NEW
YORK—It’s been a rough year for stump speaking in general, but let’s make a
resolution for 2018:
We need to
start listening to these White Pride guys in the polo shirts and khaki pants.
And we need
to start arresting the Antifa thugs.
Liberals and
conservatives alike should agree that the pattern of these events over the past
year has become obvious and odious:
The
Alt-Right announces a rally, demonstration or speakers program.
Their
enemies organize a campaign to “disrupt” the event. That’s the word they use.
It’s not counter-programming, it’s an attempt to shut them down. If it were
truly a “counter-protest,” they could do it across town, at some other
location, where the National Guard wouldn’t be required, or they could do it
immediately after the scheduled event.
By the time
the event happens, the Alt-Righters are outnumbered anywhere from ten to one to
a hundred to one.
Things get
nasty. It usually starts when an Alt-Right guy gets cut off from his comrades
and surrounded. Somebody knocks his hat off or tries to grab his flag pole
or—the biggest prize of all—seizes one of those homemade shields that are
normally found only at Renaissance Fairs. If he tries to get away, the bullies
lock arms and block his path, all the while screaming at him or spitting at
him. They’re trying to get him to throw a punch, so they can commence a group
beatdown, but since most of the Alt-Righters have prepared for this, if only in
their imaginations, they simply try to push through the crowd. But since
pushing through the crowd requires shoving some guy in the chest or holding him
at bay with a flag pole, we end up with a YouTube video of a skinny nerd being
chased through the streets for ten minutes by 30 angry guys, loaded for bear,
often restrained only by their girlfriends. Blood flows.
As soon as
somebody throws a punch—or hits somebody with a urine-filled balloon, because
projectiles are always raining down on these guys—an illegal assembly is
declared and the streets are cleared, sometimes with tear gas and rubber
bullets.
Very few
arrests are made, usually a couple of dozen. Ninety percent of the arrestees
are counter-protesters.
Bottom line:
the counter-protesters always win, because nobody ever hears the speaker.
We now know
from the 220-page report commissioned by the Charlottesville City Council that,
in that notorious case, the police chief decided to keep his officers behind
barricades even when they could clearly see physical altercations.
His theory was that the situation would get so bad he would be forced to
declare an unlawful assembly and tell everyone to leave. Of his two
obligations—protect free speech and protect public safety—he went 0 for 2. His
only strategy was to make it end quickly.
In most
cases, law enforcement ends up congratulating itself because arrests and
injuries are held to a minimum.
That’s not
the standard of success.
That’s the
bare minimum expectation.
“Motives at political rallies are
always impure.”
The standard
of civic success is this: The speaker finishes his speech and everybody who
wants to hear him can hear him.
If there are
people present who do not want to hear his speech, or do not
want others to hear his speech, and if those people take any action to make
sure he can’t be heard, they need to be carted away.
Most police
forces are so poorly trained that they think, if the demonstrators are speaking
and not being physically assaulted, then all objectives are achieved. The fact
that they’re being shouted down doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s list.
Unfortunately,
police chiefs aren’t the only public officials that simply want it to end
quickly. City Councils and Governors and City Managers and Mayors, faced with
an upcoming Alt-Right demonstration, will almost always try to deny the permit,
then force the organizers into an undesirable location, then put a time limit
on them, then pass specific ordinances designed to harass them (they wanna make
those pathetic Walmart tiki torches illegal!), then shut down the event on the
pretext of public safety. All of this occurs without the speaker ever being
heard, because, even if he manages to get his speech delivered, he’s drowned
out by bullhorns and noisemakers and profane taunts in a virtual textbook case
of what the ACLU calls “the heckler’s veto.”
As a result,
these White Pride groups have become the Jehovah’s Witnesses of our day. The
reason so many of the Supreme Court’s First Amendment decisions involve
Jehovah’s Witnesses is that they were a despised minority who could be easily
bullied because they were regarded as un-American cultists. (Among other
things, they refused to salute the flag or let their children recite the pledge
of allegiance.) The Alt-Righters are now a despised minority who can be
endlessly bullied because they can be labeled “white supremacists” (some are,
some aren’t) while city governments go through the bare minimum of ensuring
their free speech rights.
But these
people are spouting hate speech!
Yes, many of
them are. That’s legal as long as it doesn’t involve clear calls for violence
against the assembled crowd. All the calls for violence are coming from the
other side. The number of times I’ve heard “Fuck him up! Fuck him up!” on
YouTube makes me believe that this one phrase alone should be grounds for
arrest.
But these
racist organizations are provoking the counter-protesters by the disingenuous
nature of their demonstrations and rallies!
Yes, they’re
trying to provoke the left. The First Amendment doesn’t say anything about
motives. Motives at political rallies are always impure.
But the
counter-protesters have free speech rights too!
Yes they do,
but their speech has to allow space for the guy who has the legal permit to
speak that day. Their right to make noise before the speech and after the
speech is absolute. During the speech, not so much. Nor do they have the right
to block entry to the public square. A group of clergymen stood
at the stairs to Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, locking arms so that the
Alt-Right groups couldn’t get to the rally, causing a cop to say “They’re
trying to take over the street!” And they definitely don’t have the right to
use amplified sound to drown out the speaker.
But an
innocent woman died!
Yes she did,
and the unhinged extremist who did that should be treated the same way we
always treat deranged terrorists. But we shouldn’t ever create conditions where
those guys think law enforcement has vacated the premises. (The intersection
where it happened was guarded by a single wooden sawhorse. The school resource
officer stationed there had expressed fear for her safety and was told she
could leave.)
There are so
many Supreme Court cases dealing with this stuff—the right of unpopular
speakers to use the public square—that it’s hard to choose just one, but
probably the best case to talk about in this context is Kovacs v.
Cooper. Charles Kovacs was a guy who drove around Trenton, New Jersey,
in a truck outfitted with an amplified sound system expressing his views on a
labor issue of the day. He was convicted of violating an ordinance against
“loud and raucous noises” and thought his free-speech rights were being
violated. When the case got to the Supreme Court in 1949, Kovacs lost—with
Justice Stanley Forman Reed explaining in the majority opinion that Kovacs had
no right to bother “unwilling” listeners in a city of 125,000 people.
But here’s
the interesting part of the opinion. Justice Reed went on to say that
Kovacs did have a right to access willing listeners.
Therefore . . .
“Hecklers
may be expelled from assemblies, and religious worship may not be disturbed by
those anxious to preach a doctrine of atheism. The right to speak one’s mind
would often be an empty privilege in a place and at a time beyond the
protecting hand of the guardians of public order. . . . The right of free
speech is guaranteed every citizen that he may reach the minds of willing
listeners, and to do so, there must be opportunity to win their
attention.” (I added the emphasis.)
Many judges
since then have used the idea of “willing listeners” to rule against hecklers
and against politicians who serve the purposes of hecklers. The bottom line is:
The police can’t just stand there and allow speakers to be drowned out by a
mob—which is what occurs at almost every one of these gatherings. (The sole
exception may be the gathering last April in Pikeville, Kentucky, of three
Alt-right groups—the National Socialist Movement, the Traditionalist Workers
Party, and the National Front. Since there were 125 protesters and 150
counter-protesters—the closest to parity any of these events have achieved—the
police were able to establish a reasonable degree of order.)
In all the
other examples I could cite—Berkeley, Portland—city officials let a rally
begin, make sure the opposing sides are separated, cut it off for public safety
reasons, then congratulate themselves.
This is not
what the case law requires.
Let me
suggest a system that would work.
Assume that
the Alt-right people do not want to get beat up, and listen to what they say
about security.
For example,
cops could take a cue from Amanda Barker, leader of the Ku Klux Klan chapter
based in Pelham, North Carolina. Barker organized a Charlottesville rally one
month before the tragic one in August, and to make sure
everyone remained safe, she worked closely with the Charlottesville Police
Department, giving them the benefit of her experience at dozens of prior
events, suggesting changes in their operations plan that would make it
difficult for the anti-Klan element to come into contact with her members.
Unfortunately, they didn’t listen well.
For example,
she suggested that the rally not be announced to the public until the last
minute—this request was ignored, resulting in 40 counter-protesters for every
Klan member that showed up. These were not “willing listeners,” these were
active disrupters.
Worried
about their safety, the KKK assembled 30 miles away in Waynesboro, consolidated
into 18 cars, called the cops when they were 15 minutes out, and were escorted
by two police vehicles to a secure parking garage. Barker had requested
buses—past experience indicated that the safest option was to use buses from a
secret staging area so that no one has to walk through a hostile crowd—but the
city refused that request. A second mistake.
The KKK
members then marched in double file to the park, staged their event, and
marched double file back to the garage, all the while protected by lines of
police on each side of the double file. Even with this level of organization,
the counter-protesters locked arms on High Street to prevent the Klan from
entering the park, causing multiple arrests which fired up the crowd. And
people on both sides of the police line threw punches, launched bottles and
fruit, shouted ugly chants, and in some cases jumped over the officers to get
at the KKK members. Throughout the 35-minute program, there were projectiles
thrown—apples, tomatoes, oranges, water bottles—and the loud shouting of the
counter-protesters drowned out the speakers.
The wisdom
of using buses was revealed at the conclusion of the event when hundreds of
people blocked the doors of the parking garage so the KKK couldn’t drive back
to the interstate and get out of town. The police managed to push enough people
away from the entrance to get the cars out—even though the cars were hit with
sticks and bats as they emerged—and, with no enemy left to focus on, the crowd
turned on the police, chanting “Cops and Klan go hand in hand!” It took tear
gas, a declaration of unlawful assembly, 22 arrests, and 35 injuries requiring
hospital treatment to bring the crowd under control. All that happened after
the Klan was gone.
Moral:
Police intelligence units can learn things from the Alt-right.
Anyone who
blocks a march, blocks entry to a park, or repeatedly drowns out what a speaker
is saying has to be arrested immediately.
Yes, this is
messy. It requires wading into the crowd and handcuffing people and taking them
to a processing area. It slows everything down. It’s likely to cause sympathy
for the arrestee, which means other people in the audience will start doing the
same thing. They, too, must be arrested.
Because it’s
time-consuming to make multiple arrests during a speech, the speaker must be
given additional time.
One way
authorities shut down Alt-right events is by telling them “you have 30 minutes”
and then—after the first 25 minutes are spent on crowd control—telling them
they have to leave. This is just another way to endorse the heckler’s veto. The
crowd should be made aware that, every time an arrest is made, the organization
gets an additional two minutes, even if it means the event goes on for
hours.
This won’t
stop until there are consequences for punishing the “willing listener.” This
won’t stop until taking away a man’s right to speak becomes a crime.
I think
these three changes—make the hated organization feel safe, make immediate
arrests of people trying to stop speech, award more time to people being
shouted down—would go most of the way toward restoring order to a public place
where unpopular speakers are gathered.
Or we could
do what we did in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the late sixties and early
seventies. As a 13-year-old apprentice copy boy, at a time when most newspaper
articles were unsigned, I was able to volunteer for events no one else wanted to
cover. That meant I got to write about a) hippies, and b) Klan members. A
couple of times a year, ten or fifteen Klansmen would drive in from their
headquarters in the little Mississippi Delta town of Clarendon and gather at
the grave of David O. Dodd. David O. Dodd was the child martyr of the Civil
War, a teenage boy who had been executed for spying by the Union general
occupying Little Rock. (The facts of the case are hazy. He probably did carry
some letters intended for his uncle that showed Union troop positions.) The
Klansmen would go through some silly rituals and then read from a book written
in stilted Victorian English. Since most of them were only marginally literate,
this usually created somewhat hilarious effects. Nobody ever came to these events
except the media. I would duly write up the proceedings, turn in the article to
the managing editor, and he would say, “Did anything happen?” And I would say,
“Just what’s in the article.”
And he would
spike it.
“Spike it”
had a literal meaning in these prehistoric days of journalism, because he had a
long sharp metal spike on his desk and he would slam your article down on it
until there were 40 or so spiked pieces that piled up and eventually had to be
cleared out so he could start spiking more.
In other
words, the Klan was considered eccentric and irrelevant. Nobody cared enough to
beat them up.
By contrast,
I thought the most telling anecdote in the minute-by-minute account of the sad
events in Charlottesville was almost a throwaway.
“At 10:45
a.m., a man with an American flag approached officers in Zone 1 and asked,
‘What’s a good way to get into the park?’ An officer responded, ‘Right now,
there is no good way.’ Another officer suggested that ‘up the front’ would be
easiest. The man pointed at the clergy blocking the southeast staircase and
asked, ‘Through that?’ The officer responded, ‘That’s the only way.’ The man
walked away. One officer turned to his colleague and said, ‘Welcome to
Charlottesville.’”
One less
willing listener for anyone to worry about.
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