They are the Duke 88. Or Nifong 88.
They are the leftists, feminists and fascists — professors all — who signed an ad in the student newspaper in April 2006 that condemned the culture of racism and sexism on the campus.
They also bemoaned “what happened to this young woman” in the politically motivated lacrosse case.
They have been conspicuously silent since the facts started to overtake the fabrications of sleazebag district attorney Mike Nifong.
Nifong has been disbarred now, and the university has reached an undisclosed financial settlement with the three former lacrosse players wrongly accused of raping a stripper.
But the Nifong 88 apparently remain convinced of their righteousness, of their higher truth, although they are as prejudiced as racists and sexists. They just have different targets.
The Nifong 88 have not tried to make amends with the three ex-players and their families.
Their thought process has been shown to be egregious. Yet they cling to their upside-down ideology, which goes something like this: Even if these three players are innocent, you certainly know that wealthy white men and their sons have been perpetrating all kinds of horrors against black strippers since the dawn of time.
That is their higher truth. Their ideology transcends the facts of any particular incident. Theirs is a greater good.
Throw the suckers in prison, innocent or not, because someone must pay for the inequities of life, the injustices of the past.
Duke likes to think it is an elite university. And the school rankings that come out each fall inevitably rank Duke as one of the nation’s top universities. But the rankings are not steeped in hard science. They are a little of this and that, and it is hard to imagine the ideology of a faculty not being considered by those of similar political bent doing the rankings.
Here is the fundamental problem with the rankings: At Duke, you have 88 nut jobs, a number of them in the history department, looking to influence the still-developing minds of the young.
How does one compute the Nifong 88 into the rankings?
Do you want your teen to be influenced by a Nifongphile? Maybe you do. Maybe you are one of those burned-out types who finally joined the system, did all right for yourself, and now your idea of protesting the system today is to wear a Che Guevara T-shirt.
He was such a romantic, dashing figure. No, actually, he was just a garden-variety thug. But no matter. You think you want a revolution, but you can’t handle a revolution.
Most of you don’t even own a gun, you dummies, you. You would be one of the first ones lined up against a wall in a revolution.
I used to pass a couple of revolution-spouting ninnies in Tony Cheng’s neighborhood. They wore the uniform of the modern-day revolutionary: jeans with holes in them, a T-shirt bearing a slogan, lots of gel in the hair and the requisite tattoos and pierced body parts.
Only they were not handing out firearms. They were handing out fliers. Yes, fliers. I guess they expected their fellow travelers to tear up the fliers into scraps, wad the scraps up in their mouths and then attack the enemy with spit balls.
And here I thought revolutions were won with the spilling of blood.
A revolution? Oh, please. Go have a nice lunch at TGIF and enjoy the rest of the day.
I would not want my child to attend Nifong U, if only for practical reasons.
If you want your child to have exposure to the far-out, save yourself the money by taking them to Lafayette Park across from the White House.
Many of the wide-eyed souls there lack the useless paper degrees of the Nifong 88, but they are mining the same material.
And they speak with the same self-righteous, all-knowing clarity of the Nifong 88.
And their lectures do not cost you a penny.
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