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Unpopular opinion: the week a campus tour group drowned out our speaker taught me more than the speech did
Back in October 2023, I went to see a talk at a state school in Ohio about voting rights, and about 60 students showed up just to chant through the whole thing. Campus police stood by the door for 90 minutes but never stepped in, and the speaker ended up taking questions in the parking lot from maybe a dozen of us. What stood out was that the protest kids had done their homework on the topic and actually knew more than half the audience. The whole thing made me think the shout-down stuff gets way too much press when the real story is people just showing up louder than the event. Did anyone else go to a talk like that where the counter crowd basically stole the show?
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the_ruby9d ago
Went into that post ready to roll my eyes because I used to be all about the "just let them speak" thing. Then I remembered a town hall in 2022 where a group of nurses showed up to yell about hospital staffing, and they were the only ones in the room who had actual numbers and names of people who died. The speaker just kept reading from a script while they ran circles around him. Made me realize the loud ones are sometimes the only ones who did the reading.
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