Should the NYC Protesters Blocking Bridges be Prosecuted?

People are already sick of this garbage. The protesters are just trying to make people miserable.

Nicole Gelinas writes at City Journal:

Prosecute the New York Bridge BlockersOn the first commuting morning of the first full workweek of 2024, New York’s permanent “protesting” class demonstrated its tactical approach for the year: to make us miserable on our daily trips, even as the city struggles to attract pre-2020 commuting and tourism crowds. Under the rubric of “Shut it Down for Palestine,” a few hundred people on Monday managed, indeed, to shut down all three Lower Manhattan bridges to Brooklyn, as well as the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, just after the morning rush. They created gridlock that inconvenienced tens of thousands of drivers, bus riders, bike riders, and walkers. Following months of smaller-scale actions, it was agitators’ most disruptive action yet—and organizers will continue to escalate their behavior unless Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul make clear that blocking key transportation corridors is not “peaceful protest.”Protests on all sides of any issue are a fact of urban life. But protesters are not free to obstruct movement; the First Amendment protects only speech and assembly, not unlawful obstruction of roads, transit, or sidewalks.Such illegal obstruction is the core tactic, though, of the post-2020 left-wing shut-it-all-down movement, and it started before George Floyd summer. On the last day of January 2020, a self-styled anarchist movement called “Decolonize this Place” swarmed Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. The few hundred masked agitators wanted to “disrupt” commuting until New York met their demands, including free transit and eliminating all policing in the subway system.They didn’t succeed in disrupting much of anything (though they did vandalize property), and the commuters who made their way through the mob might have seen the whole thing as a one-off aggravation. Even Occupy Wall Street, the precursor movement of nearly a decade before, hadn’t regularly interrupted New Yorkers on their daily journeys to work or to run errands.

Tags: Gaza - 2023 War, Hamas, Israel, New York City, Protest

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