Portside

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The crowd streamed down from subways and sidewalks to the Lincoln Memorial, carrying signs on a bright, chilly day.

It marched for science. During the March 7 “Stand Up for Science” protest in Washington, D.C., one of many nationwide, including in Chicago, Philadelphia and other U.S. and overseas cities, the crowd rallied “to defend science as a public good and pillar of social, political, and economic progress,” according to the organizers’ policy goals. Whether the gathering at the Lincoln Memorial represented the start of a bigger movement or a mere gesture in a nation turning its back on science hung in the air, undecided, as the songs and speeches began.

The crowd brandished signs that were equal parts nerdy, clever and full of outrage. Speakers ranging from former National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins to TV icon Bill Nye (and even astronomer Phil Plait, who writes a column for Scientific American) spoke to the crowd, which consisted of a few thousand people on that Friday afternoon. They condemned the mass firings, extreme budget cuts and shuttered safety panels that have been the result of actions undertaken at federal agencies since January by the Trump administration and its chainsaw-brandishing vizier Elon Musk. “We have a job to do,” said Atul Gawande, author, surgeon and former assistant administrator of global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). “We must bear witness to the truth. We must bear witness to the damage.”

Yet the most important people at the protest may not have been on the stage but in the audience. People like Sara Rouhi, who works in research publishing and is a co-author of the Declaration to Defend Research against U.S. Government Censorship, steadily traversed the crowd, QR-coded sign and shirt at the ready.

“We’re trying to organize people across the board to push back,” said Rouhi, who added that the group behind the declaration has signed up 3,000 supporters so far. It’s looking to combine forces with organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, she said, as well as the Data Rescue Project’s effort to collect and curate U.S. government data erased from public view by the Trump administration.

That kind of activism, mobilizing people to act, is the real business at a protest, says American University sociologist Dana Fisher, author of American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave. “The big point of protests is to channel outrage into something else,” Fisher said. “Give people a sense of identity and engagement that’s longer-term and more embedded in a movement than just showing up and holding a sign, right?”

Whether the protest marks the start of an effective resistance to Trump’s moves starts with the crowd, then, not the speakers. It was refreshing, though, to hear Collins—so politically adroit during his tenure as NIH chief that he mostly avoided pandemic-related nonsense from Trump—criticize pharmaceutical companies for not speaking out against moves to slash research spending. (Collins, a guitarist, also played a science-tinged version of the folk song “All the Good People” as the crowd sang along.)

In the U.S., protests have shifted substantially since the 1970s. Decades ago massive organizing preceded massive protests. Without social media, people weren’t centrally connected, so local groups needed to decide to organize together and march on Washington, D.C. Everything from renting buses to signing people up for those seats took work that formed the glue that connected activists and culminated in the protest.

“Nowadays it’s really very different. Protest becomes the beginning of a movement rather than the end,” says Fisher, who added that social media speeds organizing. The Women’s March in 2017, for example—the largest single-day protest in U.S. history—was a harbinger of a “blue wave” election a year later that gave the Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives. That march channeled the outrage that many people felt over Trump’s behavior in his first term in office and turned it into activism and engagement that led to the highest midterm voter turnout since 1914.

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do protests, especially protests as a form of resistance,” Fisher said. The 2018 “March for Our Lives,” organized by students after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that year, brought hundreds of thousands of people to hundreds of events that often featured celebrities and bands. But while it led to record youth voter registrations and played a role in the short-lived ban on rifle bump stocks (overturned last year by the U.S. Supreme Court in a fit of gun-fetishizing bunkum), any bigger movement to end gun violence is on its back foot in the Trump era. In the 2024 U.S. election, younger men’s voting shifted to Trump even though they came of age in the March for Our Lives era of school lockdowns and continued mass shootings, such as the 2022 murder of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex.

Scientists and their supporters now face a similar test. In its first weeks, the Trump administration has targeted the U.S. scientific enterprise broadly, the culmination of decades of attacks on climate scientists, safety panels and health officials by business-backed politicians like Trump.