This whole debate is dishonest because liberals are hiding behind the content of these protests to refuse engaging with a fundamental question about the legitimacy of protests in general.
There is hypocrisy here, given that many of the posters supporting the Anti-Israel stuff called the truckers in Ottawa terrorists, with the defense they intended to intimidate.
The thing is by definition all protests no matter how "peaceful" are intended to intimidate in a democracy. Because if a group had the democratic influence necessary to get its way it would need to resort to them. Protests are an effort by a minority that has failed at democratic persuasion to make itself obnoxious enough to a majority that the majority gives in and surrenders its democratic preferences in order to live a peaceful life.
So protests sometimes may be for good causes because sometimes minorities are right and majorities are wrong. But they are ALWAYS anti-democratic, and any successful protest is by definition a violation of the rights of others, because that is the only way they can succeed.
Pro-Palestine protests are designed to override the rights that students/alumni/donors and others are guaranteed access to and have used to implement their preferences through intimidation, and therefore any protest, peaceful or violent within a legitimate political system is illegitimate. Now whether it should be suppressed by force is a different matter.
But pretending that the Truckers or Jan 6th were somehow assaults on democracy and this stuff isn't is absurd. There are matters of degree and whether you agree with the cause, but by definition if democracy matters, force is always justified in preference to concessions to minorities that have gone outside the system to enforce their will on a majority.
It was justified against the Truckers. It was justified against protestors at abortion clinics who tried to block women from accessing them. It was justified against anti-vaxxers. And it is justified here. It would be justified if vegans tried to shut down campuses until dining halls banned meat.
This is an interesting viewpoint because if the idea that any protest in a legitimate system is by definition illegitimate becomes widely accepted, especially by the authorities that would decide whether or not to use force, then any protest that actually does materialize under such a system automatically also becomes an attack on the legitimacy of the system itself.
Similarly, if it becomes accepted that any protest is by definition anti-democratic, then anyone who decides to protest over any issue, no matter how minor, is also forced to declare himself an enemy of democracy. If he is labeled an intimidator, then his relations with his fellow citizens immediately deteriorate. If he is considered to infringe on the rights of others, then he must declare his rights and those of others irreconcilable at odds.
Functionally, when the Founders enshrined the freedom of assembly and this so-called (for the sake of argument) right to protest, they were insulating the U.S. from all of this. It is quite ingenious. Despite the thousands of protests we have had over the years, virtually all except for Jan. 6 were targeted at specific issues and not the legitimacy of the government itself. The stakes of any protest are automatically minimized, and there is always an implicit compact between the protesters and the government that the latter will accept the act of protesting itself as legitimate and even an expression of democracy, while the former will make demands only for changes to occur within legal processes sanctioned by the government, even if there is virtually nil chance that they are successful.
Contrast this with authoritarian regimes, where any protest becomes an attack on the ruling ideology as soon as it is declared illegal, and is always tinged with the fear that a color revolution is starting.
