I got some spam from David Horowitz asking for donations to fund his lifestyle or something. Brad R. at Sadly, No, got the same spam. (Except that where his had "Brad" mine had "Tim".)
So who is this Horowitz fellow? Via Ralph Luker I found a discussion he had with Tim Burke. Burke began with:
On DiscoverTheNetwork, some of my objections have already been ably described by my colleagues. Let me mention a few of my greatest concerns.
First, I think the entire project has an almost non-existent sense of what represents a "linkage" between two separate individuals. This is the bread and butter art of intellectual or political history, the major question in the study of social networks. What is minimally needed to claim a serious or substantial connection between two people in terms of ideas they share, institutional projects they are both contributing to, influences they exert on one another? Whether you're talking about a connection across time (some individual in the past influencing some individual at a later time) or space (some individual in one society or community influencing another), you have to define what you regard as a meaningful connection, stick to that definition, and provide evidence of it.
DiscoverTheNetwork is justifiably made fun of not for ideological reasons but because it so miserably fails to make it out of the starting gate in this regard. DiscoverTheNetwork operates with an implicit definition of "linkage" that makes allows arbitrary assertions of connections between anyone who annoys its creators. If taken seriously, it would be hard to disallow any connection proposed: you could connect Lynne Stewart to Mayor Bloomberg or Noam Chomsky to Milton Friedman using the idea of linkage operating within the project. It's rather like the "Kevin Bacon game," only elevated to a high level of seriousness and polemical aggression.
Horowitz began his reply with:
Professor Burke begins with a series of insults---as seems to be the norm for leftists, particularly when discussing issues with conservatives whose work they have not read. But underneath the unearned scorn poured forth in Professor Burke's first two paragraphs...
No need to read any further. Burke did not begin with a series of insults. I don't know whether Horowitz is lying or crazy or what, but in any case he is clearly not worth spending any more time on.
More like this
Horowitz is crazy. I offered to help him conduct a disparity study, much like the one recently published by Rothman, Lipset, and Nevitte, only more sophisticated (their study is pretty shitty - I would use more than one DV, and better ones at that, along with a larger collection of independent variables) to test his claim that conservatives are actively discriminated against in academia, and he called it a "ridiculous exercise" (this was before the Rothman, et al. study was published -- I'd bet money he'll start citing it without calling it a "ridiculous exercise"), and called me an "asshole."
Then he had a debate with Michael Berube, didn't publish Berube's response, and said he was disappointed that Berube hadn't responsded.
Tim, David Horowitz has been a well-known celebrity of the American Far-Right scene for many years. He is not affiliated with any think tank or institute I know of (like Louis Hissink for instance) but is strictly a commentator/polemicist of the Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh school. His closest Australian equivalent would be someone like Tim Blair.
As a polemicist, Horowitz gets a lot of mileage out of inflammatory "hot talk" and as you can see, like Coulter, he is fond of accusing "liberals" of the very same cheap-shots, ad hominem and poor scholarship that those like him have depended on for years. One of his biggest sell points to the American neo-con crowd is his claim to be a "reformed leftist" who saw the light and defected to the large, and ever growing community of illiterate neo-cons in the U.S.
One other interesting resume point of Horowitz's is that he is credited with having originated the cherished neo-con urban legend alleging that Hillary Clinton defended the Black Panthers in a 1969 murder trial.
It's not for nothing Atrios has long called him "Crazy Davey"
Horowitz is one of those sixties "radicals" who discovered there was more money in being outrageously rabid rightwing than there was in being outrageously loony leftwing.
He is the sort of person who has managed to give both the loony left and the loony right a bad image.
His entry over at Media Transparency is interesting reading. Scott is correct that he is not involved in any think tanks or institutes, though he runs Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which has received nearly $14 million from different right-winged foundations in the period 1989-2003.
I can't resist quoting Scott McLemee here, regretting that he was Dissed by "Discover the Network":
What a clown Horowitz is. He basically ingratiated himself with a right-wing crowd by saying he used to be a 'traitor'. Well, if he's serious about it (which he obviously isn't), why doesn't he turn himself in? That's a serious crime, asshole.
Worthless polemicist of the most spineless kind.