For the past couple of days, I've been reading about conservatives who are defending fired UC Irvine's law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

There are way more conservatives than I can count. In "Righties defend dismissed lefty law dean Chemerinsky," the LA Times listed some of the more prominent ones. While I can't list them all, Glenn Reynolds has linked a huge number of posts by libertarians and conservatives who all -- without exception -- demand that Chemerinsky be hired back. The most recent are: John Leo, Eugene Volokh, Ilya Somin, and Hugh Hewitt. There's more here, including Ann Althouse's view that the dean should step down, and a link to Victor Davis Hanson.

Plus there's Captain Ed. And at least two more roundups from Glenn Reynolds, including this one which supplies direct or indirect links Gay Patriot, Walter Olson, Professor Bainbridge, and many others.

My point is not for this post to be a linkfest (unfortunately, I lack the patience to do those things), and again, this is in no way comprehensive. I'm simply trying to figure out something. When Chemerinsky was fired, the original LA Times piece quoted the dean as telling Chemerinsky that "he did not realize the extent to which there were 'conservatives out to get me.'"

Try as I might, I can't find the conservatives who were out to get him. Can anyone name one? Unless my logic is wrong, it seems to me that either there were conservatives who were out to get him, or there were not. If there were, then who were they? I'd like to know, as it sounds awfully peculiar.

And if there weren't, then why would the dean be saying that? Was he hoping to float a lie on what he perceived was some sort of narrative? Where might he have gotten that idea?

Considering the sort of paranoia discussed here, I wonder:

With such vast disparities between the threat professors envision and the actual security they enjoy, one would think that more people would recognize the problem of ideological bias on campus. But they don't, and the reason lies in a campus advent that has nothing to do with psychology. Instead, it's a sweeping sleight-of-hand that liberal professors have executed in their discipline. We see it operating in this very essay in Academe, and in the sentences I just quoted. Did you spot it? Professor Kilmer worries that a student who "is resistant to feminist theories and ideas" may sit in her class as a "plant," someone to incriminate her and send her upstairs for punishment. That's how she interprets uncongenial students, and it's an astounding conversion. In her class, any student who contests feminist notions falls under a cloud of suspicion. The ordinary run of skeptics, obstructionists, gadflies, wiseacres, and sulkers that show up in almost every undergraduate classroom is recast as an ideological cadre. If a student in a marketing class were to dispute the morality of the whole endeavor, no doubt liberal professors would salute him as a noble dissenter. But when he criticizes feminism, he violates a trust. He doesn't just pose intellectual disagreement. He transgresses classroom protocol.

If there's a meme being constantly repeated that conservatives are "out to get" all liberals in academia, I can easily see how this might incline a dean to simply fabricate a claim that conservatives were after Chemerinsky, without so much as a brief check.

I mean, why bother? To follow out this sloppy thinking further, even if we suppose there weren't any conservatives out to get him, isn't it obvious that there might as well have been?

MORE: According to an LA Times post that Glenn Reynolds links, no one has found the mysterious "right-wing bogeymen" relied on by the dean.

(I think if there were any, they'd have turned up by now, although I suppose someone could run a "MISSING RIGHT WING BOGEYMAN" ad on a milk carton.)