HICKORY, N.C. — Two students held up a Mexican flag. One young man pulled open his half-zipped hoodie to show off his gold rosary necklace and chest tattoo. Another young man held aloft a piece of corrugated cardboard with “F–k Trump/Hilary Clinton for President” scrawled in black Sharpie. One student wore a bandana and a black neoprene facemask.
One young woman’s sign read “I’d rather shove a brick up your a– than pay for a wall, Pendejo!”
“That’s why I served my country,” Vietnam-era veteran Larry C. Stinson told me — in all sincerity, “is for ignorant people to protest.”
He adds. “It would be nice if they knew the facts.”
For all of Trump’s antagonism towards protests, and all the political psychoanalysis of his supporters as authoritarians, the Trump fans in Hickory all had a reasonable view of protesters.
“They have a right to speak,” said Ed Plant, a baby boomer Trump backer, “but they don’t have a right to disrupt what we want to hear.”
As is typical, Trump’s rally at Lenoir-Rhyne University — a Lutheran college an hour north of Charlotte — attracted its share of protesters. Bishop Tim Smith led the North Carolina Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in a peaceful, hymn-filled protest against hate and division.
“Protests don’t bother me,” Stinson said. “I’ve been called every name in the book. I got spit on twice by the same protester at O’Hare Airport in 1972, so it don’t bother me.”
Outside the auditorium, you could see “Black Lives Matter” signs held by students, at least three Mexican flags, and “Fight for $15” signs advocating a higher minimum wage.
While chants, hymns and shouting matches filled the spring air outside, protesters inside the arena stood up and began shouting down Trump on at least three occasions. They were all promptly removed by police.
Trump fans I spoke with all drew a valid distinction between these types of protesters.
“I think it’s good to exercise freedom of speech,” Jay Tate told me as we wove through the protesters after the rally. “There are those [who] are for Trump and those who aren’t for Trump. They have a right to express their opinions. But do it in a way that’s nonviolent, and do it in a way that doesn’t disrupt the speaker from saying what the speaker wants to say.”
Media coverage of Trump protesters has elided over this distinction: There are protesters, and there are disruptors.
And among the protesters, there is another key distinction: Those dissenting from Trump’s view (trying to counter his megaphone with their signs and numbers) and those trying to shut down Trump’s rallies altogether.
“We don’t want to stop him from speaking,” Aaliyah Tate, a black student at Lenoir-Rhyne told me, while holding her “Love Trumps Hate” sign. “We don’t want to stop the rally, we’re just here to show that we’re against him — but we’re doing it peacefully.”
The organized groups in Chicago may have had a different aim.
“Stop Trump,” was the name of the Facebook group under which the Chicago protesters organized. “How black, Latino and Muslim college students organized to stop Trump’s rally in Chicago,” the L.A. Times’ headline on the protests read.
Organizers pressed the University of Illinois at Chicago to cancel Trump, invoking the “safe space” rhetoric by which campus radicals around the country have shut down speakers and views they opposed: “As an undocumented UIC graduate student, I feel unsafe knowing that Trump along with his followers will be at my university.”
Trump cancelled the event — perhaps through some combination of cynicism and cowardice — blaming the protesters, who greeted this news with cheers. “We stopped Trump!” they chanted.
This is what infuriates the Trump supporters. For the same reason Trump’s fans in Hickory all seemed to tolerate and even appreciate the nondisruptive protesters, they loathed the effort to shut down Trump’s Chicago rally: They hold dear the freedom to speak unpopular ideas.
When I ask voters around the country why they support Trump, overwhelmingly the majority begin “because he speaks his mind,” “because he says what other people are afraid to say,” or “because he tells it like it is.”
Of course, Trump often tells it like it isn’t — he constantly spouts falsehoods. And some of the “politically incorrect” stuff he says is foul or racially incendiary. But that doesn’t make it incorrect to say that political correctness can choke off legitimate political debate.
Trump, of course, takes everything a step further. When Trump disrespects women, he waves off criticism of his lack of decency as political correctness. And simply ejecting the disruptors isn’t enough for Trump. Of one disruptor Trump complained, “the guards are very gentle with him … I’d like to punch him in the face.”
At a later rally, a disruptor was escorted from another event, a Trump fan did punch him in the face.
Trump himself is not always the biggest fan of civility and free speech — he wants to broaden libel laws, and he referred to the pro-Democracy demonstrations in China’s Tianenmen Square as “riots.” But for many Americans, fighting for deceny and free speech ironically means fighting for Trump.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
