Protesters in Boston and San Francisco, many of them covering their faces with masks, blocked traffic on the Boston University Bridge and the Bay Bridge.
The Bay Bridge is SHUT DOWN
— Ariel Koren (@ariel_koko) November 16, 2023
Biden will not get away with genocide, Biden will not get away with staying in San Francisco without EVERYONE knowing he is supporting the slaughter in Gaza
No more genocide, ceasefire NOW pic.twitter.com/iQWWevwclA
Normal people get angry when you block their ability to get to work, get home from work, get your children to school, or get to where your children are. If you are advancing a cause and you make normal people hate you, that seems pretty detrimental to your cause.
If you're interested in protest activities that don't make anyone more likely to support your cause, why not at least choose something fun? Blocking a highway doesn't seem very fun compared to, say, holding a protest at the beach with margaritas.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) November 16, 2023
VIOLENT DNC PROTEST AGAINST ISRAEL BIRTHED BY LEFT-WING DARK MONEY MACHINE
But as some people like to say when it’s their allies protesting, protest is designed to make people uncomfortable. Nothing gets accomplished with safe, comfortable protest.
What’s more, some evils are so intolerable that people need to be grabbed by the lapels and have their attention turned to the evil.
I’m sympathetic to this impulse (much more than the art vandalism) because the claim made is that an evil is going on which should be arresting to contemplate, but the world isn’t stopping so you’ll *make* it stop.
— Leah Libresco Sargeant (@LeahLibresco) November 16, 2023
The Savio speech is moving! https://t.co/tXDEZnUjlo pic.twitter.com/CcYPzGQYRi
Leah Libresco Sargeant makes a fair point in that tweet. It’s not true that very disruptive protests are never acceptable or productive. It is true, though, that very disruptive protests are usually unacceptable and unproductive, and yet left-wing protesters seem addicted to using such protest in totally inapt situations.
Leftists are addicted to using civil disobedience tactics designed to achieve political change in places where there’s no democracy (colonial India, Jim Crow America) under circumstances where their ideas just haven’t won in elections. https://t.co/R9S235zswt
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 16, 2023
The pro-ceasefire, anti-Biden protesters here do not represent some overwhelming majority of the population. America is pretty evenly split on the question of continued military aid to Israel. This is a matter of live debate. The imagery Sargeant points to is from the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California. These protests were gathering thousands and thousands of students — typically, more than 10% of the student population showed up at the protests.
It was about 80 people who shut down the Bay Bridge. This wasn’t a mass movement. It was a handful of people who really wanted attention but bizarrely felt it was necessary to cover their faces.
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Another problem is that while a majority of Oaklanders and San Franciscans may agree with them that Israel should stop bombing Gaza, it’s not clear how stopping commuters and parents and visitors from traveling between Oakland and San Francisco is, to use Mario Savio’s phrase, grinding “the machine” to a halt.
The “machine” here is either the Israeli military or the U.S. government. The protesters weren’t inconveniencing the people providing aid to Israel or the people dropping bombs in Gaza. The only “machine” they were grinding to a halt was the daily life of ordinary residents.