Tilting at Academic Windmills

Before there was Milo Yiannopoulos, there was David Horowitz. Before the YouTube video had become the default medium for controversial content; before student rebels against the tyrannical academic Left had recognized that they not only weren’t alone but, indeed, that they likely outnumbered their tyrants’ ideological disciples (and, moreover, that they had the facts and the U.S. Constitution on their side); before Milo was able to enter a university lecture hall and receive a standing ovation from an overflow crowd of conservative, libertarian, moderate, and classical liberal fans (who, thanks to the internet, had been inoculated against leftist flummery)—before all that, there was David Horowitz, who, whenever he crossed the threshold of a college auditorium, was, with few exceptions, walking into the lion’s den, and, like Gary Cooper in High Noon, doing it all alone—singlehandedly confronting rabid mobs of