The Great Flip happened. It’s out there for all to see and it’s radiculopathy ridiculous. Rand Paul calling for a blockade of the Super Bowl while an old twit by AOC about how protests are meant to make people uncomfortable is making the rounds again.

Rand Paul calls on truckers to blockade the Super Bowl and DC: “I’m all for it. Civil disobedience .. is a time-honored tradition in our country from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.” pic.twitter.com/zvCBTe9wkg

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 12, 2022

Is it shameless hypocrisy, on both sides of the aisle, or is it the infantile “fight fire with fire” argument that worked so well on the playground in third grade? Or is it the new paradigm, that any excuse will do as long as it serves to produce the desired outcome of the moment, where integrity plays no role and rhetoric is a handmaiden to the cause?

There are two principled ways to approach the Canadian truckers closing roads, bridges, honking horns and disrupting their fellow citizens from using public facilities they’ve usurped for their own purpose. There is no question that there is a right to protest, even if qualified by the adjective “peaceful” (without “mostly”). But is it acceptable to engage in civil disobedience, seizure of public facilities to the deprivation of others who have as much right to the use of roads and bridges, not to mention quiet enjoyment of their homes, as the protesters?

The New York Times has found itself in a curious editorial quandary. Having gone pretty far out on a limb in the past, to the point of publishing op-eds about riots being the voice of the unheard since Martin Luther King isn’t around anymore to note they got his statement ass-backward, to serious arguments that looting is just a variation on reparations for slavery, to burning buildings isn’t violence because building are just “things” that are covered by insurance, what was it to say about this anti-vax trucker protest without being excoriated for hypocrisy?

The Times has options. It could join in the extremist view that if it serves to achieve what they deem the correct outcome, then laughable hypocrisy doesn’t matter because it would be on the right side of history (herstory?).

It could take the position that closing roads, depriving people of their right to use public facilities in the service of a cause was taking protest beyond its lawful parameters. But then, what of its full-throated rationalizations of the BLM protests, riots, destruction and highway closures?

Instead, the Times seeks to spin a yarn about protest that allows it to thread the needle.

By the standards of mass protests around the world, the “Freedom Convoy” snarling Downtown Ottawa ranks as a nuisance. The number of protesters, about 8,000 at their peak, is modest; there have been no serious injuries or altercations, the truckers stopped blaring their horns after residents got a temporary court injunction against them, and most Canadians support neither the truckers nor their cause. Yet what’s happening in Canada deserves close attention in the United States and across the world.

Whether it “deserves” anything is a subjective view. That it has attained the attention of many in the US and elsewhere is the objective view. It has, which might explain the curious second graf of the Times editorial that seems to leave out the punchline.

In an increasingly polarized political environment, the Canadian truckers became an instant cause célèbre. Donations poured in, prompting GoFundMe to pull the plug on the campaign after a few days under a policy that “prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment,” a void that was quickly filled by right-wing crowdfunding platforms.

Initially, gofundme was going to take the funds and hand them over to “legit” charities unless donors requested a refund. After howls of outrage, they are instead refunding the donations. Why the Times brought up gofundme and left this out is hard to explain other than a strained effort at Gertruding.

Eventually, the editorial reaches its buried lede.

We disagree with the protesters’ cause, but they have a right to be noisy and even disruptive. Protests are a necessary form of expression in a democratic society, particularly for those whose opinions do not command broad popular support. Governments have a responsibility to prevent violence by protesters, but they must be willing to accept some degree of disruption by those seeking to be heard. The challenge for public officials — the same one faced by Minneapolis and other cities in 2020 during the protests after the murder of George Floyd — is to maintain a balance between public health and safety and a functioning society, with the right to free expression.

And it concludes with a sentence that strains anything remotely resembling a rational thought.

Allowing nonviolent, even if disruptive, protest is an important tool for maintaining social cohesion in a polarized society.

There were two paths to take here, that closing roads, and thus depriving everyone else with the same right to enjoy public facilities as the protesters, was wrong, and wrong for everyone who did so, or that protesters had the right to disrupt the rights of others. They chose the latter to avoid coming off as hypocrites. Instead, they came off as pandering legal fools.

Cries of civil disobedience are among the many legalish concepts that are generally misunderstood. It may be an offense committed with the best of intentions, but it’s still an offense. It means that those who engage in civil disobedience believe so strongly in their cause that they are willing to suffer the consequences of the actions, including arrest, prosecution, conviction and sentence. It doesn’t mean they get a free pass.

We may well admire the fortitude of the civilly disobedient, and their good intentions may serve them well in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion and in mitigation of sentence. But that doesn’t mean anyone has a greater right to commit an offense than anyone else.

No, “disruption” is not a right of protesters. Protest is to join together with like-minded people to express your views to the government to seek redress of grievances. But not at the expense of other people’s rights to choose not to associate. Protesters don’t own the roads and bridges. They are there for all of us. That was the case when BLM protests shut down highways. That’s still the case when Canadian truckers shut down the Ambassador Bridge.

But as the unduly passionate remind us, if protesters are well-behaved, respect other people’s rights, don’t burn, loot, honk or cause people to be angry and miserable (or “uncomfortable,” as AOC prefers to call it), their protest won’t have the impact they want it to have. Here’s the dirty little secret about protests. You can do it all you want, within the parameters of what’s lawful, but you aren’t guaranteed that your protest will prevail over the will the rest of a nation. Not even if you’re absolutely certain that you are on the side of truth and justice and everyone else is bad, evil and wrong.