The Turning Point

Who are the professors who are radicalizing students? Charlie Kirk was helping us all find out — and his conflict with one professor in particular points to the process that killed him.

He seemed like such a nice boy. A good student, loving family. We’ve heard it before.

We have no idea how it came to this.

And no, I’m not talking about the shooter.

I’m talking about the professor who radicalized the people who radicalized him on the Internet or wherever it was the shooter arrived at this juncture. The people celebrating the murder, condoning it, acting like it was both deserved, inevitable, and — a victory!

Not the professor. But a type of professor. One of many professors.

You don’t understand how an assassin — from a “good” family, straight A’s, two parents, middle-class lifestyle, with vacations to St. Thomas — gets to the place where he’s scrawling “Hey fascist! Catch!” on a bullet that was destined to kill one of the brightest young stars in America for debating on campus?

You haven’t been inside a campus lately.

I have.

And here’s what we are seeing. It’s disturbing.

We are, indeed, at a “turning point.” Charlie Kirk realized this, somehow, before so many of us. I don’t know why. Some of us were inside these campuses. Some of us were teaching these classes. Charlie Kirk was putting us on watchlists. The concept terrified me at first. You mean a student could be recording every word I am saying and reporting me?

I look back now and say thank God someone would.

I was lucky enough to get a wake-up call before I caused too much damage. I was teaching a college class on the history of “revolution,” and, as I began talking about one of those revolutions in laudatory terms, I was looking into the eyes of the students in the auditorium seats.

They didn’t want a revolution. They didn’t want war and chaos and devolution. They wanted to build a future for themselves. They had sacrificed a lot, some of them, to get to this point. They didn’t want to be classified and programmed up by income or race or gender or persuasion to be soldiers in someone else’s scheme. They wanted to earn a living. They wanted to produce. They wanted to contribute. And yet I was somehow tasked with “teaching them” a type of history meant to make them “conscious,” that is to be absorbed by the idea that we are living in a dystopia, to the point where they would forget what it is they came to college hoping for.

I am so lucky I failed. They are so lucky I failed. I wasn’t good at making alphabet mafia communists or racialized radicals out of innocent students. I am an optimist and a believer. Plus, the logic just wasn’t there for me. Teaching those courses made me realize how much I hated the destroyers of civilization, the nihilistic joiners, the politically correct “new” morality policers.

I was able to convey the information with about the same level of enthusiasm that my Red State eighth-grade evangelical Christian science teacher taught evolution. The students, I hope, moved on over to STEM classes. I moved on to another career.

Others, who were better at it? They stayed.

One such professor who made it onto Charlie’s “Professor Watch” list did stay. All the way to his own death.

Like the suspect in custody, this professor seemed like a nice guy. Colleagues in remembrances recall kindnesses large and small. A cafe gift card purchase for a hungry grad student. So many clever posts, articles, one-liners, and, yes, books. I can’t say I knew anything about the inner workings of his family but it seemed like a good one to me. Solid scholar of a mother.

But this professor didn’t have a profession; he had a calling. One that, as I experienced it, was pretty much de rigueur at California institutions of higher education: he was a communist. In theory and in practice.

In theory? Dreaming utopia is easy. In practice: That takes action — and this professor never seemed to shy away from the urging-on-of-dystopia that seems communism’s constant companion. He had a particular hatred and grudge, it appeared, against Turning Point USA — as seen in editorials and actions. How dare an outside group have influence over a student population. How dare people not of his “faith” — communism — pierce the bubble?

Who was he?