The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Horowitz: not exactly backing down...
I've long been a fan of David Horowitz. His book "Radical Son" is a brilliant insider's look at the left; as Horowitz matriculates through his 60's radicalism and becomes more and more disillusioned with his "comrades", the reader is taken into the mind of a highly intelligent man transforming from a fire-breathing leftist collectivist to a blunt and self-sure advocate for capitalism and for the American experiment in general (no wonder they hate him so much that they targeted him for a pie in the face last week...).
Anyway, when I saw that Blogger Catherine Seipp had been published in National Review with a writeup on Horowitz, I had to check it out:
Pie-throwing seems to have become almost standard practice now when conservative pundits visit college campuses: Just a week before Horowitz was chocolate-creamed, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol got hit with an ice-cream pie while speaking to students at Earlham College, as it happens also in Indiana.
But Horowitz has a particular talent for sending the opposition into paroxysms of rage, even when he’s being attacked and not on the attack himself. Daily Kos, for instance, called Horowitz a “sissyboy racist” in commenting on the pie-in-the-face incident. Kristol’s incident, by contrast, got the relatively bland Kos description: “Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.”
I once wondered, during an interview at Horowitz’s home in Los Angeles, whether our psychotherapized culture means that people find his typically blunt way of making his points shocking.
“No, no, no,” he responded. “If you’re a conservative and say something blunt, people are shocked. If you’re on the left, people take no notice. Jesse Jackson says racist things every other speech he makes. The idea that black people are locked out in our society — give me a break. One of my notorious Salon columns was called 'Guns Don’t Kill Blacks, Other Blacks Do.' Well, it’s true: Ninety percent of black murder victims are killed by blacks, and I wrote the article because the NAACP had announced that it was launching a suit against gun manufacturers because so many young blacks were dying of gun wounds.”
“I think if I say it enough times,” he continued, “hone the edges of my words until they’re razor sharp, it will cut through this nonsense and maybe restore us to some kind of common sense.”
Anyway, when I saw that Blogger Catherine Seipp had been published in National Review with a writeup on Horowitz, I had to check it out:
Pie-throwing seems to have become almost standard practice now when conservative pundits visit college campuses: Just a week before Horowitz was chocolate-creamed, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol got hit with an ice-cream pie while speaking to students at Earlham College, as it happens also in Indiana.
But Horowitz has a particular talent for sending the opposition into paroxysms of rage, even when he’s being attacked and not on the attack himself. Daily Kos, for instance, called Horowitz a “sissyboy racist” in commenting on the pie-in-the-face incident. Kristol’s incident, by contrast, got the relatively bland Kos description: “Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.”
I once wondered, during an interview at Horowitz’s home in Los Angeles, whether our psychotherapized culture means that people find his typically blunt way of making his points shocking.
“No, no, no,” he responded. “If you’re a conservative and say something blunt, people are shocked. If you’re on the left, people take no notice. Jesse Jackson says racist things every other speech he makes. The idea that black people are locked out in our society — give me a break. One of my notorious Salon columns was called 'Guns Don’t Kill Blacks, Other Blacks Do.' Well, it’s true: Ninety percent of black murder victims are killed by blacks, and I wrote the article because the NAACP had announced that it was launching a suit against gun manufacturers because so many young blacks were dying of gun wounds.”
“I think if I say it enough times,” he continued, “hone the edges of my words until they’re razor sharp, it will cut through this nonsense and maybe restore us to some kind of common sense.”
