Horowitz expels me from FrontPage, cont.

This is a continuation of the immensely long thread that began here.

M. Mason writes:

Again and again we see this pattern from well-known figures in certain “conservative” circles—the fear of a direct, frank confrontation and the outcome that will follow if they risk open inquiry and debate when their latent, incoherent and cherished liberalism is uncovered. Instead of calmly and purposefully working to resolve misunderstandings and foster honest intellectual exchange, they either ramble, chain-react and engage in endless, crazy-making mystifications (Spencer), they resort to impugning false motives, distortion and using hit-and-run tactics from protected turf (Lifson) or they engage in contemptuous verbal downers to belittle and undermine, along with passive-aggressive “forgetting” and postponing to “get back” at the other person (Horowitz). They exhibit shabby behavior when asked to give clear, honest answers to plain questions, avoid unpleasant facts that are repeatedly pointed out to them and then finally cut off a losing argument by simply walking out (all three). The expectation of having to defend such an indefensible position is so threatening to their egos that they simply opt for escape.

Frankly, this sort of behavior from what passes as the political right these days has become ever more exasperating and troubling over the years and it greatly diminishes these people in the eyes of many of us who are watching. When are we going to see one of these writers engage in some brutally honest self-examination about such past conversations and ask himself questions like: “Why am I reacting to Auster like this? What is it, really, that I’m afraid of and angry about? What is the worst that could possibly happen to me if I were to set aside some time and go a full fifteen rounds with him in a frank, open and respectful dialogue—even if we don’t agree on every issue in the end? How can I present my case so I won’t be misunderstood (without resorting to a dysfunctional, dirty and counter-productive arguing style) and be willing, really willing, to listen to his?”—and most important—“What are the larger issues at stake?”

But one gets little or no sense that these people are willing to engage in that sort of mature self-reflection and self-criticism. Instead, all we get are these endless, evasive and dishonest blaming cycles that quickly escalate and shut down any real progress in getting right to the heart of very important and urgent problems we now face. Until they and others like them are willing to step up to the plate and be responsible for cleaning up their act and agree to be truly present for focused and useful public discussions about these matters (instead of contriving clever, self-justifying excuses to stay safely “out of range”), they will never, ever be on the leading edge of a strong traditional conservatism in this country.

Robert B. writes:

I’m sorry I have not been able to offer support to you sooner, but I have been busy fighting a very similar (eerily) battle on behalf of my son versus a feminist commissar masquerading as an assistant dean at his college. Though we lost initially in the first round, we ended by winning on appeal (unanimously I might add). We stuck to our guns and did not back down—and I know you will not as well. I have engaged UBM many times in verbal combat and have always ripped him to shreds—thus it is amazing to me that such as Horowitz and Spencer would even pay attention to him. I have always thought his “career” was mostly due to “patronage”. As far as Horowitz goes, remember my admonition about the left and character defects (more on that later)—they always engage in black and white thinking—either something is all good or it is all bad, there is no in-between. You are now “all bad” in David’s mind.

In times like this I am always reminded of the poem by Rudyard Kipling that my mother gave me as a very young boy. So, just in case you have forgotten it (in your busy-ness) I include for you:

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!

Laurium writes:

Look, take it easy on David Mills, he is a classic case. His whole life he has benefitted from white skin privilege, gotten affimative action and gotten grief from real black folks, folks who know personally how hard life is for a black person and know he isn’t black either.

Look at his picture andd ask yourself this: Has any white woman ever gotten off an elevator when he got on? Nope. Has any white woman even clutched her purse tighter? Nope. Has any employer given him that shocked look when he showed up at an interview and told him “the position is filled”? Nope. Has any state trooper spotted him on the freeway and pulled him over for “Driving While Black”? Nope. But SAYING he is black has been very, very good for David. I have no doubt white colleges offered him tons of money to attend as the perfect black candidate.

He really has suffered no racial disadvantage his entire life. Indeed, being “black” has made him much better off than plain old white. Think about it. A man with his verbal facility would be above average as a white guy. But as a black guy he is in the top 1%, the perfect diversity choice. And with his chubby white accountant face, he is about as physically intimidating as Beaver Cleaver. As I explained to a black man at work, our employer got a phenomenal deal by hiring my sorry white Ivy League @ss. “Do you know how much he would have to pay to get a BLACK man from Harvard Law/Yale Law/Boalt Hall to take this job?” I said. “A helluva lot more than me!”

But for all the clear financial benefit of David’s being a “black” white man, just think of the psychic stress. He must constantly justify his affirmative action, his free ride in white society, his white friends, and his white skin privilege by constantly telling himself he really is black. Over and over and over.

See, when he goes after you, he is SuperBlack the Blogger, rescuing black folk everywhere, redeeming himself, proving himself a member of the black tribe, and doing penance for his white skin privilege.

Roland D. writes:

You may not be aware of it, but you’ve actually committed a pretty serious breach of netiquette by publishing Horowitz’s private email to you without first obtaining consent. Like you, I try and live my life in such a way that I would suffer no embarrassment if the things I do and say privately were made public, but it’s generally understood that private emails aren’t for public posting without permission.

If nothing else, Horowitz will probably cite this as an example of ‘bad faith’ on your part. Which goes back to the comments of one of your other correspondents to the effect that we tend to despite those we’ve wronged—a minor (and, I’m sure, inadvertent) breach of etiquette isn’t in the same league as what Horowitz has apparently done to you, but he’ll exaggerate it in order to assuage his own guilt.

LA replies:

I disagree. It was necessary and right for me to publish it. Considering his total refusal to explain what he had done, followed by his total cutting off of any further communication with me, the only information I had on his conduct toward me was in his e-mails. For me not to have posted them would have compounded the damage he did to me: meaning that not only would I be suffering from his outrageous conduct, but I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it either.

RD replies:

The generally-accepted way to accomplish that would be to send email to the person in question asking for permission to post the correspondence in question, or stating that, absent a reply within a set time-period, you’re going to post it.

Again, I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, I’m just pointing out the generally-accepted standards for these sorts of situations, and noting that those with ulterior motives will attack such perceived slights while avoiding the very real slight you’ve apparently suffered at the hands of Mr. Horowitz.

LA replies:

I’ve never known that there were generally accepted standards for this. It’s always seemed to me a murky area. Is there a Book of Netiquette?

> The generally-accepted way to accomplish that would be to send email to the person in question asking for permission to post the correspondence in question, or stating that, absent a reply within a set time-period, you’re going to post it.

But this would mean that with or without his permission, I’m going to post his e-mails. So what then is the point of the request?

RD replies:

The idea is that this sort of exception is reserved for extraordinary circumstances. Since this particular situation affects you both personally and professionally, any reasonable person would understand why you’d go ahead and publish the correspondence, after giving notice that you were going to do so.

LA replies:

Excellent.

Jeff in England writes:

James W. seems to be thinking along the same lines I am in regard to Horowitz. But I also realise you can get too psychoanalytical in this “causes” game and we have to watch that too. As a left winger who has rejected much of the left, I feel I “know” Horowitz in part, but not every bad thing Horowitz does is down to his past leftist life, either in childhood (raised by Communist parents) or in adulthood (a major figure in the New Left who turned his back on it partially due to his friend getting murdered by the Black Panthers).

Although I previously wrote that Horowitz was reverting to patterns inherent in the left paradigm, and moreover, patterns in those who leave (betray) the left, I also know that people just do things and you can’t always blame those things on previous political mindsets or Communist parents or whomever or whatever. They often do it—as the character Joey says in the first verse of the Bob Dylan song about Joey Gallo, “JOEY”—“Just because.”

By the way, my mother grew up on President Street and knew the Gallo family. I don’t think it affected her “all that much.”

Steven H. writes:

I feel compelled to respond to Horowitz. If he doesn’t think that you are a racist but that you made racist remarks which led to your secret expulsion from his website, I think that you should have been made aware of this decision and allowed to respond.

The fact that Horowitz did not give you a chance to respond is the height of hypocrisy by Horowitz. I say this having until this time held Horowitz in high esteem.

Horowitz in the name of political correctness would rather disband open and honest debate for the sake of not offending the very people that he claims to deride on a daily basis.

Your commentaries contain some the most thought provoking thoughts to be found anywhere on the Web.

I thank you for your contributions. Keep up the good work!

Gintas writes:

Unless Horowitz were to elaborate, all we have to go on are some basic Leftist tricks he’s pulled. Given his Leftist past, it appears that he’s “reverting to form.” Doesn’t that often happen when you’re under pressure? He is turning out to be an unstable ally on the Right.

Concerning your posting the e-mails, what Horowitz did was a public thing. It deserves a public explanation. You give him a fair chance, and beyond that, you are free to post. William Buckley had the decency to explain what he was doing when he purged the Right of someone.

N. writes:

You expressed some surprise that while your simple observations on race and rape have caused ripples across the web, no one seems to be discussing the facts in the DOJ document. There was some discussion, not much, on the Free Republic thread, mentioning cultural aspects such as “rap,” revenge, and some other things along with various trashy comments of no value. Don’t bother looking, though, that thread has been pulled with no explanation by the Admin Moderator.

It appears that the DOJ stats cause people literally to stop thinking in a lot of cases. I believe this is because the DOJ stats are simple, unadorned facts that directly contradict deeply held beliefs, just as the reality of People’s Kampuchea contradicted the deeply held beliefs of many leftists. Faced with the ultimate radical regime, the left literally could not believe what they were seeing, so they flailed around in all manner of ways such as Shawcross’s “Sideshow,” rather than face the fact that their view of reality was just wrong.

NY Times columnist Anthony Lewis is a classic example, he denied the reality of what the Khmer Rouge did for over 20 years, but in the end right before he left the editorial staff admitted in a rather diffident way that he was wrong.

So it may be with this. Eventually the emotions will drain out of people, and yet the DOJ statistics will remain before them, facts that will still contradict some cherished beliefs. I predict that, in time, at least some people will begin to reassess their political beliefs in the light of the ugly reality of black-on-white crime.

Of course, when they do so, they won’t even mention you at all.

It will be something that is all their own idea.

James W. writes:

A breach of etiquette? To answer, we shall ask this question of you: Is there any mail, say in the last five years, that you personally have written—concerning all those political issues and persons with which you engage in similar circumstances—of which you would especially not wish published? Do you live one life in public and another in private?

People of different characters will indeed have different answers to that question.

Most of our critics avoid judgment by only saying what they actually feel in private, while many of those of the right still invite criticism by having already said publicly what they believe. As scarce as the truth is, the supply is always greater than the demand.

It is the objective of the left to keep it that way.

LA replies:

My own approach generally is to say nothing in e-mail that I would not mind seeing published. That doesn’t mean that people have the right to go ahead and post an e-mail exchange with me which I thought was private. I’ve had hundreds of e-mail exchanges with Horowitz over the years. I never posted one until last week, and I had a compelling need and right to do so. As for e-mails that readers send to me, they understand that I routinely post e-mail as VFR comments, and if they don’t want their e-mails posted they tell me.

On the larger implications of private versus public speaking, it occurs to me that we could define politics as what people say publicly. A person who privately insists that he’s a conservative, while he publicly subscribes to liberal positions, is a liberal.

Jeremy G. writes:

I have read through the impressive email thread concerning your troubled relationship with David Horowitz and would like to add a comment. As a college student, I was very impressed with Horowitz’s Heterodoxy publication (which was radical for me at the time) and when I heard David Horowitz speak one time on campus I became an earnest supporter of his. So I was greatly saddened to learn of his recent treatment of you and by extension of our ideas. From the perspective of our ideas, we have the unfortunate sensation of a continuous free-falling. But I believe that we are hitting the bottom. For examples, we now have VDARE and AMREN in addition to your site, impressive resources for frank discussions of immigration, race, and nationhood that are impervious to attacks from the liberals (both the left and right-wing types). These new institutions are growing and are reaching hundreds of thousands of people. Other than intimidations and expulsions, what do the liberals have to fight us with? Their ideas are bankrupt and this is becoming increasingly apparent as we decline under their rule.

M. Mason writes:

Though I gave some pretty sharp jabs to the various writers I mentioned at the top of this thread, it is precisely because of their many valuable contributions made in the past that I chided them. These are serious and intelligent men, therefore I expected better of them. If there had been some examples of sustained public dialogue about these issues with Mr. Auster either here or elsewhere that had eventually come to a close because of clearly expressed, reasonable differences of opinion at least that would have been a promising start. Yet here is the remarkable thing: from beginning to end of these abortive discussions I can scarcely find any place where his correspondents give any real, substantive arguments against what he is saying. Most of what I do see are various dysfunctional behaviors employed to ignore, dodge or otherwise evade the issues he raises so they can conveniently beat a hasty retreat back to the safety of their own websites. That peculiarity speaks loudly to my own mind.

I want to see honest and focused discussions about these subjects at the most prominent online political venues to break the current media embargo on them. VFR is one of the few that is willing to talk about such topics openly, intelligently and without apology. There is an internal logic and depth of analysis in Mr. Auster’s writings that is a stimulating tonic to those who’ve already come to many of the same conclusions as he has, but which bears down like an armored war-horse on erroneous theories. Other serious political writers should stay with the task and engage him directly in the process of wrestling with these difficult issues, not fear it; their own thinking will benefit from the experience.

Alan Levine writes:

I may have been tardy in offering support, emotional at least, to you over the Horowitz matter. I was slightly surprised by the precise issue, since I thought he had been taking a rather hard line himself over race matters, but realized my surprise was akin to that experienced by the Nazis when the Allies landed in Normandy—they knew we were going to land in France, but the place and time was not what they had predicted. In a grand strategic sense, your experience with DH is no more or less than what was to be expected from the leftist who wrote “Free World Colossus.” ….

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 07, 2007 01:29 AM | Send