Regarding this protest, though, it was evidence of violence being plotted that led to some arrests and then this investigation and the search warrants. There were undercover videos showing #disruptj20 organizers plotting to chain trains & release butyric acid into the ventilation of the Inaugural Ball, among other things. These search warrants are part of that investigation.
It's strange because if it's really just a pressure valve, that means all the authorities need to do is sit back and do nothing. The protest will burn itself out. But that's just another way of saying the goal of protesting isn't to accomplish anything except to feel better.
I'm just trying to understand the goals and motivations. Protesting has a long history in the US but it's rarely taught anywhere, so these answers aren't inherently obvious.
Protest brings people together. When it's a small protest, it's like a convention for the chronic opposition. But when a protest starts bringing in more attention, it brings people who show up in contact with new ideas, and creates a fertile ground for new collaborations. This happens in big ways (the idea of the 99% and the public understanding of accelerating wealth gaps owe a lot to Occupy, and the Bernie campaign is pretty much a direct consequence) and in smaller ways (Occupy led to many people switching from standard banks to credit unions, and also led to some excellent work opposing predatory student loans).
When you sit back and let the protest burn, you risk allowing the discontent to generalize and grow. But, sure, maybe it will just fizzle out, if there is still enough bread and circus to go around.
>the idea of the 99% and the public understanding of accelerating wealth gaps owe a lot to Occupy, and the Bernie campaign is pretty much a direct consequence
And elsewhere! Most recent large example of somewhat successful protests was the whole "Arab spring" series of events. Or the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine.
> but it's rarely taught anywhere
Of course it's not going to be taught in school ...
She places its start at the moment of a famous failure: the Mayday Vietnam protest of 1971, when twenty-five thousand people blockaded bridges and intersections around Washington, D.C. A manual describing the demonstration’s tactics allowed Nixon’s Attorney General to summon the police, the military, and the National Guard preëmptively. More than seven thousand protesters were arrested. Mary McGrory, a journalist who was sympathetic to the cause, described it as “the worst planned, worst executed, most slovenly, strident and obnoxious peace action ever committed.”
Kauffman disagrees. The spectre of the protest rattled the Administration, she points out. What’s more, it marked the shift toward the tactics-driven approach that we still follow today. “The last major national protest against the Vietnam War, Mayday was also a crucial first experiment with a new kind of radicalism,” she writes. It was less about moral leadership than about the fact of obstruction. It embraced whatever—and whoever—forced the hand of power. “You do the organizing,” the Mayday manual read. “This means no ‘movement generals’ making tactical decisions you have to carry out.”
The recent Vietnam War PBS documentary covers the Mayday protest as one of many different protests as public opinion turned against American involvement against the war. Whether the tide turned because the protests were leading or trailing public opinion is probably arguable. There were also signficant organized violent counter protesters in favor of the war/against the antiwar protesters. A bit of the info in the documentary is covered in The Fog of War but it's pretty interesting for the similarities to today. Also, there was a Vietnam vets against the war protest in DC immediately preceding the Mayday protest that the administration specifically did not oppose with police/national guard in order to not generate positive press/sympathy for the antiwar effort.
Others who may not have heard about the cause hear about it and get involved.
That, or if the man is doing something you don't like, do something they don't like.
It's better than sitting on the couch and reading about the things you don't like in the world.