Many cru­el things can be said about the men­dac­i­ty of David Horowitz. Few of them were not already said by the bril­liant Michael Bérubé, but he-of-the-accents does­n’t seem to blog any more, while D. Ho. remains as pro­lif­ic as ever in his search for Reds in the Ivory Tow­er.  RightWing­Watch observes Horowitz first sug­gest­ing that Antho­ny Wein­er is a s3kr1t Mus­sul­man*, and then that Holo­caust sur­vivor George Soros is a Com­mu­nist Nazi, or some­thing.  He told hate group leader Tim Wildmon:

George Soros, who is an evil man, who has evil designs on this coun­try, once said, he said he aspired to be the con­science of mankind. He knows that he’s a cor­rupt busi­ness­man who has caused a lot of pain and so he redeems him­self by being the cham­pi­on of the pro­gres­sive future. That’s what it does for them. If you look at his­to­ry you will see that all these ‘isms’—communism, social­ism, Nazism—they all emerge after Dar­win, that is after the decline of orga­nized reli­gion. They replace the reli­gious vision of a redemp­tion in the next life with a com­mu­nist vision with a redemp­tion in this life, and that is why they are so bloody dangerous.

This is fair­ly stan­dard wingnut­tery, but some­what fun­ny to see from Horowitz.  Horowitz is, after all, a pro­po­nent of a so-called “aca­d­e­m­ic bill of rights” which would func­tion as aca­d­e­m­ic affir­ma­tive action for con­ser­v­a­tives.  His argu­ment is that con­ser­v­a­tives are under-rep­re­sent­ed in the acad­e­my because mean com­mu­nist, Jew­ish, fem­i­nist, athe­ist pro­fes­sors exclude con­ser­v­a­tives from their ranks. 

One stan­dard riposte is to argue that con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als gen­er­al­ly don’t mea­sure up well against intel­lec­tu­als in gen­er­al.  There are few­er of them – the argu­ment goes – and those tend to be of low­er qual­i­ty, so they don’t advance in academia. 

And if we want­ed to point to evi­dence for this propo­si­tion, we could eas­i­ly point to Horow­itz’s his­tor­i­cal claim above.  Appar­ent­ly “the decline of orga­nized reli­gion” coin­cides with “Dar­win,” and com­mu­nism and social­ism and Nazism came after Dar­win so, post hoc ergo propter hoc, Dar­win caused the decline of reli­gion and the rise of com­mu­nism, social­ism, fas­cism, and Roseanne Barr.

Even if post hoc ergo propter hoc weren’t a log­i­cal fal­la­cy, this argu­ment falls apart.  Social­is­m’s mod­ern roots can be traced at least to Fouri­er’s ideas, which he began pub­lish­ing a year before Dar­win was born.  Com­mu­nism can’t have start­ed lat­er than 1848, when Marx and Engels pub­lished the Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo; it would be 10 years before Dar­win pre­sent­ed any­thing more rev­o­lu­tion­ary than a tax­on­o­my of bar­na­cles.  This isn’t “after this, there­fore because of this,” it’s “before this, there­fore because of this.”

Also, are we to believe that George Soros is both an inter­na­tion­al financier and a communist?

* Yes, Wein­er must be an apos­tate because he’s mar­ried to a Mus­lim woman who also hap­pens to be deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clin­ton.  Horowitz rea­sons (if we can apply that verb here):

Antho­ny Wein­er is a Jew. So accord­ing to Mus­lim law, either Antho­ny Wein­er has secret­ly con­vert­ed to Islam or Huma Abe­din has been giv­en a spe­cial dis­pen­sa­tion to mar­ry a Jew so she can infil­trate our government.

He’s a Jew, so he must not be a Jew or, like mag­nets, he and Abe­din would be unable to join togeth­er.  Make this man a professor.