Don’t Encourage Him
Posted by Paul Musgrave on 11 April 2005 | 6 responses
Some people on other sites are inclined to give David Horowitz the benefit of the doubt. Don’t.
6 Responses to “Don’t Encourage Him”
Amen, brother.
FPM was definitely in the wrong for not printing a complete interview transcript. It’s not like they haven’t done lengthy pieces before. But that doesn’t mean that Berube isn’t a barking moonbat:
I think we’re finally getting to the real reason David hates professors so much. It has nothing to do with our salaries or our working hours: he hates our freedom. Horowitz knows perfectly well that I can criticize the Cockburns and Churchills to my left and the Beinarts and Elshtains to my right any old time I choose, and that at the end of the day I’ll still have a job whereas he has to answer to all his many masters, fetching and rolling over whenever they blow that special wingnut whistle that only far-right lackeys can hear.
To whom does Berube think Horowitz is beholden? Isn’t Horowitz the top boss at FPM?
Academics never have to face pressure for controversial statements. Ask Lawrence Summers.
An academic bill of rights sounds like a good idea. God and Man at Yale was the first book I can recall that spoke to the perversion of the academic world. I would suggest that Horowitz is against the abuse of academic freedom and that moonbats, barking or otherwise, don’t think there can be any abuse of same.
Alan, I think you’re rather missing Berube’s point (and also perhaps the bit of irony he used in expressing it in the way he did): yes, Horowitz is the boss at FPM, but it’s not like FPM is a self-sustaining publication. It is funded by the CSPC, which in turn depends almost entirely on the contributions of donors, primarily the big-name deep-pocket uber-wingers like Scaife. Horowitz is hired to provide a certain kind of message, and if he started to diverge from that message too much, his plug would get pulled.
I posted the following about Horowitz at Berube’s blog:
Look, let’s get something straight. Horowitz is a bullshit artist. (Pardon my french, but I’m channelling Harry Frankfurt, in regards his recently-published book “On Bullshit”) Horowitz was a lefty bullshit artist in the 1960s, when one could make a buck as a lefty bullshit artist. And he subsequently became a righty bullshit artist when it was obvious that lefty BS artistry was dying and righty BS artistry was on the upswing. I read the story of Horowitz’s flippity-floppity conversion, but I’ll tell it to you straight. His story was nonsense.
As far as I can tell, Horowitz is and probably never been either a righty or a lefty. He’s probably always been a “Horowitzy”–concerned only for himself. But it seems that he’s always been a bullshit artist. He seduced someone to sponsor him in his current gig. I wonder who it is.
And profs (at least the non-tenured variety) aren’t vulnerable to having their plugs pulled? Berube doesn’t demonstrate that Horowitz is more vulnerable than academics, that he exists under a bigger thumb of Political Correctness than academics do.
Think of how contorted this logic is. Horowitz rails against academia for tolerating PC, and Berube has to come up with some other reason why Horowitz might have anything against academics?
FPM has a response:
In short, Berube didn’t follow the agreed-upon interview procedure.
FPM has interviewed many hostile sources. If there is a pattern of “60 Minutes”-styled interviews that edit out the majority of interviewees’ responses, those hostile sources would be coming out of the woodwork. If they’re not, Berube’s interpretation of events looks weak. People who emulate Mike Wallace tend to pick up that habit early, not late, in their journalistic careers. Why woudl Horowitz change his MO all of a sudden in the case of one obscure professor?