The author puts this transitional, rhetorical statement in the middle of the piece: > The question, then, is what protest is for. and somehow doesn't even rea

The author puts this transitional, rhetorical statement in the middle of the piece: > The question, then, is what protest is for. and somehow doesn't even realize that they largely answered it in the quote that seems like it was included to fill out a "rule of threes" set of examples of protests from the 70s: > and the pushy, calculating Earth First! movement, which sought to “make it more costly for those in power to resist than to give in.” If we're talking about protests throughout history as a tactic for change, that quote encapsulates not only the purpose of protests but also the metric by which we retroactively measure their success. (I say retroactively because the most important protests happen under dictatorial regimes that typically aren't keen on accurately communicating to a resistance movement how much they've managed to deplete the dictator's coffers.) There are certainly also such things as symbolic protests, but it's a truism that those are more amorphous and less likely to lead to change than more serious ones. And if the idea was to use the word "protest" as a shorthand for the set of symbolic protests in the U.S. that seem at the moment not to have had any measurable effect, that is unclear and prone to confusion.