to protest. Here is the text of the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
First it establishes freedom of religion, then freedom of speech including free press. These are not directly relevant to this discussion. I've highlighted the text following those, which is what is generally regarded as protecting the right to protest.
There are two clause in the highlighted section. Let's start with the first, "the right of the people peacefully to assemble". What does this mean? It's fairly clear to me that this means the people have the right to gather together in group, and it is implied that they are doing this for some purpose that is legal. Committing crimes is not generally considered "peaceful", so if the assembly of people is committing crimes, they are not protected by this. But, there's more to "peaceful" than just not committing crimes. We don't hear much about it today, but when this Amendment was written, it wasn't uncommon for people to be arrested and jailed for the misdemeanor of "disturbing the peace", which wasn't a strictly defined crime but included any action that interfered negatively with the lives of others that wasn't explicitly protected. "Disturbing the peace" is a situational crime where context is important. I fishmonger in a public market hollering at the top of his voice to advertise his goods during the day wouldn't be regarded as disturbing the peace, but if he was doing it at night, in the middle of a neighborhood, outside of a school, or didn't actually have any fish to sell, he could and probably would be arrested and charged with disturbing the peace, if he did not immediately comply with law enforcement ordering him to stop (and in some of those scenarios, they would just arrest him without giving him the opportunity to stop). "Disturbing the peace" has not been broadly legalized in the U.S.. It's still a crime, but some governments have used different names for the crime. A common one today is "being a public nuisance". This is where we run into our first problem: A large group of people impeding the movement of others and making a big racket with chants and signs is inherently an act of disturbing the peace and public nuisance. In the Founders own understanding, what we consider a peaceful protest today would not have been considered a peaceful protest by those who wrote this amendment. The Constitution doesn't intend to make this kind of protest protected. There is a way for governments to make protests of this nature not qualify as unpeaceful though, and that is to explicitly authorize each protest. If the protest is authorized by the government that has jurisdiction, then it does not legally qualify as disturbing the peace or as a public nuisance, even if technically speaking it does do those things. This is where we get licenses for protests. The Constitutional right to assembly does not obligate governments to do this. What it says is that Congress (note that this doesn't even apply to state and municipal governments) cannot make laws respecting the right of the people to peacefully assemble. It does not say that Congress has the grant people permission to assemble so that it can legally be considered peaceful despite disturbing the peace. Further, it does not say that state and municipal governments cannot make such laws, nor does it say they have to grant permission.
Thus, by default, the only right this actually gives is for people to assemble in ways that do not disturb the peace of other people or create a public nuisance. People don't have the right to assemble together and holler and yell slogans and chants. They don't have the right to assemble and wage obnoxious signs. They don't have the right to assemble and imped traffic, whether foot traffic, bike traffic, car traffic, or any other legal form of transportation. Depending on the venue of the assembly, it might still be protect to get out a soap box and have one person at a time give a speech. Assuming this is a public location (we will get to that in a moment), if the location is not in a place where it can reasonably be expected to have peace and quiet, it wouldn't qualify as disturbing the peace to merely have one or a series of speeches, and perhaps even a bit of cheering now and then would even be appropriate. But as soon as it escalates to disturbing the peace or public nuisance, it's no longer a peaceful assembly. If it escalates to vandalism, arson, and violence, even in the slightest amount, it exceeded the threshold for "peaceful" a long time before! There is no "mostly peaceful" when crimes beyond disturbing the peace are being committed, because the threshold for "peaceful" is so much lower.
Anyhow, there's one more critical thing we need to consider before moving to the second clause. Let's look at the first clause again, "the right of the people peaceably to assemble". Let's say there's a building in Pennsylvania. A group of people come to that build and assemble for the purpose of peacefully drafting a document defining a new government to replace the current ad hoc one. This isn't necessarily public property. It's certainly not open to the public. It is a peaceful assembly though. Let's say a group gathers at some individual's house. As long as its peaceful, that's also a peaceful assembly. Why do people insist that the "right to peacefully assemble" must always mean "on public property"? That's not what the Constitution says! It does prohibit Congress from making laws regarding peaceful assembly, so if Congress made a law explicitly prohibiting peaceful assembly on public property, that would certainly be invalid, but again, states and municipal governments are not mentioned in this. If we assume this does apply to them, that creates a problem for protest licensure laws, because those are "laws regarding peaceful assembly". But without the protest licensure laws, there's no way to make it not criminal to protest on public property, because protests are inherently a public nuisance and disturb the peace. It turns out that the Founders probably didn't mean that people should have the right to protest on public property at will. As mentioned before, the understood "peace" to mean more than just refraining from violence, theft, and property destruction. They understood that public demonstrations are inherently not peaceful and therefore Congress and other governments would not be restricted from forbidding public protests if they so desired. Licensure of public protests wasn't a way to protect the constitutional right to protest; it was an additional concession of government, to give people the ability to legally hold moderately less than peaceful protests. When the Founders said "assembly" they meant the kind of assembly they personally did, largely in private spaces, not public disruptions of society, disturbing the peace, and public nuisance.
The second clause is much simpler, "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances". The people have the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. At the deepest level this means that the people have the right to sue the government. Ironically this is a right that has been largely eliminated. Nearly all governments within the U.S. have implemented unconstitutional laws making them largely immune to lawsuits. How can you petition the government for a redress of grievances when there is no formal process for submitting a petition and no judicial process for suing the government? This clause also seems to be intended to protect the right to informally petition the government. The most obvious way of doing this (at least, to me) is communicating with your Federal representatives. And this actually works. It won't always get you what you are asking for (a petition is not a guarantee but rather a request that may be accepted or denied), but it at least will get consideration. At this point, thousands of veterans have gotten services and other compensation they were entitled to but that the Federal government was withholding from them by writing to their Senators. This isn't a formal petition to the Federal government explicitly, but with unconstitutional laws protecting governments within the U.S. from lawsuits and a lack of any other formal petitioning procedure, it's the best thing we have, and if you are willing to put in the effort, it does work. How does this relate to protests? In the terms of the Constitutionally protect right, it doesn't! A protest is not a petition. It's more like a tantrum. If we go back to historical precedent involving the people who wrote this amendment, we can determine the actual meaning. Before even drafting the Declaration of Independence, the Founders tried to resolve the problem by petitioning the British government for redress of grievances. They began with peaceful assemblies, on private property and in public buildings that were often closed to the public during the meetings, and which they were explicitly authorized to use for this purpose. In those assemblies they discussed the situation and drafted petitions. Then the petitions were sent to the British government, often accompanied by someone assigned to the role of diplomat. No one gathered in front of parliament or wherever the king happened to be. No one shouted slogans or held up signs. That kind of protest was considered, both in the American colonies and in Britain, to be extremely unpeaceful.
When we put these two clauses together, and consider the historical context, it becomes fairly clear. This amendment was never intended to protect the right to take to the streets with massive signs, gather in public spaces, and wave the signs while shouting chants and slogans. Protests like that are not "peaceful" and in fact they are quite specifically a public nuisance and disturbing the peace. Regardless of whether we apply the First Amendment just to Congress or to all governments in the U.S., the allowance of modern protests is not a Constitutionally protected right. It's a concession given by our governments, in spite of failing to be peaceful. What these clauses do protect is the right to gather privately to produce and submit petitions to the government for a redress of grievances.
Now that we've worked out what is actually Constitutionally protected, we should consider the value of modern non-protected protests. In most cases the costs in term of disturbing the peace and public nuisance are pretty low. As long as protests like this aren't very frequent in any given location, the mild annoyance and inconvenience they may cause isn't really a big deal. Some things even justify disturbing the peace over, right? Yelling and hollering in the middle of the night to alert people that there is a fire is certainly well justified. So if there is some disaster going on in terms of governance, shouldn't the same thing apply? While it was fairly easy to analyze the First Amendment and draw solid conclusions based on historical precedent, this question is much more difficult, especially when people don't agree. Most protests going on now aren't people petitioning for redress of grievances cause by the government. They are people trying to use protest as a form of campaign against people they disagree with. In fact, the vast majority of the time, they are protesting against policies desired by the majority. The current protests and riots in LA are a great example. The protestors are targeting ICE, but their grievance isn't against what the government wants, their grievance is against the majority of voters who elected our current government, and the non-voting Americans who support that government. In short, these protests aren't even being done for the purpose given in the Constitution for protected peaceful assembly. They aren't peaceful, and the purpose of the protests is rebellion against democratic governance, not redress of grievances that the government is solely responsible for. And worse, their "grievances" aren't even for themselves. This is far closer to insurrection than January 6th ever was, and insurrection is not a protected right. But, people keep trying to justify and rationalize by saying this is Constitutionally protected behavior. Now, we've established that this is not true. This kind of assembly very much is not Constitutionally protected, whether it is violent or merely is disturbing the peace. The question though is: Should it be a protected right to gather in a public space to protest with large signs and loud shouting, so long as no laws beyond disturbing the peace are broken? Last year the Utah state legislature attempted to pass an amendment to the state constitution giving the legislature the power to repeal laws enacted through voter initiatives. This would have essentially negated the entire ballot initiative process by letting the legislature repeal laws the people voted to pass directly without the consent of the people. The amendment ultimately never made it to the polls, because the legislature failed to provide sufficient public notice under Utah law and because the state supreme court ruled that the proposed description of the amendment on the ballot was misleading and dishonest. It should be easy to see, though, how such a government act would severely undermine the rights of the people and the accountability of the government to the people. There were a lot of protests over this before it was ultimately removed from the ballot by the state supreme court. Where the protests in LA and surrounding area against the actions of ICE authorized and desired by the majority of Americans are clearly not protected by the second clause we analyzed because they target grievances against the majority, not the government, this case clearly is targeting grievance against the government specifically. The people of Utah did not ask for the legislature to attempt to take power away from the people to empower itself more. Technically the people did vote for the dishonest lawmakers who desired to usurp the power of the people in this way, but the whole point of the right to petition the government for redress of grievances is that the Founders knew that elected officials would sometimes be tempted to renege on their duties and obligations to their constituents and there needed to be a means of holding the government accountable when this resulted in grievances. At the same time though, these particular protests still use the modern pattern that is not Constitutionally protected, because it disturbs the peace. Obviously though, the people should have a way to protest this kind of usurpation of democratic power.
We have two examples here. One is a blatant abuse of right to assembly that doesn't legally qualify for protection and also is not covered by the intent of the protection. The other is a protest that very much does fall under the intent of the Constitutional protections but still doesn't qualify, because it's still a disturbance of the peace. It seems like, if we could find a way to protect protests that aren't peaceful but don't involve any crimes beyond disturbing the peace, and if we could limit that protection exclusively to protests of legitimate grievances against U.S. governments, it would be a good thing. There are a lot of problems with doing this though, the most basic of which is: Who gets to decide what is a legitimate grievance against the government and what isn't? I'm sure there are plenty of California Democrats that would argue that the LA riots over ICE are legitimate grievances against the government, even though the core policy behind the government actions are supported by the majority of Americans who deliberately voted for candidates with that agenda. And I'm sure if you asked Utah legislators who supported the attempted coup, they would say that because the people have to vote to pass the amendment, that wasn't a legitimate grievance against the government.
There's one more thing that requires consideration here. That is this: https://crowdsondemand.com/. Yes, there is an organization from which you can hire protestors. This begs the question, is a protest even valid, when many or most of the protestors are hired actors who may or may not actually care about or even be affected by the grievance in question? It gets worse though. While the owner of this company vehemently denies any connection with the LA anti-ICE riots, there is significant evidence that most of those rioters are also not legitimate protestors but are actually paid actors themselves. Further, we also know that most of the anti-Israel protestors demonstrating at U.S. college campuses over the last few years were also paid protestors who were hired, trained, and paid to protest in favor of the Hamas terror and genocide campaign against Israel and Jews in general. Do protests continue to carry any meaning when the majority of protestors are paid actors rather than people with potentially legitimate grievances? Because it turns out that at this point the majority, and perhaps the vast majority, of protestors in the U.S. today are merely paid actors.
Understanding this requires us to understand the core purpose of protests in the first place. The shallow explanation, which is how most people understand protests, is that a large number of people protesting where lawmakers can see them sends the message that the people aren't going to continue to put up with whatever it is the protestors are protesting against. The message is that we won't vote for you, if you don't do what we want. While it does send that message, it's more complex and nuanced than that. If an elected official's region has say, 100,000 voters, and that official normally wins reelection by say a 5,000 vote margin (that's 52,500 votes for and 47,500 for other candidates), and there are 500 people protesting from various nearby regions, that sends the message that maybe 50 or so votes are on the line, and possibly less, because some of the protestors probably dragged so people along with them that are too young or too apathetic to vote. That's 10% of the margin the official normally wins by, which isn't a threat at all. Further, if the agenda of the protestors opposes the agenda the official was elected on, odds are none of those 50 voted for him in the first place, so there's no loss in votes by ignoring the protestors. For this particular official, the protest accomplishes nothing. For an official that agrees with the agenda of the protestors, there's also no gain, because protesting doesn't magically make that official's vote for the agenda stronger. The only officials that might be swayed by the protest are those who were elected on margins significantly smaller than the number of protestors present. If there are 500 protestors, and the official won by a margin smaller than say, 250, that might be enough to cause some fear. The number of protestors who are in their voting region is probably more like 50 or less, but maybe there are some likeminded people who didn't make it to the protest. Even then though, if the agenda of the protestors is opposite that of the platform the official won on, that indicates that doing what the protestors want will probably lose more votes than it will gain. The dynamics of protesting are far more complicated that most protestors understand. A protest that has a poor turnout will almost certainly do more harm than good, because officials who don't have a strong position on the agenda of the protestors will see that the agenda of the protestors isn't popular enough to bring very many people and may choose to vote against that agenda to avoid losing or even to gain appeal to those who oppose the agenda of the protestors. It's all about numbers. With good numbers, protests are likely to have some influence in the direction they want, but with poor numbers they are likely to have some influence against their own agenda.
Now, what happens when we add hired actors to the mix? Elected officials generally aren't stupid or uninformed. They know that most protests now are a majority paid actors. This creates a serious problem in terms of the effectiveness of protests. We already have a numbers problems, and that is the fact that most elected officials have tens or hundreds of thousands of constituents. If a particular official consistently wins with a margin of 5,000, and he estimates that maybe 10% of the people present are from his district, and only 10% of those people (1% of the total) are people who normally vote for him in the first place, the protest would need to have 500,000 people to indicate there is a significant danger to him. 500,000 people just won't fit. Supposedly the largest protest in history was the February 15, 2003 Iraq-war protests. That protest is estimated to have had between 6 million and 10 million protestors worldwide, in more than 600 cities. If we are extremely generous, and assume the maximum number of protestors estimated and the minimum number of cities, that's an average of only 16,666 per city. The world has never seen a protest with anywhere near 500,000 people in one place, and yet that's the kind of numbers we would need for a modern protest to have real teeth. (And note that 10 million people in 2003 was a pathetic 0.16% of the population of the world. Despite being the biggest protest in world history in terms of total participation, the relative number of people who showed up was almost no one. And relative numbers are all that matter when it comes to voting. Hillary Clinton had the popular vote majority in 2016 by 2 million, but that's less than a 2% difference, so in relative terms the popular vote was basically a tie. 2 million out of 150 million total is almost nothing. And 10 million out of 6.272 billion is insignificant even compared to that.)
So first, we can't really do protests big enough to be meaningful anymore, because our population is too big. We can't fit enough people in one place to show elected officials that there are enough people opposed to their agenda to significantly impact their reelection odds. When we add paid actors, that makes the problem even worse. If it would take a protest of 500,000 people to indicate a significant danger to any particular candidate, and then we water down the protest with 50% hired actors, now it would take a million. With 75% paid actors, it would take 2 million. Some of the protests promoting the complete genocide of the Jews were almost 100% paid actors, and there's evidence that close to 100% of the anti-ICE protestors are paid actors. When you get to numbers like that, protests no longer carry any meaning. But protesting as a means of petitioning the government for redress of grievances lost all meaning long before hired actors entered the field. The general top end for protest sizes is between 15,000 and 20,000. The average number of constituents per state legislator in 2020 was over 60,000, and the average per state senator was 167,820. The average number of constituents per House Representative was 747,000 and the average per U.S. Senator is around 3.5 million. Voter turnout for state level elections tends to be low, so if 2020 Presidential election turnout was in the 60% range, voter turnout for state level elections might fall as low as 25%. This means that the typical state legislator is probably competing over a total of around 15,000 votes. Winning margins can vary dramatically, but 5% seems to be a common lower end. That's 750 votes. If the typical protest is attended by people from the closest 10 electoral districts (this will vary by state and region within the state), that means that for any given official, probably only 10% of the protestors are from his district. That means to be a serious danger, there have to be at least 10 times as many protestors as the count of the vote margin. That's an average of 7,500 protestors. But, not all protestors are people who show up to the polls to vote. In fact, it turns out that a lot of protestors are people who don't vote, because they don't believe voting is effective, which is why they are protesting. To be as far as possible, let's assume the voter percentage of protestors is the same as the voter turnout. That's 25% for state elections, so we have to multiple the previous total by 4 to get the minimum adjusted for voter turnout. That's 30,000. So if 100% of protestors are honest people with no hired actors, we need 10,000 to 15,000 more people than the largest protests to make a difference to the average elected official. If 75% of the protestors are also hire actors, we have to multiply by 4 again (only 25% are legitimate protestors), for a grand total of 120,000 people, or 6 times the absolute largest protests, to make a difference for the average state legislator.
I was going to do the math for the other officials, but there's no point. The average number of constituents for state senators is close to three times that of state legislators, which means they would need around 300,000 protestors to be meaningful. U.S. Representatives have more than 4 times that, which would require over 1.2 million protestors in one place to make a difference. U.S. Senators have over 4 times that, which would require almost 5 million protestors in one place to be meaningful. We've never seen even close to 30,000, which is the smallest viable number for non-municipal legislative positions in the U.S..
So here's the question: If protests cannot be large enough anymore to have any meaningful impact on law makers, is there any value in allowing them at all? I've spent some time on internet forums discussing and promoting protesting, and it seems like a great many people believe that protesting is a more effective means of promoting political change than voting. There are thousands and maybe tens of thousands of Americans who are authorized to vote but instead of voting they protest, because they are convinced that protesting actually scares lawmakers into doing what they want. The above proves that protesting does not influence lawmakers significantly, aside from occasionally giving them horrifically bad ideas that have resulted in absolute disaster (defund the police anyone?). They didn't need protests to make them stupid though. They were already stupid, and if people had written polite letters to them asking them to defund the police they still would have done it, and a piece of paper, some ink, and envelope, and a stamp costs a tiny fraction of the price of protests (or they could write an email at the cost of only a few minutes of their time).
There might be some value in continuing to allow protests. I don't know. It does create a sense of connectedness and community for likeminded people, and while this doesn't seem to have turned out great for political stability or wise governance, maybe it is good for their mental health. Liberals seem to think that there is significant value in "being heard" whether it has any real impact on anything else or not. Maybe it's true. Making tolerating protests that definitely aren't peaceful, but are at least respectful of other people's lives and property, allows people to let off steam that might otherwise build up into more violent rioting and insurrection.
I'm not going to decide for you, because I don't know the answer myself. The evidence proves that protests aren't effective engines of positive change. The Constitution clearly does not the protect the right to protest in ways that cause significant inconvenience or annoyance to others going about their lives. But we do have a long history of tolerating public group vocal dissent that does not injure people or damage their property. Despite the fact that it doesn't actually work, maybe there is some value in the tradition and the symbolism it contains. The right to protest is symbolically associated with our identity as a free people who are protected from government oppression by a formal agreement with our government. Protesting is closely associated with patriotism and with our right to liberty. Is the damage caused by dishonest protesting justified by the sacred place we have given it in our culture? Protesting is certainly not justified by effectiveness, because it isn't effective, but maybe it is justified in other ways. Again, I don't know the answer to this, and I'm not trying to tell you want to think. I do think this is an important question though, given that protesting is no longer effective and is now becoming a profession people get paid for rather than organic dissent.
There is one more thing to consider though: If protesting was effective, then the ability to hire protestors for money would give a huge advantage to the rich. This is probably irrelevant, because protesting isn't effective, but it feels like the advent of professional, hired protestors is just another scam by wealthy people to allow them to purchase power and influence with their wealth. I guess at least they are spending their money on something that doesn't work instead of on things that do.
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