No, no, Horowitz is just reciting the Leftist rant that he is attacking. I think you misunderstood him.
I have read several of his books, and I appreciate his conservative qualities. And I also appreciate the bent of this article.
But in the context in the article and how he used it in his opening sentence, I don’t believe he is gratuitously using the word in a mocking way or throwing it back at them. While David Horowitz is a conservative, I believe that historically, he doesn’t have any appreciation of McCarthy and as he would likely put it, his “methods”.
There are a lot of conservatives who feel that way about McCarthy, that he ran roughshod over people, unfairly painted them, shouted them down and wouldn’t let them speak, which is how David Horowitz is rightly painting this campaign we see on campus.
In that narrow sense of how the word “McCarthyism” is used by society, David Horowitz is spot on and correct and I don’t have an issue with the meaning he intended.
I have an issue with using him as the example, which I think is exactly what he did.
However, the “McCarthyism” lie is propagated over and over again. I think is unfair, undeserved, and a shame. McCarthy was a patriot who sacrificed his office, his reputation, and eventually, his life in defense of his country from what we know now for certain was not a “Red Scare” of boogeyman communists hiding under beds, but was a serious infiltration of communists and communist sympathizers in government, particularly in the State Department.