Interview: Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?

By David Horowitz

From: "Scott McLemee"
To:
Subject: questions for Intellectual Affairs column
Date: Sunday, February 19, 2006 7:50 AM

Dear David Horowitz,

I hope to write something about "The Professors" for my column this week, and we be glad to incorporate your responses to the questions below. To include them, I would need your answers by late Monday evening.

Scott McLemee, columnist

Inside Higher Ed

1. A new book, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," has just been published, listing you as its author. Have you read it?

A: Have you?

2. Over the past year, a number of anecdotes, claims, and quotations you have circulated have been shown, time and again, to be inaccurate and in some cases simply false. You have on occasion been obliged to admit as much. In what sense can you now claim any right to being taken seriously?

A: These charges against me are lies that I have refuted on several occasions. Since you obviously don’t intend to acknowledge my answers, or confront the issues themselves, in what sense can you claim any right to be taken seriously?

3. Are you taking steps to make future statements appearing under your name at least somewhat plausible, if not credible? Will you consider applying some of your high lecture fees -- for example, the $3500 you were paid by Hamilton College for speaking there at the invitation of a left-wing professor, which I understand was a fraction of what you initially demanded -- towards paying a fact-checker?

A: Since my past statements are both credible and true, and no one has proven otherwise, the question has no meaning. Perhaps you will take steps to make your next attacks on me at least somewhat plausible, if not credible. Such left-wing notables as Jello Biafra have been paid university fees of $9,000, which is almost twice my asking price. Now that you mention it, I should probably raise my fee. Since you are a left-wing notable yourself, why don’t you hire a fact checker with the riches you have put in your pocket?

4. Over the years, you have published a number of autobiographies. (Those, at least, I assume you actually did write.) How many more autobiographies do you think you have in you?

A: I have written one autobiography. Better get that fact-checker.

5. Will there be future editions of "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America"? If so, can you give any advice to academics who would like to be listed?

A: Are you volunteering to be my agent? Academics who want to be listed should violate the academic freedom precepts of their universities, conduct political propaganda campaigns in their classrooms, call for the killing of white people, the elmination of Israel from the face of the earth, death to Americans, and the defense of pedophiles. Are volunteering for this, too?

6. Many people have compared you to Joseph McCarthy. I believe this is a mistake, and that your actual model is Andrei Vyshinsky. Would you care to address this controversial matter?

A: I think the question about McCarthy should be put to Professors Schrecker and Scott and the other McCarthyites at the AAUP who have attempted to find me guilty by association, by innuendo, by malicious falsehood, and anything but what I have actually said and written. In fact, why don’t you ask yourself? As for Vyshinksy, this is a question you should put to your friends at The Nation, whose comrades loved Andrei when he was still with us.