Democrat senators and Eric Zorn get nailed by wokesters.

Pastor Martin Niemöller‘s famous lament described how he didn’t care and kept silent when “they came for” others, but “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

It came to mind with the news about how the woke have turned their fury on two Democratic senators and former Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn.

By now, you should have seen (or maybe not) how wokesters followed Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizon into a public washroom, and video taped the episode while she did her business behind a closed stall door. Or how they harassed her on an airplane. The former is a crime and if the latter isn’t, it should be.

Another Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, got the same dose of malevolence for, like Sinema, wisely and courageous stepping forward to oppose the lunatic multi-trillion-dollar basket of goodies concocted by President Joe Biden and his progressive puppeteers. They kayaked up to his houseboat, as if surrounding him on the water would persuade him to change his mind.

More on point is the treatment the wokesters gave to Zorn. He had been invited to be on a DePaul University panel to discuss “Tough times for local journalism.” But the sponsors were urged, more like instructed, to disinvite Zorn. The demand came in an op-ed in the school’s newspaper headlined: “DePaul prides itself on diversity, but invites controversial guest speaker Eric Zorn.

Now you might think that the demand came from a couple of right-wing nuts, seeing as how Zorn has established himself as one of Chicago’s most thoughtful and credible liberal voices.

Nay. The demand was issued by students Sonal Soni and Nadia Hernandez, because–get this–Zorn allegedly “…wrote an opinion article following the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo that expressed racist views about Latinx youth and great insensitivity towards police brutality.”

Huh? Really?

For sure. The invitation, they whined, was “incredibly out of touch.” Zorn, they said, had offended “an entire community.”

Among Zorn’s parade of horribles:

Prior to his Toledo column, Zorn further showed his racial bias when discussing the cases of Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman in another opinion piece. Rittenhouse killed two peopleduring street protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August 2020. Zimmerman fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. Both Rittenhouse and Zimmerman claimed they were acting out of self-defense. Zimmerman was acquitted at trial in 2013, and, I believe, rightly so,” Zorn wrote in his Chicago Tribune column.

Uh oh, Eric. You stepped in it right there.

To sum up: Zorn decided to withdraw, because, among other things, ” I concluded that my presence here would distract from the agenda and be unfair to my friends on the panel.”

I wouldn’t have withdrawn, but that’s me. Bring it on. I reserve my greater disappoint for the two panel sponsors, DePaul University’s Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence and the DePaul University Society of Professional Journalists. Aside from whatever feeble attempts they may have made to defend Zorn, they should have raised the roof. This was an attack on a journalist colleague and more broadly on freedom of speech and the press.

As for DePaul, it used to be a university, where debate, learning and respect for ideas used to be the coins of the realm. I don’t know what DePaul is now.

The woke demands that Zorn withdraw would be fatuous if they weren’t so libelous. Zorn doesn’t need me to defend him; he’s a talented and honest craftsman, although wrong on most things.

The bullying by a couple of sophomoric kids wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t an isolated incident. But it’s just a symptom of an authoritarian streak that has been brewing for years in liberal circles. I personally felt it in my 30 years of op-ed writing for the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune. My bosses were regularly told, “How can you have someone like Dennis Byrne working for you?” I don’t know just how much of a role they played in my departure.

Current examples abound:

Maddison Farris, the editor-in-chief of the Oklahoma State University student newspaper, was forced to resign after facing criticism for writing a column critical of her university’s mask policy.

Dorian Abbot, a professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, was invited to give the annual Carlson Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A student mob protested and his invitiation was withdrawn. His sin? “Arguing for academic evaluations based on academic merit,” he said.

Examples could fill a book. Actually it already has. Check out Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters, by Charlie Kirk.

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