(LifeSiteNews) — It is easy to cherry-pick the worst behavior of the ideological group you disagree with and highlight it as evidence that the fringes represent the whole. That, unfortunately, is not the case with a video that recently went viral showing an adult woman harassing a 12-year-old boy at a Canadian protest wearing a “Save Canada” ballcap. He stands there awkwardly smiling and shifting uncomfortably as an—again, adult—woman dumps glitter over his head while smiling the smile of someone who recognizes her power:
When she is approached by a police officer who warns her that if she harasses the child again she will be arrested, she brazenly insists that she “isn’t assaulting anyone” and is doing nothing wrong. This is progressive entitlement on full display.
Dumping things on the head of a child who you disagree with isn’t assault and isn’t wrong, you see—because she is entitled to harass and assault those she disagrees with, because she is right and they are wrong. Her smirk says it all. If this were a social conservative harassing a progressive—or worse, a trans activist—it would be all over the front pages and the prime minister would have condemned it by now.
I’ve seen progressive protestors in action more time than I can count, and entitlement is a fundamental characteristic of their behavior. I’ve seen swarms of protestors physically blocking a university door in order to prevent a speaker from getting to his audience, screaming at and even shoving police when they intervene or attempt de-escalation.
I’ve had my own presentations interrupted by shouting, pot-banging protestors who felt that those attending the speech (one of them in a private, prescheduled room) had no right to hear what they had chosen to hear. At one presentation, topless protestors showed up and attacked one of our vehicles. At another event, they physically barricaded the parking lot so attendees couldn’t park.
In many cases, as I’ve written here before, abortion protestors are fully willing to get violent in order to make their point—which is consistent with their worldview, which permits violence against inconvenient persons.
Trans protestors the world over have grown increasingly violent over the past couple of years, with a feminist speaker in New Zealand recently fearing for her life when she was mobbed. In Canada, when feminist Meghan Murphy was scheduled to speak at the Toronto Public Library, LGBT protestors gathered in front of the building shouting obscenities, with one attendee being told she should “choke and die.”
All that to say that the video of the adult woman harassing the child is not a fringe example. Her behavior is typical of progressive protestors. For all of their sound and fury about human rights, dehumanizing those they disagree with is a fundamental part of their modus operandi.
Compare that, for example, to the comportment of pro-life activists across the country. The best evidence of the pristine good behavior of pro-life activists in Canada is that no matter how hard they tried, pro-abortion politicians couldn’t produce examples of harassment even when advocating for bubble zones around abortion clinics—and indeed, abortion activists have actually been convicted in recent years of faking hate crimes against themselves.
Or compare the behavior of progressive protestors with the Freedom Convoy, which remained peaceful despite relentless media efforts to find someone—anyone—who was violent. It didn’t happen.
Progressive protestors believe that they own the culture and they treat those they disagree with as non-persons who can be mistreated at will. As we see in the video above, not even children are exempt.
