Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left: HERE.
When a radical mob that included former CNN anchor Don Lemon broke into Cities Church in St. Paul to protest ICE, were they upholding or violating the First Amendment?
According to everyone from Sen. Patty Murray to the International Press Institute, breaking into a church and interrupting a religious service is “First Amendment activity”. But if preventing other people from praying is “First Amendment activity” then what is the church service itself?
First Amendment activity entails expressing your opinion, your belief or your religious practice, but the moment your actions interfere with and prevent someone else from engaging in their expression or activity while they are within their space, it’s an assault on their rights.
The Left has normalized attacking churches and synagogues, like Adas Torah in Los Angeles, ‘occupying’ campuses and public buildings, even vandalizing them and assaulting employees and worshipers, while describing this vandalism and thuggery as “First Amendment activity”.
Democrat jurisdictions have created a heckler’s veto by failing to immediately arrest rioters blocking buildings and streets, harassing students, professors and parishioners, and worse still, often telling the speakers and events being protested that they need to shut down instead.
This has frequently happened to conservative events on campus which are shut down when a large enough mob blocks the doors, takes over the room and shouts down the speakers. And when Jews counterprotested Marxist and Muslim mobs at Adas Torah, UCLA or in Brooklyn, they were the ones arrested and were more likely to be subjected to court cases and trials.
The name for this state of affairs isn’t “First Amendment activity”: it’s the ‘heckler’s veto”.
The heckler’s veto allows the most disruptive group to block the speech of others and when that group also enjoys the patronage of the authorities, as it does in New York, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, then when it escalates, it also enjoys a monopoly on harassment and violence.
This isn’t “First Amendment activity”: it’s the suppression of First Amendment activity using illegal intimidation and worse still represents the government-backed harassment of dissenting views by factions and mobs that the Bill of Rights was meant to prevent. When elected officials endorse or protect mobs harassing religious worshipers, whether it’s practiced by Hamas supporters in New York, New Jersey and Los Angeles, or ICE opponents at a Minnesota church, they are in violation of the First Amendment and everything that it stands for.
What began as ‘civil disobedience’ during the civil rights era, in which individuals deprived of equal rights violated the law to redress extreme wrongs, became the standard toolkit of every leftist cause. Over the past decade, every leftist cause from abortion to environmentalism to open borders to to Hamas to generic opposition to Trump has been pursued with the same tactics of blocking streets, intimidating individuals, and shutting down public and private spaces.
When every cause is ‘civil disobedience’, then civil disobedience ceases to be an emergency tactic and becomes the standard form of political protest. Those who practiced civil disobedience during the initial stages of the civil rights movement took real risks while their modern counterparts walk away with desk appearance tickets. The old civil rights protesters had made a point of staying peaceful while today’s radicals engage in violence and then cry about it.
Today’s radicals want to be treated like Martin Luther King even as their martyrs are a woman who tried to run over an ICE officer, a gunman who attacked federal law enforcement, a disgraced former CNN anchorman who stormed a church to protest the day job of one of its clergy, and a wealthy kid who murdered the head of a health care company.
None of this is ‘First Amendment activity’, nor is it civil disobedience, it’s political intimidation.
This reinvention of mobs engaging in political intimidation against individuals, churches, synagogues, educational institutions and other non-government actors, often with the backing of local government authorities, is a war on civil rights. When KKK mobs engaged in this behavior, the federal government sent in the troops and treated it as an insurrection. Radical insurrections are far more widespread, far better financed and enjoy far more political support than the KKK.
And the most dangerous thing about them is that they operate under the color of civil rights.
The mob never changes, but its false flags do. The white radicals screeching and blowing whistles for illegal alien gang members were rioting for BLM five years ago and for Hamas last year. They borrow the costumes of supposedly ‘oppressed groups’ to allow them to pretend to be an oppressed minority and its ‘allies’ rising up against government authoritarianism.
These riots have virtually no impact on government officials, but a great deal of impact on the ordinary people who are intimidated by them. That is the opposite of First Amendment protests.
The First Amendment isn’t threatened by the arrest of the ‘independent journalists’ who like the ‘street medics’ and ‘legal observers’ are just components of these radical movements, but it is threatened by the inability of worshipers to gather for services without being terrorized, by speakers who cannot come to campuses, professors who could not teach and students who could not attend class because of ‘encampments’, and by ordinary people who face violence if they counterprotest or express opposing views that of the mobs either online or in person.
Tyranny has come draped in slogans of liberation and fascism has come to America wrapped in a protest sign and a cause. Democrat politicians and the media claim that their radical mobs are protected by the First Amendment while the opposition’s rallies are a “threat to democracy”. Their speech is sacrosanct social justice while opposing speech is dangerous “misinformation”.
The First Amendment wasn’t needed to protect the speech already favored by elites. And yet, if liberals and leftists had their way, it’s the only speech that it would protect. The former censors of Facebook and Twitter insist that rioting mobs burning communities are “mostly peaceful” but that speech they don’t like is “violence”. Now, in the face of violent riots, they claim that their violence is speech and that the First Amendment entitles them to shut down church services.
The First Amendment is not a heckler’s veto. When your speech consists of silencing someone else, what you’re doing isn’t speech, it’s censorship, intimidation and totalitarianism.
To restore the First Amendment, we must end the radical heckler’s veto on the speech of others.
