Monday, March 14, 2016

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the cancelled Chicago Trump rally, and the room it gave some rightbloggers to hedge their anti-Trump positions. It was inevitable that some incident would trigger the lawn-order instincts of the brethren this political season, and for them Chicago was Double Stuf because 1.) black people, and 2.) the freespeech rights of a rich guy who already has more freespeech (in the form of freemedia) than anyone else on Planet Earth.

UPDATE. In the column I'm agnostic about the protesters' behavior because the column's not about them, it's about the reactions to them. I'd like to leave it as a tactical question, as Charlie Pierce eloquently does here, and just say it doesn't work, but I'm also against speech shutdowns as a matter of principle. Here's something I'd like to know more about, though: whether the Chicago rally had to be shut down, or whether the protesters could have been removed and the thing was just cynically closed by Trump for the boob-baiting effect.

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