- Don't Protect This Speech

Some video of a leftist demonstration on Wall Street this weekend, which is being depicted in leftist circles as police brutality. Personally it just made me laugh.



The traditional American leftist protest does meet the threshold for constitutionally protected speech, but I’m no longer convinced it deserves that protection. It’s not that I think the opposition should be silenced, on the contrary. If they had more to say about policy or for that matter anything meaningful or rational to say at all, I’d argue that they should receive more protection, not less. But the fact is, at this moment in American history they are as detached from reality as any homeless man ranting on a traffic island. And I believe that utter irrationality invalidates their claim.

Keep in mind; I don’t think they should meet some political standard here. That’s not the metric I’m measuring them against. I think it’s safe to assume that I would disagree with their views (if they were capable of voicing any) but that’s not my point at all. My point is that since they aren’t actually doing or saying anything lucid, they are really just creating a public nuisance. Even the New York Times feels they're not making much sense. And when your allies abandon you, maybe it's time to rethink your tactics.

If you’d like to see real political speech that I’m opposed to, but also believe should be protected, go to any union hall on meeting night or pick up a copy of ‘The Nation”. Even a public march can be a perfectly valid format. They have a pro-abortion rally in Washington DC every year which I think clearly meets that criteria. Those are all examples of people doing their best to persuade or inspire. I can’t imagine you’ll find anything that I agree with in any of those formats, but I absolutely think that they are forms of speech which should be vigorously defended. I find them irrational and completely unpersuasive, but I think they're absolutely entitled to state their case.

But the best thing you can say about these ridiculous spoiled rich kids is that they’re wasting our time. Their education about how the world works has been so deficient and they all have all been so thoroughly insulated from the realities of the world, that even the most generous observers can only describe them as irrational. Even devout leftists are calling them nonsensical - and that's a pretty low bar to expect them to clear.

These aren’t really political protests at all – they are a form of public temper tantrum springing from the infatilization of American society. These are kids who have so forsaken adulthood, that even their ‘revolution’ involves holding their breath and stamping their feet. I not only think the police acted appropriately in this case, but I think they could have acted more harshly.

Early in my career I had an experience with a similar Wall Street protest, that didn’t make any more sense than this one:


It was 1990, and I was living in Hoboken while working unspeakably long hours at JPMorgan on 60 Wall Street. Normally I was in the office before 6:00 AM but I had been there very late the night before and had overslept. So that day I was on my way in to the office at the embarrassingly late hour of about 8:00 AM.

When I reached the corner of Broadway and Wall st. about a block from the exchange, I noticed that there was a smallish protest going on and the commuters were giving it an awfully wide berth. The protesters had their arms linked and were blocking all the pedestrian traffic on Wall Street, just west of the New York Stock exchange building. There were no more than about 70 protesters and the police had them outnumbered. When I arrived, they were just watching the protesters scream at them, and were taking no specific action.

I had no idea what these people were protesting and I don’t think anyone else did either. They certainly weren’t communicating it to anyone. I assumed it had something to do with greed and hating the rich. But being neither particularity greedy nor rich, whatever it was I was quite certain that it had nothing to do with me.

I was just a little worker bee after all, not anyone that they would be concerned with. I wasn’t a Wall Street Fat Cat… I was a skinny kid with a head for math, mounting debts, and an unresolved compulsion to over achieve. I wasn’t even actually going to the Stock Exchange; I was just trying to get past it. Besides, at that time I very much saw myself as a member of the lower economic class that was just ‘passing’ on Wall Street. I was trying to make up for my lack of proper “Wall Street breeding” by working harder than anyone else, and hoping they'd let me hang around a while because of it.

At the time I was totally unconcerned with politics. I remember that my only concern at the time was how late I was and that looping around the block in that heavier than normal crowd would add another 10 minutes to my walk. So instead of fighting through the mob and coming in a different way, I slipped up to the protester on the far left side of the street furthest from the exchange, said “excuse me”, and tried to slip between him and the wall. This it turned out, was just the opportunity he was waiting for.

I guess he saw stopping my effort to gently slip past him as his chance to ‘make a difference’ and stand up to ‘the man’. So he looked at me with utter vitriolic spittle flecked hatred, and screamed in my face (from about 5 inches away) at the top of his lungs “NO F-ING WAY MAN!!!!!!!” as if my trying to get to my job as a lower level research drone was the the most vile act of a flailing tyrant. Then he broadened his stance, squared his shoulders and braced himself with his fellow protesters for what he was sure would be my coming assault.

I just stood there dumb-struck. I was totally perplexed and completely confused. Why in the world could this man be so angry with me? He was several years older than me and as far as I could tell, was probably making more money. I was after all, just a kid - late for work. I couldn't imagine what any of this had to do with me.

At that point I felt a hand fall gently on my shoulder. It belonged to the police sergeant (also about 15 years older than me) who until then had been standing just behind me with his troop of policemen. He calmly looked me in the eye and said ‘excuse me sir.”, as he stepped in front of me, courteously stretching a hand across my chest to insulate me from the protesters. He then waved his other arm in a beckoning manner, and the police who had been forming up behind him swooped in.

They started grabbing the protesters three policemen to one, and tossing them through the air at about waist height, into a large truck nearby. First grabbed was the bearded 30 something guy who had been screaming at me just seconds before. Once he went airborne, infantile bedlam broke loose among the rest of the protesters. It was strikingly easy to imagine them all as diapered three year olds in the middle of a nursery school, being forced to cope with some aspect of reality that they don't like.

Several fell to the ground as dead weight while pulling on the others. They were all screaming NO, and stamping their feet. None of this deterred the police in any way. After about 8 or 10 of them had been unceremoniously scooped off the pavement, the sergeant then waved me forward and personally walked me the 30 feet or so past their remaining number. He then tipped his hat to me, smiled a little, and told me to have a good day.

The reaction of the police sergeant left me even more dumb-struck. Up to that time my only contact with policemen had involved the phrase ‘What exactly do you think you’re doin here boy?” And I think it was the very first time in my life that a policeman had actually called me 'sir'. Until then it had never occurred to me that the police were ever going to be anything for me except a source of physical threat.

And it was that day, that moment really, that I became aware that my place in the world had changed in an important way. I realized that wearing a $30 tie meant the difference between being hand cuffed and frisked on the side of the highway by a South Carolina state trooper, and having a bunch of NYC riot police toss people through the air so that I can be on time for work. That realization changed me and my world view in an important way that day. So armed with my new realization about how my world had changed, I did what any rational person would do in that situation.

I went to work.

That was over 20 years ago when the New York Stock exchange and Wall Street were still the hub of the western financial wheel. But these days nothing much actually happens on Wall Street anymore. JPMorgan is now based on Park Avenue, and even at the exchange they don’t really do that much. But it’s still a magnet for these irrational leftist temper tantrums.

I don’t think the police should use tear gas because that might inconvenience innocent tourists in some small way. And so long as the protesters aren’t violent or destructive (and it doesn't seem that these were), I see no need for more violent police action either.

But I think mace is a perfectly appropriate response, and teaches these people that some aspects of reality can’t be avoided no matter how much they think they should. They can turn fire hoses of the stuff on them as far as I’m concerned. And good riddance.

Nonsense like this amounts to a 'protest' to the left because it's outdoors, and involves people screaming. But I think that overestimates them. If they have something meaningful to say, really anything to say, then they should be allowed to say it. But these people only cheapen the movement they think they're helping. They'd probably never admit it, but we'd be doing real political participants on the left a favor by simply macing these kids, and carting them all off to jail.