We lose institutions by allowing the minnows to eat the whale
writes Legal Insurrection's
Professor Jacobson (via
Instapundit).
It happened to my alma mater, Hamilton College, which
acquired the liberal Kirkland College across the street in the late
1970s, and then allowed the leftist Kirkland faculty to take over the
school. Hamilton now is so unhinged that it would not allow The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization to locate on campus. It’s a story told at campuses across the country.
The same thing apparently has happened at Forbes, once a bastion of
free market capitalism. It acquired the far left True/Slant, and then
appointed the founder of True/Slant to a key position which has resulted
in Forbes — at least on its highly trafficked website – becoming a
vehicle to attack the right.
Robert Stacy McCain, writing at The American Spectator, has the details:
Over the weekend, professional golfer Phil Mickelson
complained about tax increases (including state income taxes in
California) that he said had pushed his marginal rate to 63 percent:
“I’ve got to make some decisions on what to do.” That incited a scolding
from Syracuse Universtiy professor Len Burman, who said Mickelson
should “stop whining” because he was so “lucky” to be one of the world’s
highest-earning athletes.
Well, just another cranky liberal academic, eh? We are not surprised
to learn that Burman served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury in the Clinton administration, nor are we surprised that Burman
founded the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institute, a liberal
think-tank. What is perhaps surprising is that Burman published his
attack on Mickelson’s “whining” at Forbes.
Forbes was once a leading advocate of free-market economic policy and
has published such famed conservative writers as P.J. O’Rourke and
Peter Brimelow. The magazine’s publisher Steve Forbes sought the
Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000 on a platform
advocating a flat tax. His father, the late Malcolm Forbes, proudly
named his private jet the “Capitalist Tool.”
Yet in recent years, the online version of Forbes has become
increasingly notorious as a hive of strident left-wing opinion. Forbes
publishes environmentalist blogger Steve Zwick, who has waged a one-man
jihad against the free-market Heartland Institute for its criticism of
climate policy. Last February, Zwick used his Forbes blog to promote a
hoax in which a fake document purported to show Heartland’s “secret
strategy.” Forbes also publishes Rick Ungar, who became notorious in
2009 for a column with the headline “Send the Body to Glenn Beck,”
blaming the talk-radio host for the alleged lynching of a Census worker
(who, as it turned out, had committed suicide).
What happened to Forbes? Two words: Lewis Dvorkin.
A former AOL executive, Dvorkin got funding from Forbes in 2009 to
start a Web site, True/Slant, that lasted a little more than a year
before it was taken over by Forbes in a deal that brought Dvorkin into
the company with the title of Chief Product Officer. (Dvorkin’s “Copy
Box” column is a lot of jargon-crowded hype about the awesomeness of the
“product”; he recently defended the concept of “sponsored content” in
the wake of last week’s debacle in which the Atlantic published an
“advertorial” for Scientology.) Dvorkin’s July 2010 deal also brought
under the Forbes online umbrella several of True/Slant’s left-wing staff
and contributors, including Zwick, Ungar and, apparently, Professor Len
Burman.
Can anyone cite an example of where a prominent liberal publication
has brought in a conservative in a leadership position and allowed the
conservative to turn the publication on its political head? I can’t
think of an example.
This is one of the reasons we lose.
