“Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are. Never let the man that you’re against form your opinions. This is the trick that’s played on everyone who’s oppressed: when you have a revolution in a country, the first thing you take over is the radio. Then, you start telling the people that the war is over, so all of them surrender. They believe that thing right there.
And once they take that over, they start telling you where you are and where they are, and you fall right in line — it’s plain thought control.
The majority of the American people aren’t segregationists. The majority of the American people aren’t imperialists. But the government is. The structure is. The power faction is. So, how, then, do all the majority go along with it?
Because those who sit in power over the television, over the radio, and over the press is constantly telling those who are the masses how free they are, how this they are, and how that they are.”
The Militant Labor Forum, New York, New York, May 29th, 1964
This is often what things like pride parades are for. It’s easy to worry that just getting out and walking through the streets doesn’t mean a lot.
Some people out there live in a bubble and have controlled information around them. Some people literally live in Trump country, and will echo “Praise Trump” simply because they’re afraid of being the sole outcast in a world that adores him.
So seeing pride in a belief brought into the open, unafraid, leads more “passive” people into realizing what world they’ve been tricked into.