Peter Frase

The ever-insighful Scott McLemee takes on red-batiter extroardinaire David Horowitz in this week's column at Inside Higher Education. It's an unusually humorous romp through a subject which is, already, inherently hilarious.

D. Ho, as they're calling him these days, is out with his book on "America's 101 most dangerous professors", and naturally communist brainwashers everywhere are incensed at being left off the list. Now normally, it's my opinion that the left is best served by ignoring people who make their reputations off of baiting the left--characters like Christopher Hitchens, Marc Cooper, and to a certain degree Todd Gitlin (who scored a totally unearned spot on the Horowitz list). But in the case of D. Ho, we are dealing with a figure so ludicrous that I'm inclined to just enjoy the silliness. It's true that by talking about him, we raise his profile, promote his book sales, and thereby perpetuate the phenomenon. But I don't think this has very real political implications (in contrast to more measured and reasonable figures), so objecting in these grounds is sort of like observing a personal boycott of Coca-Cola out of concern for Columbian trade-unionists: it may promote feelings of virtuousness, but has few implications in the real world.

So instead, I say, go on and enjoy the Network(s)!