He was a cigar chomping, jesticulating professor who woke up the world to the left’s PC practice of shutting down discussion by making it taboo. His book The Closing of the American Mind was seminal. It was the first formulation of what has become an axiom: “The Left really doesn’t like free speech”. Why? because in any argument that pretends to logic, they cannot win.

Now Ellis Washington, in his blog has written a remarkable remembrance of Alan Bloom. For conservatives Bloom is inextricably intermixed with his ideas. We understand that a person is not judged by his race or gender, but by the force of his actions, his ideas, and yes, the content of his character. Washington gives the straight dope on Bloom, and though Bloom has been gone twenty years, we still feel his loss.