Here is a quite

Here is a quite good run-down of the recent activities of the notorious self-promoter and opportunist David Horowitz. As you may know, Horowitz has recently taken it upon himself to bravely take on the virtually non-existent movement to pay reparations to African-Americans for the sin of slavery. I saw Horowitz (or rather heard him, he ‘appeared’ by phone) on C-Span this morning and the things he said were about as pitiful as one would expect.

One of the more tricky and beguiling aspects of Horowitz’s rhetorical style is that it is often difficult to decide whether his statements are more foolish than offensive, or more offensive than foolish. Sometimes it’s simply a tie; but it’s always a challenge disentangling the two, and measuring them one against the other.

There are actually a number of aging lefties — a number of whom I know — who still admire Horowitz, or at least refuse to dismiss him outright, because they admired him terribly when they were all in their twenties. But, ya know, many of these worthies dropped a lot of acid back in the day so you really can’t be too hard on them if they still can’t see the light about Horowitz.

In any case, two points seem worth making. One is that Horowitz in person is as obnoxious and unpleasant as he seems on all those talk shows. I got in a scrape with him a couple years ago because of a brief mention I made of him in an article in The American Prospect. (There are actually a few points I’d change in the article; but the description of Horowitz isn’t one of them.)

At that time I figured that — like many high-profile controversialists — Horowitz merely played an a–hole on TV. Yet after running into him at a Hillary-bashing conference last April, and having him repeatedly call me a liar and “disgusting” to my face, I concluded that he was actually the real McCoy.

Anyway, enough about my run-ins with him. Let’s get to that second point. These days, whenever he’s charged with anti-black animus, Horowitz insists that he’s got nothing against blacks, only what he calls the “black left.” Now one can certainly distinguish between blacks and the “black left.” But given what we know about this man, doesn’t this sound terribly reminiscent of that old hedge which anti-Semites love to employ: I’m not anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist.

Oh. And if this all seems a bit a bit heavy and you want to lighten things up, you can buy Horowitz’s risible autobiography on Amazon. Yes, I know it may be galling to send a few bucks his way by buying it. But trust me, it’s really funny.

P.S. Dying to read the offending passage in the aforementioned article? Okay …

That zeal to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to excoriate the entire progressive tradition for the misdeeds of the extreme left is an approach that Radosh shares with a slew of former left-wingers who jumped ship and became conservatives as their hair turned gray. David Horowitz, to take the prime example, was a second-string radical journalist in the 1960s and 1970s who shifted to the political right in the mid-1980s and, in midlife, fashioned himself a second career as a sort of Whittaker Chambers manqué for 1990s conservatism. Horowitz’s 1996 autobiography Radical Son chronicled the story of his life from youth as a “red-diaper” baby, through stints as co-editor of Ramparts and his association with the Black Panthers, to his eventual conversion to political conservatism. Almost all of Horowitz’s writing since he became a conservative has been dedicated to attacking the principles and persons of the left.

That Horowitz, with his radical left-wing history, has been so readily accepted into the right-wing fold goes to the heart of the matter and connects the McCarthyism of yesteryear with its tamer cousin today. The strength of the ex-communist’s supposed moral superiority was always based on a dubious premise: that someone who had been entirely taken in by the party, willingly spied against his country, and obediently followed every zig and zag of the party line was somehow more to be credited than the momentary fellow traveler who attended a few meetings, signed a few petitions, and then walked away after seeing the party for what it was. In other words, the more radical the conversion, the more moral credit the McCarthyite (or New McCarthyite) supposedly accrues. This suits the Horowitzes of the world just fine, because they feel it gives them the credibility to denounce the left—believing that they can make up for youthful credulity with middle-aged ferocity. But just because Horowitz got taken in by the Black Panthers—long after almost everyone else on the left had washed their hands of them—hardly means that the progressives of today’s generation have anything to apologize for.