"David Horowitz's career evokes the familiar "God that failed" trajectory of the disillusioned leftist who swings violently to the right. The years have transformed Horowitz into a steely gladiator, an indefatigable pugilist in the culture wars, the right's very own Ahab. "Lapsed radicals like ourselves are always condemned to regard the left as their Great White Whale," Horowitz and Peter Collier confessed in their 1991 anthology, Deconstructing the Left. "This book is a record of our sightings of the beast. We may not yet have set the final harpoon, but we have given chase."

Throughout the nineties, Horowitz spent much of his time combating "political correctness" in American universities. His weapon in that crusade was Heterodoxy, the tabloid-sized monthly he founded with Collier in 1992 and which, Horowitz has written, "is meant to have the feel of a samizdat publication inside the gulag of the PC university." But the spirit of Havel and Michnik is noticeably absent; Heterodoxy is a garish, surreal compendium of Horowitz's obsessions and demons, neatly packaged for right-wing consumption. There are lists ("The Ten Wackiest Feminists on Campus"), odd cartoons (Karl Marx in drag) and admiring letters from the next generation ("I am 11 years old and I cannot thank you enough for publishing this wonderful paper...my schoolmates are a bunch of feminist, liberal, PC, vegetarian multiculturalists"). In 1993, when the literary critic Catharine Stimpson told a reporter that frequent attacks in Heterodoxy had transformed her into the magazine's "centerfold," the editors replied with a pornographic pastiche of her in its April 1993 issue, under the caption 'ms. april.'" from www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20000703&s=sherman

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