be careful

(Wildlife warning found here.) 

Hats off to David Mills, writing as "Undercover Black Man", who lobbed a grenade into David Horowitz's little foxhole, "FrontPage Magazine" and got one especially nasty little racist toad taken right off the FP roster (via Wolcott).  It's like they say, if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is the one you hit.

What happened, Mr. Mills?

One year ago, right-wing activist David Horowitz seemed convinced that Lawrence Auster, an occasional contributor to his FrontPage Magazine website, trafficked in "racist" ideas. And he seemed to cast Auster out.

I had sent Horowitz and Jamie Glazov, FrontPage's managing editor, an 11-page letter detailing Auster's views on race, as expressed on Auster's own blog.

(For example, his description of black people collectively as "the savages.")

Concerning my letter, Horowitz emailed Glazov and me on May 14, 2006: "I think it's a persuasive argument for not running Auster unless he publicly repudiates these positions which are racist and offensive."

Sure enough, Auster's essays didn't appear in FrontPage Magazine after that.

Well, that seems unusually ethical and above-board for Horowitz.  Maybe he-

Until today.

Oh.

Yes, Lawrence Auster is back, alerting David Horowitz's readers to an epidemic of black-on-white rape.

Well, it's not like that's a hot-button issue or anything.  Nobody's ever used a mythical threat of black-on-white rape to foster race hatred and violence in the good ol' US of A, have they?  Like, ever?

But what evidence do you have that Mr. Auster is a racist?  Are you sure you're not overreacting, here?

His assessment of "black inferiority" was spelled out in an essay originally written in 1995 but published in 2003 in a racialist journal called The Occidental Quarterly. (It is archived on Auster's blog.)

Auster, convinced of "an inherent, dangerous weakness in black ways of thought," argued that blacks are profoundly different from white people.

"Through numerous experiences and observations, I started to have the sense that blacks are more 'non-objective,' they understand things in a much more personal, subjective way than whites," Auster wrote. "They seem to have much less interest in knowledge or beauty for its own sake." Which means that "blacks are in fact less endowed with the qualities that make civilization possible, particularly Western civilization."

Ohhhhh.

Well, clearly, Auster is a racist dickhead who dresses up what is basically 1850's Reconstruction Era racist cant in a tissue-thin veneer of academic language and then wants to know why liberals are so hysterical that they won't just sit down with him and calmly debate that blacks and other non-whites are morally and intellectually inferior to Great White Hunters like him.  Mills is right to call out Horowitz on this one, for whatever Horowitz's intellectual and moral failings may be, he does at least try to play-act at respectability, and this tripe of Auster's is just a little too...obvious for FrontPage, methinks. 

So, Horowitz moved to cut his ties with Auster.

And that's where the fun starts!

Let's go to Auster's blog, shall we?  What's the little Uptighty Whitey got to say for himself?

Horowitz expels me from FrontPage

(Note: When I was first drafting this blog entry, I did not quote verbatim David Horowitz's e-mails to me, but paraphrased and summarized them. However, when I received his final e-mail, in which he totally refused to give any explanation for his behavior and rudely severed our relationship, at that point I felt I had the right to tell how he had conducted himself toward me, and the only way I could do that was to quote his e-mails in full.)

Oh, goody!  *claps tiny forelimbs with delight*  This ought to be fabulous!  Why, there's absolutely nothing in the world I'd enjoy more tonight than a slap-fight between two men who are so histrionic and intellectually dishonest that they make DANGERSTEIN look like the goddamn Dalai Lama.

Here's how it started. This morning I wrote a friendly note to Israeli writer David Hornik, with a cc to David Horowitz, agreeing with Hornik's article today at FrontPage Magazine about the report on the Israeli government's actions in the war last summer. A few minutes later David Horowitz sent me a reply to that e-mail. Horowitz said:

Are you unaware that you have been attacked--and I through you--on Huffington Post?
He gave no further details, but I figured it was probably David Mills, the Undercover Black Man, who I knew from Google listings had been attacking me lately, though I had not actually read any of it.

Oh, bad call, Auster.  Know thine enemy and all that. 

That David Horowitz had had such an exchange with David Mills last year was news to me. Until my piece at FP this week on interracial rape, I had sent Horowitz several article submissions and article ideas over the last year, mostly dealing with the Islam issue (and none of them, to my memory, dealing with race), and they had all been rejected; I simply figured the pieces were not right for FP. Now it turned out that something else was going on. But I had had no way of knowing that. Horowitz, for whom I've been writing for over five years, and with whom over the years I have exchanged several hundreds of e-mails on intellectual topics in addition to e-mails relating to my work at FrontPage, had never told me about any of this.

On reading Mills's post, I wrote to Horowitz and asked him if he had sent such an e-mail to Mills. He responded with a one-word e-mail:

Yes.

Oh, "Professor" Horowitz.  Surely you didn't think you could get away with just that, did you?  You just told Auster you cheated on him with a (gasp!) LIBERAL WRITER!  GACK!!  Ah, god!  He's not going to take that lying down!

I wrote back:

Doesn't this require more explanation from you? You never told me this. You never told me you weren't going to publish me unless I repudiated certain positions. You never forwarded to me the material from Mills that led you to decide you wouldn't publish me any more. You told David Mills, a complete stranger, that you weren't going to publish me any more, but you didn't tell me.

Further, since you decided, without telling me, that you wouldn't publish me any more, why are you still publishing me now?

Uh, obviously, Horowitz thought Dave Mills wasn't paying attention anymore and had some extra column inches to fill, and...

Horowitz replied:

Lawrence you're a big pain in the ass.

Someone please note the date and time.  David Horowitz tells the truth! 

One article from you takes more time and energy than 50 articles from 50 writers and gets me attacked and now is getting me the third degree from you. We have had many arguments over your racial attitudes as you know. I don't think you're the kind of racist this prick Mills describes you as (and if I can find it I will send you the email I sent him defending your current piece). But I do think you have made statements that are racist. I have a million enemies out there and I don't need attacks waiting to happen by publishing your stuff. I published this piece because I forgot my exchange with Mills last year and my overall impression of your work is that it is interesting if obtuse. I forgot I guess also how difficult you are to work with. I'd like to see you defend yourself against the charges Mills is making rather than attacking me.

In other words, "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!  I'm so big and important and now YOU want a piece of me?!  Oh, thankless, thankless child! WAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!" 

Now, for those of you keeping score at home, we have two fact-free, reactionary, histrionic Right Wing gasbags locking horns via email.  Who do you think will call the other a Nazi or a Stalinist first?  I'm putting my money on Auster.  Of the two, he seems to be the less, shall we say, "restrained" in his rhetoric.

I replied:

You told this stranger a year ago that I was a racist and that you wouldn't publish me any more, and you never told me about this, and now, because I've found about this and have asked you to explain, you call me a "big pain in the ass"?

Is this really the way you want to address me? Is this the way you want to address this issue?

Hee!  Here comes The Bluster, soon to be followed by The Threats, which will inevitably be followed by The Usual Tears and Recriminations.  Right Wingers always talk the toughest right before the big fat tears leak from their eyes and roll down their flushed, overheated faces.

You write:

I'd like to see you defend yourself against the charges Mills is making rather than attacking me.

I've never ever heard about these charges until today, because you never told me about them. And now because I'm asking you to explain, you say that I'm attacking you?

Please think carefully before you reply and don't reply off the handle.

Or what, Lawrence?  What are you going to do if Horowitz snots off at you?  Send more angry emails?  Round up your blog audience of eleven readers and systematically dismantle the Horowitz Media Empire?  Cry like a baby?  Hold your breath until you turn blue?  Go all Fatal Attraction and boil his pets?

Four hours later, Horowitz replied:

Uh, you know Auster was hitting "Refresh" on his email account every ten seconds for the ENTIRE FOUR HOURS.  Horowitz, you torturer! 

I want you to go away Lawrence.

I can't believe that David Horowitz and I actually agree on something. 

You have caused me more trouble than I care to think about and the fact that you're piling on me while I'm getting letters from my children asking me why I published a racist, and while I'm waiting to see this spread across the Internet, is more than I can handle right now.

Awwwwwww.  Poor, poor, pitiful li'l bald-headed thing.  It's hard work having to deal with the consequences of your little mealy-mouthed jihad, isn't it, Horowitz?  You end up having to joust with Unabomber types like Auster, or else face ominous, vaguely worded threats!  Oh, no!

I wrote back to him:

Groan.  Of course you did, Lawrence.  If there is one thing I have learned about contrary, attention-starved, high-maintenance assholes on the Web like yourself, it's that you will always, always, always have something else you'd like to add.  Whether it's Jeff Goldstein, Gay Right Wing Blogger Ace at Ace of Spades, Dan Riehl, or Jules Crittendon, you always think that your next point is going to be the absolutely devastating Last Word, a ruthless rhetorical coup that will slay your opponent and leave him weeping in a pool of his own remorse.

Sadly, no.  As is generally the case, your semiotic SCUD missile turns into a DUD missile and you just continue to bleat and wail like you were an hour ago, only more insistently.

I've just learned today, a year after the fact, that you had expelled me from FrontPage. You had not told me that you had expelled me; and you have not given me your reasons for expelling me, since you have not identified any statement of mine that you think is racist and offensive so that I could defend myself; and you have not told me why you never told me that you had expelled me. And when I ask for explanations for all this, you tell me that I am "a big pain in the ass," that I'm giving you the "third degree," that I'm "attacking" you, and that I'm "piling" on you, and then you tell me to "go away" as if I were some bum accosting you on the street.

Your behavior is shameful.

You, the great crusader against campus PC, have just behaved in the most outrageously PC manner I've ever seen in my life.

Doesn't he sound like your worst boyfriend/girlfriend ever in the last fight you had the patience to endure?  "It's not that you cheated on me!  It's that you LIIIIIED about it!"

Which is of course, total bs.  Yeah, it's that you cheated.  The lie was just the frosting on their overall Unhappy Cake.  But, of course, the Prime Directive of Passive-Aggression is that you never, ever fight the real fight.  You find a side-issue and then labor it until it bleeds.

But, hey, I lost my bet.  Auster never called "Ho Ho" Horowitz a Nazi.  Or even Leon Trotsky, let alone "Uncle" Joe Stalin.  I'm so disappointed.  Still, for one blinkered, ideological blowhard to call another blinkered, ideological blowhard "PC" is tantamount to invoking Godwin's Law, I should think.

If you'd care for some more (and who wouldn't?), you can follow the rest of this sad, sordid falling out in the myriad of posts and follow-up posts Auster has done in the process of nursing his resentment.  In fact, it looks like he could keep this going for months.

It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for David Horowitz.

Except that it isn't.  Those two deserve each other.

Good luck, little boys!  If you're going to kill each other, take it out in the yard.  We just had the rugs done in here.