Campus Radicals Fail to Disrupt Ann Coulter Speech in Austin
by Brian Bodine

Unsuccessful and belligerent. Those are the two words that can be used to describe an attempt by radical leftists to disrupt a speech by Ann Coulter at the University of Texas in Austin.
Tuesday, May 4, had the conservative pundit speaking to several hundred people in the LBJ Auditorium at the UT Austin school of Public Affairs. The event was put on by the Distinguished Speakers Committee, an organization that is notorious for bringing in a number of liberal speakers at UT Austin, including Michael Moore and Eric Schlosser.
Past Ann Coulter speaking events at American universities have been plagued by a spat of pie throwing incidents. Other conservative speakers have also been targeted by pie throwers. While event organizers were careful to discourage and prevent individuals antagonistic toward Coulter from bringing pies into the event, they failed to prevent radicals in the audience from interrupting her speech and from holding a protest in the rear of the auditorium.
Additionally, the Distinguished Speakers Committee attempts to discourage interruptions during Coulter’s speech went largely unheeded by the protestors. Throughout the event, several individual radicals in the audience stood up to shout at Coulter. A predominantly conservative audience, however, managed to silence a few persistent interrupters by simultaneously condemning them. Some of the more disruptive protestors were ultimately led out by security.
Two particular individuals stood out among their counterparts in making a scene at Tuesday night’s speech. One used his opportunity at the microphone to ask a question and then abruptly proceeded to walk away, show the middle finger, and mimic a flatulence noise. Miss Coulter commented that the arguments of liberals had been reduced to flipping the finger and making farting noises.
Another student by the name of Ajai Raj took advantage of his opportunity at the question microphone to use vulgarity in his question about marriage between a man and a woman. The student asked, “How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but f*@k his wife up the ass?”
Moments later, an apparent incident outside the auditorium led to Raj being arrested. Two dozen leftist protestors at the event stormed outside the auditorium, carrying their signs, and proceeded to berate police officers arresting the individual, demanding that they “let him go.”
At that point, much of the audience erupted in cheers as protestors filed out of the auditorium.
One of the highlights of the evening involved a brief conversation between Kfir Afalia of “Protest Warrior” and Coulter. From one of the question microphones, Kfir identified himself and pointed out mistake in Time Magazine’s recent front page story on Ann Coulter. The mistake was in one of the pictures that Time used from protests during the RNC convention in New York last August. Apparently, Time thought that the signs they had photographed and placed in the issue were from actual left-wing protestors. In reality, the signs were actually puns being held up by members of Protest Warrior. One of the signs had a picture of Ann Coulter with a huge red “X” over her mouth and stated “Communists for Kerry. Ann Coulter: Reactionary Neo-Imperialist Criminal.”
While the shouts and behavior of certain left-wing individuals and groups within the audience marred the event, they failed to silence Coulter and force her leave. In the case of this particular speech at UT Austin, the demands of a largely attentive audience overwhelmed the left-wing radicals who wanted nothing more than to close down the event censor Coulter.

Brian Bodine is Regional Coordinator for the Leadership Institute and a University of Texas Alumnus.