As promised, I attended Horowitz's talk at SJU this evening. It was sloppy, illogical, fundamentally dishonest, and rambling, but it didn't matter. His fellow ideologues in the audience seemed to enjoy it. Like the talk, my summary here is going to be rather incoherent—it's hard to piece sense out of nonsense.

As an interesting opening gambit, Horowitz began his talk by slandering St. John's University, and every other university in the country. The professors are totalitarians who bully their students; they are unprofessional; they suppress opposing viewpoints; university departments are devoted to attacking America; you can't get a good education here. He accused universities of requiring students to hear leftist speakers, but silencing conservative voices.

He was curiously oblivious to the fact that David Horowitz was standing on a stage at the university in a well-attended and well-publicized event, expressing some extremely conservative views. And in a nice bit of irony, it was revealed in the question period that the professor of an evening peace studies class had let the students out early, specifically so they could attend the event. You'd think you'd notice when you are the counterexample to your own blanket accusation, but no, Horowitz is completely unaware. The whole evening was like that: Horowitz would say something appallingly stupid, and just trundle obtusely on.

Wait, that's not entirely fair. He did have evidence for his accusation. He ranted about Ward Churchill for 5 minutes. I had not known that Ward Churchill was in the employ of SJU. Ward Churchill is now the Official Standard Academic, whose name can be generically substituted in place of any other actual representative of the profession.

Reality was not something Mr Horowitz emphasized that evening. Apparently, conservatives are toughened by their minority status and their oppression, while liberals and leftists never get any opposition research. We liberals are the unquestioned majority. In America. Seriously.

Students are required to read the Communist Manifesto several times during their undergraduate career, and there are no professors who give a different point of view. This was very surprising news to me. My son the economics major is always coming home with books by these guys named Smith and Hayek and Friedman and Galbraith and Krugman and Greenspan; I had no idea they were all lousy Marxists. Clearly the economics department at SCSU needs a severe dressing down, and maybe the commie who runs it needs to be fired…too left-wing.

He spent a little time on the Summers affair. The whole situation is simply explained: Summers asked an innocent question, and the liberals formed a lynch mob. Hiss, boo. And, by the way, did you know that there has never been a great female composer or mathematician? It's been 50 years since Betty Friedan, so there's been plenty of time to raise one, if they were capable of it. (That's right, Betty Friedan fixed everything for women, so it's all your own damn fault now, feminists.)

Also by the way, there are no gender, race, or class hierarchies in America, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they are feeding you ideological lies. The proof: Oprah Winfrey. There is no longer any oppression or racism or economic discrimination in America, because Oprah Winfrey exists. And Chewbacca is a Wookie from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor.

Guess what cause World War II? The peace movement. They killed 70 million people. The peaceniks also killed millions in Viet Nam, and Watergate was a political attack by the peace movement on President Nixon. The peace movement is also effectively crippling our military, and is killing our soldiers now. This had me thinking that peace movements seem to be the most effectively murderous death machines of all time, and that maybe instead of funding our military, we ought to be supporting peace movements abroad. That'd be an irresistible way to destroy our enemies.

Now, really, Horowitz is not such a demanding guy. He said he'd be content if universities just got their professors to agree not to do political recruiting in their classrooms. That's all he wants. That's why, apparently, his argument about the evils of the professorate consisted of pointing out that they mostly vote Democratic; that they post liberal political cartoons on their doors; that they publish articles which he finds offensive; that they express opinions he dislikes at speaking engagements; and that they never, ever allow conservative points of view to be expressed on campus.

I swear, he was trying to kill me with irony. I should have called the cops and had him arrested for attempted murder when he announced that because liberals have contempt for the other side, they're going to lose.

The whole talk consisted of these incoherent non sequiturs greased up with condescension, and really, it's hard to take the man seriously; he's a babbling clown. All that nonsense up there? He actually said it^*. But it was one of the students at SJU who let me down and broke my heart.

The last person in the question and answer period was a student who had been in Iraq during the last election, and he got up to say that he wanted to back Horowitz up on one earlier comment, when he'd mentioned that it was disgraceful that John Kerry had questioned our engagement in the war. He agreed, and said it was un-American to oppose the war. And half the students present stood up to applaud wildly.

It is un-American to oppose the war.

Like Horowitz, he was obviously unaware of just how profoundly un-American his statement was.

It is tragic that our soldiers go off to fight a war, proudly told that they are fighting for freedom and democracy, and they have so little idea of what the words mean. Apparently, democracy means never questioning the decisions of your president. Freedom means doing what you are told.

And this is what Horowitz wants the outcome of a university education to be.

^*OK, he didn't actually use the Chewbacca Defense. But it would have fit right in if he had.