David Horowitz responds, Watchful Babbles on:

Horowitz has brought up HW in his latest blog, but does not, we fear, provide any substantial points, thus capping off a week of remarkable moderation in his rhetoric.

Leaving aside the exchange of ad hominem attacks, which I find enjoyable though not enlightening, I would like to address one charge:

    I am also accused by Scoobie of being an apologist for white supremacy. The mind boggles at the imbecility of this attack. ... Scoobie's readers have full access to what I have wrtten and he is attacking. He even links his accusations to my text which will show anyone with half a brain that Scoobie is both a liar and knave.

This, however, is not entirely correct. Scoobie says (and I agree) that Horowitz acted "as an apologist for white supremacist Jared Taylor of American Renaissance magazine," which is a very different thing. Horowitz's obsession with race has always, to me, seemed the symptom of a man raging against betrayal (by his former allies on the left); that propulsive emotion has led him to say some remarkably foolish things in the past, and to join with some very disreputable characters, tarnishing his own reputation and that of conservatism as a whole.

Readers can judge for themselves whether the article in question, originally seen in AmRen and published, in redacted form, by Horowitz, is -- as we believe it to be -- a rather sophisticated and invidious piece of propaganda, masquerading as journalism but filled with the cant of intellectualist racism. But until Horowitz chooses to respond to these charges, we have, for better or for worse, the last word on the issue.

In the meantime, I would suggest that Horowitz, and all other conservatives who ally themselves with the fringe on policy while privately maintaining doubts regarding philosophy, consider the words of Lord Acton, used as an epigraph in Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:

    At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition.