We’re getting strong reminders, lately, that a free society with mutual respect for rights is vulnerable to those who have no such respect and don’t much like freedom.  Among the most-stark examples I’ve seen is this incident, in which pro-Hamas Columbia activists encircle and bodily remove a student who objected to their destroying a campus building:

Two observations are glaring, here.  The first is that the activists are behaving as if they are a police force authorized to determine who has a right to stand where and take organized action to control the situation.  The second is that they completely dehumanize their target.  He’s just an obstacle to remove, not a human being.

In her post, Marina Medvin implies an expectation that he’ll have some compensation for this violation of his rights, which is appropriate, but a problem remains.  That approach to justice merely allows these activists — who will not likely be found, identified, or prosecuted, especially in New York City — to offload the consequences for their actions onto somebody else.

A similar reminder comes with the increasingly frequent road blockages, with activists disrupting the lives of perhaps thousands of motorists by clogging major thoroughfares.  In both cases, the victims are reluctant to cross lines of civility and law, and indeed, there’s good reason for that.  For years, now, the message has been clearly conveyed across the West that our governments afford special privileges to left-wing activists.  The overriding standard for the law is not what a person does, but why the person claims to do it and who the person is.  Obviously, the kangaroo-court prosecutions of Donald Trump lead the field of examples.

This has to change.  The young man pictured above rightly notes that the activists are assaulting him, and he may, with some effort, be compensated by the university, but the damage done to all of our freedom is not recompensed as long as the incentives remain for activists to increase the pressure.  They’re doing the same thing to our rights that they did to the young man:  actively and deliberately eliminating them from the scene.

At a minimum, it should be unambiguously permissible for victims to remove the masks of their assailants so they can be identified.  The law should also include a presumption that any harm occurring in such situations, no matter to whom, is squarely the responsibility of those who give themselves the authority to bodily remove people.

The tyrannical activists are deliberately playing at the edge of assault and others’ right to self-defense.  We must mount a civilizational defense, and for that purpose citizens must know that their government supports them, not the people who wish to dehumanize them.

Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.