The shouting down of speakers at public meetings, a well established phenomenon at universities, seems to be making a comeback in American political culture generally. Last Friday, I and perhaps 100 others attended a speech given by veteran Senator Orrin Hatch (R‑Utah) before the Washington, D.C. lawyers’ chapter of the Federalist Society at Tony Cheng’s restaurant in Chinatown. Sen. Hatch spoke on current legal controversies, and as he approached his discussion of the current vacancy on the Supreme Court, about eight persons, evidently at a prearranged signal, rose to their feet and began chanting slogans at the top of their lungs. The disrupters went on drowning out the senator for some time, refusing to stop or leave on request. (A news account is here.)
In the age of social media it was unlikely those taking part would remain anonymous, and indeed within hours the group responsible was boasting of having shut down a senior GOP Senator at one of his events. That group, whose staffers talked on Twitter of their role in the episode, turned out to be Generation Progress, a group whose Wikipedia entry notes that respectables such as Pres. Barack Obama, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, the League of Women Voters, and Ambassador Samantha Power have cooperated in its activities. Indeed, Gen Progress is a 501(c)(4) affiliate of the very well established left-leaning Center for American Progress with its 2013 budget of $40 million. Call it a new model think tank.