With the approach of the Republican National Convention, we’re starting to learn more about the protesters and their supporters. The thing that strikes us is how disconnected from reality they are. One of the biggest protest groups is United for Peace and Justice, which wants permission to stage a rally on Central Park’s painstakingly restored Great Lawn. Two representatives of the Communist Party USA – Judith LeBlanc and Jessica Marshall – sit on the 35-person steering committee that runs United for Peace and Justice, according to UPJ’s site on the World Wide Web.

The Communist Party USA took orders from the Kremlin and defended the Soviet Union’s murderous record all through the Cold War. Even today, the Web site of Ms. Marshall’s Young Communist League – the youth group of the CP USA – carries such question-and-answer material as,”Q. Is Cuba a dictatorship? A. No.” But the absurdities extend even to more mundane matters. Consider, for example, the memorandum of law that United for Peace and Justice filed in support of the group’s request for a preliminary injunction allowing a rally at Central Park.

In the same paragraph of the memorandum that mentions “lack of shade” as a problem with the alternative rally site suggested by the city, the organizers complain about another problem – too many trees. The memorandum complains of a “treed median in the middle so that only a small percentage of the participants will actually be able to see the event.” What extraordinary trees these are, that manage to block the views of protesters without blocking the rays of the sun. Maybe the trees are Republicans.

Another disconnect comes from the Washington Post, which weighed in yesterday with an editorial. The Post argued that the city should turn the park over to the protesters because “something precious is threatened when demonstrators – even rowdy, obnoxious and possibly misguided demonstrators – are kept at such distance from the objects of their protest.” Yet the route for which the city of New York is prepared to issue a permit for United for Peace and Justice, and to which UPJ previously agreed before changing its mind at the last minute, would take marchers up Seventh Avenue and west on 34th Street.

Those are streets that – though they may be strange territory to those within the sanctum of the Post’s publisher – are exactly adjacent to Madison Square Garden, site of the convention. Central Park’s Great Lawn, by contrast, is more than 45 blocks north of Madison Square Garden. So if it’s “distance from the objects of their protest” that the Washington Post editorialists are worried about, we’d be happy to mail them a map of New York City.

Most disconnected from reality is the conference this weekend at the City University of New York Graduate Center and at Hunter College, two institutions funded by the taxpayers of New York. The conference, our Jacob Gershman reported in yesterday’s Sun, is titled “Life After Capitalism.” Among participants are Lynne Stewart, the New York lawyer on trial for helping Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a convicted terrorist, communicate with a terrorist group. At Stanford University Law School in 2002, Dean Kathleen Sullivan withdrew an invitation to Ms. Stewart. Apparently the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College have lower standards.

This is in a city that has been scarred by terrorist attacks and at a university with a board full of members appointed by leaders such as Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani and Governor Pataki, who should know better. And make no mistake about it – the “Life After Capitalism” conference isn’t about free academic debate or open scholarly inquiry. It is about political indoctrination. The conference’s Web site states: “During the weekend we wish to allow groups who share anti-capitalist and non-sectarian politics the space to describe their work and projects. We ask that these politics be respected when considering tabling.”

In other words, no non-“anti-capitalists” are welcome. As organizer Ora Wise told Mr. Gershman, “In light of the RNC coming to New York, we feel it’s important to not only criticize the Bush administration for its militarism but also to take a deeper look at our entire society and how it’s structured.”

With capitalism catching on now even in Russia and Red China, it seems that the only ones planning for life after capitalism are at New York’s taxpayer-funded universities.

These columns have already discussed the legal principles at stake in the court dispute over Central Park that will be sorted out soon enough. We wish the city good luck in its efforts to protect the park in which so many New Yorkers have invested. Meantime, file “Life After Capitalism” with non-dictatorial Cuba, the shadeless but view-obstructing trees, and the “distance” between Seventh Avenue and Madison Square Garden as more evidence that the protesters and their backers are off in their own altered reality.