[driftless]

Personally I don't believe in heckling even a stupid, leftist assw... like Doctorow. Silence would be a better weapon. Shouting down even obnoxious creeps like him will only lead to retaliation. Action should be taken to get conservative speakers on campus and scolding college admin for letting such useless jerks speak.

[swilhelm73]

I'll be honest with you. I'm sick and tired of conservatives playing by the rules while the Left breaks them with impunity.

The Left isn't going to play nice no matter how much we do, and our principles may well lead to us losing the culture war.

Doctorow violated the unwritten code about using such a speech as a narrow, partisan weapon. As such, there was little reason for those in attendance to respect the similar unwritten code of politely listening. Booing him was the right thing to do. Perhaps the next time a Leftist considers givign such a speech he will thing twice...

[aculeus]

Personally I don't believe in heckling even a stupid, leftist assw... like Doctorow. Silence would be a better weapon. Shouting down even obnoxious creeps like him will only lead to retaliation. Action should be taken to get conservative speakers on campus and scolding college admin for letting such useless jerks speak.

Baloney. He wasn't invited to give a political speech, one that students had the freedom to ignore by not attending. He was invited to a commencement and decided to make a political speech. As Peggy Noonan wrote yesterday: "Go, Hofstra!"

[Paul Atreides]

Guffaw! Go ahead, tell me another joke.

News bulletin for you: this booing of Doctorow IS retaliation. This is the treatment that the left has been giving conservatives for years. It's long past time to ditch the "New Tone."

[McGavin999]

Silence would be a better weapon.

Silence is the weapon we've used for the last decade, it's not effective. Unless we start speaking up, unless we let these out of line leftists know we will not be silent anymore, we might as well give in.

No, we should no longer be silent. Freedom of speech works both says.

[bfree]

Too bad. You may not like it, but the left will continue to use the tactic and it must be used against them. Respect is earned, not given, especially to socialist elitist fools. If left unchallenged, they begin to think that everyone accepts their drivel. The revolution is beginning and the left must be defeated anyway possible.

[Southack]

"Personally I don't believe in heckling even a stupid, leftist assw... like Doctorow. Silence would be a better weapon."

I disagree. In the 1980's Texas was still a Democratic Party state, but no one really knew that a revolution was coming.

...at least, they didn't know it until the Cotton Bowl one year when Democratic Governor Mark White decided to walk onto the field to give a partisan speech.

He was booed, heckled, and shouted off the field. Texan after Texan looked around, amazed that everyone else felt like they did, disgusted by the liberal-left politics of the state's Democrats.

You see, the liberal newspapers hadn't been revealing just how much sentiment was against the various uber-liberal state funding/school-spending and general Democratic Party nonsense that was going on.

But at that one massively public event, tens of thousands of Texans suddenly realized that they weren't alone...and so too did millions in the TV audience.

It was a watershed event. It led directly to Republican control of the entire state in a brief amount of time.

Silence would not have accomplished that feat.

It was a spontaneous, grass-roots expression in the most public of forums (i.e. packed football stadium and big TV audience) that changed the course of history.

It surprised everyone simply because the shift (or rise) in anger towards the Democrats hadn't been reported. The media had censored that news...but all of a sudden the cat was out of the bag, never to be returned to its old dark state.

Likewise, the anger against left-wing PC nonsense on college campuses is being censored. It will take these sorts of shout-downs to break that information bottleneck, get the word out, and hasten the Rightward shift that must inevitably occur there.

[Petronski]

I approve of heckling. The only alternative protest that would be effective (perhaps more effective) would be to rise and leave the hall until the speaker was finished. Five people doing this is a smoke break. Five hundred people leaving will suck the lifeforce right out of a leftist through the eyes.