13 August 2026 - 12:45pm
If you’re under 40, you likely haven’t heard of Ward Churchill, who died this week at 78.
That’s too bad, because the former University of Colorado professor turned Bush-era national figure of scorn was a pioneer — arguably the first viral prototype of the America-hating woke professor, at a time when it just meant something vague that Erykah Badu was singing about. He was also a reliable punching bag for conservative talk radio and Fox News and was cancelled before it was the Left doing the cancelling. Indeed, Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House once described the pre-Bernie Sanders cultural image of an American Leftist as epitomised by Churchill: “this college professor who says humourless drivel like, ‘I wish we had two 9/11s!’”
He was referencing the essay that destroyed Churchill’s career, written the day after the September 11 attacks. In “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens”, he claimed that the 9/11 terrorists weren’t evil but desperate, and that the real villains were George W. Bush, Madeleine Albright, “squatting in her studio chair like Jabba the Hutt”, and US General Norman Schwarzkopf. He further argued that the attacks were blowback for American violence abroad and described the financial workers in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns” — not innocent civilians, but technocrats who kept the “mighty engine of profit” running.
That essay was turned into a book in 2003, but both gathered dust until 2005, when Hamilton College invited him to speak and the works were dug up. What followed will feel familiar to anyone who has watched a professor fed into the culture-war woodchipper over the past decade, except that back then the mob was wearing a US flag pin. Colorado’s Republican governor, Bill Owens, went on Fox News to demand Churchill’s resignation. At the same time, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh turned him into a recurring nightly villain as speaking invitations for the academic began disappearing.
CU Boulder’s initial review reached the correct conclusion that a tenured professor could not simply be fired for saying something unbecoming. The university then opened a research-misconduct investigation and, in 2007, found enough plagiarism, fabrication and falsification to dismiss him anyway. In 2009, a jury found that Churchill’s protected speech had been a substantial factor in his dismissal and awarded him exactly one dollar; a judge then vacated the verdict on quasi-judicial-immunity grounds, taking away any hope of reinstatement.
But even before his firing, Churchill was a model of the scholar-activist who came to dominate the 2010s and early 2020s. He employed the language of colonialism and genocide promiscuously, and presented identity as a source of intellectual authority. He claimed Cherokee and Creek ancestry and described himself as an enrolled member of the United Keetoowah Band. The group later clarified that Churchill only possessed an honorary “associate membership” and was not eligible for tribal enrolment. Reporters examining his genealogy found no documented Native ancestor. Long before Elizabeth Warren was caught up in a scandal over her Native ancestry claims test or Jessica Krug admitted she was not in fact black, Churchill had already run the identity-fabrication playbook that became a stock scandal of the next 20 years of academia.
None of this should obscure that Churchill was often right. America’s military adventures in the Middle East were frequently foolhardy, and 9/11 became a pretext for the disastrous Iraq War, which was built on the “weapons of mass destruction” lie. That remained largely taboo in the Republican mainstream until Donald Trump shouted it from a presidential-debate stage in 2016. The problem was that Churchill had a talent for translating legitimate criticisms into language so inflammatory that it overwhelmed the criticism itself. The irony is that the Right has since decided cancel culture is a Left-wing invention, all Bipoc struggle sessions and HR departments. Churchill is the reminder that free speech restrictions are a bipartisan hobby.
Revisiting On the Justice of Roosting Chickens now, it is hard not to hear Churchill’s argument echoed in some Left-wing commentary after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and during the current Iran war: the same slippage from explaining political violence to romanticising it, and the reflexive anti-Americanism. Perhaps Ward Churchill walked so Hasan Piker could run.
