To Victor Davis Hanson, Ward Churchill is a sort of shadow creature, all smoke and no substance, the archetypal academic con man: Does Ward Churchill even exist?

Instead of seeing Churchill as no man, it is better to envision him as an academic everyman. In the alternate universe of the modern campus, any collective imbalance of wealth, education, health, happiness, or almost anything is explicable only in terms of deliberate present discrimination and systematic past oppression.

Any other exegesis — cultural attitudes, individual preferences, bad personal choices and behaviors, time off for child-rearing, bad luck — is irrelevant. Indeed, to raise them is prima facie evidence of one’s own discrimination, intolerance, and racism, and can lead to the academic guillotine. Ask Harvard president Larry Summers.

Instead, equality of result is to be mandated by a government that in turn is to be instructed on how to do so by the university. Its cadres of subsidized social scientists and humanists provide both the rigged diagnosis and the lucrative therapy. Thus, to succeed on campus without a degree or talent or much of anything, it is absolutely critical to be an ideologue of the first order.

Churchill’s rantings are full of leftist hyperbole, vicious Nazi allusions, and calls for violence against the United States (“more 9/11s are necessary”) and an end to America itself (“There’s no U.S. in America anymore”). Should Churchill have been such a vicious court jester of the Right and slurred gays and minorities as he did the victims of mass murder, he would have been fired long ago.

Rule 1: Profess to be as far left as possible, understanding that extremism in the service of utopian virtue is no vice.

Most academics are retiring sorts. They enjoy the tranquility of the campus and its isolation from the conundrum of society at large. But like peaceful sheep grazing in green pastures, they are easy prey for rapacious wolves. Professors are especially vulnerable to a bully and showman like Churchill, whose record of both oral and written intimidation leaves most disturbed, frightened, or at least convinced to steer clear of this loose loud popgun when he goes off.

Note then his evocation of past bomb-making, his photo-ops in fatigues with obligatory machine gun, and his occasional brushes with the law.

Read it all.