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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In 1989 Horowitz confessed to Sun Myung Moon's Insight magazine that fate had bound him, like Ahab, to pursue his "white whale" forever -- a quest "to stigmatize the Left and separate it." But he presents his new project as a fountain of data, not stigma. "I want to make it clear at the outset that I have striven to make an informational database, and not ... a 'tar and feather the left' database," he told Salon.
He's sick of what the other side does, he says, surfing the Web while we talk for examples of anti-Horowitz rants. "It's like, 'Is Horowitz a lunatic?'" he says. He ends up at Media Transparency and points to a headline: "David Horowitz's imagined supporters speak out." In comparison to that language, Horowitz says, "I feel I set a standard here ... I don't think there's another site that's as responsible" as Discover the Network.
Adds staffer Genesio Zenone, the site is an "electronically overdue other side of the argument."
But many Discover the Network entries run hotter than the ones on Media Transparency. Hillary Clinton's dossier soars into a many-paragraphed rumination on Clinton loyalists, explaining what one can learn from their "sordid, criminal means" about the evil nature of progressives, whose idealism is skin-deep: "They hate you because you are killers of their dream ... Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them."
Confronted with this vitriolic passage, Horowitz concedes it was excerpted from a 2000 piece of his published on FrontPageMag.com, "Progressive Narcissism," but says his overly reverent staff improperly cut-and-pasted a polemic as an entry in a strictly nonpolemical data source. "I have this problem with my staff," Horowitz says, "and that is, they won't touch my words." He says that while his writings have formed the basis for many entries, they're supposed to be edited down to just the facts. His editor is going to have to fix that one, he says.
One man who won't be removed from the database is Ebert, No. 298. "I was surprised to find myself linked to a terrorist I have never heard of," Ebert said, facetiously. "I was not curious enough about him to Google him, but perhaps he will Google me and, having discovered my wonderful reviews, will renounce terrorism and spend more time at the movies." (What earned Ebert his spot, the site says, was his criticizing "runaway corporations," accusing the U.S. death penalty system of inequity, and making an unflattering reference to former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.)
"The one link Discover the Network seems to be missing is 'David Horowitz and Sen. Joseph McCarthy,'" Ebert says. "David was a respected journalist. He could be a respected conservative commentator. Why does he lower himself to rabble-rousing?"
Told of Ebert's criticism, Horowitz began to call the movie critic "an a -- ," but stopped and settled for calling him "probably ignorant of everything I've ever written."
In fact, it's Horowitz's past work that explains his method of lumping together the individuals and organizations on his site into one vast left-wing conspiracy -- including last year's book, "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left," praised by former CIA director James Woolsey for revealing the enemy within. "This is the left that I see," Horowitz says. "The background for this, for 20 years I've had in my head." With a burning fuse on its cover, "Unholy Alliance" argues that groups who despise one another might actually be working closely together, maybe without even knowing it. This philosophy forms the backbone of Discover the Network, which digitizes theories of Horowitz's that are long in the making.
