Analysis

Left-Wing Activists Will Never Understand Why Their Pressure Tactics Don’t Work

ANALYSIS
Activists In D.C. Demonstrate For Israeli Ceasefire In Gaza

(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Gage Klipper Commentary & Analysis Writer
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There’s nothing new about obnoxious left-wing protesters shutting down public roads and bridges. While it may seem like a function of our performative social media era, it actually dates back to the 1960s Civil Rights movement. What defined protesters back then is the same thing that will ensure their defeat today — they’re so lost in their own narcissism that they can’t imagine why their preaching fails to resonate.

Left-wing protesters mobilized a blockade of New York City roadways on Monday in response to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The New York Police Department quickly mobilized to re-open several access points shut down by protesters, leading to over 100 arrests. This is already the second time this year activists have planted themselves on New York City roadways to protest Israel. The tactic has become routine in other progressive cities as well. (RELATED: Left-Wing Activists Simultaneously Shut Down New York City’s Transportation Arteries

With traffic blocked on the Manhattan, Williamsburg and Brooklyn Bridges as well as the Holland Tunnel, travel in and out of the city — as well as on the city’s major highways — is all but impossible. Travel disruptions to and from New York’s notoriously inaccessible airports are the mildest concern. Nearly a million suburbanites cannot get into work, and most critically, police and other first responders cannot be sure of their ability to reach people in distress. The city’s economic pulse and basic public services come to a screeching halt.

This might seem like a recent development, a symptom of urban America’s rapid decline under ultra-progressive mismanagement. We have certainly witnessed a spike in these sorts of protests in recent years as far-left racial and climate politics came into vogue. Progressive officials — content with rampant crime, open drug use, and sprawling homeless encampment — don’t have much will to counter the protesters because they too support disruption in the name of “social change.” Social media encourages it all, with activists posting videos of their “heroic” deeds for likes and clout. But the original “stall-ins” had a much more humble aim.

The first protest of this kind came in April 1964, at the height of the civil rights movement. The Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality organized a blockade of New York City highways on the opening day of the World’s Fair in Queens, with hundreds of thousands of people expected to attend. Thousands of motorists stalled their cars across the city’s major arteries to keep visitors from reaching the fairground. Slate explains the organizers’ thinking.

“If the gesture were grand enough—and yes, theatrical enough—it would grab the attention of the president and Congress, indeed the entire political establishment of the nation, the very people who had so egregiously ignored the demand for racial justice for so long.”

The assumption here is that all the civil rights movement suffered from was a lack of “attention.” If given more exposure, the injustice was so great that people would come around to the cause. Yet there’s a whiff of moral superiority embedded in this assumption that verges on narcissism. Their cause is so overwhelmingly urgent that any inconvenience (or even real harm in the case of police and ambulances) people experience pales in comparison. It is so undeniably righteous that everyone will recognize this and march together toward change.

Sixty years ago, when systemic racism did still legally exist in America, it’s conceivable that the protesters had a point: the founding principles had been imperfectly applied to black Americans for far too long. But their inheritors — the DEI zealots, the climate cultists, and rabidly pro-Hamas anti-semites — have no such leg to stand on.

As one protest sympathizer put it on X, “We are going to inconvenience every single person who doesn’t give a fuck until they give a fuck” about the genocide Israel is supposedly carrying out in Gaza.

This is more than just the narcissism of feeling entitled to ruin someone’s day — it’s the narcissism of being so assured of your moral superiority that the only reason your cause could possibly fail to resonate is lack of exposure. Yet unlike the original civil rights movement, there’s been no shortage of exposure. Left-wing activists and their sympathizers in media, government and international bureaucracy have all worked in lock-step to push the pro-Palestine narrative. It fails to resonate because its moral claims are asinine.

No need to argue the philosophical basis of determining right and wrong, objective truth or reality. The simple fact is that most people saw these protests for what they are.

There was deep injustice occurring for far too long in the South, and only through the rise of mass media did the bulk of the country finally get to see it with their own eyes.

In the same vein, Israel suffered a vicious terror attack and is now defending its security against an existential threat, not waging a “genocidal war” — no amount of exposure will change how most Americans understand this.  People aren’t going to stop driving to work to change the weather — they’ll take their chances with the “climate crisis.” They have diverse friends and see racial minorities doing exceptionally well in America and won’t stop believing their own eyes just because they are stuck in traffic.

One driver had the perfect reaction, yelling to protesters from his stalled vehicle: “They ruined my day? Fuck them! This is New York, not Palestine, not Gaza!”

The protesters are too self-absorbed to see that this is the only response they are likely to get.