BY AARON BARLOW

At one point in North by Northwest, Leo G. Carroll’s character The Professor says “It’s so horribly sad. Why is it I feel like laughing?” Of course, he isn’t really a professor but is an intelligence agent. But this professor had exactly that reaction this morning on reading in The Guardian about Donald Trump, Jr.’s attempted book talk at UCLA on Sunday.

Apparently, the session, like so many right-wing events on campuses these days, was something of a set-up, with the expectation of exploiting leftist attempts at disruption.

It didn’t work out that way. According to The Guardian, Trump was:

hoping to prove what he had just argued in his book – that a hate-filled American left was hell-bent on silencing him and anyone else who supported the Trump presidency.

But the appearance backfired when his own supporters, diehard Make America Great Again conservatives, raised their voices most loudly in protest and ended up drowning him out barely 20 minutes into an event scheduled to last two hours.

The Washington Post chimed in: “it wasn’t leftists who cut the event short. Instead, the rebukes came from a crowd of young people who rank among the most ardent and extreme supporters of President Trump.”

The event was sponsored by the David Horowitz-inspired Turning Point USA, the group responsible for the website Professor Watchlist. The organization created itself upon the myth that university campuses are hotbeds of liberal propaganda and indoctrination, and it attempts to prove this by cherry-picking professors and events as representatives of the whole. It also likes to provoke reaction from the left, as was the intent at UCLA, where Trump, Jr., whose new book picks up on TPUSA themes, was expected to provoke outrage.

Which he did. Just not from the right people.

The right-wing strategy of sowing confusion among the left by marching straight at it has been around for years. When I lived in Chicago in the late 1970s, a group of Nazis decided to parade in suburban Skokie, the home at that time of thousands of Holocaust survivors. Such actions are guaranteed to bring media attention, the oxygen for all groups involved.

That this stunt at UCLA backfired certainly is funny—if you are on the left and have been growing frustrated by right-wing campus antics—but it also is deadly serious. It shows how sidetracked our discussions of Freedom of Speech have become, how far we are removed from the real issue of rights in the public sphere. This deliberate strategy has had a great deal of success.

The UCLA event was truncated by protests by one of TPUSA’s rival right-wing groups, America First. For whatever reason, a scheduled Q&A session after the main even was cancelled, the cancellation announced at the start of the event. America First seized upon this and started trying to shout down Trump, Jr. who, thinking the voices were from leftist opponents, ad libbed, “And that is the problem. And the reason oftentimes it doesn’t make sense to do the Q&A is not because we’re not willing to talk about the questions, cause we do. No. It’s because people hijack it with nonsense looking to go for some sort of sound bite. You have people spreading nonsense, spreading hate, trying to take over the room.”

True, though he wouldn’t have said this had he been aware that the protesters were rabid supporters of his father angry not at him but at TPUSA.

Events like this one are never designed for real discussion or even for debate. They certainly have little to do with learning or with any academic pursuits—not even when occurring on campus. These are political tricks taking advantage of Free Speech purity in order to provoke and gain attention. Trump, Jr. thought he had gotten what he wanted (maybe he had) so was able to walk away after twenty minutes secure in the knowledge that major media would make a story out of it.

What should be obvious is that what happened at UCLA on Sunday has nothing to do with Freedom of Speech. It has to do with theater and political manipulation. It was an attempt to mock opponents from a perceived position of strength, driving the others into a frenzy. The problem here was that those made crazy were not the intended.

The lesson from this incident is that we on the left need to step away from our defenses of such events on Free Speech grounds, for speech and ideas have nothing to do with them but are red herrings created by the right. We need to name these events for what they are, ‘reality’ TV roadshows. We need to laugh and take our serious concerns elsewhere.

Carefully.

We cannot ignore this sort of nonsense for, as The Professor says, it is serious. However,  when we react to such provocations as planned by their creators, we end up helping bring Free Speech (among other things) crashing down about our mouths and ears.

We may not be able to shut these people up, but we can let them make fools of themselves—as Trump, Jr. did at UCLA. Let’s concentrate on allowing that to happen.