One can reasonably argue that the current protests about police violence and racism are good, and April’s protests about lockdowns of business and society were bad. But the problem is this: The liberals attacking the conservative anti-lockdown protesters in April tried to claim they weren’t simply disagreeing with those protesters — that would be a petty argument. Instead, the critics claimed that they were objecting to the very act of protest amid a pandemic.
So now that most of the media is pro-protest (I am still pro-protest), it’s not satisfactory to say, “This cause is more worthy than that cause.” Their very objection in April was to protest itself. The problem isn’t that our media went from pro-lockdown to anti-racism. That’s normal. The problem is our media went from anti-protest to pro-protest.
For instance, here’s a New York Times opinion writer, Charlie Warzel, agreeing on Wednesday that “In America, Protest is Patriotic.”
i feel compelled to say that i disagree with every word in that Tom Cotton op-ed and it does not reflect my values. this piece does though https://t.co/Vrlw3NVtBH
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) June 3, 2020
That’s great. The New York Times editorial is mostly right. Protest is patriotic and an important right. “It is not enough even for them to think only of protecting life,” they said of law enforcement, “though that is critical. They need to also protect the freedoms of assembly and expression.”
I agree: Protecting life and protecting freedoms both need protecting!
But Warzel had a slightly different opinion last month. He wrote an op-ed against the anti-lockdown protests.
And here’s the important part: Warzel, like most media critics of the lockdown protests, didn’t merely say he disagreed with the policy aim of the protests. He didn’t merely criticize the protesters who carried large firearms (which they shouldn’t have done). Warzel said that simply gathering in large crowds was wrong and that rejecting social distancing was foolish.
Warzel scolded the April protesters who “flouted social distancing,” before he agreed with his editorial page that the jam-packed May and June protests were fine and good and patriotic.
“At one point during protests at the Michigan Capitol,” Warzel noted back in April, “the group’s orchestrated gridlock blocked an ambulance.” Orchestrating gridlock and standing too close were exactly the crimes he was decrying. I can promise you there has been harm worse than gridlock from the George Floyd protests.
Here’s the heart of Warzel’s case against the anti-lockdown protesters:
“For those who’ve chosen to put their trust in science during the pandemic it’s hard to fathom the decision to gather to protest while a deadly viral pathogen — transmitted easily by close contact and spread by symptomatic and asymptomatic people alike — ravages the country.”
This was the standard form of argument back in the spring. It wasn’t these protesters are wrong on the substance. It was these protesters are wrong for protesting.
“The anti-lockdown protesters defied Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s stay-at-home and social distancing orders, and got away with it,” complained the Arizona Republic’s Elvia Diaz in a piece headlined “Gov. Doug Ducey must ban protesters defying his COVID-19 orders.”
“While protesters play revolutionary in the springtime air,” Kathleen Parker wrote in the Washington Post, “nurses, doctors and medical staff spin the chamber in a game of Russian roulette as they try to heal the sick and comfort the dying.”
These arguments from April apply just as well today. “Thus far, nearly 9,300 U.S. health workers have contracted COVID-19, and 27 have died in the line of duty. The least we can do is try to stay well.”
This was the standard form of liberal attacks on the April protests. The writers could have said, “These protesters are pursuing bad policies.” They could have limited their criticism of methods to “you shouldn’t carry rifles to protests or to state Capitols.” But they all tried to paint the anti-lockdown protesters as deplorable for simply gathering too close to one another.
The liberal protest critics in April made general arguments divorced from the substance of the protests. They made universal claims that protests amid a pandemic were a horrible idea. If they just meant “I really disagree with these protests, so I hope they shut up,” they could have written that.
It would have been a weaker argument, yes, but it would have been less disingenuous.
