You, Christine Petersen, wrote:

>But anyway, (sorry for the long post), I was wondering if anyone could
>give me any details on this guy's background.
I did realize David Horowitz had graced our fair city with his odiferous
presence. I must have been indoors. Your recap of his talk sounds right
on target. He's a former editor the self-styled radical journal Ramparts,
much in vogue in the 60s. Sometime after his flirtation with the Black
Panthers resulted in a friend of his getting killed, he flipped and
lunged into the arms of the Reaganites in the 80s. Since then he has
deployed the Stalinist style he's familiar with to trash all former
comrades who didn't degrade themselves like he did.

He's a complete idiot, and utterly unprincipled. Most relevantly he
falsely claimed Chomsky praised the Khmer Rouge, using a quote of NC's
that he wrote in a preface to a book about *Norodom Sihanouk*. This bit
of slander was exposed by Chris Hitchens in his essay on Noam's
detractors (http://www.worldmedia.com/archive/other/85-hitchens.html )
Horowitz is only interesting as an example of how any pathology is
marketable if it serves elite interests. If you are a glutton for
punishment, or connoisseur of crackpottery, the online zine Salon
(http://www.salonmagazine.com/) carries his "column" every other week
("balanced" by James Carville's!). He also harrangues critics in the
Table Talk section of the same site.

Finally he also has a "memoir" out: "Radical Son." My mom, a dittohead,
gave it to me. I immediately looked up Chomsky in the index. Predictably
he misquoted/distorted NC in each instance, though he did not revisit his
shameful performance re NC and Pol Pot. Down Orwell's memory hole, I
suppose.

Best,

Tresy