"The Professors" Squeal Like Stuck Pigs

A friend of mine wrote this review for Amazon.com and gave me permission to reprint it here.

David Horowitz is one of my favorite writers and favorite people. He was raised by Communist parents and thus became a radical in his early years, leading anti-war demonstrations and other subversive activities in the the 1960's. But David had a brain and a conscience, and it slowly dawned on him that socialism and communism were failures that never worked. They destroyed human productivity and human freedom. There were no exceptions. He began his slow and painful move to the right, a journey that is chronicled in his book Radical Son. Many other books followed, but his most recent is The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

Since the 1960's colleges and universities have become the last refuge of the dying ideologies of the Far Left. The Leftists have holed up in this final fortress, perhaps for their last stand against reality. They have regularly denied tenure to professors of conservative persuasions (no matter how qualified in their field) and actively hired, supported and celebrated the most god-awful extremist kooks. Communist Angela Davis, who had a hand in a jailbreak in which the judge was held hostage and murdered, is now a sitting professor at University of California at Santa Cruz, where my youngest son graduated only two years ago.

Other dubious stewards of college age kids' education include Nicholas De Genova, a Communist professor at Columbia University who called for "a million Mogadishus," the military disaster in Somalia in which 18 U.S. soldiers lost their lives. De Genova sounds like a raving lunatic as he denounces Western Civilization as bastions of imperialism and white supremacy. Not surprisingly, he also hates Israel and wishes to see it destroyed.

Another "professor" described in The Professors includes Bernardine Dohrn, a professor of law at Northwestern University. In the 1960's she was the leader of the radical and violent "Weatherman" faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, an antiwar leftist group that actively supported the Communists drive to annex South Vietnam. Her views today are as radical as ever, but apparently Northwestern couldn't find a better qualified law professor. The truth is that she was hired as a reward for her radical past and her extreme views.

People who hate America and Western Civilization tend to hire and associate with others who reinforce their biases rather than those who might challenge them. They seek psychological mirrors of themselves, people who reinforce their prejudices and give them a false sense of validation. In such an atmosphere there is no "reality check," no accountability from competing ideas. Not surprisingly opinions become increasingly radicalized in that environment and leftist caricatures like Ward Churchill and Nicholas De Genova become the norm.

Indeed, the Left has long captured both the lecterns of learning as well as the main stream media, where they now wallow in an incestuous orgy of self-validation and stagnant ideologies, where competing ideas are suppressed and even demonized. For instance, they have not received Horowitz's book The Professors with kindness and objectivity. On Amazon.com where the book is sold (follow the title link), angry leftist academics regularly excoriate the book without having actually read it, and a hacker recently replaced the Amazon page title with one that said "Springtime for Stalin and Other Hits." The American Amazon page was repaired after readers reported it, but as of today the Amazon UK page still has the hacked title. See it here.

Horowitz says that of all the books he has written, this one has engendered the greatest wrath from the Left. That's a great reason to buy it. Do so today.