[A. Pole]

The part that confuses me is who was going to kill Strauss if he didn't talk in code?

He would be denied tenure and black-listed by the publishers in the name of political correctness? This would be a form of death for a political thinker.

[William McKinley]

That does not follow. The people doing the blacklisting would supposedly be the same people, the 'elites', to whom he would have been talking in code.