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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) likes to argue that the “whole point” of protesting is to make people “uncomfortable.”
Debate. Dissent. Running highly misleading political ads on TV. Those are all part of our great tradition of political discourse. Taking to the streets to disrupt the lives of average citizens is a leftist ideal, not an American one. It’s antithetical to the virtues of republicanism, namely, minding your own business.
But decades ago, American leftists began conflating “activism” with patriotism, and millions of young people were convinced that protesting was an expression of good citizenry. These days, caring is often given more reverence than wisdom, knowledge, achievement, or patriotic activities such as working, getting married, and raising children.
An equally intolerable and parallel notion has also sprung up: It says the rest of us have a patriotic duty to admire anyone who’s “making a difference” or engaged in “participatory democracy,” no matter how insufferable or wrong they are. And protesters are almost always insufferable and wrong.
Every loudmouth ignoramus with an opinion has a First Amendment right. You’re not special. Yet the modern left-wing protester believes their passion and anger imbue them with moral license to demand things and speak over their fellow citizens. Just watch the video of those self-righteous “protesters” disrupting church services in St Paul, Minnesota, the other day, or global warming cultists shutting down traffic in major cities, or college students using their heckler’s veto to disrupt speeches and debates, as they have been for decades.
For many, street protests are a physical manifestation of ad populum fallacy. Just because a bunch of people have time to get together and yell about guns or abortion or immigration doesn’t mean they deserve to get their way any more than the person busy building a new business or attending college to try to learn something.
Then again, most of these efforts aren’t organic or spontaneous expressions of political anger anymore. They are well-funded and managed by organizations that see political benefit in creating chaos and turning our country into a revolutionary battleground. From Vladimir Lenin to Saul Alinsky, forced confrontation has been a tactic of Marxist activism.
So, it’s hardly surprising modern protests often flirt, and sometimes wholly descend, into violence and intimidation. Many of the fashionable anti-Israel, often antisemitic, protests that broke out on campuses after Oct. 7, 2023, were meant to intimidate Jews, administrators, and chill speech. Before that, the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted on the heels of the George Floyd killing turned into riots of 2020, which broke into looting and vandalism that was roundly defended and justified by progressive Democrats as acts of righteous anger.
Every bully, of course, sees themselves as the embodiment of Martin Luther King Jr., though most of them lack dignity and a worthy cause. It’s amusing to hear these self-aggrandizing activists treat protests as great acts of bravery. You’re not actually living in a fascist state. Those marching against the clerics in Iran risk their lives. As did those who marched in Tiananmen Square in 1989, during the Prague Spring of 1968, or engaged in civil disobedience against the Stamp Act in 1765. You can be as passionate as you like, but laws governing the border and immigration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement itself, were all democratically instituted. You’re free to vote in the next election. Failing to get your preferred legislation passed isn’t repression, and you’re not Mahatma Gandhi.
Though it’s heartening to know that most protests are merely performative acts with little political consequence. Demonstrations are rarely a barometer of public sentiment. In the Left’s hagiographic rendering of the 1960s, peace-loving demonstrators took to the streets and ended the Vietnam War. In the real world, President Richard Nixon, who won a historic landslide victory in 1972 against peacenik George McGovern, ended the conflict. Anti-war protesters couldn’t stop the Iraq War, either. Or any American war, for that matter. Tea Partiers couldn’t stop Obamacare. “Occupy Wall Street” was unable to overturn the laws governing basic economics. P****hat marchers embarrassed themselves, but they didn’t stop Donald Trump from occupying the White House any more than Jan. 6, 2021, marchers and rioters did Joe Biden. And the anti-ICE nuts disrupting church services who accuse parishioners of being “white supremacists” will likely have similar luck.
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That’s good news.
The “right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” is our inheritance. It guarantees that anyone can march without worrying about punishment or reprisals from the state. Though it shouldn’t escape our attention that many of the same progressive Democrats who treat public demonstration as the purest form of “democracy” advocate censoring views they find dangerous, as they regularly conflate speech with “violence.” “Democratic socialists” nearly always shed the adjective as soon as they gain power. Let’s face it, though: Most unhinged activists you see ranting and raving act like children. And children have trouble comprehending the distinction between things you can do and things you should do. You can cosplay Islamic revolutionaries on campus. What you should do is read some books about the Middle East. But nothing in a free country compels the rest of us to celebrate or treat spoiled adults making a spectacle of themselves as anything but nuisances.
