Dean of the Faculty
Speeches & Articles
“Steinberger’s Defense: An Essay” Reed College Quest
November 29, 2005
So why was I so mean to David Horowitz? After all, wasn’t he just interested in having a serious, rational intellectual discussion about academic freedom?
In his writings (books, articles, website), Horowitz calls Cornel West an “airhead.” He says that West is “an intellectual of modest talents whose skin color has catapulted him into academic stardom with a six-figure income at Harvard.” He dismisses Simone de Beauvoir as a “Stalinist camp follower.” He says that bell hooks is a “racist.” He calls Teddy Kennedy a “fellow traveler.” (A fellow traveler is a communist or communist sympathizer who is not formally enrolled in the Communist Party.) He calls Howard Dean a “fellow traveler.” He calls John Kerry a “fellow traveler.” He says that John Kerry “betrayed his country” when he protested the Vietnam War. He calls Al Sharpton an “anti-Semitic freelance racist.” I could go on and on; Horowitz is given to savage, offhand, unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks. You may find this amusing. I don’t. My point, by the way, is not specifically to dispute any of these characterizations (believe me, I hold no brief for Al Sharpton). But when you call someone a commie or a racist in print, you’d better present – or at least immediately refer the reader to – some pretty compelling evidence.
Okay, so he’s gratuitously nasty to people. No big deal, right? Well, I think it is a big deal, and I think it’s the very antithesis of serious, rational intellectual discourse. But hang on: it gets much worse. Horowitz says, for example, that left-wing opposition to the Iraq war is literally “treason.” It’s not mistaken or misguided or wrongheaded; it’s treason. He acknowledges that it is not “actionable treason,” i.e., it doesn’t meet the formal legal definition. But he clearly thinks it is morally tantamount to legal treason. He says that opposition to the war in Iraq involves an “unprecedented betrayal of America in time of war… [which] is undermining the morale of our troops and encouraging our terrorist enemies….” Worse, he says that domestic opponents of Bush’s policy are engaged “in a psychological warfare campaign conducted against this country and its men and women in arms. Its aim is to sap the will of America to fight its enemies in Iraq – and not only in Iraq.” He calls opposition to the war “seditious.” He says, on the one hand, that he has “no problem with critics of the war.” But in the very next breath, he says that opposition to the war is dominated by “leftists who have declared war on their own country in the midst of a war.” He says that opposition to the Iraq war is very much like the anti-Vietnam war movement, which he says was directly responsible – the peace movement, not the war – for the death of between two and three million Indo-Chinese.
Or again: he says that the very same radical, treasonous left has become “integrated into the heart of the Democratic Party.” These radical leftists – Howard Dean is one of them – are really Marxists and Communists, or at least fellow travelers. They have illicitly co-opted the term “liberal” and the term “progressive.” He says that “progressives” such as these "have killed 100 million people in the 20th century, in peacetime.” He says elsewhere that “the left which supported the Communists – or at the very least opposed our anti-Communist policies in Indo-China – was by the late 1960s strong enough to defeat the government’s efforts to safeguard our security by enforcing the Espionage Act and other laws that had been designed to protect us. The subversive left and its liberal allies are far stronger and more dangerous to our security now than they were then.” He says that the subversive left today is spearheaded by a “Shadow Party” that “controls the machinery that nominates and elects Democratic presidential candidates.” He explicitly says that this anti-American, subversive and treasonous “Shadow Party” includes such groups as NARAL, Emily’s List, League of Conservation Voters, NAACP, and Planned Parenthood. It is really hard to escape the inference: the views of a Teddy Kennedy or of Planned Parenthood or the NAACP have some kind of serious and direct internal connection – not simply an innocent connection – with, say, the murderous policies of Joseph Stalin or even Pol Pot. Horowitz doesn’t say exactly that; but that’s where the rhetoric inexorably leads.
