Sometimes You Can Smell the Scotch Coming Off the Web Page (Updated)
Dear Professor Bruce Frohnen:
I set out this morning to read your critique of my work on conservatism “The Left’s Caricature of Conservatism.” I was stopped at the outset, however, by this lengthy quotation you attribute to me at the top of your post.
Conservatism is the attempt to prevent emancipation of the lower orders. It is a creed for those with privilege and a taste for violence who see their power being threatened and are willing to do almost anything to put down calls for freedom and equality whenever they begin to make headway. If forced to exist within a mass democracy, conservatives face the constant threat of marginalized groups seeking a true voice within public space, and respond by doing whatever it takes to instill fear in those groups. Conservatives for the most part have succeeded in the United States, driving leftist unions and intellectuals underground during the red-baiting McCarthy era and undermining calls for economic justice, especially in the Reagan era, but throughout the last several decades in which they have unleashed heartless capitalism.
Initially, you claim that this statement appears in my book The Reactionary Mind, but later in your post, you claim to have read it in a transcript of an interview with me that a “friend” sent to you.
Because I couldn’t recall ever writing or saying any of this—the garbled syntax bears little resemblance to how I speak or write—I googled each of the four sentences in the quotation. Lo and behold, there is only one site on the entire internet on which I can find any of them: your post.
While I have some experience with the phenomenon of fabricated quotations, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered one quite like this. Then again, you did write it for a website called “The Imaginative Conservative.”
I trust that you will issue a correction with, if not the requisite decency or embarrassment, then at least the necessary haste.
Sincerely,
Corey Robin
Update (2:30 pm)
A few hours after my post appeared, Professor Frohnen’s post was revised to remove the various errors. The quotation marks around the alleged quotation were removed, as was the attribution to The Reactionary Mind (Error 1). And then the sentence that attributed the quotation to a transcript of an interview with me (Error 2) was substantially revised to remove any reference to any statement of mine. None of these edits was initially acknowledged. And then the following acknowledgment appeared at the bottom of the post:
Editor’s note: The opening block quotation was originally misattributed to Corey Robin. We apologize for this error, which was our mistake and not that of Mr. Frohnen, the author of this essay.
Needless to say, that’s not quite the whole story. There were two errors, not one, and while both errors were fixed, only one—the one that can easily be blamed on the editors of the website rather than Frohnen—is admitted. Despite my writing Frohnen directly, I never received any apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing from him. But this, I guess, is how imaginative conservatives roll. Their website, incidentally, is dedicated to “those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful.”
Update (3:45)
Within an hour of my posting the update above, Professor Frohnen sent me the following email:
Prof. Robin. Am traveling, but saw your email, checked website, saw the attribution. Apologies, it was added by the editors as they apparently thought it a quote, not my intention to imply such. Contacted editors. Correction and note should be posted momentarily. BPF