Saturday, March 12, 2016

Brown on the Disrupters

Speech disrupters in Chicago yesterday managed to derail a big Trump rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago. So Trump cancelled it.

Today, in the press, the people who play at being responsible are mostly trying to blame it on Trump, who apparently brought it on himself. In other words, they're saying he was asking for it.

A fair number of left-leaning friends of mine are happy that his rally was disrupted.

I think the most astute comments I've seen were from Mark Brown, a local columnist for the Sun-Times. He is no friend of Trump.

To be clear, I’m glad people came out to protest Trump. I was hoping for it.

But as I watched an elderly man with a walker trying in vain to return to his car because idiots were running wild through the parking garage where many of Trump’s fans parked their cars, I was ashamed.

“This is what free speech looks like!” shouted a leader of the protesters on his megaphone while the old man asked the police if it was safe yet to get to his car.

I hope this isn’t what free speech looks like.

Brown argues that this is just the sort of thing that lends energy to the Trump campaign, and I think he's right about that. It was a prime example of political correctness, of unwelcome speech being shut down by a mobilized left. And one of the big things motivating Trump voters is that they're sick of it.

The idea behind free speech is to let people go on talking
even if you think it's offensive squawking.

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