Wow, does Mark Goldblatt absolutely rip University of Colorodo ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill to shreds in his new NRO column.
Which returns us to Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies, University of Colorado. In one sense, he’s like a thousand other burnt-out refugees from the 1960s who avoided a full-time job long enough to acquire multiple university degrees. Along the way, however, he convinced lots of people that he was a Cherokee Indian  apparently on the basis of an honorary tribal membership  and thus tapped into the vast reservoir of white liberal guilt flowing through the halls of academia. Most critically, he found outlets to publish crypto-Marxist rants and thereby distinguished himself from the vast majority of his invincibly ignorant peers. That publishing record, in turn, allowed him to command not only his tenured professorship, but activist committee posts and lucrative speaking engagements at campuses nationwide.
So who published Ward Churchill?
Well, there’s AK Press. Publisher’s mission statement:
AK Press is a worker run book publisher and distributor organized around anarchist principles. . . . Our goal is to make available radical books and other materials, titles that are published by independent presses, not the corporate giants, titles with which you can make a positive change in the world.
Then there’s South End Press. Publisher’s mission statement:
Since our founding in 1977, we have tried to meet the needs of readers who are exploring, or are already committed to, the politics of radical social change. . . . In this way, we hope to give expression to a wide diversity of democratic social movements and to provide an alternative to the products of corporate publishing.
Finally, there’s City Lights Books. Manuscript submission guidelines:
City Lights Books is a publisher of fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, poetry, and books on social and political issues. We publish a dozen new books a year and are committed to providing the finest works of vanguard literature and oppositional politics.
In other words, Churchill hooked up with like-minded lefties, networked himself into book contracts, parlayed these into academic prestige and political name recognition  and thus a wholly unserious man who says wholly unserious things wound up being taken very seriously. In a more rational world, Churchill would be an amateur conspiracy theorist with a chip on his shoulder, the type who spends an hour on hold with CSPAN to spew 15 seconds of venom before Brian Lamb cuts him off.
I would encourage you to read the whole thing.
