Yesterday The Nation hosted an online roundtable about an incident at Brown University in which New York police chief Ray Kelly, the public face of that city’s racist, unconstitutional stop and frisk program, was heckled so severely at the start of a scheduled speech that he and the college cancelled the event.
I can see where both sides of the Nation debate are coming from, up to a point. On the one hand, I’m mostly a big fan of the idea that the cure for bad speech is more speech, and heckling is clearly a tactic that will turn a not-insignificant number of people off. On the other hand, there’s no question that it makes a powerful impression — Jesse Myerson is right to reject the idea that setting rhetorical traps for someone like Kelly in the Q&A period is likely to garner more publicity for your cause.
But I think that it’s a mistake to frame this discussion purely as a matter of organizing strategy. Because here’s the thing: Ray Kelly was not harmed in