For better or worse, one of the most significant cultural shifts since the counterculture revolution has been our collective tolerance of risk, and we should not tolerate any activity that violates the current societal norms around safety and public behavior.
At the risk of stating the obvious typing away at a keyboard in front of a 57” inch curved screen Samsung double 4k monitor, this isn’t the 1960s. Back then, Bob Dylan, the acknowledged poet of the era, sang that the times, “they are a-changing” and change they have, so much so that the entire world looks different, down to the very countries on the map. For better or worse, one of the most significant cultural shifts has been our collective tolerance of risk. The 1960s were, generally speaking, a free-wheeling era where many of the laws, rules, and regulations that govern life today simply didn’t exist. You could smoke in hospitals and on airplanes. In most states, you could drink in public. There were no seatbelt laws, drinking and driving was a misdemeanor. The complex array of fire codes, building codes, and other codes that govern our behavior in public spaces simply didn’t exist. There was no such thing as security at schools, much less armed resource officers, or just about anywhere else. If you were to time-travel an airline passenger from 1968 and deposit them at Newark Airport today, they might conclude they’d booked passage to another planet rather than Chicago, the security being something closer than they’d expect out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metal detectors existed, but weren’t almost everywhere, much less the searches we experience today entering a concert or other large venue, forget a government building. Once inside a venue, the scene would look nothing like it does now. Far more people would be packed inside, far less staff would be on hand to ensure order, and far less facilities would exist to serve either. If Woodstock were held today, and 400,000 people descended on a small town, breaking down the barricades to enter, it is likely the National Guard would be deployed long before the bad acid was distributed. I do not write this to comment on whether these changes are either good or bad, merely to state the reality, as evidenced by many studies, that the risk-reward calculation has fundamentally changed over the past 60 years and to note that, even back then, there were some things that weren’t tolerated.
While the 1960s are rightfully considered the height of the counterculture revolution, when protesting in general took on its modern form, the level of force turned at protests, civil disobedience, occupying buildings, and other illegal activity was shocking by our current standards. At Columbia University, which has recently been in the news again, students gathered to protest the Vietnam War in 1968. The scene was originally described as having a “carnivalesque quality” until the protest expanded into the occupation of five buildings on campus and a dean was briefly taken hostage. The university president at the time, Grayson L. Kirk, called in the New York City Tactical Police Force in response to the escalation and summoned some 1,000 officers armed with nightsticks, many mounted on horseback, some with the intent to harm these upstart kids as they saw them. One building was cleared without incident, but others resisted. As Barnard Magazine described it, “In Hamilton Hall, the first to be cleared, the arrests proceeded peacefully, in large part because the students had political officials on the outside negotiating on their behalf. These allies opened lines of communication between the students and police commissioner. Together, they agreed that if the University sent in the police, the students would not resist arrest but rather would walk out peacefully…In other buildings, the story was different. There were no advance negotiations, no agreements about resisting arrest. Some did walk out. Others locked arms in peaceful resistance. And a few fought back. The police, all white this time, broke down doors and made their way through the furniture barricades. Perhaps resentful of the students for the privileges the officers never had, they used their flashlights and night sticks liberally.” In total were over 100 injuries, pictures show students bloody and beaten, and over 700 arrests, primarily for criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.
For the past several years, progressives, largely driven by outrage against Israel, have been trying to return to this heyday that wasn’t really a heyday, cheering on protest and protestors as if the world hasn’t completely changed, or at least as if the nature of protesting hasn’t changed. Last week, for example, the media, mainstream, right, and left described a “sit in” at Trump Tower as merely another peaceful protest. NBC News wrote that “Protesters arrived in two groups around 11:30 a.m. Police said some entered through a side door and others through the front, dressed in regular clothing before they revealed their ‘protest gear underneath.’ The protesters were wearing red T-shirts that said ‘Stop arming Israel’ and ‘Not in our name,’ the group’s spokesperson, Sonya Meyerson-Knox, told NBC News. About 300 protesters were present, she said.” The report continued, “The protesters hung two banners along the golden escalator Donald Trump rode down when he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015 before police arrived and started removing protesters from the building, she said.” The Associated Press described it similarly, “Demonstrators from a Jewish group filled the lobby of Trump Tower on Thursday to denounce the immigration arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist who helped lead protests against Israel at Columbia University. The demonstrators from Jewish Voice for Peace wore red shirts reading ‘Jews say stop arming Israel’ and held up banners as they chanted ‘Bring Mahmoud home now!’ on the lower level of the Fifth Avenue building’s public atrium. After warning the protesters to leave, police said they arrested 98 people who stayed on various charges, including trespassing, obstruction and resisting arrest.” Later in the same article, they pretended this was normal and somehow acceptable, “Trump Tower serves as headquarters for the Trump Organization and is where the president stays when he is in New York. The skyscraper often attracts demonstrations, both against and in support of its namesake, though protests inside are less common. The multi-story atrium is accessible to the public and connects visitors to eateries including the Trump Grill.” Conservative media, generally speaking, also described the event as a protest and the participants as protestors, as though there was an applicable permit, no laws were violated, and no safety regulations shredded. Photos, meanwhile, show the entire atrium filled to the brim by so-called protestors, many of them masked, sitting or standing on every available space, brandishing signs, chanting, and disrupting the peace of a private business subject to strict fire codes and other regulations.
Somehow, however, no one on either side of the aisle has asked what might have happened if there were a fire, a medical emergency, or some other kind of emergency, defeating the entire purpose of the various safety codes that have been implemented over the past half-century. There were somewhere around 300 people crammed into a public atrium, plus the police who responded, the regular people in the building, employees, residents, and others, simply going about their business, even forgetting those that were gathered in the street. In our highly regulated era, no permit would have been issued for obvious reasons, and everyone in the media should know it. The very idea promoted by the Associated Press that protests of this kind inside Trump Tower are “less common” than outside is a false assertion that these are legitimate protests in the first place. They aren’t. They might well have been tolerated in the 1960’s, though even that is debatable based on the above, but by the standards of today, there should be no tolerance at all. While I am hesitant to go so far as to label it “terrorism,” the dictionary definition of the term is “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” What is the purpose of unlawfully occupying a public space other than intimidation, or putting this another way, why did they choose this space rather than following the process and getting a proper permit for an authorized purpose? Whatever you choose to call it, simply labeling it a “protest” as though this was par for the course as they say fails to reflect the reality of the world we live in.
This is doubly true when you consider that much of the same language has been applied, even more stretched to the point of meaningless, to recent protests against Tesla complete with attacks on Tesla dealerships and other assets,. Recently, a group called Tesla Takedown, issued something of a call to arms, for a “Global Online Working Session” to “Announce [a] New Call to Action Against Musk, Fascism, Oligarchy and DOGE.” The flier continued to claim, “As Tesla Takedown efforts expand globally with no signs of slowing, the movement has already completed 368 peaceful protests registered on the http://www.teslatakedown.org website with 131 more already scheduled in the next two weeks. The grassroots global movement includes many protests that haven’t been registered online, so the total number is far higher. Organizers promoting the peaceful public rallies outside Tesla dealerships will host an online meeting via YouTube on Wednesday, March 19th at 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time to unveil important next steps in the grassroots campaign. The call will feature elected officials, celebrities and hosts of events, including actor John Cusack and U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX).” Simultaneously, however, a website named “Dogequest” has been set up that lists the names and addresses of every Tesla owner in America complete with a Molotov cocktail icon over their homes, in what is clearly an attempt at intimidating private citizens, fitting the definition of terrorism. According to them, the only way to be removed from the list is if you provide proof that you have sold your Tesla. “Is DOGEQUEST a protest platform?” the website asks. “If you’re on the hunt for a Tesla to unleash your artistic flair with a spray can, just step outside — no map needed! At DOGEQUEST, we believe in empowering creative expressions of protest that you can execute from the comfort of your own home.”
Undoubtedly as a result, or at least in conjunction, Tesla dealerships have also been targeted with violence and vandalism. As NPR recently described it rather mildly, “Cybertrucks set ablaze. Bullets and Molotov cocktails aimed at Tesla showrooms. Attacks on property carrying the logo of Elon Musk’s electric-car company are cropping up across the U.S. and overseas. While no injuries have been reported, Tesla showrooms, vehicle lots, charging stations and privately owned cars have been targeted. There’s been a clear uptick since President Donald Trump took office and empowered Musk to oversee a new Department of Government Efficiency that’s slashing government spending. Experts on domestic extremism say it’s impossible to know yet if the spate of incidents will balloon into a long-term pattern.” Sadly, even the FBI seemed confused. “Was this terrorism? Was it something else? It certainly has some of the hallmarks that we might think — the writing on the wall, potential political agenda, an act of violence,” Spencer Evans, the special agent in charge of the Las Vegas FBI office, explained at a news conference. “None of those factors are lost on us,” which might be true except why not simply explain it as the terrorism it is, terrorism that is implicitly supported by supposedly peaceful protests? David Strom, writing for HotAir.com, illuminated the connection earlier this week. “No doubt the visible organizers will decry the violence, just as the people who spent years slandering MAGA and Donald Trump both before and after the two assassination attempts on his life ‘decry’ the violence as they call him a tyrant and an existential threat akin to Hitler. But when you make a website that uses a Molotov Cocktail as the cursor, your intentions are not peaceful.” As he concluded, “They are like the spokesmen for the political wing of a terrorist organization. Assuring us that they have nothing to do with the violence as they arrange for it all to happen, cheer it on in many ways, but tut-tut to the media who call them ‘mostly peaceful.’” To me at least, the issue is broader: We should not tolerate any activity that violates the current societal norms around safety and public behavior. To encourage anything otherwise, is flirting with terrorism at the least, actively committing terrorism at the worst. If my rights to freedom of speech, free expression, and general privacy can be curtailed in the name of public safety, the right to peaceably assemble is no different and should not be treated as such based on your political preferences. Putting this another way, if I can’t discreetly drink a beer in a public space, you can’t protest there either.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 