In “Exposing Lies of the American Left,” a 2003 interview with Stephen Good and Rick Kozak, Daniel J. Flynn, executive director of Accuracy in Academia, explained his impetus for helping to form the organization that has become — as readers of this issue know well — a flashpoint for attacks on a wide range of academic leftists. In response to the question from his interviewers “When did you first become aware of how much the left hates America?” (a nod to Flynn’s book Why the Left Hates America), Flynn explained that while he was a student at UMass – Amherst in the 1990s “a series of demands were put forth by student activists” on campus. “They wanted the school to get rid of the Minuteman, a symbol of Revolutionary War patriotism, as the nickname of the sports teams, and they wanted to name the library in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois.”1 Flynn said he objected immediately to the nickname ban of a “racist, sexist white man with a gun” as “ridiculous,” but that “discovering what was back of the Du Bois demand took a little investigation”: “Like most others, I thought Du Bois was some kind of early version of Martin Luther King, a civil-rights hero. I found that he was nothing of the sort. In fact, he disagreed with Martin Luther King on most of the tenets of the civil-rights movement. Du Bois apparently hated America, and he called [Josef] Stalin a great, courageous man. He renounced his U.S. citizenship and moved to Kwame Nkrumah’s Marxist hellhole in Ghana.”
