Politics & Power Quote by David Horowitz

The line is built like a legal brief trying to pass as reassurance. Horowitz anticipates the obvious charge - that a campaign framed around "balance" and "rights" is really a purge - and answers it with a narrow denial calibrated to sound broad. The key move is definitional: he rejects firing or hiring decisions based on political views, but leaves open a much larger arena where pressure can still be applied without ever saying "fire them". You can intimidate through investigations, student grievance channels, donor agitation, legislative oversight, or public shaming and still claim clean hands on the literal act of termination.

"Attacked by my opponents" sets a familiar culture-war stage where criticism is positioned as partisan reflex, not substantive warning. The Academic Bill of Rights is invoked as a first principle, not an outcome: it functions as a shield, suggesting procedural neutrality while the project itself targets a specific image of the academy as ideologically captured. The repetition of "political views" is doing work, too. It narrows the battlefield to explicit partisanship, sidestepping how scholarship, hiring, and pedagogy actually operate: values, methods, canons, and power rarely announce themselves as party labels.

Context matters. Horowitz emerges from late-20th-century conservative activism that treated universities as the command center of liberal cultural authority. In that climate, the rhetorical win is to sound like a civil libertarian while mobilizing an audience that wants institutional confrontation. The sentence ends on an unfinished vow - "nor would I" - a gesture toward moral certainty that tries to seal the argument with character rather than mechanisms. It's persuasion by plausible deniability: promise neutrality, pursue leverage, insist the critics are the real extremists.