A near-totalitarianism of thought, speech, and ideas continues to rampage through the public square. It must be fought, and it must be defeated. And people need to calm down rather than looking for new reasons to take politically correct offense at ever-growing lists of imaginary sleights that never were rooted in animus, racial or otherwise, in the first place.

On June 25, the U.S. Department of Education threatened to fine the University of California, Los Angeles for threatening disciplinary action against a professor who ran afoul of the perpetually offended race police. The department’s concerns are justified. The alleged sin of the professor, Lt. Col. W. Ajax Peris, was to say the N-word as part of reading aloud the famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. To compound his sin, he also showed a documentary film that included a narrator quoting the same word in explaining the history of lynching.