June 10, 2024

CHARLES COOKE: Did I Miss the ‘Vandalism Is Fine Now’ Memo?

Many of the protesters wore masks and keffiyehs to cover their faces, in apparent violation of a D.C. law that prohibits demonstrations “while wearing any mask, hood, or device whereby any portion of the face is hidden, concealed, or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer.”

No arrests were made during the day, even as protesters vandalized property and clashed with police, according to law enforcement officials.

Can someone please explain to me, in words that your average ten-year-old could understand, what the argument in favor of this abdication is supposed to be? Suppose, arguendo, that I do not share the worldview of the vandals. What case could be made for their liberation that would persuade me? I can’t see one.

As a rule, I am very much interested in what other people think about politics. In my estimation, you cannot be useful as a citizen if you do not comprehend what your ideological opponents believe, and you cannot be effective as a writer if you do not understand why you don’t share those views. But here? Here, I’m stumped. Vandalism is a crime, and a malum in se crime at that. It is a crime at the federal level. It is a crime at the state level. It is a crime at the local level. Morally, it is considered a crime even where there is no law. I was taught as a child that vandalism was wrong; I have taught my own children that vandalism is wrong; and, even if I hadn’t done that, I suspect they’d grasp it instinctively. There is no ethical framework I can intuit in which defacing public monuments is acceptable, and no prosecutorial theory I can detect in which it ought to be ignored. Opposition to vandalism is obvious, widely understood, and value neutral. All in all, there cannot be more than 5 percent of Americans who believe that spraying graffiti on statues is okay.

Right around this time in  2020, it became widely accepted on the left that toppling statues of bad people was perfectly acceptable. These were historic figures who committed doubleplus ungood crimethink, and thus desperately needed to become unpersons, the sooner the better. Historians and even mainstream publications such as Popular Mechanics(!) dispensed advice on how to topple said statues without getting injured in the process. So what’s some graffiti in comparison.

It’s not like it’s skidmarks on a pride flag-painted crosswalk, after all. Speaking of which, as America’s Newspaper of Record reports:

Posted at 6:53 pm by Ed Driscoll