The Width of a Sidewalk

On free speech zones, Patriot Front, Mount Rushmore, and the quiet ways dissent gets moved out of view.

Dispatches from Reagan’s Attic

Last year, in Coos Bay, I watched a protest zone itself out of existence over a line of chalk.

Our local MAGA contingent hosted a Turning Point USA event at the Egyptian Theatre, with Steve Bannon’s daughter as the keynote speaker. Local pro-democracy advocates did what responsible civic people do: they went to the city, got a permit, set up a table, played music, and planned a protest in a patio area near the theater.

Then someone wrote “No Protesting on Sidewalk” in chalk, and that was that.

The protest organizers kept everyone behind the edge of the public sidewalk, tucked back just far enough that passing drivers could barely see the signs and people entering the theater could mostly avoid them. Meanwhile, the TPUSA line stood on the sidewalk in front of the theater, occupying the visible public space without apparently suffering a moral crisis over it.

When I asked why the protesters were not standing on the sidewalk too, the answer was: “Because we follow the rules.”

That sentence has stayed with me because it is both noble and dangerous. The sidewalk is not just scenery; it is the holy ground of protest in a country that claims to protect protest at all. Public sidewalks, like public streets and parks, are among the places where political speech has historically received its strongest protection, precisely because they are where the public actually is. A protest moved off the sidewalk and tucked onto a patio has not merely changed locations. It has changed audiences. It has traded encounter for permission, visibility for compliance, the public right-of-way for a managed corner where dissent can be technically present and practically unseen.

That is what these “First Amendment areas,” these so-called free speech zones, really expose. The right technically exists, but the exercise of it is managed, minimized, relocated, softened, and politely escorted out of view. A free speech zone is what power calls the place where dissent is still legal but no longer inconvenient. The spectacle gets the monument. The dissent gets the patio.

On the 250th birthday of the United States, one week ago, the government measured out, in three different cities, in three different registers, exactly how much room an American gets to disagree. And the strangest thing about those measurements is how rarely anyone had to enforce them. The chalk in Coos Bay was only the first one I saw. It was not the last.

At Mount Rushmore, the answer was one hundred feet.

That is the length of the First Amendment area the National Park Service designated along Highway 16A, at the edge of Keystone, for Friday’s fireworks display, the first at the memorial in six years, staged with the President in attendance. One hundred feet of permitted dissent, set roughly two miles below the mountain, downhill from the carving.

Two miles below. The distance is not incidental. It is the argument.

The mountain sits in the Black Hills, taken from the Lakota through treaties the government broke. In 2020, when the fireworks last returned at then-Governor Kristi Noem’s request, a Native-led protest formed along the road to the memorial. There were clashes with law enforcement. There were arrests. The charges were later dropped.

Dropped is the word to sit with. If the charges later disappeared, the arrests still accomplished what they needed to accomplish in the moment: they cleared the road. The arrest was the point, and the case was the receipt no one intended to pay.

This year the protest leader from 2020 says his group is boycotting. They read the geometry, one hundred feet, two miles below, and declined to be staged inside it. You cannot be arrested for refusing to appear in the space the state built to contain you.

The theory underneath all of it was the one Ian Reifowitz named on France 24: L’état, c’est moi. The state is me. Louis XIV was not confused when he said it; he was precise. He was describing a theory in which the nation has no existence apart from the person of the sovereign, so that loyalty to the country and loyalty to the man become the same loyalty, tested the same way, failed the same way.

That is one measurement. Here is the second.

On the National Mall the same weekend, the sorting was harder to photograph, because it came dressed as history. Freedom 250, the President’s parallel structure, built alongside the America 250 that Congress chartered a decade ago to stand above politics, presented the nation’s story through a curriculum assembled by Hillsdale College and PragerU. The claim it makes about who belongs is encoded, delivered in pageant register, deniable by design. It does not measure dissent in feet. It measures belonging in generations: whose ancestors arrived when, whose story counts as the American story, who is a guest in the founding and who is an heir.

That same morning, a few hundred masked men marched near the Mall under the banner of Patriot Front, waving Confederate flags alongside American ones, some of the American flags flown inverted. George Washington University’s extremism program describes the group plainly: an ultra-nationalist movement built around the creation of a white ethnostate, rejecting multiculturalism and diversity. Their ideology excludes people of color from the nation’s definition of legitimate belonging.

A Reuters photographer caught the image that measures the day. The men, all of them, filling a Metro car, surrounding a Black woman seated among them on her commute. The length of that measurement is the length of a train car. She did not choose to appear in it. There was no designated area. There was no two-mile buffer. There was a seat, and then there were the men.

A States News reporter asked a National Guard soldier who the marchers were. The soldier said: protesters.

So lay the measurements side by side, the way the weekend laid them.

One hundred feet, at Rushmore, for the dissent the state permits, zoned, buffered, two miles below the spectacle.

The span of a curriculum, on the Mall, for the exclusion the state curates, encoded in the history it commissioned about who the country was always for.

The length of a Metro car, for the exclusion that needed no permit and drew no buffer, because the men who marched it were called, by a soldier of the state, protesters.

The distances are different. The sorting is identical. Each is a way of drawing the same line: who is inside the American “we” and who is assigned a place at its edge, or below it, or across the aisle from it with nowhere to move.

That is the theory performed this weekend. When the country’s meaning is made inseparable from one man, then every celebration of the country becomes a loyalty test, and every loyalty test needs a place to put the people who fail it. A hundred feet of highway, a commissioned history, and a Metro car with no room left.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the argument was that a country could belong to no king, that it could be held in common, by people who never agreed on much beyond that. The measurements taken this weekend are the counter-argument, made in feet and miles and the width of a train, that it belongs instead to those who look like the founders the pageant chose, and that everyone else gets exactly as much room as the state decides to lend them.

At Rushmore, the state made arrests, filed charges, then dropped them, rules spent freely by a power that knew the bill would likely never come due. That is one way to treat a rule: as a weapon, hollow when tested, useful anyway.

There is another way, and I watched it on a sidewalk in Coos Bay. A chalk line no authority had issued, obeyed as though it were law, by the very people who had come to defend the idea that a country belongs to no king. There were no arrests. Someone wrote four words on the concrete and the resistance built its own hundred-foot box and stepped inside it, and when I asked why, the answer was that they follow the rules.

It is the asymmetry measured this entire week. One side has understood that a rule is a medium of power, something to spend, to draw, to write in chalk and watch the other side honor. The other side has understood a rule as a form of virtue, a thing you follow to prove you are good, even when following it makes your own signs invisible from the road. You can measure the distance between those two understandings, and the unit is whether anyone can see what you came to say.

One hundred feet. Two miles. One Metro car. The width of a sidewalk.

Measure the country by how much space it gives the people it would rather not include, and by how much space those people, out of a habit they mistake for principle, decline to take, and you will know what it is celebrating, and how little the celebration has to fear.