Coulter was heckled by the left throughout her speech, but in a way that she found peculiar. "It was not arguments they were reacting to -- I could have been talking to a stone wall, so closed or empty were these young minds. It was isolated words that set them off." This reflected the reality, which was not a confrontation of views, but an encounter between a witch-hunting mentality and its intended target. The left is faced with a serious problem when it actually goes into these battles, because its radical paradigm requires a fight with "white supremacists," the updated version of Marx's "ruling class." Hence the fliers with references to Hitler and Duke. But once leftists arrive at the scene of their battles, these days, it is quickly apparent that there are no white supremacists around -- certainly not Bush conservatives like Ann Coulter.

So it becomes necessary to invent them or, even better, to discover them, hiding behind the masks of Bush-era tolerance and compassion. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., veteran witch hunter, once remarked that now Republicans supported tax cuts instead of poll taxes and wore suits instead of sheets -- conveniently forgetting that it was his own party that was the political home of slavers and Klansmen. The same mentality prompts leftists to complain about "subtle forms of racism" and "institutional racism" when there are no obvious bigots to point to. It is what causes them to think it nothing to smear a John Ashcroft, whose public persona is transparently decent and beyond reproach. Even if you can't see the witch, the witch is there, because the world is still a battlefield between Satan and the saints -- or, in left-wing parlance, the oppressors and the oppressed. Depend on it: Behind the mask of tolerance and reason there is always the racist within. If only we had a dunking stool to unmask her. Or perhaps a single word will cause her to betray herself.

That's exactly what happened to Ann Coulter. One anti-Coulter outburst, for example, was triggered in the middle of a sentence in which she pointed out that European slave traders bought Africans who were already enslaved: "It wasn't as if the traders ran into the jungle and kidnapped their victims." It was the word "jungle" that triggered an audience uproar. Jungle? Somewhere deep in the left-wing psyche the word (as in what? "jungle bunny"?) tripped an ideological wire. Aha! We knew, behind the smile, you were a racist all the time.

Coulter managed to make it to the question period, but only just. During the discussion, the podium and stage were pelted with oranges while one champion of the people after another got up to talk about racist oppression they knew about personally. Victimhood is perhaps the only thing these students have actually been taught in college. From orientation on they are told: You are oppressed; you are a victim. This is their romance and their power. It is not something they are about to give up. This is the conservative challenge, since what makes them conservatives is the denial of the Marxist view of the world as divided into oppressor and oppressed. But victimhood has become the identity of these minority students and their leftist mentors; to deny it is to deny their existence.

After a while, one man in the audience stood up and after ranting about his "slave ancestors," lunged at the platform where Coulter stood. The police managed to grab him just before he reached her, and took him away. The Cornell administration was lucky -- the lunatic was white (his slave relatives were allegedly Scots). Finally, an older black man got up and began a rant he refused to end. The campus police are not about to arrest older black men and risk being photographed, and then subsequently denounced as a "racist Gestapo" (a practice common among campus radicals). So Coulter left.

In the 1930s, a popular parlor game was to ask whether fascism could come to America, a fascination reflected in the title of Sinclair Lewis' bestselling novel "It Can't Happen Here." The populist demagogue Huey Long, who was himself a product of the '30s zeitgeist, disagreed. Fascism could come to America, he said, but it would come calling itself democracy. With the acquiescence of the Neville Chamberlains who administer American college campuses, this kind of fascism -- calling itself multiculturalism and "identity politics" -- is already here.

This story has been corrected.

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