Antony Blinken’s children were on their way home, so the protesters knew it was time to uncork the fake blood.

The group had been camped outside the Secretary of State’s home near the Potomac for a couple weeks, the latest example in the fraught trend of protests at the homes of Washington officials. By now, they could tell when something was up. The guards in front of the house had perked up; the black Suburban blocking the gate had been rolled out of the way. Someone was coming. But who?

At this time of day, it wouldn’t be Blinken himself, or his wife, White House Cabinet Secretary Evan Ryan. That left the other members of the family. One of them is three years old. The other is four.

But that was no reason to lay off. “Entire neighborhoods have been bombed to the ground with children missing under rubble,” Hazami Barmada, the encampment’s organizer, told me. “Why are those children forced to understand the brutal, barbaric realities of war, when his children should be sanitized from it?”

As the car carrying the kids rolled up, the group took their places. Some shouted: “YOUR FATHER IS A BABY KILLER!” Some waved signs: “WAR CRIMINAL BLOODY BLINKEN LIVES HERE.” Another poster featured a blown-up image of an old Blinken tweet of him and Ryan holding the children as infants. It was annotated with a chilling stat from the Gaza war: “10,000 fathers have lost their children.”

A few denizens of the encampment hoisted gallon jugs of bright-red liquid and poured the contents out on the street in front of the vehicle, splashing another pop of color onto a roadway that’s been stained repeatedly since the protests began last month.

The whole encounter took less than a minute. The automobile continued safely into the driveway. The gate rolled shut. And the 20 or so activists went back to milling about what they’ve come to call Kibbutz Blinken, their collection of tents beneath a Palestinian flag on the shoulder of a busy suburban street.

If the tiny passengers in the back seat of the car had any reaction, no one could tell.

But the fact that we even have to ponder the merits of strangers yelling at preschoolers is a sign of something troubling in our political culture — something that existed long before the Gaza war. It’s also a commentary on the dubious efficacy of this very of-the-moment variety of direct action. A cathartic........

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