Prolific commenter Other Bill just sent me a provocative link, with an implied question. The link covered an event this week sponsored by ‘Democracy Now!’ in which legitimately credentialed linguistics expert and professional America-hater Noam Chomsky answered questions from interviewer  Amy Goodman  at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The topic was President Trump’s first hundred days.

Chomsky has been sowing the same anti-U.S. bile since I had hair, and his targets–capitalists, businesses, conservatives, whites, Republicans, the military, anyone who doesn’t reflexively barf at the sound of the Star-Spangled Banner—are on notice what to expect, and have been for decades. Sure enough, Chomsky delivered: his theme this week was that the Republican Party is “dedicated to the destruction of organized human life on Earth.” No, seriously. This is the kind of thing Chomsky fans have feasted on forever.   “Is the Republican organization—I hesitate to call it a party—committed to that? Overwhelmingly. There isn’t even any question about it,” he says at the outset. Later he says the the Republican Party is “the most dangerous organization in human history.” More dangerous than the German Nazis, more dangerous than the Soviet or Chinese Communist Parties, more dangerous than all of the organizations, cults, religions and radical groups that murdered and tortured innocents, engaged in genocide, spread terrorism and launched wars. and

Sure, Noam. Whatever you say.

Now, it is beyond denial that Chomsky’s assertion that The Republican Party is essentially evil is at least as hateful as the worst thing Ann Coulter ever said in her career of making money with outrageous statements. Such a claim could easily provoke one or more of the Left’s unhinged—and increasingly the Left itself appears unhinged—to violence. If we reject the progressive definition of hate speech as  speech that only progressives find discomforting, but adopt a more fair and realistic definition, surely Chomsky’s demagoguery is hate speech, if anything is.

Chomsky is also far more “dangerous” than Coulter. In the course of his decades of giving vent to anti-American, leftist propaganda, he has caused more tangible harm than any number of conservative trolls—Milo, Richard Spencer, Coulter have combined. For one thing, though his academic field has nothing to do with the topics on which he is usually blathering , the fact that he was an MIT professor confers legitimacy on that which has no legitimacy at all. Noam Chomsky is the political equivalent of  Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry who expended his fame and credibility to become a shill for vitamin C. Ann Coulter, in contrast, is a cynical performance artist, a skilled provocateur who courts controversy to sell books—I’m sure she dictates each of them in about a day—- to salivating and uncritical conservatives. Whose speech would I rather attend? Tough one.

So why is it that Ann Coulter can not safely make her silly speech at a allegedly liberal university without taking her life in her hands, but Chomsky, determined to demonize a huge portion of the American public, Congress, and the Presidency, isn’t being shut down by threats, riots, demonstrations by those who, quite reasonable, think he is full of crap?

How ironic! Those Republicans who want to destroy the world somehow choose to respect freedom of expression and speech, and Chomsky’s converts and allies—-the professor is one of those who shares responsibility for the ongoing indoctrination of college students into the “by any means necessary” totalitarian sensibilities for the increasingly radical Left—do not.

Why is this?

Democrats and progressives are ethically obligated to confront that question. I wonder if they are afraid of the answer.