Peaceful protest: What's acceptable?
'Your right to throw punches ends at my chin'
We’ll be embarking soon on another trip to the Pacific Northwest, so before leaving I have a few brief thoughts to share on the protests, mostly on elite college campuses, against Israel’s military reaction to Hamas’ horrific terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
In my 66+ years, I’ve never encountered a single American who does not believe in the rights of people to protest peacefully when they think injustices have occurred. “Peacefully,” of course, is the operative word.
The January 6, 2021, protesters against the ratification of Joe Biden’s election as president had a right to assemble in front of the U.S. Capitol, but once they broke into the building, beat up police officers and demanded the results of the election be changed, they committed criminal acts and most were held accountable.
Nationwide protests against police brutality after the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis cop were justified. But when protesters started to vandalize private property, they crossed a line — though it’s worth noting that participating in an insurrection against the federal government is orders of magnitude worse than hurling a Molotov Cocktail into an empty Starbucks. But I digress …
This weekend, after saying much the same thing about Bay Area demonstrations that illegally blocked traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, I had the misfortune of engaging on Blue Sky with someone who thought the demonstrators’ actions were just fine because they were trying to effect change (see below):
The premise being, of course, that disruption during protests is a fait accompli. Right, but if you violate the law in carrying out a disruptive protest and ignore repeated police requests to disperse, then you will pay the price. The right to protest comes with certain responsibilities.
In the case of the bridge protesters, there were likely thousands of motorists stranded for hours who were either late to work or could not make it to their jobs at all. Others, including nonsalaried contractors, no doubt lost an entire day’s pay. Sorry but you’re right to protest does not extend to hitting me in the wallet. As my favorite talk-show host, the courtly libertarian Gene Burns used to say, “You can flail away with your fists all day long, but your right to do so ends at my chin.”
Then my sparring partner, Ms. Coombs, questioned whether or not I would have supported “the first unions who fought for survivable working conditions and wages, or the civil rights movement, or Ghandi or Mandela, or the suffragettes, or the antiwar movement in the 60s, or the resistance in Nazi Germany, because they were all engaged in illegal activities?”
First of all, the comparisons are apples to watermelons. Be that as it may, as both Ghandi and Martin Luther King have said, acts of civil disobedience often come with consequences, and you must accept your punishment. Many of these protesters are doing the opposite. They often scream and complain loudly when police try to clear them from streets and other public places.
In my state of Connecticut, city of New Haven and Yale University police arrested more than 48 protesters who refused to leave an encampment after blocking traffic downtown for eight hours. Nearly all of them were Yale students.
As Yale senior Gabriel Diamond wrote in the Wall Street Journal (free link), “Identifiably Jewish students found themselves surrounded and cornered by protest mobs.” One of them jabbed a Jewish student in the eye with a flagpole, requiring her hospitalization.
“They cornered a man at the plaza for wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Fuck Hamas!’” Diamond continued, adding that on Friday night the mob cheered as students ripped down the American flag in front of a memorial for fallen soldiers and tried to burn it. All of this is a clear violation of the university’s code of conduct. Some of the actions were criminal and resulted in the aforementioned arrests.
Remarkably, in reaction to being sanctioned by their schools, some of the students are claiming their actions are protected by the constitution, but this shows a remarkable misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights. As the Journal helpfully reminds us in an editorial entitled, “Defining Free Speech Down,” (free link), the Supreme Court has ruled that, with isolated exceptions, the First Amendment’s free-speech protection clause applies to government actions against citizens: “It doesn’t apply to private citizens or institutions except in rare instances when they are acting as government agents.”
One of the arrested protesters, Thomas Birmingham, a senior and a reporter for the Yale Daily News, posted Monday on X the names of 21 police officers who he said “were on the scene and assisted in the effort to arrest peaceful student protestors today.” That information is likely public and would be available later in police reports, but posting it so soon while emotions were still raw is clearly an invitation to fellow protesters to harass these cops for doing their jobs.
Children of privilege — and let’s face it, if you go to Yale, Columbia or Berkeley, the shoe fits — rarely consider the effect of their actions on the little people. While entitled students can make time in the middle of the day to protest, those who work for a living often can’t.
How many blue-collar workers could not make it to their place of employment in Marin County and had to either be docked a day’s pay or burn through a personal day because you wanted to block their only means of transportation to exercise your right to free speech? How many wait staff in downtown New Haven saw their tips evaporate because you blocked access to merchants and shouted ugly epithets about the Jewish State?
On the positive side, things seem to have settled down a bit in Morningside Heights, where my friend Dan Shaw took these photos on this morning:
Thanks for reading and see you next week. I’ll be sure to post some photos of Seattle.
Genuinely enjoyed and completely agreed with your post on peaceful protest. When Mark Rudd and his soldiers took up the sword against Columbia in the late '60's, I disagreed with the method (not the message). The video on tonight's national news looked exactly the same.
Good points made about taking the consequences for protesters who break the law.