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The scenes in Brooklyn this week of anti-Israel rioters pouring into a Jewish neighborhood to denounce the Jewish state should be a warning to all of us, and we should say clearly, “Don’t make trouble where our families live.”
Images of Orthodox Jews shivering on their porches watching as their tree-lined streets are taken over by progressives, many of whom have been arrested for violent crimes, demand a strong response from the government that is supposed to protect our neighborhoods from disaster.
Although the constitution protects demonstrations, even in residential areas, such as outside the Supreme Court building, there are steps the government can take to prevent violence and intimidation in such areas.
Here’s how Ilya Shapiro, director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute put it:
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“The Constitution protects the right to protest, but like the protection of speech in general, there can be time, place and method restrictions,” he told me. “A person can be properly charged with disturbing the peace by using a megaphone at two o’clock in the morning to express their opinions about political leaders. Obviously, a state or municipality can define ‘disturbing the peace’ in a way that protects residential areas like it does schools, houses of worship and other sensitive places.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks at a Ramadan Iftar organized by his team at the New York Taxi Workers Association, Wednesday, March 18, 2026, in New York. (Angelina Katsanis/AP)
Therefore, for example, local, state and federal governments can and should provide much stronger penalties for crimes related to protest committed in a residential area, where the clear purpose is not speech, but intimidation.
Residential riots have a long and difficult history in our culture, from the pogroms of the Middle Ages to the razing of Catholic neighborhoods in Elizabethan London, to the KKK in the Jim Crow south, and the Crown Heights riots in the 1990s. It rarely ends well.
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I’m not sure there’s even a single historical example of sit-in protests bringing about positive, peaceful change, but examples of chaos and violence abound, written in blood.
Both Renee Good and Alex Pretti would still be alive today if they had protested in a traditional way in a public place instead of barricading federal agents in residential areas.
Since the beginning of civilization, cities and towns have been built with large public spaces that allow for exits and exits, allowing a safe place for crowds of thousands to celebrate or protest. But that’s not what residential areas are about.
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What purpose would there be in marching past innocent Jewish homes to oppose the Jewish state, without pure fear?
Supporters of Palestine gather at the ‘Stop the Sale of Stolen Palestinian Land’ protest against the ‘Great Israel Real Estate’ event for the sale of Palestinian land at the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan on Tuesday, May 05, 2026, in New York City. The NYPD has tightened security at E. 67th and E. 68th Streets and set up a perimeter that extends for blocks around the Park East Synagogue. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
These are the same confused ones who think that there should be no safe places for their protests other than synagogues. But why? Why do they need to reach their weapons at their Jewish targets, if not to intimidate or beat them?
This is why federal legislation to improve the penalties for crimes related to residential protests is important, and we know that such measures work because, since Don Lemon and his group of idiots attacked a church in Minnesota and were arrested, no other churches have been filled.
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Likewise, as soon as the Trump administration made it clear in 2020 that vandalizing state statues would land you in prison for 10 years, the statues stopped falling.
In a sane world, the organizers of the protests themselves, or their leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran ‘Madman’ Mamdani, would insist that protests never take place in residential areas, that people’s homes be respected. But don’t hold your breath.
For whatever insane reason, these leftists think it is not only their right, but their responsibility to cause chaos and fear among the Jews until everyone comes around to their politics of fear of Hamas, a cabal of cowards who terrorize children.
Because the behavior is stupid and criminal, we can’t stop progressive loonies from setting up camp outside the home of a conservative judge or member of the Trump administration. Sometimes, in fact with some practice, freedom of speech becomes freedom to be stupid.
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But we can make it clear that, if by doing so, you break the law, it’s not just a ticket and a summons but real jail time for scaring people off the streets where they live with their children.
Brooklyn is known as a city of homes and churches and we are very fortunate that so far, the targeting of those homes and places of worship by the remaining protesters has left no one dead. But before that luck runs out, Congress must act, and protect our homes and families from political violence.
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