Late night with David Horowitz

And now the part we've all been waiting for: The questions begin. Why did he say there never was an anti-slavery movement until one was started by white Christian males? asks the first questioner.

"Because it's true," he says.

On Jews and reparations: He's in favor of Germany paying reparations, but not the U.S. He's against federal funds for the Holocaust Museum. He's for reparations to black victims of syphilis experiments in Tuskeegee, Ala., and to victims of the Tulsa, Okla., riots of 1921.

Horowitz holds court for more than an hour, and agrees to take one more question, which will prove to be the last of the evening.

"First of all," announces his questioner, a slim, well-dressed black man who did not give his name, "let me say, of your attempts all night long to play up on the sometimes willful ignorances of white, especially Republican, students: You have misinformed them. In case you do not know, by the laws of this country no newspaper is obligated to accept any ad. That is not considered freedom of speech. And the Daily Cal would hypothetically have every right by whatever standard it chooses to turn down any ad."

"I never said otherwise," Horowitz counters.

The two go back and forth until Horowitz asks, "Are you going to refute another thing that I didn't say? There's no great achievement in arguing with somebody who's not in the room."

Whether it is willful foreshadowing or just a slip of the tongue, what Horowitz means, of course, is that it's no achievement to refute a statement that was not made.

At this point he and the questioner begin speaking over each other like two quarrelers in a parking lot, or on "Crossfire." The crowd noise grows and it's hard to hear.

"I am not going to stand here and argue with you," Horowitz shouts.

"Then don't," retorts the questioner in a rhetorical triumph of the playground variety that brings applause from the left-wing constituency.

And the testiness escalates.

Questioner: "No, you're not going to filibuster me. Second of all, there are people in this hall, some of whom may be too young to know, many people who are ..."

Then someone in the crowd shouts out, "Turn his mike off!" and the crowd erupts in boos. The speaker's mike is indeed turned off and in the classic gesture of the aggrieved speaker the questioner climbs on a chair and continues to speak, but now he cannot be heard over the roars of the enraged crowd. One of the Republicans handling the mike where the questioner had been standing signals frantically to Carrasco, the host, to turn the mike back on. His face looks like Reese Witherspoon's face in the movie "Election" when she's trying with every fiber in her body to exert her will over the cruel, cold reality of high school politics.

The microphone does not go back on. The crowd grows angry. Next thing you know, Horowitz exits stage right, with bodyguards.

And Carrasco is back at the mike. "David Horowitz has left. And I just want to thank everyone for coming. Please take it outside. We're asking everyone to leave through the back doors."

And with that, it was over.

For all the sound and fury, the question of reparations never separated itself from the hubbub over free speech and academic freedom. So as the crowd thinned and Horowitz's anticlimactic exit left us unsettled, some of us walked into the night air with the burdens of a cruel history still weighing heavily on our shoulders.

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