Success Quote by Craig Bruce

Bruce’s line is a sly jab dressed up as a compliment: activists, he suggests, aren’t irrationally tilting at windmills. They pick targets with leverage. The “it’s funny” opener does the heavy lifting, signaling wry detachment while smuggling in a critique of activist culture as strategically narrow, even opportunistic. “Usually” keeps him from overcommitting, but still paints a pattern: protests cluster around institutions that can actually bend.

The subtext is more barbed. If you only protest what can deliver, you’re also admitting what actually holds power. That can make activism look less like moral witness and more like a kind of political consumerism: pressure the brand that can be shamed, sue the agency that has a budget, boycott the company that needs good PR. Bruce is hinting at a selection bias that flatters activists (they’re pragmatic) while also narrowing their moral horizon (they avoid fights that are just). The line quietly reframes protest as an efficiency problem rather than a justice problem.

Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st-century landscape where activism often operates through media amplification, reputational risk, and institutional accountability. Democracies, universities, corporations with ESG anxieties, and police departments under consent decrees are “credible” precisely because they’re sensitive to public pressure. Dictatorships, informal power networks, or diffuse cultural forces are harder to protest into compliance. Bruce’s intent, then, is to puncture the romance of protest: the street isn’t outside the system; it’s aimed at the system’s most reachable pressure points.