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At Emory, civil disobedience ain’t what it used to be

By Andrea Widburg

Beginning in 2020, Democrats gave up any pretense at all of law and order for political protests. Blocking streets and freeways, looting stores, burning buildings, attacking the police...it was all good.

Those who oppose the pro-Hamas anarchy on America’s college campuses have enjoyed the footage of an Emory University economics professor resisting arrest, something she justified on the grounds that “I am a professor of economics.” However, that video was a shorter segment of a somewhat longer video generally revealing that civil disobedience, once a principled stand against morally wrong government actions, is now seen as a free pass to lawlessness. And given how Democrat-controlled governments in America have encouraged lawlessness for decades, you can’t really blame these foul young Democrats for their attitude.

We’ll begin with a short history of civil disobedience. In the middle of the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau articulated what constitutes civil disobedience. Thoreau opposed both the Mexican-American war and slavery, so he refused to pay his taxes because he would not financially support a government that engaged in illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional activity. He knew he would be—and he was—jailed, although a relative paid his taxes, securing his release the next day. Thoreau then wrote “Resistance to Civil Government,” which was published in 1849.

The key to Thoreau’s thesis is that when a government passes unjust laws, there is a single principled way to challenge them: “Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” In other words, the martyrdom of arrest and imprisonment lies at the heart of principled civil disobedience. Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, using non-violent protest to force the British and Southern governments to be exposed for the evil they were doing.


(Note: Thoreauean civil disobedience works only against abusive but non-totalitarian governments. In truly totalitarian systems, the penalty for opposing the government isn’t imprisonment; it’s death. Thus, this past week in Iran, rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death for criticizing the government.)

For a long time, though, Democrats have done away with the principled part of civil disobedience, that is the willingness to go to prison or face other consequences short of torture and death to highlight the problem with the government. Indeed, the opposite has been true.

Those who have violated laws that Democrats dislike were feted. Gavin Newsom, who illegally conducted same-sex marriages in San Francisco in 2004 when he was the mayor, used that “civil disobedience” as a platform for his gubernatorial run, which has positioned him for a presidential run. Break the law, and you’ll get fawning interviews, book deals, political power, and Hollywood parties.

Beginning in 2020, Democrats gave up any pretense at all of law and order for political protests. Blocking streets and freeways, looting stores, burning buildings, attacking the police...it was all good. Since October 7, those who pulled down posters of the Israeli hostages whom Hamas had kidnapped, made open threats to kill Jews, or assaulted people on the streets...almost all of them got away without charges or with limp spaghetti slaps on the wrist.

As the pro-Hamas, antisemitic protests took over one Ivy League campus after another, the various administrations bowed down before—and joined in with—the illegal protests. And they are illegal. Putting aside the violation of campus speech codes, which should require suspension or expulsion, to the extent all these protests have been physically and verbally aggressive toward Jews, they violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Because there were no consequences at the Ivies, it’s no wonder that students at Emory University in Atlanta—a blue city in a purple state—thought that they could do the same without repercussions.

As you can see in this video (which I cannot embed), the hysterical students are genuinely bewildered as to why they are being arrested. They’re also unclear about the mechanics of arrest because they view the limited restraints of zip ties as a fascist attack. (Clearly, they haven’t been paying attention to Iran, which really does fascism the historically accurate way, with bullets, beatings, and executions.)

The key part of the linked video, of course, is when Caroline Fohlin gets arrested. You can see her come up behind the officer as he is engaged in arresting a screaming protester. Then, when he turns on her for interfering with his official duties, she resists arrest while protesting that she’s an economics professor:

It is worth watching this CNN video from the moment Emory Econ Professor @CarolineFohlin came across the violent arrest of a protester on campus and asked the police, with shock, "What are you doing?" That's all that prompted an officer to hurl her to the ground and handcuff her. https://t.co/QKNRqOoIiS pic.twitter.com/uYpXwKuc8D
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) April 26, 2024

What the video doesn’t show, but a clueless Fohlin later concedes, is that she hit the officer on the head when she went up to him:

Here’s that Professor of Economics who was arrested at Emory university and everyone seems to think is some poor victim of police repression. Caroline Fohlin ADMITS she hit a police officer on the head. Even professors are not allowed to assault cops. Yes, even professors. pic.twitter.com/YK5TrZokPD
— Heidi Bachram 🎗️ (@HeidiBachram) April 27, 2024

Fohlin genuinely does not understand that there’s a problem when you do not immediately remove yourself from an illegal protest and then compound that with assaulting a police officer, interfering in another’s arrest, and resisting your own arrest. In her world, civil disobedience, especially when you’re encased in the armor of the protected class of professorship, means you are free from all consequences of your actions. The students believe the same.

As I said at the start of this essay, they’re all justified in believing as they do. For decades, and with increasing visibility over the years, Democrat-affiliated, violent activists have gotten a pass for criminal behavior that they re-define as the highest form of civil disobedience. The notion that you show that laws are unjust through your own martyrdom is utterly alien to them.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether any of the arrestees will actually be prosecuted, suspended, or fired for their conduct. If not, the Atlanta government will simply reinforce the Democrat idea that “civil disobedience” is a free pass.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/at_emory_civil_disobedience_ain_t_what_it_used_to_be.html