David's Money/David's Facts ...

Jennifer Jacobson's"What Makes David Run?" Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 May, (subscriber only) features my favorite right-wing demagogue, David Horowitz. There are a couple of amusing notes in it."If he were liberal, [Horowitz] contends, he could be an editor at the [New York] Times or a department chairman at Harvard University. And his life story would have already been told on the big screen. Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, his autobiography, has been out for eight years. ‘Someone would have made a film out of it if I was a leftist,' he says bitterly." What this guy needs is a bigger ego!

But the article corrects some errors that I've made in posts at Cliopatria and I want to correct them. Several months ago, I reported that Horowitz was paying himself $179,000 a year to do what he does. I thought then that, given his limitations, $179,000 was way beyond his due. Given the unreliability of information posted at his site, I suggested that he give himself a salary cut and hire some fact-checkers to give what is published at Front Page Rag some credibility. Well, I apparently vastly understated David's self-generosity. Jacobson reports Horowitz's salary in 2003 at $310,167. Add to that the $5,000 he charges for each of 30 to 40 demogogic speeches a year and you're closer to his annual income. The book royalties would be modest and, apparently, he hasn't seen anything yet on film rights to his life story.

But, incidentally, I want to add a note about the poison Horowitz and Front Page Rag are to well-meaning academics who give them any credibility. I have defended and will continue to defend Jonathan Bean's prerogative of assigning James Lubinskas's article,"Remembering the Zebra Killings," from Horowitz's Front Page Rag as supplementary reading in his class at Southern Illinois University. As the discussions here at Cliopatria and at Inside Higher Ed have made clear, Lubinskas's article exaggerated the number of killings by a factor of 5. You could have a very smart discussion with undergraduates about the necessity of interrogating lies of that magnitude. But, for g_d sakes, David, give yourself a salary cut and hire some fact checkers!