This is a guest opinion column

It is telling that those who have such a tight grip on Alabama politics are terrified of certain “divisive topics” being discussed in the state’s college classrooms This is because their power is not based on logic or reason but a very sophisticated propaganda that will eventually be found to be nonsense.

I am sure that George Orwell has been blacklisted along with other writers that predicted the rise of a dystopic totalitarian state and predicted the recent attempts of certain legislators at policing the thoughts of college students and professors.

While some are afraid of being linked to the evil slave trade of the past they are totally unaware that they have already proven to be the goons of a future catastrophe that will lead to the end of the republic.

In his essay The Freedom of the Press, Orwell says: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Included in this is the right to speak, think and express one’s self without being questioned by the state police.

The federal courts are clear that college professors while bound to a curriculum are not mere mouthpieces of the state. However, if certain Alabama legislators succeed in their socialist agenda, the state will assume the responsibility of parenting adults in the conversations they have, the books they publish and the research that they conduct. The anti- divisive language bill marks the height of a statist regime. It is not enough to have a super majority in the legislature, the judiciary and the executive office, but to better insure social control, they must oversee discussion, debate and dialogue in the college classrooms, which the courts have called “the market place of ideas.”

While supporters of these bills claim that various topics are divisive and make some students feel uncomfortable, the use of threats, intimidation and fear to stifle objective discussions is as oppressive as anything Stalin could have conceived.

Some erroneously claim that those who teach African American history are socialist, yet they have offered no bill sponsoring the enhancement of the teaching of capitalist principles. The reason is clear; that if capitalist principles were to be taught in our schools, it would become glaringly clear that those so-called conservative legislators who so vehemently claim to be capitalist are not capitalist at all but shrewd appropriators of the state revenue.

While claiming to be Christian, by eliminating bible study, prayer and free speech in schools, they have proven themselves to most apostate, baring the mark of the beast.

Alabama ranks at the bottom of most negative social and economic indicators and in order for there to be free enterprise and good schools in Alabama there must be free thought.

While obscenity and vulgarity should be censured in grade school environments, we feel it is unconstitutional to ban professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoint, the later offering no solutions to existential problems and only replication of the same diminished ends of the past.

Robert White II, with his wife, pastor the Montgomery City of Refuge and the Greenville City of Refuge. He has been a member of the faculty of Alabama State University for more than 20 years and serves as adjunct instructor for other local colleges. He is also part of the HBCU legal focus group created at ASU and other institutions of higher learning to provide support to aspiring law students who attend HBCUs.