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Tricia Willoughby is a 14-year-old homeschooled student from Madison who is now something of a minor Tea Party celebrity after speaking this weekend at a rally in Madison, the same event that drew Sarah Palin and a gathering of anti-Tea Party protestors.

Tricia Willoughby and the heckler

Among them was a man – as of yet unidentified – who heckled Willoughby during her seven-minute address, yelling “Go home you little brat!” and “Get a driver’s license before you tell me what to do!” and also “Pay a bill before you lecture me, you little f—king brat!” The man occasionally flipped her “the bird” while saying, “Right here!”

Willoughby, whose two older sisters have spoken at other Tea Party events, said of the national debt: “At my current age of 14, I am not yet able to vote and decide how my future paychecks will be spent. So please, protect your children and my future children and their future children from having to pay off this titanic debt. We must join together to make sure the danger of this astronomical burden does not swallow us.”

Willoughby said later she couldn’t hear the heckler during her speech and, upon watching a video of him posted on YouTube, was more humored than offended.

In an interview with St. Louis conservative talk show host Dana Loesch, Willoughby said, “Definitely it was a bullying attempt. The unionistas, their actions did not surprise me whatsoever … He was just an immature, grown man who was yelling profanities at whoever was up there.”

In an interview on ABC News, the Madison teen noted, “When that particular man was screaming obscenities at me, he wasn’t criticizing my logic, he wasn’t criticizing what I was saying, he was just saying I was a little brat and I should go home because I was simply a member of the opposing side up at the podium.”

Wall Street Journal writer and editor James Taranto titled a recent blog post on Willoughby’s travails “A Star is Born.” In sharp contrast, Taranto dubbed the heckler “The Pudgester.”

Willoughby says a career in politics, however, isn’t in her future; she wants to become a nurse, although, she told ABC News, “I will always be active in politics.”

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