This ultimately degenerates around the extremes, and I believe that is what the poster is concerned about; that your definition basically bakes in the assumption that any protest must necessarily be so minor in nature as to not overly disrupt, when in reality, the point of a truly effective protest is to disrupt.

Assume that somehow a fit of madness took hold of the Highest authorities in the land and sufficient agency to implement and enforce dicta in a resistable, but still a threatening degree to the nation as a whole. Assume quite literally the entire country except the perpetrators disagreed.

Now apply your rule. We've got a situation where literally everyone but the people wrecking things is ready to organize resistance. Your rule places the Authorities on a privileged position of presumptive legitimacy where none exists. Only token protests capable of being safely ignored due to transient nature and poor coordination will be tolerated. Anything (even peaceful in the extreme, literally being somewhere, taking up space, breathing air, and just existing), but requiring extensive/non-trivial logistics becomes an act against which force of law is "justifiable" to disperse.

Personally? I don't accept your view. If there are enough people that feel like their capital is best allocated making themselves a pain-in-the-ass to <authority of the week>, that's their perogative.

...Now, given, the cross-border jurisdictional complications in this case, I will give you this seems different because people in another nation are funding disruptive activity in yours. If it were only coming from domestic funders, that'd be one thing. The external funding elevates this to something else. However, this is a complication that has been long in coming to the forefront, and poses diplomatic questions currently above my paygrade.

However, I'm still more sympathetic to the protestors here in the same manner that I disagree with the Taft-Hartley Acts ban on organized secondary striking. Ultimately, I believe the People (for any unit Nation's definition thereof which is a completely different thing to kavetch about) are the ultimate authorities on what is legitimate, and what isn't. If they decide to fund something that the government, or even the rest of the populace doesn't like, ultimately, the vote of no confidence inherent in the action elevates their behavior to civil disobedience.

Which I am totally okay with.

Note: the implicit okay evaporates once people start getting violent, actually committing crimes (where said crimes are not transparently "stop being inconvenient" crimes, a la assault/battery/arson/murder/larceny/grand theft/kidnapping/property destruction).

Let’s say a sit in did need support. Do you think that’s a valid use of GoFundMe?

>I think the real struggle is understanding the degree to which they are peaceful or not. Obviously nothing is black or white.

I would also add, the next struggle is what it impact it should have on our reaction, if any.

Obviously violence has nothing to do if someone if right or wrong, but it does have to do with if they should be tolerated. At what point do we no longer tolerate protests based on some violent indivduals?

What if their leaders endorse violence? If 1% of protesters are violent? If 0.001% are violent?

These are the real questions, and not particularly new ones.... There was a lot of violence from US civil rights protesters, people even got violent at MLK protests.

But still, there is a limit somewhere. I think protests should be shut down if the leaders endorse violence. Beyond that, it is really hard to say. Maybe percent is a bad way to think about it, and we should look at damage, IDK.