Does history make protest or does protest make history? Do protests rise up through the fissures and structural instabilities of systems (e.g., capitalist, liberal, racial, environmental, sex/gender systems)? Or does protest create those fissures and instabilities? Do all the massive protests underway around the world since 2011, starting in Tunisia, share a time frame, an epoch, or are they making a time frame and thus making history? These are central questions of social theory today on the subject of protest. In my inquiry on how the time of protest is conceptualized in social theory, I find that although social theory on the times of protest is typically written by those whose political sympathies align with the protests they study, they have the perverse effect of silencing protest. In the gap between what happens in protest and what is said to have happened in social theory, I find five reasons to reconsider the ethics of social theory.