Why Horowitz overlooked Princeton

David Horowitz has never lost his desire to shock.

The "red-diaper baby" of Communist parents, Horowitz spent his youth as an ally of the Black Panthers, creating mayhem and protesting that black men could never get a fair trial in the United States.

Then the Black Panthers murdered one of his friends, and suddenly the criminal justice system didn't look so bad. After several years of soul-searching, Horowitz became a radical right-wing activist. Some people can never do anything halfway.

As a former radical leftist, though, Horowitz understands what sets his old buddies off. And that's why this whole controversy over his reparations ad is so interesting.

Horowitz's ad, "10 Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks are Bad for Blacks — And Racist, Too," has a simple enough message: Slavery was a crime against humanity, but the descendants of slaves in America are more prosperous and free than their counterparts in Africa. His tone is a bit strident, and he throws in a gratuitous statement about America having already transferred wealth in the form of welfare payments to blacks. The ad isn't particularly well-written, but then, neither is most of the content of college newspapers.

Horowitz claims he tried to buy advertising space in 52 college newspapers (though not The Daily Princetonian) to further the academic debate on reparations. During February (Black History Month), many colleges hosted conferences on reparations. As one might guess, left-leaning colleges almost universally thought it was a swell idea. Horowitz didn't, so he said he wanted to put forth the other side.

The resulting mayhem at Brown and Berkeley erupted on schedule. People stole the offending newspapers and burned them. Protesters made childish demands — daily front-page apologies and weeks of free advertising space in atonement, among others. Other newspaper editors, petrified of being called racists by their own student radicals, refused to run the ad. The Daily Californian took to self-flagellation for becoming an "inadvertent vehicle for bigotry." At Brown, they went into hysterics. "People haven't been able to perform basic functions like walking or sleeping since this ad ran," one protester moaned. Please.

But what the leftist thugs who burned the newspapers didn't realize in the heat of the moment is exactly how much they played into Horowitz's real scheme.

Now conservatives everywhere can categorize campus leftists as criminals.

They can point out the irony — those who claim to be liberals are actually fascists silencing speech. Now they can point to the intolerance of supposedly liberal institutions, claim they ban conservative thought and accuse the generally left-leaning student newspapers of censoring ideas.

Conservatives love to accuse leftists of this. When I ran the Princeton Tory for a year, I met a number of other students who ran conservative magazines or newspapers at their campuses. At every conference, people would tell stories of having their papers burned. It was a badge of honor — a demonstration of how 'tough' you were. In fact, you weren't really taken seriously as a conservative student activist unless campus radicals had tried to silence you.

I always thought this was ridiculous. No one has ever tried to 'silence' me. I've gotten my fair share of angry e-mails, but alas, no one has ever burned anything I've written. Does this mean I'm not a 'real' conservative?

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Hardly. First of all, it means I don't believe in gratuitously offending people. Most of the burned papers made inflammatory statements about some minority groups — blacks, gays or others. I'd rather attempt to convince people than offend them. There's no excuse for burning papers, but Horowitz could have made his point without claiming that welfare should count as already-paid reparations. But a big reason I've never had to worry about paper-burnings — I've realized after reading the Atlantic Monthly article on Princeton — is that we're different. David Brooks, the author, claimed that he saw no Bush or Gore posters here, and thus we're politically apathetic. This man obviously did not visit my room and shrine to Dubya. We're not apathetic. We simply believe in reasoned debate. When the Tory ran an article a few years ago on ex-gays, the LGBA took out an ad in the 'Prince' countering it. End of story. No burned papers, no problems.

What about the Horowitz ad — would the Prince run it? "In general, we want 'Prince' advertising to be open to everyone," said 'Prince' Editor-in-Chief Daniel Stephens '02. "It would take something very offensive for us to refuse to print an ad," though of course the Prince reserves the right to do so.

Newspapers are private property. Not running an ad isn't censorship, much as some people have tried to claim it is. When I ran the Tory, I refused to run ads from Holocaust-denial people, and I had no qualms about it. But the Horowitz ad was no where near Holocaust-denial on the scale of offensiveness. I haven't seen polls, but I suspect a majority of Americans would be opposed to reparations. At Princeton we respect that view and don't scream, "Racist!" at the people who hold it.

Which is why I suspect Horowitz never sent his ad here. The 'Prince' would have run it, and that would have been the end of the story. Perhaps someone would have written a letter to the editor. Perhaps Whig-Clio would have had a debate. But under no circumstances would anyone have burned the 'Prince.'

Horowitz doesn't get his name in headlines — and he doesn't get lauded as a hero in the conservative press — unless papers get burned. A 'Prince' ad wouldn't have been worth his money. Laura Vanderkam is a Wilson School major from Granger, Ind. She can be reached at laurav@princeton.edu.