Whitney Museum

The mob waged war on the Whitney Museum and won. The scalp this time belongs to Warren Kanders, who owns Safariland, a manufacturer of law enforcement and military supplies, and who, until his resignation last week, was a vice-chairman at the Museum. Kanders’s great crime was that his company manufactures tear gas, a non-lethal weapon which has been used — in my view most unfortunately — at the southern border. However you feel about the border crisis — and I’ve been quite clear on my outrage here — most reasonable people should admit that in almost all cases, the use of tear gas makes it likely that lethal crowd-control tactics will not be used. This story is not really about Warren Kanders or his company, and that’s precisely the problem.