A few weeks ago, someone in Saint Cloud posted a fairly scabrously racist poster, defaming the Somali community.

My friend and radio colleague King Banaian, who is not one to cry “racism” prematurely,  says the poster was pretty bad.  And the “somali community” took, at least at first blush, the course every real American should take; by meeting bad speech with more, better speech.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, along with the one Somali speaker, they recruited some SCSU faculty.  And university faculty are (King’s company excepted) rarely people to go to for “real American” responses to anything:

Somalis are upset, and rightly so. When the campus announced that its Somali student organization wanted to hold a speak-out, that seemed a very reasonable thing to do. The best way to deal with hateful acts is by speaking about them. But the news report this morning about this event contains two statements that I found deviated from speaking against the cartoon. And, unfortunately not a surprise, it comes from two faculty. First,

Luke Tripp, a professor of community studies, said the same “conservative white” mind-set led to the election of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater.

So is it that voting for Rep. Bachmann (as a thin plurality did in the past two elections, which were famously awful for Republicans at large) makes you a racist?  Or that being a racist (as Mr. Tripp apparently believes most “conservative whites” are) make you vote for Michele Bachmann? 

Or both?

King:

This is an outrageous accusation. It says that anyone who voted for Rep. Bachmann has the same mind-set as the scribbler, is capable of being the scribbler, and is a reprobate. By what perverted analysis do you determine the moral principles of tens of thousands of area citizens that voted for this woman, many of them twice?

[Need I remind you – there’s your tax dollars at work!]

What inspires a man to take a speak out against hateful speech of his students as an opportunity to engage in the worst stereotyping of political opponents?

How do we count the ways?

Because academia, especially in lefty bullpens like “Community Studies”, promotes both extremism (and its bedfellow, bigotry) and unaccountability?

Because “Professor” Luke Tripp, who lives a comfy, cushy life as an (I’ll assume) tenured professor in a make-work “discipline” that is essentially a left-wing echo chamber, has developed both a deep sense of the bigotry that acc0mpanies marinading ones’ intellect in comfortable agreement for a whole career, and the tendency of too many such academics to say what they want, and hiding behind “academic freedom” to prevent himself from being held accountable?

Mr. Tripp; I invite you to come on the Northern Alliance Radio Network one of these weekends to defend your defamatory claim; I invite my St. Cloud and SCSU area readers to please forward this challenge to “Professor” Tripp (not that I think he has either the intellectual integrity or the balls to take me up on it).