Saturday, March 04, 2006

More On What the Wingnuts Talk About



I posted earlier about the dangers that wingnut blogs worry about in these days of the Bush administration, things such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg falling asleep and liberal teachers hurting wingnut children's beliefs.

The Wingnuttia more generally has decided to worry about the academia: that place where feminazis run rampant and where all evil things have their beginnings. The prophet on this danger to America's heartland is David Horowitz:

Summary: On MSNBC's Scarborough Country, right-wing activist David Horowitz claimed that "[t]here are 50,000 professors" who are "anti-American" and "identify with the terrorists." There are just over 400,000 tenured and tenure-track full-time university professors in the United States. If Horowitz's numbers are accurate, that means approximately one out of every eight tenured or tenure-track college and university professors is a terrorist sympathizer.

Frightening, isn't it? Or rather, how extremely insulting that slander like this is freely disseminated on mainstream television. One in eight of our university faculties want Osama bin Laden not to be found and killed! One in eight of our university faculties are "anti-American"! Is this why the government is building new detention centers?

Where does Horowitz get his numbers? We are not told, naturally, so that it's impossible to have an intelligent discussion about his assertion. But suppose that he in fact was correct in his preposterous statement. Suppose that one out of every eight professor was a terrorist sympathizer. Then what are the other seven out of eight professors? How many of them are American Taliban sympathizers? How many of them are Dominionists who believe that women should be in kitchens, barefoot and pregnant? How many of them identify with Attila the Hun or Torquemada?

Horowitz doesn't tell us. What we need are websites like his but from the other side. Where all those of us who were lectured by rightwing professors can send our complaints, especially if we didn't get an A in the course.