There are a few consistent themes running through the many letters we have received in response to my columns, but there is one in particular that I would like to address this week, because it reveals exactly what is going on here, and exactly why I write and will continue to write the things I do. It began with Thomas Kegler’s letter, published in our second issue this fall, in which he called my writing on tobacco “factually inaccurate slop.” It continues in this week’s edition, where Patrick Sivak encourages all of you to show me that my “opinions are unpopular, and wrong, and unimportant, and insignificant, and so on and so forth.” (“And so on and so forth” being, in fact, present in the original.)

What is particularly disturbing about the many complaints about my column is that they rarely say anything like, “I disagree with Declan for this or that reason.” When they do, I appreciate it deeply and I take these arguments into careful consideration. But they almost always take the approach of “Declan said something I disagree with, which must mean that his opinions are so far detached from rationality and respectability that they cannot even be entertained.” These responses are characterized by condescension of the worst kind: the absolutely certain conviction that anything outside of one’s own understanding is not interesting but terrifying, not a disagreement to be discussed but a danger to be eliminated. There seems to be an assumption that, if my allies or I do not bow down to the idols of the 21st century — intellectual, moral, cultural, religious, political or otherwise — it is simply because we do not know enough, or we have not read enough of the current wisdom, or we are stuck in another century or we are just too simple to understand.

I recall one of the most distinct examples of this condescension in the fall of 2016, when the Washington Post denounced Yale Professor David Gelernter as “fiercely anti-intellectual” in a headline for a news piece. David Gelernter — a brilliant computer scientist and incisive cultural critic — is many things, but to call him anti-intellectual is absurd. What the Washington Post likely meant is “anti-establishment” or “anti-paradigmatic.” Because Gelernter challenges the supposedly infallible authority of the leftist elites of academia, he is condemned as not just an enemy of the left but an enemy of the intellect. For the progressives who dominate the American education system, what is intellectual is simply what they tell us to believe.

Ironically, this is exactly the subject of Gelernter’s most controversial work. What he calls “imperial academia” has turned thought into a top-down process, in which elites adorned with those alphabetical indicators of unassailable omniscience (Ph.D.) dictate what is right and proper and appropriately “intellectual” to eager masses of students, many of whom accept this imposition all too willingly. This system is conveniently self-sustaining and self-preserving. From the most obedient drones of each generation, the reigning arbiters select the next crop of professors, administrators and sanctioned intellectuals.

There is, of course, still room for academic freedom in this system. One may identify as any of a vast number of different kinds of Marxist. There are a thousand different angles from which an intellectual may attack Christianity, so long as he picks one and stands firmly on it. And if an academic — whether she be a sociologist, gender theorist, economist, political scientist, philosopher or a member of any of a hundred other fields which have all devolved together into a depressingly dull and truly anti-intellectual liberal apologia — really wants to be innovative, she need only pick any of the 26 letters our Phoenician friends so kindly gifted to us and tack it on to the end of that ever growing LGBTQAIAQP*+.

Imagine the response, however, if any member of the grand American academic community actually expressed a real disagreement with the accepted views of the establishment. Imagine an economics professor who sensibly disagrees with the theories of John Maynard Keynes and agrees instead with the thoughts of Hayek, Mises and the rest of the Austrian School; or an English professor who explains to his class quite rationally that Rudyard Kipling’s poetry is actually a cultural and artistic gem to be studied and preserved while Rupi Kaur’s is just a bunch of emotional, incoherent fourth-wave-feminist gibberish; or a professor of medieval history who believes that the central focus of medieval studies is not the discussion of fringe racist groups in the modern day, but rather the study of a fascinatingly complex and deeply misunderstood stage in the development of this great Western civilization of ours. These things do happen — this last example is a real-life controversy surrounding University of Chicago Professor Rachel Fulton Brown’s refusal to turn her field into a fairground for race baiters — but when they do they spark shock and outrage and, perhaps most of all, fear.

This is what is happening here. I am no David Gelernter or Rachel Fulton Brown, but I have committed the same heinous crime: I dare to speak out against the paradigm imposed on us at the expense of the genuine exercise of the individual intellect. Many of my peers have exhibited the conditioned response of rage and called emphatically for me to be silenced. The more courageous among them have written directly to me or to the paper, while numerous others are working as I write to protect themselves from this terrifying menace of free thought through administrative back channels. Not one of these people has actually approached me with a desire to discuss or to understand.

We must recognize the real cause of all this anger. Nobody is really angry because I made a joke about baristas. Nobody is really angry because I suggested that Catholic Tradition has a rightful place at a Catholic school. People are angry and afraid because — maybe for the first time since many of them came here — the conservative students of JCU are willing to speak up and challenge the things we were meant to accept without thought. They are afraid precisely because the rest of us aren’t anymore. It is time now to stand up and show them that we are not hateful, not anti-intellectual or unimportant or insignificant. We are members of a proud and rich intellectual tradition stretching back for millenia, students of Aquinas and Burke and Buckley and countless others whom we look to as guides but never as dictators. We are not bigots simply because we cling to what is good in all that our forefathers have given us. We are every bit as thoughtful and compassionate and every bit as significant. And so on. And so forth.

In the view of our friends on the left, however, we conservatives are not peers to be debated but cavemen to be civilized, and those of us who resist are barbarians to be conquered. But if this is your civilization then I will have none of it, and if this is how you fight then you will find me unconquered at the end of all your efforts. I do not need to be accepted into the fold, but I will not be silenced simply because you have been told to hate me. You can leave me as a voice crying out in the wilderness; I find myself in good company here.