By PETE SEAT
Reporter Columnist
When two men wearing black hoodies rushed the stage during Ann Coulter’s question-and-answer session on the University of Arizona campus, the instinct of this theatre arts major was to think they were technicians coming to fix a bad microphone. But my Spidey-sense was off – way off.
I had shared with the police officers we hired to secure the event that message board chatter (this was in the stone ages of 2004) indicated a disruption of some kind was planned. Being naïve and unschooled in how vile the campus left already was in those days, I thought the worst we would witness was indecipherable shouting or sloppily hand-written poster board signs.
Coulter’s assailants, however, had another idea in mind. Concealed in laptop cases they held parallel to the ground, their weapons of choice were pies that they hurriedly hurled at Coulter’s head. Thanks to a combination of poor aim and Coulter’s Matrix-like agility, the pies only grazed her hair.
The duo called themselves Al Pieda – a pathetic play on the name of heartless, blood thirsty terrorists who killed 3,000 American souls three years earlier. Charges were pressed but the Pima County prosecutor, a Democrat, refused to pursue the case because, well, she was a Democrat.
Despite being the person who invited Coulter and raised the money to host her on campus, and having sat next to her as the events unfolded, the incident didn’t shake me at first like it did others. Coulter parlayed the attack into a series of media appearances, including several hits in the succeeding days on Sean Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show, and it probably boosted her brand overall if I had to guess. She even hired a full-time security guard after that. Nothing makes someone look cooler than having a security guard in tow, ya know?
But over the years, as I watched conservative after conservative get attacked on college campuses, or find their lectures canceled before a word was spoken, I became embarrassed that we had not done more to sound the alarm.
What I saw that night and learned in the years that followed is that the campus left is uninterested in verbal debates. Coulter was chosen to be rhetorically provocative and because she was within our price range. Student government leaders thought it wise to invite liberal blowhard Michael Moore to campus three weeks before a presidential election without a conservative counterpoint, so it was left to us to fight verbal fire with verbal fire.
But what the campus left showed us is that if they disagree, any response, up to and including violence, is justified. We debated Moore, and complained about his student government funded event, on the airwaves of Tucson television and radio; they decided to assault a woman with whom they disagreed by chucking pies at her (and missing, as Coulter joyfully pointed out over and over).
The same cult of agitators say, as their ears burn, that “words matter.” I agree. My entire living comes from writing and speaking words. But freedom of speech matters, too. Moore had every right to spew his vitriol on campus without fear of physical harm. Coulter should have felt similarly at ease.
When ideas of all kinds cannot be expressed without violence or someone pressing charges, the whole system is broken. A country whose very foundation rests on freedom of speech cannot function when speech is muffled, silenced and attacked with blunt force. Everyone has a right to speak their mind. We can ignore and avoid, but we cannot and should not silence.
As I recently watched the Adam Carolla/Dennis Prager Amazon Prime documentary, No Safe Spaces, I came to realize our event was the canary in the coal mine. We saw to what lengths the left is willing to go in order to shut down free speech. We thought it was a one-off event at the time, but it was only the beginning of what was to come. I wish we had done more.
Pete Seat is a former White House spokesman for President George W. Bush and campaign spokesman for former Director of National Intelligence and U.S. Senator Dan Coats. Currently he is a vice president with Bose Public Affairs Group in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is also an Atlantic Council Millennium Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations Term Member and author of The War on Millennials.