My parents, who were Communists, always pretended to be American patriots. You can always convince yourself you are: 'I love America, I just want it to be perfect, which it will be when it becomes a Soviet Communist state'. When the left called for 'liberation' what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again. Like everybody else, I see things that need to be improved. I just am mindful of the fact that they can be made a lot worse.

I have also been attacked by my opponents as someone seeking to purge university faculties of leftist professors. This is false. The first provision of the Academic Bill of Rights is that no professor should be hired or fired because of his or her political views. I have never myself called for the firing of any professor for his or her political views, nor would I.

For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social conditions - poverty, racism and oppression - for which the Western democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame.

My parents, who were Communists, always pretended to be American patriots. You can always convince yourself you are: 'I love America, I just want it to be perfect, which it will be when it becomes a Soviet Communist state'. When the left called for 'liberation' what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again. Like everybody else, I see things that need to be improved. I just am mindful of the fact that they can be made a lot worse.

If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.

A university is not a political party, and an education is not an indoctrination.

According to a Pew poll, 49% of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism. What is socialism? it is a system that leads to mass misery, mass impoverishment, and human slaughter. That's what it means. Yet almost half of the young think it's benign.