I went out on Tuesday afternoon to find the protesters, who were supposed to be doing “direct action” around town. I found them, eventually, on The Post’s doorstep.
At this point, it seems like most of the people left in the streets of New York are the fanatics. But that’s not what bothers me.
What bothers me is this:
A crowd that has been screaming about free speech for the last three days — any time someone denied them a permit or asked them not to lie down in the middle of the street — showed up at my place of business, where people write news articles and broadcast their opinions, with a constructive message: “Shut up!”
Now, up to this point, I’ve been willing to give the protesters their due. Most of the people in the streets on Saturday and Sunday were decent people. But there is an element of this crowd that cannot tolerate dissent. It’s the element that was in front of my building screaming “shut up” and “Fox News off the air.”
Let me ask this: Do conservatives or libertarians protest leftist media organizations? Do I show up at The New York Times with a placard reading, “New York Times Unfair to Charter Schools!”? Maybe one or two nuts do this, but we were looking at a crowd of at least 1,000.
The entire idea of protesting a media organization strikes me as antithetical to the idea of a free press. I don’t mean that the protesters don’t have the right to do what they do. Nor do I mean that their protesting impinges on our right to free speech. But protesting a media organization, as opposed to, say, countering its arguments (or lack thereof), turns what could be a debate into a name-calling match.
And that, I fear, is all politics is to many of the people who were in the crowd today, anyway.
So, here are some of my pictures from Tuesday’s protest. It was, as always, a circus. There are some choice shots in here — chief among them, the one above.
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