Bombthrowing II

You can review the first stage of the saga here. Ryan Davidson -- the racist first-year ND law student I targetted in my last letter to the Observer -- didn't respond directly to me, but, after a week's silence, wrote this spectacular piece of rhetoric. He's responding to this letter, but you really don't need the context -- Davidson accuses his target of having "toxic opinions", making "confused and benighted moral equivocations" and displaying "intractably paranoid anti-Semitism". And then we have this final paragraph:

I would implore the editors of The Observer, the official student publication of an officially and concernedly Catholic institute, to refrain from countenancing such immoral race-baiting in the future. It does nothing but unnecessarily inflame discussion with unrelated issues and has no place in serious academic discourse.

As near as I can tell, he's not talking about his own letter, but the one he's criticizing. I don't hesitate to point out how bizarre this is.

Then I visit Facebook. It turns out that Davidson has a blog, and the man appears to be a living caricature of my theories about conservative political philosophy. In particular, within the last ten days, we have the following:

1. Not one but two posts wherein he expresses approval for the Pope's recent denunciations of Islam.
   
2. A post where he speculates that Hobbes is "really on to something" with his paranoid, pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic version of the state of nature.
   
3. He calls one of the last Crusaders a hero of the "great war" -- on September 11th.
   
4. Granting "terrorists" (by which he means detainees disappeared to secret CIA prisons and recently relocated to Guantanamo) protections under the Geneva Convention means "they win. They get to use any tactics they want, but we're not allowed to use reasonable and proportionate force to stop them."
   

None of which, of course, is anywhere near as disturbing as the simple fact that this sort of paranoid xenophobia -- transcending even simple racism -- is quite mainstream here. New university tagline:

The University of Notre Dame: Bizarro Academia.