It might come as news to the millions of pink-hatted anti-Trump marchers, the marauding rioters at Berkeley and Middlebury, and the anti-pipeline hippies in North Dakota, but apparently Americans’ right to protest is under threat. We know that because two “special rapporteurs on freedom of expression” at the United Nations say so.
Our friends at the U.N. cite various moves by state governments to rein in protesters as evidence that the United States is seeing an “alarming” and “undemocratic” trend of “criminalizing peaceful protests.” They cite, for example, proposed laws in Minnesota, Michigan, and Iowa that would toughen penalties for blocking traffic. You might be forgiven for asking: Since when has it been a right to imprison innocent bystanders in their cars for hours on end? But for the U.N. this is the very definition of “peaceful protest”—crazy as that definition may be, certain friends of New Jersey governor Chris Christie might find it useful upon appeal.
The U.N. experts also fret about a Missouri attempt to criminalize protesting while wearing a mask—disregarding the fact that masked rioters are anything but peaceful. Such laws are already on the books in many states, a vestige of the bad old days when the main masked marauders were the Ku Klux Klan. But mask-wearing is now a human right—at least as long as the masked people engaged in violent protest are doing so in opposition to Donald Trump.
The U.N. would no doubt feel obliged to correct The Scrapbook on that point. “There can be no such thing in law as a violent protest,” they say. “There are violent protesters, who should be dealt with individually,” they explain. Are they special rapporteurs on sophistry as well?
