"Conservatives don't get honorary degrees"

Tony Kushner got one.

He wrote about ethnic cleansing and tried to lie his way into the position that Israel should never have been created.

Someone on the board at CUNY disagreed with giving him an honorary degree. Gosh, Brandeis gave him one in 2006, they're that intelligent, how come CUNY isn't intelligent enough to give him one?

As Prager says, "You can't be too far left."

I was a student at UCLA in the second half of the Seventies. That being the decade after the Sixties, one would think that the acceptability of leftwing thought would have been at its zenith, but no, students incapable of analyzing the intellectual iconoclasm of "question authority" graduated, finished growing up, and became college professors. They settled in nicely to reform the world by passing on their extreme leftism. Their students, the next generation of Americans, graduated around the turn of the century.

I knew this bunch, I was one of them, I lived among them, and despite the desperate measures UCLA took to keep students from meeting, discussing, hashing out, learning from one another, or making friends, I had many many political discussions with many of the roughly forty people who hung around the computer club in the Seventies. Most of them were liberal. I was liberal. We agreed that liberalism was good. We agreed that we were better people because we were liberals. We knew that our opinions were higher and more noble than any other opinions, because they came from around the world as well as from our own liberal roots that we had acquired in high school and even in junior high, though this varied from student to student.

We knew that "share the wealth" was good. We knew that capitalists were greedy bastards who kept other people from sharing in the immense bounties of this country. We knew, too, that this country had within it the resources to make everyone rich if they didn't fight the opportunity. Sure, there were lazy bastards who were just fine with being poor. But these lazy bastards tended to have children, and their children would grow up poor, deprived, malnourished, lacking opportunities, and educated to be like the rest of the Great Unwashed America.

That's right. Everyone else was a great unwashed one. We were the privileged knowledgeable few. That's because we were leftists and leftists always knew better.

This is liberalism. This is the self-aggrandising of all liberal and leftwing opinion. Left is good, conservative is evil. Nazis were right wingers, therefore right wingers are Nazis. Communism was good. Equality of all is what this country was founded on and this is a value we need to enforce today, even if it means legal strictures and the force of law. Inequality means persecution, oppression, and exploitation, all of which are straight from the devil. Therefore conservatives are demons and their ideas are demonic. Repress and suppress them, throw rocks at them, kill them.

My point is, or would have been if I had the energy to finish what I was driving at, that my university was so damned leftist there was no room for dissent or disagreement, and no need for discussion. And that's why today no conservative gets those honorary degrees or speaking engagements on anything like par with the leftist professors, guest authors, opinion wonks, and journalists from any college or university in this country.