Most public conservatives are familiar with the sort of censorship the GWU students tried to advance. Students at Elon University in North Carolina once tried to boycott me and petitioned the university to cancel my speech, citing a humorous but serious book I wrote about saving the males. The university president denied the petition, hired an armed guard to follow me around and, get this, asked me not to give the talk I was planning to give — on free speech. I’m happy to wing a speech, which I did, but I shouldn’t have backed down. They needed to hear that lecture.

I wish Thomas hadn’t backed down either. I’m just a columnist, but Thomas is a Supreme Court justice and the only Black conservative justice in U.S. history. His recusal from teaching is a loss for the university and for the students whose self-anointed betters have effectively denied those who wanted a chance to hear Thomas — and perhaps to challenge him. The self-righteousness of the close-minded is nothing short of bigotry.

Conservatism has acquired a bad rep in recent years, thanks to you-know-who and his minions — including, alas, Thomas’s betrothed.

But true conservatives eschew ideology and welcome all ideas in the secure knowledge that they will prevail through logic, reason and an unromantic view of human nature. Until they win the war against the ideologues in their own midst, America has much more to fear from the tyranny of the mob than it does from a Supreme Court justice talking about the U.S. Constitution to, hello, law students.