Protected Liberal Lunacy

Ann Coulter just wrote an excellent column about free speech in the Stalinist states that are American universities. A few of her comments really hit me hard. In addition to calling Americans murdered on 9/11 "little Eichmanns," [Ward] Churchill has said: — "The U.S. Army gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians specifically intending to spread the disease." Not only are the diseased-blanket stories cited by Churchill denied by his alleged sources, but the very idea is contradicted by the facts of scientific discovery. The settlers didn't understand the mechanism of how disease was transmitted. Until Louis Pasteur's experiments in the second half of the 19th century, the idea that disease could be caused by living organisms was as scientifically accepted as crystal reading is today. Even after Pasteur, many scientists continued to believe disease was spontaneously generated from within. Churchill is imbuing the settlers with knowledge that in most cases wouldn't be accepted for another hundred years. This comment hit me like a thunderbolt. I have heard the infected blanket story all my life and it never occurred to me that it could be false. But the pure logic of Ann Coulter's remarks makes total sense. I feel like I've been intellectually molested. [Churchill also said] — Indian reservations are the equivalent of Nazi concentration camps. I grew up in the West and have seen my share of Indian reservations. Prior to the casino boom, Indian reservations were models of what happens under pure socialism. On just about every reservation you could see the same conditions that you would see in North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, or Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. These are the conditions under which liberals want all of us to live. The column is a good read.