I can’t say that I felt sorry for the loser. Contrary to what he told me about Central Pennsylvanian Indians gently handcrafting pottery, I’ve since learned the Susquehannock wiped out most other Indians in their path. Apparently these Native Americans had never taken the Peace Studies course the professor with the swastika offered. These looting warriors may have shared with the Nazis more than a predilection for an ancient symbol.

Then there was the pious atheist—a philosophy professor at another institution who was always ranting against religious simpletons. This guy couldn’t get over the idea that some people still believed in a divine being; they seemed to furnish proof that critical inquiry had not yet bested ignorance and superstition. Everyone who accepted God’s existence was “just a jerk” and certainly not as bright as this academic imagined himself to be. The most outrageous expression of primitivism, he explained to me, is that “some intellectuals assume intelligent design in nature,” a belief the very mention of which caused him to spit out F words. He was sure that one could work out all the steps whereby—given enough hypothetical time—life forms came along chemically without the aid of some mythical organizing intelligence. Although I considered his explanation to be hardly conclusive, he was entitled to his beliefs. It was his ranting against theists that I found tiresome, particularly since he peppered his tirades with childish obscenities.

Even when leftist orthodoxy flew in the face of the “science” he claimed to worship, he held tightly to his appalling PC fixation. Although he knew that genetic differences existed, he never dared apply them to human beings in ways that might hurt his career or his relation to his social think-alikes. He assured me there were no socially significant differences between genders or races. In fact, such differences were mere fictions that an unjust governing class created to divide us. Only bigoted or ignorant people would argue differently—perhaps ignoramuses such as Darwin, who wrote about things that our professor refused to consider, such as the significance of subspecies and sexual dimorphism.

Although a hater of Christian sentimentality, he would melt into sappy tenderness at the very mention of a designated victim group. We could never do enough for women, blacks, gays, Latinos, Aleuts, etc., in light of the Christian prejudice that had blighted their lives. Once I got so pissed off listening to him, I said that Nietzsche must have been thinking about someone like him when he spoke about “slave morality.” Despite his screaming about Christian sentimentalists, this fellow was always going on and on about the “marginalized.” Although a self-proclaimed free thinker, he was the incarnation of what Nietzsche rightly or wrongly despised as Christian silliness. In response to my scolding, he announced: “Well, shit, we have to do something for these people.” But it is hard to think of anything he did for his beloved minorities (like adopting an inner-city black) except for voting at faculty assemblies for “diversity training.” And he did this after he propagated a totally unfounded rumor of outbursts occurring on his campus against Muslims and Hindus. What did someone once say (I can’t remember who) about those denying the deity’s existence believing in just about anything? In my experience, with rare exceptions (such as John Derbyshire), it is not “just about anything” these people believe. They are almost always hooked specifically on PC stupidities.