Take Collegian’s For A Constructive Tomorrow’s most recent packet on Earth Day, which, as I stated in my column, links Earth Day to a sinister communist plot involving Nikita Khrushchev, Lenin, and a US Senator. The fact that Earth day happens to occur on Lenin’s birthday is not a coincidence, CFACT says. Pinko Commies are lurking in your room! On the street – behind that newspaper! IN THE HALLS OF POWER!

This is only too reminiscent of McCarthy-era politics – and after a good chuckle, such absurdity begins to sink in. Until SSFC denied it funding this year, CFACT was a group with a good degree of influence on campus. Certainly their parent organization, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, seems to make a good effort at having a sincere scientific groundwork to its claims on the environment. And although it would probably take a fat piece of sky shattering on the pavement before the “Committee” CFACT changed its mind, at least they are not engaging in red-baiting.

So why is its collegiate arm resorting to a tactic discarded some time before the fall of the Berlin Wall?

The answer lies in the increasing marginalization of the right on campus. While the campus left has always had some ideological influence here – even if it has waned to the point of irrelevance – the right, including the College Republicans and CFACT, has hardly had any since the Herald moved to a moderate position in its politics. Thus the right has been allowed to develop in its own conservative cacoon, widely derided but nonetheless left to its own devices. So when the chair of the College Republicans states in a debate that she “will worry about the economy when [she] loses her job”, it becomes easily apparent that the right needs to be brought into the dialogue, lest they grow even more confused.

That isn’t to say the nutbar commie paranoia should be taken seriously. It shouldn’t. And on the whole, conservatives have rarely proved themselves to be any better than your money or your freedom than liberals (or leftists). But today’s Sara Mikolajczak (or however the fuck you spell it) is tomorrow’s Sarah Palin. In contrast to this, today’s David Lapidus is tomorrow’s Arlen Specter. And certainly, the campus right may prove itself unworthy (yet again) of being taken seriously.

But we should try engaging the moderates in the right – lest a statue of Marx suddenly get erected in Humanities, courtesy of our own home-grown Communist majority. You know, the one CFACT warned us about.