As a former graduate and honorarium instructor at CU, and a former leftist, I was not surprised to hear of Professor Ward Churchill’s tirade against the United States and its conduct as the world’s preeminent superpower.
Churchill’s radical worldview has been popular among the professoriate for generations, stubbornly retaining its deceptive allure at our colleges and universities.
Churchill reminds me of my experience as a freshman at CU, when my political science instructor said that adolescents reject Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny as harmless propaganda.
We were then told that other fantasies, equally absurd, but far more insidious, are widely disseminated though rarely contested in mainstream culture-the United States as a bastion of freedom, liberty and justice, for example.
Or the belief in America as a mighty force for good in the world.
Churchill and other critics of American democracy aim to destroy this proud heritage which embodies America’s historical mission statement.
And these countercultural activists delight in “exposing” our traditional patriotic beliefs as social mythologies to every class of incoming freshmen.
I take pride in the fact that America bashers like Churchill are entitled to air their defamatory vitriol under the umbrella of free speech.
But I am ashamed when Churchill’s detractors vandalize his property and threaten his life.
This kind of thoughtless retaliation can only embolden the radical Left, falsely reinforcing their thesis that people who feel marginalized inevitably resort to violence, and may even be justified when doing so.
At present, university investigators are determining whether Churchill has violated the faculty code of conduct and should be dismissed.
Regardless of the outcome, we must take the moral high ground in exposing Churchill and his kind as hypocrites. We must expose them as people who enjoy our freedoms but who would deny those freedoms to others.
Though not well known, Churchill is among the more vocal opponents of Denver’s Columbus Day parade.
He and others have sought to abridge the free speech rights of peaceful parade organizers by branding the Italian-American event as hate speech.
Evidently, those who disagree with Churchill’s distorted view of evil are either intellectually bankrupt and “banal” (Churchill’s description of his critics), or they are practitioners of ethnic intimidation and must be silenced.
If you’re a campus radical, only hate speech from the left is worthy of constitutional protection.
