Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
He didn't just lie about President Clinton and Anita Hill way back when. In "Blinded by the Right," he lied about me.
Apr 17, 2002 | Even fans of David Brock's new politics are having a hard time digesting "Blinded by the Right," his latest piece de scandale. It is a book that attempts to take down former conservative friends and confidantes with the same ferocious zeal and suspect journalistic methods that he deployed on President Clinton and Anita Hill in a former life. But as Frank Rich observed in a New York Times essay, "By his own account, Brock has lied so often that a reader can't take on faith some of the juicier newsbreaks from the impeachment era in his book." Actually, for anyone with first-hand knowledge of the targets, it's not just the juicier newsbreaks that are problematic in Brock's book. There is virtually nothing believable in what he has written, as I have reason personally to know.
In all the years David Brock was posing as a conservative (which is what he says of himself in this "confession"), I met him only two or three times. The first was before he became notorious over the tattered reputations of Anita Hill and President Clinton, and another came after he had disclosed his homosexuality, but had not yet switched political sides. On both occasions, I believe I was a supportive friend. On the first, as the older writer, I gave advice and encouragement to the young man on the threshold of a journalistic career. On the second, I let him know he could count on the support of a conservative who had always made it a point to stand up for gays within the circles of the right (where such a defense is sometimes necessary) and who condemned anti-gay prejudices wherever he encountered them. (In fact, I have made personal enemies of three very prominent conservatives through my public attacks on their sexual prejudices, and these are the only conservative enemies I believe I have made.)
My publication, Frontpagemagazine.com, is the first conservative Web site that features a regular (daily) column by a gay journalist, Andrew Sullivan. In my estimation, Andrew Sullivan is one of the most intelligent and insightful conservative writers, regardless of sexual preference. At the same time, in "Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality" and "Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival," Andrew has written two of the most elegant, poignant and wise accounts of homosexuality and AIDS available. Frontpagemagazine.com has also featured gay commentators and reporters like Camille Paglia, Norah Vincent and Ed Anderson, and has run two conservative gay manifestos, one by a gay male who was also a Mormon, and the other by a lesbian Republican.
Therefore, it was something of a shock to me to see the following passage at the conclusion of a chapter titled "Out of the Closet" in "Blinded By the Right." In this chapter, with all the deceitfulness characteristic of Brock's work, the author attempts to justify his personal betrayal of former friends (via insinuation and gossip) by their alleged betrayal of him as a gay man:
"Then there was the case of David Horowitz, the neo-conservative firebrand, whose publication had rushed out a piece when I came out of the closet using the occasion to proclaim the conservatives' tolerance for homosexuality. Soon thereafter, Horowitz uttered a hateful anti-gay slur to an editor friend of mine whom Horowitz didn't know was gay. At the time, I shrugged it off, not willing to face the truth about my friends and supporters. Not until such epithets were hurled at me would I realize I had been on a fool's errand in trying to carve out a place for myself as an openly gay icon in the conservative movement. Only then did I begin to see by allowing myself to be used as a kind of gay right-wing poster boy, I had been complicit in the bigoted politics and rank hypocrisy of the conservatives."
For the record, I am not a "neo-conservative" (unless the label is intended to mean -- as it sometimes is -- that I am a conservative who is a Jew); my Center for the Study of Popular Culture is not -- as Brock maintains in the only other chapter that mentions me in the book -- "devoted to promoting conservative values and politics in the entertainment industry" (I am a big fan of "South Park" and have written articles defending it and other films that conservatives have attacked; I have had on-air battles with right-wing religious critics of Hollywood like Michael Medved, and have concentrated my efforts on creating liberal-conservative dialogues and working with the liberal guilds (actors, writers and directors) to defend the entertainment industry against censors from both the left and the right; I have also never been "violent" or "extremist" on either side of the political divide -- let alone on both -- as Brock maliciously asserts. My book "The Art of Political War" does not, as he claims, recommend to Republicans "the same tactics he had once described as illegitimate and immoral" (i.e., the tactics of the Marxist left -- which I have actually never described in those terms); instead, my book recommends that Republicans take a leaf from the populist tactics of the Democratic Party, as even the most casual but minimally honest reader can attest.
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