Inside Politics

SPEECH STOPPERS

Left-wing protesters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill forced former Rep. Tom Tancredo to flee a campus building Tuesday night.

Campus police released pepper spray and threatened to use a Taser on the student protesters when they disrupted the ex-Colorado congressman’s speech opposing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, the Charlotte News & Observer reports.

Mr. Tancredo was invited by a group to speak, but his speech lasted only five minutes. He left once protesters broke a window outside the classroom, the newspaper said.

Before the event, campus security removed two women who delayed Mr. Tancredo’s speech by stretching a 12-foot banner across the front of the classroom that read, “No dialogue with hate.”

Several student protesters screamed curses at Mr. Tancredo and Riley Matheson, president of the UNC-Chapel Hill chapter of Youth for Western Civilization.

“This is the free-speech crowd, right” Mr. Tancredo joked.

Geography professor Alpha Cravey joined protesters in chanting the names of Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus.

Mr. Tancredo was escorted from the room by campus police.

About 200 protesters reconvened outside the building. “We shut him down; no racists in our town,” they shouted. “Yes, racists, we will fight; we know where you sleep at night!”

“Fascists are fascists,” Mr. Tancredo said. “Their actions were probably the best speech I could ever give. They are what’s wrong with America today. When all you can do is yell epithets, that means you are intellectually bankrupt.”

A conservative blog called Moonbattery (www.moon[R]battery.com) commented: “Imagine the hysterical reports Homeland Security would produce on the menace of right-wing extremists if any of us behaved like liberals.”

TEA PARTIES

“So who’s behind the Tax Day tea parties?” Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing ‘flash crowds’ [-] groups of people, coordinated by text or cellphone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month. This is part of a general phenomenon dubbed ‘Smart Mobs’ by Howard Rheingold, author of a book by the same title, in which modern communications and social-networking technologies allow quick coordination among large numbers of people who don’t know each other.

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