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It turns out when fascists start arresting and deporting citizens en masse it has a chilling affect on speech.
In addition to being suppressed, the protestors are also seeing that their efforts have not changed anything in the past year. In fact, the opposite has occurred, the behavior being protested has continued and grown in scope.
That's a lot of it. I helped facilitate protests during Iraq2, and it feels like it did very little compared to efforts, I dunno, volunteering at the local homeless shelter?

I do a bit of activist work still, and help with protests from time to time. This year I joined up with some folks and we have a street medic group that has been supporting some local protest efforts, fortunately it's really only been needed once this year, when some folks got pepper sprayed and needed to decontaminate.

However, even when protests might be effective, there are a couple of other relevent things:

there has been very little time to react to anything because this admin just kind of seems to operate under some chaotic principle of YOLO, so you can't plan protest a month out for an event that is planned for two months. I don't think even the admin is thinking that far ahead,

there are about 4 other things that folks have been working on, even if we don't add in the 5 other things that dropped in the last month that are worth attention. The zone is flooded as they say...

The Atlantic spent like a year complaining about student protest and supporting efforts to punish protest, sometimes with arrests and felony charges. They further amplified the false connection between protests for palestine and antisemitism. The federal government responded to these protests by illegally cancelling grants and withholding money to universities and state governments sought to fire faculty for this stuff. And they have the gall to complain the students aren't protesting enough now.

The "oh where are the protests now" complaint is truly garbage, even if the article couches this a criticism of administration.