An interview with David Horowitz
By Julia Lipman

The conservative was outnumbered on Salon's Table Talk discussion boards. It was a heated discussion, and he was starting to get angry.

"It's beyond me why I waste my time with you abusive clowns," he wrote. He referred to Noam Chomsky as "the Dr. Demento of the brain dead left" and told another participant, "You have had so much feminist smoke blown up your ass you simply don't know what you're talking about."

None of this would be at all remarkable, except that these broadsides were posted by David Horowitz, best-selling memoirist and Salon columnist. Accustomed to discussing his views in forums like C-SPAN and "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour," he was engaging in a no-holds-barred Internet flame war with a crowd of unknowns, mixing it up with hostile Salon readers who delighted in calling him names like "Whoreowitz" and "Halfowitz." And he was giving back as good as he got.

Horowitz, who no longer posts in Table Talk, is no stranger to in-the-trenches, in-your-face political tactics. The recent controversy involving an ad he tried to place in college papers across the country attacking the idea of slavery reparations is the most recent incarnation. Student editors who ran the ad, which suggested that descendants of slaves actually owe a debt to "white Christians" who worked in the abolitionist movement, apologized. Copies of papers with the ad were stolen. Horowitz was compared to Al Sharpton in the pages of Salon itself.

But that's just one event in a long career of stirring up controversy by unconventional means. The sixties radical turned right winger has consistently behaved in ways more suited to the guy handing out anti-Clinton leaflets on the bus than a successful author and commentator. And that makes him more compelling than either the apolitical PC-bashers or stodgy George Will wannabes that make up a good proportion of the conservative punditry.

One visit to his website, FrontPage Magazine, is enough to establish Horowitz's approach and style. It may be a weblog of sorts, but it's no genteel navy-and-white andrewsullivan.com. The first thing you notice is a picture of Hillary Clinton with moving eyes that implores the reader to visit SlapHillary.com. The site's banner is a picture of Horowitz superimposed on a scene with barbed wire and a sign reading "Big Brother Is Watching." The design's lack of anything resembling restraint or understatement is no accident.

"I really like (andrewsullivan.com). It's very elegant," Horowitz says in a phone interview. But that's not his style. "It's a taste thing. I'm more tabloid." Horowitz says he didn't design the site himself but is responsible for its general look. "I like to have a lot on (the front page)," he says. "I like to hit you with everything at once."

Hitting you with everything at once is not a bad shorthand for Horowitz's political style, which has involved distributing pamphlets on college campuses, confronting the academic Susan Sontag at a book signing over what he saw as her refusal to condemn totalitarianism and, of course, buying (or trying to buy) ads in college papers. All of this points to the tactics of an outsider, a village crank trying to get across the message by any means necessary. A real conservative pundit, you'd think, would just debate Sontag in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, or buy a few college papers and be done with it. That's why real conservative pundits are so boring.

Horowitz, the author of books like "Radical Son" and "Destructive Generation" (with Peter Collier) doesn't fit the profile of the crackpot conspiracy theorist who spends every hour of free time in the library with back issues of Commentary, writing letter after letter to the local paper. With him, it's more of a compulsion to get his conservative views out to as large an audience as possible than a forcible confinement to the fringes of politics. Having a column in Salon is a nice start, but it's just a start.

Of course, he engages in his share of conspiracy theories. "I've revealed the paternalistic, elitist and even borderline totalitarian mentality of campus editors," he says of the controversy surrounding his anti-slavery-reparations ad. "Campus faculties are run by Stalinists who want to airbrush you out of the pictures, so my books are not assigned. The campus papers are never going to review them. I don't get invited—" He breaks off the sentence. "I hate this. I don't want to whine."

Like the local conspiracy theorist, Horowitz wants to get his ideas out there for the sake of the ideas themselves. So while his campus paper ads (he says he'd originally planned to spend "something like $10,000") may have been some of the most cost-efficient publicity he's ever generated, those who speculate that Horowitz must have planned to spark controversy specifically by having the ads rejected are probably missing the point.

"I'm being seen as, depending on which side you're on, as a media genius or a publicity hound," he says, and complains on his website that he's now considered a "political provocateur." Whether you think his after-the-fact protests are disingenuous or not, it seems evident that Horowitz, who placed pamphlets around MIT to protest the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto, would have been happy just to see the ads in print.

So why is Horowitz's political bomb-throwing interesting after 10 years of offend-everyone "political incorrectness"? It's because he really is a political provocateur, with the emphasis on political. He doesn't adopt the worn-out pose of the equal-opportunity offender; he's a pure ideologue. Horowitz may try to offend, but his goal is to provoke, and ultimately to convince. He really cares whether Angela Davis is representative of contemporary leftism and whether Marxist theory stood up after Stalinism. He really believes that leftist orthodoxy is stifling academic inquiry at universities; some of his partners in anti-PC-ness do, too, but think that "academic inquiry" is something that has to do with fraternity-sponsored wet T-shirt contests. Compare Horowitz to someone like the smarmy Bill Maher, hailed as "controversial" and "provocative," whose idea of a hot political topic is "Can a person be justifiably fired for being too beautiful?"

Horowitz has the left to thank for much of his appeal and passion. He is defined by it even as he fights against it. As editor of the radical magazine Ramparts in the 1960s, he found a personal and political immediacy for his quest. In "Destructive Generation," he discusses Betty Van Patter, a friend of his whom he says he persuaded to take on bookkeeping work for the Black Panthers. Van Patter was murdered, Horowitz says, by Panther leaders, an event that he has often written about as a kind of turning point for him.

His experiences with revolutionary groups seem to have convinced him that the contemporary left is, if not actively totalitarian, at least complicit in promoting totalitarian ideas. For some conservatives, the enemy is the estate tax, or a vague feeling that you can't listen to Howard Stern at work without getting a reprimand from a supervisor. For Horowitz, the enemy is none other than the Red Menace itself. He criticizes Sontag because, he and Collier wrote in "Destructive Generation," she "understood the political stakes but didn't push things far enough." Horowitz sees the stakes as high, and pushes things far.

And it may also be the left that's responsible for Horowitz's hit-you-with-everything-at-once style that ultimately sets him apart from other conservatives. "In my life, I've always..liked there to be access to information. When I was young, my parents were communists, and they concealed a lot, trying to protect me," he says. "I've always had a desire to know things in my personal life and in my political life."

E-mail Julia Lipman at julia@flakmag.com.