Political correctness demystified the Left. I saw amongst the radical students a herd mentality more rigid and unthinking than I’d ever seen in an entire life growing up in a fundamentalist church (yes, fundamentalist — our little sect believed only its members merited eternal life). The herd conventional wisdom hardened virtually overnight, debate was minimal to nonexistent, and condescension and anger substituted for reason and thought. Activists raged at Christians for being intolerant, yet they exhibited less tolerance and open-mindedness than any angry pastor or minister I’d ever heard — and I’d listened to lots of anger from the pulpit. I often met liberals who’d literally never heard a coherent conservative argument and never met a conservative Evangelical.

In the late summer of 1991, I think I might have been the most insecure person alive. I was driving a Ryder van from Georgetown, Ky., (my hometown), to Cambridge, Mass., to start my first year at Harvard Law School.

I was pretty sure the admissions committee had made a mistake, or — at the very least — I’d just squeaked in on some kind of redneck affirmative-action plan. I’d done well in school, but I was hardly an imposing academic specimen, graduating from a public high school in rural Kentucky and then a small Christian college largely unknown (at the time, at least) outside the Southeast. I spoke no foreign languages. Aside from a short-term mission trip to Honduras, I’d spent virtually no time outside the United States. I hadn’t started any nonprofits, had done nothing much to “change the world,” and my athletic accomplishments were limited to a mediocre intramural sports career. In short, I felt like I was a pretty ordinary person going to an extraordinary place, shortly to be surrounded by extraordinary people.

To prepare for what I thought would be the intellectual challenge of a lifetime, I devoured book after book in the summer before law school — books on Christian apologetics (I figured I’d have lots of conversations about my faith), books about the law-school experience itself, and books on the history and development of the law. Without the Internet, my research about the Ivy League experience was limited. If a story wasn’t in the Lexington Herald-Leader or in my weekly Newsweek, chances are I didn’t know about it. So, truth be told, when I presumed I was facing a primarily intellectual challenge, I had no idea what I was walking into.

In the academy, the early Nineties represented the first peak of political correctness, with routine shout-downs, speaker disruptions, and the growth of an unapologetic speech-code movement. But I wasn’t aware. Today, we take for granted how quickly we can research any new environment, prepping ourselves at least for a version of reality. Not long ago, if we happened to miss a news article or a news broadcast, we just missed it. And I had missed 99 percent of the reporting on the world of PC.

My first few days of law school, I focused on making friends, and I found out that virtually everyone was intimidated by the prospect of the Socratic method. I was surrounded by the most leftist people I’d ever encountered, but it was all civil. For a short time, politics took a back seat to academics. We were all scared together.

Then I opened my big mouth.

A few weeks into my first year, I drafted a letter on behalf of a small number of pro-life law students. We notified the student body that even though Harvard health fees covered elective abortions, students with conscientious objections to funding abortion could request a partial refund of their fees. It wasn’t much money, but the principle was important. So we drafted a short letter and stuffed it into every student’s mailbox (The campus mailbox was a forum for student engagement, featuring near-daily activist messages). I had asked respondents to fill out a form and drop it into my mailbox, so the next day I checked my mail and was pleasantly surprised to see it stuffed with forms. Still naïve, I thought, “I just tapped into the latent pro-life movement at Harvard Law School.”

How foolish. The first form I looked at simply said, “Go die, you fascist.” The next said something like, “Go die, you f***ing fascist.” Multiple messages were variations on the same theme: A death aspiration (not a true threat — they wanted me to die but weren’t willing to do the deed), profanity, an accusation of fascism, or some combination of all three. There were a few genuine responses — from pro-life students — but the hate dominated.

From that point forward — in class after class — I had a simple choice: be silent or face the strong probability of insults, shout-downs, cat-calls, and other lame efforts at intimidation. In extreme instances, conservative students had their faces pasted on gay porn and posted in the halls. Other students endured activists calling future employers and demanding their termination. While I didn’t face the full wrath of campus activists, I endured more than my share of intensely personal backlash. The shout-downs were routine, so were the insults.

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