It should come as no surprise that the compulsion to disrupt a speaker with whom one disagrees isn’t just a progressive problem, but an entitlement for college kids. And so a group favoring Trump proved itself no different than its opposition.

Whittier College…hosted California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, in a question-and-answer session organized by Ian Calderon, the Majority Leader of the California State Assembly.

They tried to, anyway.

The event ended early after pro-Trump hecklers, upset about Becerra’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over DACA, continuously shouted slogans and insults at Becerra and Calderon. A group affiliated with the hecklers later boasted that the speakers were “SHOUTED DOWN BY FED-UP CALIFORNIANS” and that the “meeting became so raucous that it ended about a half hour early.”

On the bright side, no one was physically harmed in the process, but to the extent there was any claim of holding higher moral ground by the support of free speech, the willingness to allow people with whom they disagreed to speak, this exercise of the heckler’s veto sucked the air out of the room.

As is invariably the case, the right is just as inclined to fabricate excuses as its counterpart on the left. With infantile retorts like, “well, they started it,” or “we’re just doing what they’re doing,” the tu quoque fallacy rears its ignorant head.

Do you similarly conclude that the Allies hated peace as much as the Axis because they shot back?

Putting the absurdly failed analogy aspect aside, so does the right agree with their brethren in black that speech is violence?  Or if the mere attempt at an analogy is too taxing to dispute, there’s the argument offered by the more plain-spoken Trumpkin.

LOL, this is a lie. Everyone knows Democrats & left wing are anti free speech on college & university campuses.

Don’t try to make sense of this. It will only make your head hurt. But just as the disturbance at Thurgood Marshall Law School exposed, the question remains whether this is merely rude and contrary to any principled support of free speech, or a wrong that should be targeted for official sanction. Adam Steinbaugh at FIRE notes that the California Supreme Court has held that people who disrupt meetings can be penalized.

As the California Supreme Court observed in upholding the constitutionality of the state’s disturbance-of-meetings statute, authorities cannot punish every instance of protest at a public meeting. Brief expressions of disapproval contribute to the exchange of ideas without preventing the speaker from sharing his or her views in a closed space with an audience that wants to hear them.

But, as the California Supreme Court explained, authorities are not powerless to penalize substantial, material, and intentional disruptions:

Under most circumstances, of course, ordinary good taste and decorum would dictate that a person addressing a meeting not be interrupted or otherwise disturbed. The Constitution does not require that any person, however lofty his motives, be permitted to obstruct the convention or continuation of a meeting without regard to the implicit customs and usage or explicit rules governing its conduct.

There’s some curious shade. The Constitution “does not require” anything, but rather prohibits the government from impairing people’s rights. Leave it to California to use “ordinary good taste” as a standard.

Audience activities, such as heckling, interrupting, harsh questioning, and booing, even though they may be impolite and discourteous, can nonetheless advance the goals of the First Amendment. For many citizens such participation in public meetings, whether supportive or critical of the speaker, may constitute the only manner in which they can express their views to a large number of people; the Constitution does not require that the effective expression of ideas be restricted to rigid and predetermined patterns.

All true, though there is nothing in the First Amendment that limits speech to that which “advances the goals” of anything. All speech is protected, except if it falls within a defined exception, whether it “advances” any ideal or reflects the deepest thoughts of Bojack Horseman fans.

Since the Constitution indubitably affords some measure of protection to the free expression of all those present at a meeting—speakers, officials, and audience—[the statute prohibiting] “disturbances” [of meetings] potentially may collide with safeguarded First Amendment interests. […] Nonetheless, the state retains a legitimate concern in ensuring that some individuals’ unruly assertion of their rights of free expression does not imperil other citizens’ rights of free association and discussion. […] Freedom of everyone to talk at once can destroy the right of anyone effectively to talk at all. Free expression can expire as tragically in the tumult of license as in the silence of censorship.

There is no doubt that the concern of allowing individuals to speak without disruption is legitimate, but that fails to come anywhere near the question raised by the First Amendment, what clearly established exception to the First Amendment allows for the state to prohibit speech?

Notably, the California Supreme Court does a good job explaining why heckling can serve a legitimate political purpose, even though no such purpose is required by the First Amendment, vitiating any claims that time, place and manner restrictions would overcome the problem. After all, you can’t effectively “boo” a speaker with whom you disagree the next day in your dorm room.

So it appears that the right, just like its sympatico counterparts on the left, cares just as little for the norms of “ordinary good taste,” not to mention the marketplace of ideas at which they might claim to deliver a better product. Who “started it” is an infantile response; if letting a speaker speak when it’s Milo is the purported virtue, it cuts both ways.

There is no way to weasel out of what happened here, and if the right wants to wear the mantle of free speech heroes, then it can’t do what it attacks the other side for doing.