David Horowitz

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David Horowitz

David Horowitz is a writer and political commentator. He was born January 10, 1939 to a Jewish family in Forest Hills, New York and was prominent in the American New Left movement but today holds staunchly conservative views and is sometimes referred to as a "lapsed leftist"[1]. He is currently a writer for the conservative magazine NewsMax and his own FrontPageMag.com.

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Life and career

His parents Phil and Blanche Horowitz were schoolteachers in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, New York City and raised their son in a strict Stalinist environment. Horowitz went to Columbia University as an undergraduate, later taking a Master's degree in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Horowitz became a prominent member of the New Left movement in the United States—a break with the earlier Communist Party USA. After moving to California, Horowitz became a well-known Marxist supporter of the various leftist causes of the 1960s and 1970s. He worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and authored several books on Marxian interpretations of history, as well as serving as an editor of the radical magazine Ramparts. He also provided help to the Black Panthers and became a confidant of its leader Huey Newton.

As the years went on, however, Horowitz became very disillusioned with some of the tactics of the American Left, especially after one of his close friends, Betty Van Patter, was murdered in 1974. Horowitz attributes her murder to the Panthers; no one was charged or arrested, and the case remains unsolved. Horowitz's thinking gradually became more conservative, and today he is regarded as a leading conservative advocate. Among the key events he credits with his intellectual transformation were the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis. He has written about his transformation in an autobiography, Radical Son, and Left Illusions.

Horowitz's transition from a left-wing to a right-wing position is characteristic of so-called neoconservatives but Horowitz strongly rejects the "neoconservative" label.

Horowitz is a prominent opponent of affirmative action programs in the United States. In response to a current campaign for reparations for black slavery he once distributed an essay titled "Why reparations for slavery are a bad idea, and racist too"[2] to more than 50 college and university student newspapers. Though the essay was offered as a paid advertisement, it nonetheless sparked protests and few papers accepted it. In a series of events almost guaranteed to confirm Horowitz's take on the academic Left as inherently intolerant of opposing ideas and totalitarian in style, college newspapers which eventually agreed to carry the advert were destroyed and even burned by campus leftist groups. His "crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism on college campuses" inspired the book Uncivil Wars.

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Academic Bill of Rights

Horowitz, along with some Republican leaders, has been promoting his "Academic Bill of Rights," an eight-point manifesto that seeks to eliminate alleged political bias in university hiring and grading. Horowitz claims that liberal bias in universities amounts to indoctrination and charges that conservatives and particularly Republicans are systematically excluded from faculties. Critics, such as Stanley Fish, have argued that "academic diversity," cited in the bill, is not a legitimate academic value. Fish once wrote a book entitled There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and a Good Thing Too. [3] Other liberals claim that it is just an affirmative action program for conservatives, though Horowitz denies this, saying that the Bill is designed to prevent hiring being carried out on anything other than clear academic criteria. Similarly, Horowitz charges the campus Left as having heavily slanted courses and reading lists towards a Left-liberal interpretation of history and society, implicitly or explicitly excluding non left-of-center points of view. Studies of reading lists in the humanities tend to have born this out. Horowitz was attacked with a pie in the face by left-wing activists during a lecture given at Butler University just days after similar incidents at Western Michigan University, during a speech by Pat Buchanan, and Earlham College, during a speech given by Bill Kristol. Numerous surveys showing that there is a heavy bias towards left-liberal ideals on US university campuses have been cited as proof that Horowitz's perspective and campaign is well founded.

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Projects

In 2004 Horowitz launched Discover the Networks (DSN), a conservative watchdog project that monitors the relationships between groups and individuals on the political left in the United States. DSN researches the political activities and financial supporters of its subjects and publicizes connections between prominent liberal figures and communist, socialist, Arab terrorist and other organizations described as extremist by the group.

One of Horowitz's recurring themes is that of a western political Left in the C20th which actively or tacitly colluded with violently repressive socialist/communist regimes and yet which has so far not had to come to terms with the fact, let alone been held to account. He has coined the term 'neo-Communist' to describe the current incarnation of, he says, such inherently totalitarian Leftism still extant in the west – and in particular in academia.

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Criticism

In 2003, liberal activist Chip Berlet wrote an article for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) entitled "Into the Mainstream", which named Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) as one of an "array of right-wing foundations and think tanks support[ing] efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable," for passages pertaining to Horowitz's writings against slavery reparations and affirmative action. [4] In an open letter to SPLC president Morris Dees, Horowitz urged Dees to remove the article from the SPLC website, alleging that it was "so tendentious, so filled with transparent misrepresentations and smears that if you continue to post the report you will create for your Southern Poverty Law Center a well-earned reputation as a hate group itself." [5] Dees declined to remove the article. Since then, Horowitz's Front Page Magazine has carried a response from Berlet accusing Horowitz and the CSPC of using "inflammatory, mean-spirited, and divisive language that dismisses the idea that there are serious unresolved issues concerning racism and white supremacy in the United States," [6], a further rejoinder from Horowitz addressed to Dees, [7] and an article by Chris Arabia harshly critical of Berlet in which he claims that Berlet's work creates the "false illusion that conservatism and racism walk hand-in-hand" and "has squashed vigorous debate and discourse," including among the political left. [8]

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Books

Horowitz has written many books and pamphlets, including:

Student: The Political Activities of the Berkeley Students, (1962, this was his leftist period)
Empire and Revolution: A Radical Interpretation of Contemporary History, (1970 ISBN 0394708563)
Corporations and the Cold War, edited and with an introduction by David Horowitz (1970 ISBN 0853451605)
The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (1971 ISBN 0809001071)
"A Radical's Disenchantment," The Nation, December 8, 1979
The Art of Political War And Other Radical Pursuits
How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas
Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (1998 ISBN 0684840057), his autobiography
Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s by Peter Collier, David Horowitz ISBN 0684826410
Uncivil Wars : The Controversy Over Reparations For Slavery (2002 ISBN 1893554449)
Hating Whitey: and Other Progressive Causes ISBN 189062621X
The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future
Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (2003 ISBN 1890626511)
Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (2004 ISBN 089526076X)
The Anti-Chomsky Reader with Peter Collier (2004 ISBN 189355497X).

Together with Peter Collier he wrote several best-selling biographies of prominent American families:

The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976)
The Kennedys: An American Drama (1985)
The Fords: An American Epic (1987)
The Roosevelts: An American Saga (1994)

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Quotations

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus? - from the 1999 Salon article "Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do"

Real human flesh and blood had been sacrificed on the altar of utopian ideals. A collusive silence had followed. - Concerning Betty Van Patter's murder from Jamie Glazov's introduction to "Left Illusions"

For the sake of the poorest peasants in this Godforsaken country, I can't wait for the contras to march into this town and liberate it from these fucking Sandinistas! - In the dining room of the Intercontinental Hotel in Nicaragua, during the fall of 1987

Leftists think that nothing is bad but the Holocaust. - from a speech at Michigan State University

Leftists want to regulate everything but hard drugs and sex. - from a speech at Michigan State University

What about the debt blacks owe to America—to white America—for liberating them from slavery?- from "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too," an article in FrontPageMagazine.com, January 3, 2001.

Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution. - from the 1969 essay "Imperialism and Revolution"

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Regarding Peter Jennings' death

Horowitz responded to the August 7, 2005, death of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings with his August 8 post on the Moonbat Central weblog, titled "Peter Jennings Sympathies for the Devil," in which he wrote:

Peter Jennings is dead, may he rest in peace. Lest we forget, however, while he was alive Peter Jennings did considerable damage to the cause of civilization and human deceny [sic] by his sympathy for Jew-hating terrorists and their supporters.

Media Matters for America and Al Franken of Air America Radio criticized Horowitz for his statement.

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