The slime had yet to congeal on the 2016 election before many of us took a stab at a consoling hypothetical. Welp, at least under Trump, the art and music is going to get good again, we told ourselves, probably not really believing it, but needing anything to grasp onto at the time. I don’t know if that came true or not. Eminem certainly gave it a shot with whatever that whole thing was , while others like Kendrick Lamar, Joey Bada$$, and Fiona Apple made emotionally stirring and pissed-off music, but much of what they were protesting were problems that would’ve been with us with or without Trump’s wet hand on the rudder of the country.

By and large, the era of protest music that everyone from Amanda Palmer to the most earnest #Resistance auntie in your timeline promised us has yet to arrive. Which is not to say there hasn’t been all manner of brilliant punk and punk-influenced music made this year—Camp Cope, Pianos Become the Teeth, Sorority Noise, and American Nightmare, to name a few, have seen to that—it just hasn’t felt anything like the culture-wide artistic watershed we might’ve hoped for. Alec Baldwin did some funny faces on the TV though, you have to admit that.

Nonetheless, one still wants to give it a shot. As Noisey’s Kim Kelly wrote at the time, “Write the songs. Buy the albums. Then hit the streets.” That’s a message I took to heart personally, spending more time in the first year of the Trump administration at protests and rallies than I had since the Iraq War, which didn’t seem to dissuade the Bush administration in retrospect.

Something making protesting more compelling of late was the emergence of the wriggling hive of MAGA chuds, white nationalists, and alt-right nerds. At one rally in Boston, right around the time Richard Spencer got his grill tuned up, I was particularly inspired. It had been some time since I’d had the pleasure of being there for the bouncing of a piece of shit Nazi out of a show, and so it was something else to see one of life’s greatest pleasures, familiar to anyone who’s spent time in the punk or hardcore scene, going mainstream. After the rally, I wrote a song for my indie-emo divorce-core band no hope / no harm’s new EP, Swimming in the Charles, about bonding and falling in love with someone at a protest when you both realized how much fun it would be to punch a Nazi. So far, pretty self-explanatory. But then I hit a roadblock.

Say what you will about Arlo Guthrie or Bad Brains or whoever it is you hold up as an icon of protest music, but one obstacle they never had standing in their way was the brutally indifferent machine of the algorithm. I soon found out that sharing a protest song with the world wasn’t as easy as putting it to tape when my otherwise inoffensive country-emo song, “Punch a Nazi in the Face,” got censored by the internet music distribution apparatus. How are we supposed to take part in the promised post-Trump musical revolution if we can’t even get the tunes out?