Who is David Horowitz? Why is he receiving as many searches as actress Kim Basinger and evangelist Billy Graham? Why is he receiving 12 times as many searches as he was just two weeks ago?
The answer gets us deep into the latest controversy to rile American campuses: slavery reparations. Political issues get many fewer searches than movie stars or Japanese cartoons, but we can still see when they are gaining momentum among Lycos users, and right now reparations are the hot topic.
Horowitz is a former Berkeley liberal turned conservative commentator. He writes a column for Salon.com as well as hosting his own website, Frontpage.com. Don't confuse him with David Horowitz, the California TV consumer reporter.
Back in May, Horowitz wrote a column about why slavery reparations are a bad idea. For those unfamiliar with the concept, some civil rights leaders now say that the American government should pay money to the descendants of slaves in order to make amends for the labor which southern landowners received for free before the civil war. Similar reparations have been paid in recent years to Japanese-Americans by our government, and to Holocaust survivors by the German government.
This idea was first put forward by far left elements of the civil rights movement but has gradually become an excepted, if highly controversial, subject of debate. It won't surprise anyone that conservatives don't really like the idea. Horowitz describes a number of arguments against reparations, but most of them revolve around the fact that we have no idea who should get paid. After all, no slaves are alive today.
Horowitz realized that his article was a good way to test the limits of political correctness and free speech at universities. A few weeks ago he began purchasing advertisements in college newspapers in order to reprint his column. Surprise, surprise, chaos and hilarity ensued.
So far, Horowitz has submitted his ad to 50 college papers, and only ten have accepted it. The universities where the advertisement has run are up in arms. For example, at Brown University, the entire press run of the Brown Daily Herald was stolen by a coalition of leftist students angry at the paper for accepting the ad.
This spawned a huge campus debate about free speech versus press responsibility. It also sent students to the web to search for both Horowitz's column and the Brown Daily Herald itself; for a college newspaper to show up in the Lycos search logs is rare indeed. Searches for slavery reparations tripled last week.
While the Lycos 50 takes no political stand on the issue, I personally wouldn't mind slavery reparations -- as long as I could get a big fat check from the Egyptian government. What's the statute of limitations on pyramid-building, anyway?
TOMORROW: Oscar nominations, updated.
