BY AARON BARLOW

David Horowitz, whose attacks on “professors” caused a great deal of concern among the American faculty a decade ago, is back in the news in relation to Florida Gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, who spoke at a number of Horowitz’s Freedom Center conferences. DeSantis is quoted in the Washington Post from a conference speech for the Freedom Center in 2015, “David has done such great work and I’ve been an admirer. I’ve been to these conferences in the past but I’ve been a big admirer of an organization that shoots straight, tells the American people the truth and is standing up for the right thing.”

Shoots straight?

A look at the Horowitz FrontPageMag website this morning shows, out of the nineteen features stories, negative ones on Serena Williams, Colin Kaepernick, Andrew Gillum and Cory Brooker and eight with an anti-Moslem slant. Among the other seven is one featuring a Robert Spencer video, two criticizing The New York Times, one attacking Nike one on Twitter and one attacking those not pleased with Judge Kavanaugh. The only other story lauds Horowitz. There’s nothing “straight” or fair about any of this. In fact, it would be easy to conclude that FPM and, by extension, all of the Horowitz empire, is downright racist and anti-Islam.

Given this focus, I wonder if the Horowitz attacks on the professors were nothing more than preemptive strikes meant to shut us up. Horowitz is quite sharp and is a proponent of what he calls “political warfare.” Winning is everything, to him—and the means? They’re meaningless. Do what you must, this anti-democratic mindset insists, to achieve victory.

I suspect that Horowitz doesn’t bother to attack professors much any longer because, first, the threat he perceived from us has diminished and, second, because others have taken up the cudgel and now wield it more effectively than he did. The threat has diminished because many of us have withdrawn from the public sphere through exhaustion, cowardice, need to attend to other tasks (like teaching) and/or increased attention to internecine conflicts. Social media has made it possible for attacks on professors to be much more damaging than they were a decade ago, for institutions and their overseers have become incredibly sensitive, one might even say paranoid, when it comes to online attacks. Now, Horowitz apparently believes, he can turn from a defeated foe to his main enemies, African Americans (going back to his disenchantment with the Black Panthers almost fifty years ago) and Islam.

According to that Washington Post story, Horowitz was temporarily banned from Twitter recently by posting, “If you’re a Muslim, you might not want to be sworn in on a Judeo Christian bible, since Islam has conducted a 1500 year war against Christians and Jews, is calling for death to Israel and has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Christians recently” and also has tweeted “Black Africans enslaved black Africans. America freed them sacrificing 350k mainly white Union lives. American blacks are richer, more privileged, freer than blacks anywhere in the world, including all black run countries.” The attitudes behind these statements are, protests from Horowitz notwithstanding, Islamophobic and racist. Not to mention that they show no understanding of the Islamic world or of Africa.

Among the faculty, we do have such understanding. And we should be acting in ways that share that knowledge in positive ways with our fellows beyond campus walls. This can be difficult, for emotions have been inflamed by the likes of Horowitz, Trump and, apparently, even DeSantis. And we can over-react in response (lord knows, I have, particularly in the face of anti-immigrant comments). Still, we need to make it our business (for it is, in fact, if we believe in the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles) to make corrections to statements like those of Horowitz on a daily basis in our lives off campus—and to do so more calmly than many of us (including me) sometimes manage. Like Horowitz, we need to be strategic, recognizing that we are engaged in a long-term struggle.

The difference between us and Horowitz and his allies is that we are not interested in annihilating our opponents but in convincing them to reexamine their beliefs. That, by the way, should not only be the faculty strategy but the American one.

For the sake of our country, we can’t accept the defeat Horowitz already assumes.