David Horowitz is the leading opponent of slavery reparations. He could not have any debate on American campuses about it, so he decided to put paid ads in campus newspapers. Most student papers banned those, too.

The few campus papers that took Horowitz' ad faced major campus uprisings. At the University of California, the Daily Californian ran a front-page editorial apologizing for having allowed the anti-reparations ad.

At the University of Wisconsin, 100 students confronted the student editor demanding her resignation.

On other campuses, gangs of students openly took the papers from distribution racks and trashed them.

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in New York, said that Mr. Horowitz was clearly on a campaign of provocation but that colleges were easy prey. Contrary to their image as arenas of intellectual debate, Mr. Botstein said, colleges tolerate dissent poorly.

Botstein said this was particularly true of race, which he called "the central question of life in America."

David Horowitz, like all accepted spokesmen for the right against today's racial excesses, is a neoconservative. This means that he backed the leftist approach to race issues all the way until recently. According to him and his fellow "neos," everything was fine with liberal policy until, suddenly and inexplicably, it went to extremes just recently.

Horowitz was a good leftist until he sent a friend of his to work for the Black Panther Party. She was murdered there, he said, "for asking too many questions." He said the Panthers were a front for criminal and drug activities

It took that kind of shock for him to see what had happened. Until now, according to neoconservatives, the race issue was being handled just fine. Respectable conservatives not only agree, but do not allow anybody but a "neo" to represent the right on racial issues.

But if you take the line that "neos" and respectable conservatives take, the anti-Horowitz protesters are perfectly correct. Horowitz argued, for example, that American blacks don't deserve reparations because the slaves' descendants today earn fifty times as much money per capita as blacks whose ancestors were not slaves.

That's true, but according to the rules agreed to by neos and respectables, you are not allowed to talk about race just because what you say is true. No one is allowed to point to white achievements, and every conservative publication agrees to this. A British court sent a man to prison under the Hate Laws with the flat statement, "The truth is no excuse."

White people are only to be mentioned when something they did was bad. If it's good, "humankind" did it. All through the civil rights battle, liberals made it clear that if you are free to discuss what each race actually did, that leads you straight into white supremacy.

You could not have gotten integration, much less the total suppression of all dissent on campuses, if racial heresy were allowed.

Needless to say, the Thought Police are now in charge of any discussion of genetics on campus.

The Human Genome Project is based on the ground-breaking research of three scientists. To prove his political orthodoxy, one of them donated all his prize money for the project to the Black Panthers.

Anyone who wants to do genetic research must first make his declaration of ideological orthodoxy up front. The Human Genome Project declared that race does not exist. Otherwise, it would not exist.

Books like "The Bell Curve" demonstrate the impossibility of liberal -- and now conservative -- orthodoxy on race. So does real history. But truth has nothing to do with what is now allowed on campus, and no one will enforce racial orthodoxy any more fanatically than respectable conservatives.

So every conservative discussion begins with, "I'm not talking about race" and continues somewhere in the middle with a declaration of personal orthodoxy on race. They end with a tribute to the liberal days of the "neocons" and a salute to Saint Martin Luther the King and all he stood for.

The neocons are right when they say that no free society can allow this kind of ideological Goodthink to be enforced and obeyed. But that orthodoxy was necessary for their own earlier liberal policies (which, like all liberal policies, don't WORK) to be enforced.

Contrary to respectable and "neo" orthodoxy, this problem did not suddenly appear yesterday. Liberal policies, even the holy racial policies, don't WORK. So the only way they can be enforced is by suppressing serious opposition as naziswhowantokillsixmillionjews and so forth.

Mr. Botstein, president of Bard College in New York, said there was another common misperception:

"Anybody who tells you once upon a time you could say anything you want on campus is romanticizing the past," he said. "Once upon a time you were labeled a communist."

Many today say you cannot discuss racial questions freely today because different races are on the campus. In other words, a multiracial society cannot be a free society (though no one is allowed to put it that way).

But the previous orthodoxy had the same excuse. Back when Communism and socialism were deadly epithets, a very small percentage of the people went to college. Students were from relatively well-to-do families, or were working to become rich.

Back then, anyone who discussed anything relating to income distribution was directly insulting those who paid the bills and the families of most students. It seemed impossible that such topics could ever be broached on a college campus.

So what happened to that orthodoxy?

What happened was that mainstream liberals finally had the guts to say that there could be no freedom of speech until even Communists were allowed to share in it.

There was a time when liberals hid under the table every time income redistribution was mentioned. They, like respectable conservatives today, asked only that if the ruling establishment was lynching heretics, they be allowed to lead the mob and prove their orthodoxy.

Only when liberals stood up and demanded free speech for extreme leftists did the old orthodoxy end.

As long as everything conservatives say reads like the argument I outlined above, as long as neoconservatism remains the only position anyone is allowed to take on the right, you can forget freedom of speech.

And if you can forget freedom of speech, you can soon forget all freedom.

If no discussion is allowed unless it "is not about race," then liberals know what to do. They inject race into every discussion, one way or another, and then bring in a black spokesman to shriek for them and scare off the conservatives.

And they are perfectly right to do so. Race is central to modern America. No great issues can be dealt with without race entering somehow into it. Leftists are going to use that hammer as long as the so-called opposition keeps hiding under the table.