Campus Clown

Has it really been only about a month since David Horowitz blew through the Princeton University campus for Islamo-Fiasco Awareness Week? That cross-country pity party, which drew horselaughs from left- and right-wing alike, served chiefly as a stage for Horowitz’s fantasy of himself as a charismatic firebrand who needs a phalanx of bodyguards to keep from being assaulted every time he sets foot on a college campus. As it turned out, the only people who needed protection were the unwary souls who wandered into one of his speeches and instantly suffered attacks of narcolepsy.

But it appears Horowitz made a big impression on one Princetonian: Francisco Nava, a winger student who last week concocted a story about being beaten unconscious by two assailants after receiving e-mails threatening him with all kinds of mayhem because of his conservative views.  Nava has now admitted to lying through his teeth about the whole thing, but his recantation came too late to keep high-profile winger pundits from (you must forgive the word) liberally applying egg to their own faces. Nava’s tale of terror dovetailed quite neatly with their notion that college campuses exist in a perpetual twilight where left-wing thugs terrorize any student unwise enough to be caught with an Ann Coulter poster in his dorm room. 

There is no word on how the university will respond to the uproar, but I predict a bright future for Nava as a correspondent for Horowitz’s FrontPage site. You can’t trust him any farther than you could throw him, but he’ll fit right in with the Horowitz crowd.