Horowitz Bak

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</div><div>=</div><div>booktv 4/19 all you need to understand world is 1st couple chaps of genesis</div><div>
</div><div>all libs are racists</div><div>
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</div><div><div>horowitz2419</div><div>
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</div><div>see main</div><div>12/17</div><div>
</div><div>capt 419</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>update</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ron-desantis-appearances-at-horowitz-events-even-worse-the-closer-you-look/</div><div>
</div><div>Knowing that Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Democrat Andrew Gillum in Florida’s gubernatorial race, attended conferences hosted by right-wing author David Horowitz is concerning—and the closer one looks, the worse it gets. Not only did DeSantis appear on stage with the unsavory characters listed in Sunday’s investigative report by The Washington Post; the same conferences also hosted the founder of a violent far-right hate group, a Canadian alt-right entrepreneur and an anti-Muslim activist who has downplayed the horrors of the Holocaust.</div><div>
</div><div>DeSantis has recently faced public criticism for using language that many perceived to contain “dog-whistles,” or language that insinuates racial animosity. August 29 on Fox News, DeSantis remarkedFlorida should not elect Gillum, who is black, despite him being “articulate,” and said of the election that he hoped his state wouldn’t “monkey this up.”</div><div>
</div><div>On September 9, The Washington Post reported that DeSantis had spoken four times at conferences in Florida and South Carolina sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, including annual Restoration Weekend conferences where “hundreds of people gather to hear right-wing provocateurs such as Stephen K. Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos and Sebastian Gorka sound off on multiculturalism, radical Islam, free speech on college campuses and other issues.” From The Washington Post:</div><div>
</div><div>Founded in 1988, the Freedom Center described its mission on a fundraising appeal: “We combat the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror.”</div><div>
</div><div>Guest speakers at its conferences over the past five years have included Republican members of Congress, former governors Rick Perry of Texas and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, young conservative activists James O’Keefe and Ben Shapiro, and right-wing European politicians Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders.</div><div>
</div><div>[…]</div><div>
</div><div>Beyond the annual ­conferences,­ Horowitz has a record of inflammatory comments on social media. He was temporarily locked out of his Twitter account last month for a post involving Islam.</div><div>
</div><div>Right Wing Watch has been keeping an eye on Horowitz for more than a decade. We remember when he condemned the Conservative Political Action Conference because he believed it had been “compromised by radical Islamic influences,” and when he suggested that Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and had decided to “marry a Jew so she can infiltrate our government.” He’s accused former President Barack Obama of wanting a “free ride” because he’s black, and claimed that the nation’s first African American president was anti-Semitic. Horowitz said that “there is no community more racist in America than the black community,” and saideverything Democrats do is “an attack on white people,” who Horowitz says should be thanked for ending slavery. The largest hate group in America, according to Horowitz, is the “anti-Trump hate group.”</div><div>
</div><div>Despite Horowitz’s lengthy history of inflammatory rhetoric and revisionist history, Restoration Weekend events have existed for years as a place where activists embedded in the fever swamps of right-wing politics go to pitch their causes in front of wealthy funders and political influencers. The event also manages to wrangle handfuls of politicians each year. In addition to the figures listed in the Washington Post report, past attendees include current Attorney General Jeff Sessions, senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, Sens. Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, and Reps. Louie Gohmert, Steve King, and Brian Mast.</div><div>
</div><div>But to best understand the nature of the Horwitz events, one should examine the speakers list and the audience members it attracts.</div><div>
</div><div>Prior guests include Andrew Torba, owner of Gab, a Twitter knock-off site that is populated with white supremacists who frequently encourage violence, who pitched his site at the 2017 conference. Others who have presented at Horowitz’s events include Dinesh D’Souza, a far-right propagandist who recently released a movie accusing liberals of being white supremacists, Gavin McInnes, the CRTV host and founder of Proud Boys, an organization recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, and Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim hatemonger who thinks that having lost her Twitter verified status is akin to being a victim of the Holocaust, and Ezra Levant, owner of the far-right Canadian outlet “The Rebel.”&nbsp; And while the Post mildly describes James O’Keefe, who also spoke at the 2016 Restoration Weekend event, as “a young conservative activist,” he actually traffics in deceptively edited videos designed to smear core constituencies of the Democrats, such as Planned Parenthood and labor unions.</div><div>
</div><div>The Washington Post article prompted Horowitz to pop into the conservative media sphere to offer his own rebuttal.</div><div>
</div><div>Yesterday, on the “Breitbart News Tonight” program hosted by SiriusXM radio, Horowitz said he knew why The Washington Post called him before their story: because he had been “slandered and defamed and libeled for decades.” Horowitz called Gillum a “corrupt, idiot leftist” that wants to make Florida a sanctuary state and to invite in “tens of thousands of criminals.” He also lamented that DeSantis received criticism for using “the word ‘monkey’ within a hundred yards of a black person.”</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz told Breitbart that he had been a “fighter for civil rights” his whole life, and went on to describe liberals as “anti-white and racist.”</div><div>
</div><div>“They use this term, ‘white skin privilege,’ which takes away the efforts and achievements of whites and teaches black kids that the system is rigged against them, that people—that they succeed through privilege,” Horowitz said, adding his contention that black students who are accepted into college despite scoring lower than the “whites and the Asians that get in” actually experience “black skin privilege.”</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/ron-desantis-david-horowitz-race-war</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Sunday, the Washington Post detailed Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ron DeSantis' ties to an extremist group founded by far-right activist David Horowitz.</div><div>
</div><div>According to the Post, DeSantis was a speaker in at least four "Restoration Weekend" conferences hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) in 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2017 in Palm Beach, Florida, and Charleston, South Carolina.</div><div>
</div><div>At the 2015 engagement in Charleston, DeSantis said, "I just want to say what an honor it’s been to be here to speak ... David has done such great work and I’ve been an admirer. I’ve been to these conferences in the past but I’ve been a big admirer of an organization that shoots straight, tells the American people the truth and is standing up for the right thing."</div><div>
</div><div>At the DHFC events, DeSantis appeared alongside such figures as Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart writer who called feminism "cancer" and defended statutory rape; James Damore, the author of the "Google memo" that called women genetically inferior at computing jobs; and Charlie Kirk, the president of Turning Point USA, a far-right youth group that is engineering takeovers of student elections on college campuses.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz himself, once a prominent member of the New Left movement in the 1960s, has gone on to preach an ideology of hate against immigrants, Muslims, and people of color. He has said the Palestinian people are Nazis, compared Black Lives Matter to the KKK and al-Qaeda, claimed former President Barack Obama was "inviting the terrorists to behead more Americans," said that blacks "would still be slaves" if not for "the sacrifices of white soldiers," and argued that the "real race war" in America is against white people.</div><div>
</div><div>According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Horowitz has also used his online periodical, FrontPage Mag, to promote material from American Renaissance, a white supremacist publication, arguing that its founder Jared Taylor is "no more racist ... than Jesse Jackson and the NAACP."</div><div>
</div><div>DeSantis, a devoted supporter of President Donald Trump, has spent the last few weeks facing controversy for his statement that Florida should not "monkey this up" by electing Andrew Gillum, his Democratic opponent and the first African-American major party nominee for governor of Florida. He was also discovered to be the administrator of a racist Facebook group, which he claims he was added to without his knowledge.</div><div>
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</div><div></div><div>https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/08/13/alec-in-disarray</div><div>
</div><div>It&nbsp; took about 10 minutes for a picture of Ronald Reagan to emerge on the screen at the opening ALEC lunch event I attended after my arrival in New Orleans for the 45th ALEC conference. I never did see a picture of President Donald Trump. As the hot mess of the Trump presidency unfolds, ALEC is struggling to both embrace the major things they love about him (deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy), while keeping a healthy distance from the chaos and corruption engulfing his presidency.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump certainly wasn’t ALEC’s first choice. Or second. Or third. During his campaign, Trump never came to kiss the golden ALEC ring, like ALEC acolytes Scott Walker and Mike Pence. As corruption charges continued to emerge against prominent Republicans, and the trial of Paul Manafort waged on, I didn’t hear one attendee legislator extoll the virtues of a Trump presidency. In fact, I heard almost nothing about Trump at all from the actual attendees. But the speakers and presenters were more representative of the Trump administration than last year.</div><div>
</div><div>Elaine Chow, the Secretary of Transportation came in and tried to give a speech but the ballroom lunch, sponsored by Marathon Petroleum, was so loud you could barely hear her. She did extoll the need to repeal California’s ability to set fuel emissions standards in favor of a weaker federal standard. Former Texas Policy Institute director Brooke Rollins, now a key Trump advisor, was next. She repeated the oft cited metaphor of Trump “draining the swamp” with the islands that emerge being the states, the “great laboratories of innovation.” Except Elaine Chow had just moments before argued to repeal a state’s right to set fuel emission standards.</div><div>
</div><div>And this revealed a major, continuing tension of ALEC. They want state’s rights, except when they don’t. The same contradiction is evident with their struggle with local control–sometimes they like it, sometimes they don’t. The defining factor is whether these levels of government promote the far-right ALEC agenda. It is getting harder and harder for ALEC to ignore these internal contradictions.</div><div>
</div><div>And there are visible cracks in ALEC world. Collectively, this was the messiest and least disciplined ALEC conference I have attended since 2013. In the energy task force, presentations were all over the place. A natural gas and electricity supplier went off script by openly discussing the billions in subsidies the oil and gas industry receives. There was silence in the crowded task force room, filled with fossil fuel producers and lobbyists.</div><div>
</div><div>Though some continued to insist that clean coal was possible and renewables unreliable and expensive, new ALEC members from renewable energy companies gave a compelling pitch about the declining price and high demand in the private market for wind and solar, especially in red, rural communities. After one of the renewable energy presenters mentioned that the wind energy sector was working with Congress to phase out subsidies (not something we would ever see from the fossil fuel industries), a skeptical executive asked if they would help get rid of states’ Renewable Portfolio Standards. The renewable energy guys had the perfect answer–it was up to the states. Remember, the laboratories of democracy? ALEC’s hostility to renewable energy and other green energy policies prompted infighting between industries and high-level departures, most recently by ALEC funder and board member ExxonMobil.</div><div>
</div><div>In the Health and Human Services task force, the Goldwater Institute and Buckeye Foundation were in a tizzy because the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was still in existence and the left seemed to win that war, at least for now. How could it be, they moaned, when Republicans are in charge of EVERYTHING? They whined that the “debacle of last year was horrible” and that Congress wouldn’t touch another repeal with a 10-foot poll. So, 100 conservative groups came together to propose an alternative plan that guts the ACA, again. But the list was messy and confusing, and even the presenters seemed doubtful their plan would ever succeed.</div><div>
</div><div>But the biggest disaster I have ever seen at an ALEC conference was on a panel about the Convention of States (COS) project. COS is mobilizing in states to call an Article V Constitutional Convention for the purposes of amending the federal constitution by passing a balanced budget amendment, term-limits for federal judges, and who knows what else. One of the key speakers was right-wing provocateur David Horowitz, who has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of America’s most dangerous hatemongers” for his virulent anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant websites and speeches. After converting from being a Marxist decades ago, Horowitz now runs his own right-wing think tank, bankrolled to the tune of $3.4 million by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. Horowitz gained recent fame as a key mentor of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, the “the architect” of Trump’s family separation policy according to the Atlantic.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz gave two inflammatory speeches. Over breakfast he claimed that “at the K-12 level, school curricula have been turned over to racist organizations like Black Lives Matter and terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood.” Later he commended Trump for not retreating after calling Rosie O’Donnell a “big fat pig.” Regarding Trump, Horowitz commented “so this guy showed what you can do if you have confidence and you are always on the offensive, which he always is.”</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz’s other allegation is that “the left’s attitude towards the Constitution is they hate it.”</div><div>
</div><div>As justification that Democrats hate the Constitution Horowitz stated:</div><div>
</div><div>You know, one of the really vicious things about the left is how they attack the founding principles of this country. I’ve heard this from Democratic leaders, I remember Al Gore saying it, they say it all the time, that the Constitution is, you know, designed by slaveowners and it regards blacks as three-fifths of a human being. Well actually the word black, white, male, female those words do not exist in the Constitution. The whole identity politics is anti-Constitution.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz’s beef is that the South wanted to treat slaves as full human beings for population purposes so they would “count” towards congressional representation. The North, however, insisted on curtailing a more powerful South by counting slaves as three-fifths of a human. Of course, Horowitz ignores the fundamental fact that slavery was a barbaric Southern system, initially tolerated by the North and protected by the founding fathers in the U.S. Constitution who prioritized preserving the nation over treating people of color like human beings.</div><div>
</div><div>I have sat through many ALEC conferences. At times I have wanted to scream, tear my hair out, stomp away, or run away. I don’t hide who I am, but I don’t announce it with a megaphone. I am quiet. I am respectful. I am there to observe. I am there to plan the resistance to the harmful ALEC agenda that has swept, and continues to sweep, into my state and our country and erode our democracy. But at this moment, I couldn’t write about it, tweet about it, Facebook about it, and then sit there in it. I rose to the microphone and waited my turn. To my objection to the “big fat pig” comment, Horowitz replied “She is a big fat pig.” To my objection to Horowitz commending the South for wanting to treat slaves as full humans while perpetuating the barbaric institution of slavery, I was told by the panel moderator and COS director I had simply “misunderstood.”</div><div>
</div><div>ALEC is moving into dangerous territory. Despite the formidable infrastructure they have built over 45 years, their control of 33 state legislatures and their hordes of corporate cash that perpetually grease their wheels, the organization seems to be increasingly in disarray and in an identity crisis. While simultaneously distancing themselves from the chaos and corruption of President Trump, the reality is that they need him, and his hate-mongering, to further the foundation of their right-wing agenda–gutting the ACA and federal conservation standards, repealing workers’ rights, pushing down wages and privatizing public education.</div><div>
</div><div>And so the Horowitz’s of the world, who ALEC at least publicly has kept at a distance during my tenure, are now becoming part of the ALEC universe. Are ALEC supporters, including their corporate funders, willing to embrace this hate-mongering to continue to advance their corporate agenda?</div><div>
</div><div>Read more on ALEC’s agenda in NOLA and the bills being debated, here.</div><div>
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</div><div></div><div>https://www.billwhittle.com/speaking/david-horowitz-freedom-center-palm-beach-fl</div><div>
</div><div>video also front page</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.billwhittle.com/content/about-bill</div><div>
</div><div>man from uncle logo?</div><div>
</div><div>Whittle is an American conservative blogger, political commentator, director, screenwriter, editor, pilot, author and the voice of The Common Sense Resistance.&nbsp; He is best known for his YouTube videos, one of which, "Three and a Half Days", has been viewed more than 2.5 million times. He is currently the host of Firewall, and co-hosts Right Angle with Stephen Green and Scott Ott. Bill's latest video series "We The People V2.0"&nbsp; made for young adults in cooperation with Turning Point USA. In addition, Whittle has interviewed a number of political personalities as a PJTV.com commentator.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>He is a former National Review Online contributor and has been a guest on the Fox News Channel, The Dennis Miller Show, Sun TV, and national radio programs. His first book, Silent America: Essays from a Democracy at War, was published in 2004. Since 2009, Whittle has been a featured speaker at numerous universities, Republican, Tea Party, and high school events throughout the United States. Bill is a Fellow of The David Horowitz Freedom Center, and he contributes daily commentary for NRATV.&nbsp; His new daily talk show, Bill Whittle Live, premieres in January of 2017.</div><div>
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</div><div></div><div>looks like nat ass picked up the tab? brandon robotically read intro? no idea who he is?</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.tv/2018/06/22/david-horowitz-at-uc-santa-cruz/</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>he refs 10 yrs ago:</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/zz/20080529/NEWS/805299882</div><div>
</div><div>Conservative David Horowitz relishes jeers from UC Santa Cruz students</div><div>By Kurtis Alexander - Sentinel Staff Writer</div><div>POSTED: 05/29/08, 12:01 AM PDT |0 COMMENTS</div><div>Before David Horowitz stepped into the lecture hall to face a wary crowd of UC Santa Cruz students this week, he was seeking assurances from university officials that campus police would have his back.</div><div>
</div><div>Such is life for a former liberal turned right-wing pundit who travels from campus to campus insulting nontraditional curriculum and chastising what he sees as a liberal bias at public universities.</div><div>
</div><div>His Web site named UC Santa Cruz the biggest culprit last year.</div><div>
</div><div>So Tuesday night, amid a skeptical student body, dozens of demonstrators and talk of a faculty/student protest on the other side of campus, Horowitz spent a good chunk of his hour-and-a-half presentation at the Jack Baskin Auditorium on the defensive.</div><div>
</div><div>"What you're witnessing here is a witch hunt, and I'm the witch," he told the standing-room-only crowd of about 200.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz, who often shrugged and sighed as he does on cable news stations, stood by his central platform -- that universities need a balance of political thinking -- and cast himself as the outsider willing to expose this unpopular truth.</div><div>
</div><div>But as reasonable as his points may have been, his jabs at some of the university's most cherished thinkers -- feminists, Marxists, Muslims -- seemed to alienate many in attendance and ultimately undercut the efficacy of his message.</div><div>
</div><div>"He was just ranting," said junior Maeghan Tanner.</div><div>
</div><div>Others, though, were shaken by Horowitz's statements. A handful of demonstrators banged on windows and held signs that read "Racist" and "Kill Whitey," references to his positions against affirmative action and reparations for slavery. Two audience members got in verbal spats with Horowitz and were shown the door by police.</div><div>
</div><div>The reactions seemed to only embolden the pundit.</div><div>
</div><div>"You people are being robbed of your education dollar," he said. "You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half the story."</div><div>
</div><div>His statements follow the argument of his well-known September 2007 article that called UCSC's curriculum "anything but academic" and the college "beyond any doubt the most radical university in the United States." In the article, Horowitz claimed popular professors like Angela Davis and Paul Ortiz spoon-feed students a liberal agenda, preventing students from seeing the bigger picture.</div><div>
</div><div>Across campus on Tuesday night, community studies professor Ortiz was holding a "teach-in" with about 75 others to counter the presence of the conservative.</div><div>
</div><div>"I would love to have the opportunity to debate him," said Ortiz on Wednesday. "But I don't think he's really interested in a debate ... it's more about entertainment and provoking people."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz, like many at the Baskin theater, took issue with how well Horowitz really knows UC Santa Cruz and whether his claims of bias on campus are legitimately researched.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz acknowledged that he'd only interviewed four or five students for last year's story about the university and that his methods were not those of U.S. News and World Report. He also said his observations of bias only apply to UC Santa Cruz's liberal arts programs, not its science and engineering divisions.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz appeared to win a few people over with these concessions. And similarly, the larger-than-life figure, by the end of the night, seemed impressed by the attention he was given by students.</div><div>
</div><div>"You've been a good audience," he said more than once.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz, who recently wrote the best-selling "Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9/11," has not always been a leading figure on the right.</div><div>
</div><div>Raised by parents who were card-carrying Communists, his early political life involved the 1960s anti-war movement and fundraising for the Black Panthers. These actions, he told the audience, he now, at 69, regrets.</div><div>
</div><div>"And," he said, "I was never as stupidly left as your professors."</div><div>
</div><div>Contact Kurtis Alexander at 706-3267 or kalexander@santacruzsentinel.com.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/11/17/steve-bannon-to-receive-courage-award-at-david-horowitzs-restoration-weekend/</div><div>
</div><div>Executive Chairman of Breitbart News and former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon is being honored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center at its annual Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, FL, as a recipient of the Annie Taylor award.</div><div>The award, which will be handed out on Friday during the evening festivities, is named for Annie Edson Taylor, who was 63 when she became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. The honor is given to those who display great courage.</div><div>
</div><div>“The ideology of the progressive left and its Democratic Party is the antithesis of America’s constitutional system based on individual rights, individual accountability, and individual freedom,” Horowitz said. “This is an irreconcilable conflict. A nation cannot exist half collectivist and globalist, and half individualist and free.”</div><div>
</div><div>“In short, Steve Bannon’s war is a war for our country,” Horowitz said. “It is about patriotism — which Steve likes to call nationalism — and its enemies. It is about us. God bless him.”</div><div>
</div><div>Past award winners include radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, Sheriff David Clark, and activist Phyllis Schlafly.</div><div>
</div><div>On Friday, Bannon will also deliver remarks during a segment entitled, “Trump: The President at War.” David Horowitz will be introducing him.</div><div>
</div><div>Other scheduled speakers include Jesse Watters, author Mark Steyn, author and commentator Anne Coulter, former advisor to President Donald Trump and now with the MAGA Coalition Sebastian Gorka, Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), James Damore (the engineer fired from Google) and radio talk show host Tammy Bruce.</div><div>
</div><div>Read More Stories About:</div><div>Big Government, Annie Taylor award, David Horowitz, David Horowitz Freedom Center, Restoration Weekend, Steve Bannon</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>apr 2015 wa Ex (hmmn)</div><div>
</div><div>Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has resigned as editor-in-chief of TruthRevolt, a non-profit news website site that he co-founded just two years ago.</div><div>
</div><div>Shapiro's departure from the young media group, which he launched in 2013 along with David Horowitz of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, comes amid the group's decision to let go of many of its writers — and as Horowitz is hitting back against widespread rumors that the site is sinking.... Although Shapiro's name is prominently displayed on the website's homepage, it is nevertheless a "project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center." Horowitz himself owns the site.</div><div>
</div><div>"I am no longer associated with [TruthRevolt] and it's a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, fully owned and operated by them," Shapiro told the Washington Examiner's media desk when asked about the future of the website. "What David Horowitz chooses to do with the site after my resignation is out of my purview."</div><div>
</div><div>Shapiro told the Examiner that he formally resigned last week, but held off announcing it until he and others involved had time to work out his exit.</div><div>
</div><div>He said that he's focused right now on an upcoming project for the 2016 presidential election, adding that his exit from TruthRevolt has freed him from the restrictions of the group's non-profit status.</div><div>
</div><div>"There's only so much that you can do with a 501(c)(3)," he said.</div><div>
</div><div>Since January, at least 10 writers have been cut loose, Shapiro told the Examiner.</div><div>
</div><div>Soon-to-be-former TruthRevolt writers, some of whom found out just last week that they would no longer be writing for the site, told the Examinerthat they were shocked when they were told via emails written by former executive editor Jeremy Boreing that they had been let go.</div><div>
</div><div>"One day, I was just sitting around and I opened up my email," one outgoing writer said. "I have no idea if they're just getting rid of me because I'm disagreeable or because they actually are funding something. Beats the heck out of me. I haven't got a guess. I have zero idea."</div><div>
</div><div>There also appears to be confusion over the website's future.</div><div>
</div><div>Boreing seemingly suggested in several notes to his staff that the website would be shuttered on May 1, according to emails obtained by the Examiner.</div><div>
</div><div>"Writing with bad news. Effective May 1, TruthRevolt will no longer be a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. They've decided to pull the plug," read one such email written by Boreing.</div><div>
</div><div>The note to staff continued, explaining that "[Ben Shapiro] and I are trying to buy the site, and if we do we may circle back with you and try to sign you back on, but for now, please consider this official notice that May 1 will be the last day."</div><div>
</div><div>A separate email written by the former executive editor read, "May 1 is the official end of business."</div><div>
</div><div>Boreing told the Examiner Thursday that he is no longer associated with TruthRevolt or the David Horowitz Freedom Center</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz maintained in a conversation with the Examiner that there are no plans to "pull the plug" on the site, that TruthRevolt will continue to produce new content and that all claims to the contrary are simply false.</div><div>
</div><div>"We certainly have no plans to close the site down. None. And we haven't pulled any plugs," he said. "Some people have been let go. But we're not letting the site go."</div><div>
</div><div>He added, "We're keeping some people on and I expect it to be a really, really good continuation at TruthRevolt."</div><div>
</div><div>Asked whether the site would continue to run even after losing its editor-in-chief and many of its writers, Shapiro repeated that he no longer has anything to do with the website and that it's all up to Horowitz.</div><div>
</div><div>Launched in 2013, TruthRevolt was intended to act as a conservative counterargument to David Brock's left-wing, pro-Clinton Media Matters for America.</div><div>
</div><div>The site's stated goal is to "unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases."</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>MMA 2013</div><div>
</div><div>Conservatives have launched TruthRevolt, a website which aims to "unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases." The history of two main TruthRevolt figures, Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz, suggests the site won't prioritize accuracy or refrain from smears.</div><div>
</div><div>David Horowitz Launches TruthRevolt As The "Anti-Media Matters"</div><div>TruthRevolt Wants To "Unmask Leftists In The Media For Who They Are, Destroy Their Credibility With The American Public, And Devastate Their Funding Bases." From the mission statement posted on its website:</div><div>
</div><div>The media win elections for the left. It's not the left's competence in office; leftists have demonstrated none. It's not the left's ideas; leftist ideas have failed everywhere they have been tried. The left wins for one simple reason: leftists control the information distribution system in the United States. And they use that system to pillory conservatives heartless bigots intent on harming the poor and targeting minorities.</div><div>
</div><div>The media must be destroyed where they stand. That is our mission at Truth Revolt. The goal of TruthRevolt is simple: unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases.</div><div>
</div><div>TruthRevolt focuses on high-profile media members, and holding them accountable. But TruthRevolt does not stop there. TruthRevolt understands that all politics is local, and therefore looks to fight leftist propaganda at the local level, monitoring local newspapers, television and radio. TruthRevolt also seeks to stop the left dead in its tracks when it comes to training the next generation, our college campuses.</div><div>
</div><div>TruthRevolt works to make advertisers and funders aware of the leftist propaganda they sponsor - and bringing social consequences to bear to create pressure on such advertisers and funders. [TruthRevolt.org, accessed 10/7/13]</div><div>
</div><div>TruthRevolt Bills Itself As The "Anti-Media Matters." From an article about an interview with TruthRevolt editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro:</div><div>
</div><div>Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 with Breitbart News Executive Chairman and host Stephen K. Bannon, Shapiro said those who "bankroll" and enable the mainstream media to lie and "push their agenda" must "be made aware that the American public is not going to stand for this bullshit."</div><div>
</div><div>He simply said there has to be a "price to pay for that."</div><div>
</div><div>Shapiro said TruthRevolt will be billed as the "anti-Media Matters." He emphasized that Media Matters has tried to destroy the careers of conservatives who are truth-tellers and TruthRevolt will "turn that around and go after the liars of the left-wing" and the mainstream media. [Breitbart.com, 10/7/13]</div><div>
</div><div>TruthRevolt Is A Project Of The David Horowitz Freedom Center. From a post on the David Horowitz Freedom Center website:</div><div>
</div><div>Today, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is launching TruthRevolt, a much-needed campaign to expose the hypocrisies and mendacities of the leftwing media. A brainchild of Ben Shapiro, TruthRevolt is a groundbreaking initiative to engage in investigative journalism about the leftwing media figures who produce radical ideology masquerading as "news" and feed it to the American public as objective journalism.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>TruthRevolt differs from other organizations in its action orientation. It is determined not only to confront the leftwing media, but also to impact their profits. By enlisting thousands of conservatives to aggressively call on these media sponsors of leftwing propaganda to cease their sponsorship of destructive views and radicalized demagogues, TruthRevolt will put pressure on the advertisers who support such programming to pull their sponsorship.</div><div>
</div><div>"The far left site Media Matters,&nbsp; run by self-confessed liar David Brock, has achieved enormous success by using the power of astroturfed boycotts and campaigns against conservative media figures, targeting their funders and advertisers," commented Freedom Center Chairman David Horowitz. "TruthRevolt will fight fire with fire, working to make advertisers and funders aware of the malicious propaganda they sponsor and create." [HorowitzFreedomCenter.org, accessed 10/7/13]</div><div>
</div><div>Ben Shapiro, TruthRevolt's Editor-in-Chief</div><div>Shapiro Credulously Reported That Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel Received Money From Non-Existent "Friends Of Hamas." Citing "Senate sources," Shapiro claimed that then-nominee for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel may have received money from a group called "Friends of Hamas." It was later revealed that "Friends of Hamas" does not exist. [Media Matters, 3/3/13; Daily Beast, 10/7/13]</div><div>
</div><div>Shapiro: "Of Course Hitler Was A Left-Winger." [Premiere Radio, The Sean Hannity Show, 3/7/13, via Media Matters]</div><div>
</div><div>Shapiro: "Arabs Like To Bomb Crap And Live In Open Sewage." Shapiro tweeted about the Israeli and Palestinian conflict: "Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock." [Twitter, 9/27/10, via Media Matters]</div><div>
</div><div>Shapiro: Obama Administration Is "Openly Anti-Semitic" And Rahm Emanuel "Is A Kapo." Shapiro claimed in a syndicated column that the Obama administration was "openly anti-Semitic" and called Rahm Emanuel, then-White House chief of staff, a "kapo," a term that refers to Nazi concentration camp prisoners who aided the Nazis. [Media Matters, 4/28/10]</div><div>
</div><div>Shapiro: Obama Was "An Ideological Muslim" And Hillary Clinton Was "An Ideological Lesbian." In a post on Breitbart.com, Shapiro claimed that Obama was not an actual Muslim but "an ideological Muslim in the same way Hillary Clinton was an ideological lesbian in her college days." [Breitbart.com, 9/21/11, via Media Matters]</div><div>
</div><div>David Horowitz, Freedom Center Chairman</div><div>Horowitz Claimed There Was A Muslim Brotherhood "Infiltrat[or]" At CPAC. At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, Horowitz attacked conservative activists Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist, claiming that Khan, with Norquist's aid, "infiltrat[ed]" CPAC, the Bush White House and the conservative movement on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. [David Horowitz's CPAC speech, 2/12/11, via Media Matters]</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz: It's A "Fact" That Clinton Aide Huma Abedin Is Connected To "Nazi Organization" Muslim Brotherhood. The allegation that Abedin is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood has been disproven and also condemned by both Republican and Democratic leaders. [Fox News, America Live, 9/19/12, via Media Matters; Media Matters, 7/31/12]</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz Claims He's Proven "That There Are Only A Couple Of Degrees Of Separation Between Anybody On The Left And The Terrorists." [The Washington Times, 3/24/05, via Media Matters]</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz: "Blacks Are The Human Shields Of The Democratic Party." Horowitz called former President Jimmy Carter an "anti-Semite" and said "blacks are the human shields of the Democratic Party." [Fox News, Glenn Beck, 9/16/09, via Media Matters]</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz: Professors "Are Recruiting For Radical Parties, Terrorist Supporting Parties, No Question." Horowitz claimed that university professors are "recruiting for radical parties, terrorist supporting parties, no question." [Fox News, Hannity, 9/03/10, via Media Matters]</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz's Book The New Leviathan Was Filled With Numerous Errors, Distortions, And Falsehoods. [Media Matters, 6/11/12]</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz's Book The Shadow Party Featured Doctored Quotes And Factual Errors. [Media Matters, 8/2/06]</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.c-span.org/video/?436716-1/the-black-book-american-left</div><div>
</div><div>11/2017</div><div>The Black Book of the American Left David Horowitz talked about his book The Black Book of the American Left, in which he examines the left’s impact on America’s universities and colleges.</div><div>
</div><div>intro:</div><div>GOOD EVENING. IT SHOULD HARDLY COME AS A SURPRISE TO ANYONE IN THIS ROOM THAT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES HAVE BECOME FLASH POINTS FOR THE MOST HEATED CULTURE WAR CONFLICTS OF THE DAY. UNIVERSITIES ARE NOW BESIDES A FAR LEFT-WING INDOCTRINATION.ANARCHIC VIOLENCE AGAINST STUDENTS ADMINISTRATORS LITERALLY UNDER SIEGE FROM RADICALIZED MINORITY STUDENTS DEMANDING SOCIAL JUSTICE PAYBACK PAYBACK, STUDENTS WAILING ABOUT THE RETREATING INTO SEGREGATED SPACES. OUR FORMER INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER LEARNING HAVE DEGENERATED INTO CIRCUSES OF MILITANT IRRATIONALITY AND RADICALISM. HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION YOU CAN DO NO BETTER THAN TO READ DAVID HOROWITZ BOOK TO LEFT IN UNIVERSITY VOLUME EIGHT IN THE LATEST EDITION TO A SERIES OF COLLECTIVE DESK WITH THE CONSERVATIVE WRITINGS INCLUDING "THE BLACK BOOK OF THE AMERICAN LEFT" INCLUDING ESSAYS FROM 1993 TO 2010 AND ADDRESSES WHAT DAVID HOROWITZ DESCRIBED AS ONE OF THE UNDERAPPRECIATED TRAGEDIES OF OUR TIME THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LEFT TO SUPPORT THE CURRICULA OF COLLEGIATE INSTITUTIONS AND TRANSFORM ENTIRE SCHOOLS AND DEPARTMENTS INTO DOCTRINAL TRAINING CENTERS FOR SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CAUSES FOR THIS CAMPAIGN ARGUABLY HAS DONE MORE TO STEER AMERICA TOWARDS THE LEFT THE LEFT GOAL OF THE FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THIS COUNTRY THAN ANY OTHER STRATEGY AND CULTURAL MARXISM.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;IF THE "CHRONICLE" SAID CAMPAIGNER FOR NEXT QUARTER CENTURY AND GAVE OF DAVID'S EFFORTS TO BRING POLITICAL NEUTRALITY AND INTELLECTUAL INTEGRITY TO COLLEGE CLASSROOMS. YOU PARTY NOW DAVID HOROWITZ IS THE AUTHOR OF TOO MANY BOOKS AND ARTICLES TO NAME ALL OF THEM ESSENTIAL READING FOR UNDERSTANDING THE RADICAL LEFT AND WAGING WAR AGAINST IT BUT AMONG THE MINOR TIMES BESTSELLERS RADICAL SON UNHOLY ALLIANCE AND MOST RECENTLY BIG AGENDA PRESIDENT TRUMP'S PLAN TO SAVE AMERICA.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>IF YOU HAVE HEARD ME INTRODUCE DAVID BEFORE YOU'VE NO DOUBT HEARD THE CALL AND THE LEFT MOST HATED APOSTATE BECAUSE HE KNOWS THEM BETTER THAN THEY KNOW THEMSELVES AND THAT MAKES HIM AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO THEM AND INVALUABLE TO US. PLEASE WELCOME THE AUTHOR OF THE LEFT AND THE UNIVERSITY AND THE FOUNDER OF THE FREEDOM CENTER, DAVID HOROWITZ. [APPLAUSE]</div><div>...</div><div>[protest vid]</div><div>...THAT WAS SEVEN MINUTES INTO MY TALK AND DIED SAID AT THE OUTSET OF THE TALK WHEN I WAS A RADICAL AT HER GLEE AND COLUMBIA IN THE 60s I ALWAYS WANTED TO HEAR WHAT THE OTHER SIDE HAD TO SAY BECAUSE I FELT THAT WOULD MAKE ME A BETTER RADICAL. I WOULD HAVE AN ARGUMENT. THOSE DAYS ARE GONE. THE GREATEST AMERICAN TRAGEDY OF MY LIFETIME IS THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM BY PROGRESSIVES AND ITS CONVERSION INTO AN INDOCTRINATION AND THE RECRUITMENT CENTER FOR THIS THEOLOGICAL LEFT.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>THIS BOOK THAT I'VE WRITTEN, THE LEFT IN UNIVERSITY IS THE FIFTH BOOK THAT I HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY. THE PROBLEM WHICH HAS BEEN 50 YEARS IN THE MAKING AND IT HAS A SPECIAL INTEREST BECAUSE IT'S REALLY DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR FRONT. WHAT I WROTE ENGAGING IN A BATTLE TO RESTORE ACADEMIC FREEDOM TO THE UNIVERSITY, TO RESTORE THE MODERN RESEARCH UNIVERSITY TO BASICALLY OUR LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES IN THE PRINCIPLES OF IT. I BASE MY CAMPAIGN WHICH WAS FOR AN ACADEMIC GOAL OF RIGHTS FOR STUDENTS ON THE VERY FAMOUS ACADEMIC FREEDOM STATEMENT OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS WHICH THESE DAYS IS RUN BY STALINISTS WHO ARE NOT HAPPY WITH MY PROPOSALS.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>I TOOK THEIR 19 TEEN STATEMENT WHICH WAS REALLY THE STATEMENT THAT CREATED THE MODERN RESEARCH UNIVERSITY BASING IT ON SCIENTIFIC PENCILS AND SCIENTIFIC PROCEDURES. THAT IS YOU HAVE A HYPOTHESIS AND YOU TRY TO TEST IT BY EVIDENCE AND OF COURSE IN A LIBERAL ARTS FIELD HUMANITY, SOCIOLOGY POLITICAL SCIENCE THERE IS NO WAY IT'S CONDUCTING THE KIND OF EXPERIMENTS THE SCIENTISTS ACTUALLY DO SO EVERY AND ISSUE IS CONTROVERSIAL 1915 STATEMENT SAID IT'S NOT THE PLACE OF A FACULTY MEMBER IN A DEMOCRACY TO INDOCTRINATE HIS OR HER STUDENTS BUT TO PRESENT THEM WITH DIVERGENT OPINIONS IN A FAIR-MINDED WAY BECAUSE THE TASK THE TEACHER AND THE DEMOCRACY IS TO TEACH STUDENTS HOW TO THINK NOT TELL THEM WHAT TO THINK. WHAT HAS ACTUALLY HAPPENED OVER THE LAST SIX YEARS IS THAT THE POLITICAL LEFT AND I SUSPECT A LOT OF MY GENERATION OF RADICALS STAYED IN THE UNIVERSITIES AND PURSUED ACADEMICS TO AVOID THE DRAFT, TO AVOID FIGHTING COMMUNISM WHICH THEY SYMPATHIZE WITH. ..</div><div>
</div><div>See all on BOOK TV COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES LIBERALS One-Party Classroom</div><div>APRIL 1, 2009</div><div>One-Party Classroom</div><div>David Horowitz talked about the book he wrote with Jacob Laksin, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top…</div><div>
</div><div>Big Agenda</div><div>FEBRUARY 16, 2017</div><div>Big Agenda</div><div>David Horowitz talked about his book Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America, in which he outlines the…</div><div>
</div><div>Progressive Racism</div><div>MAY 13, 2016</div><div>Progressive Racism</div><div>David Horowitz talked about his book, Progressive Racism, about the left’s impact on racism in America.</div><div>
</div><div>The New Leviathan</div><div>JUNE 22, 2012</div><div>The New Leviathan</div><div>David Horowitz argues that the Left has used their finances to promote a progressive agenda that has transformed the…</div><div></div><div>Series: Black Book of the American Left (Book 8)</div><div>Hardcover: 256 pages</div><div>Publisher: Second Thoughts Books (October 2, 2017)</div><div></div><div>http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267983/left-university-david-horowitz</div><div>
</div><div>Below is David Horowitz's introduction to his new book, The Left in the University, which is volume 8 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of David Horowitz's conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com – which features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-8 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.</div><div>
</div><div>The eighth volume of the series of my writings called The Black Book of the American Left is about one of the underappreciated tragedies of our times: the successful campaign of the left to subvert the curricula of collegiate institutions and transform entire academic departments and schools—including Schools of Education—into doctrinal training centers for their social and political causes. This transformation of the educational system in turn has underpinned the steady dismantling of America’s social contract, which has been the ongoing project of the left since the 1960s.</div><div>
</div><div>This is actually the sixth book I have written on the subject of the transformation and its destructive consequences.</div><div>
</div><div>In addition to whatever analytic contributions are made in these pages, they provide a compendium of anecdotal evidence about the manner in which progressive activists have taken control of liberal arts curricula and reverted them to their 19th-century origins as instruments of religious indoctrination. The new doctrines differ from their 19th-century predecessors in that they are political and secular, having been shaped by Marxism and its derivatives. These “progressive” doctrines, however, share with traditional religions the same impulse to redeem a fallen world and to suppress what they regard as hostile—therefore heretical—ideas in the name of human progress.</div><div>
</div><div>One can measure the current corruption of the academic profession through a summary observation about the views of academic historians that was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Historical Society. The summary appears in an article written by Jennifer Delton, a tenured history professor at Skidmore College—a top-tier liberal arts school. It describes a purported orthodoxy in historians’ views of Cold War anti-communism.</div><div>
</div><div>According to Delton, this historical consensus regards Cold War anti-communism as an irrational phenomenon and a species of political persecution. [// bernstein ~ mcclean]Equally as striking as this problematic characterization is Delton’s assumption that an orthodoxy about so controversial an issue can and should be a normal condition of academic scholarship. Here are her words: “However fiercely historians disagree about the merits of American communism [sic!], they almost universally agree that the post-World War II red scare signaled a rightward turn in American politics.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The consensus is that an exaggerated, irrational fear of communism, bolstered by a few spectacular spy cases, created an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria that was exploited and fanned by conservative opportunists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. . . . We may add detail and nuance to this story, but this, basically, is what we tell our students about post-World II anti-communism, also known as McCarthyism.” (emphasis added)</div><div>
</div><div>In other words, it is the professional opinion of this tenured professor, the editors of the Journal of the Historical Society and, apparently, academic historians generally that concern about a domestic communist threat during the Cold War was equivalent to “McCarthyism”—a witch-hunting mania about imaginary demons.4&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>This, according to Delton, is what academic historians “tell our students,” and not as mere opinion but as a historical consensus, and thus an academic fact. This consensus exists, apparently, in the face of easily established, indisputable facts that refute it: the fact that McCarthy was censured by an anti-communist Senate, including senators who sat on his committee; the fact that he was opposed by an anti-communist president, Dwight Eisenhower, and by anti-communist liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote one of the seminal anti-communist books of the period, The Vital Center; or the proven fact that the federal government had been penetrated by communist agents at the time, and at the highest levels.</div><div>
</div><div>It goes without saying that no conservative scholar could agree with the conclusion of Professor Delton and her colleagues, and thus no conservative scholar could be readily regarded by the consensus she describes as a reasonable member of her profession.</div><div>
</div><div>To ideologues like Delton, the contents of this volume will seem an extreme view of what has taken place in American liberal arts colleges and graduate institutions. But to recognize the intellectual corruption of the contemporary academy is hardly what is extreme; what is extreme is the politicized state of academic discourse, the confusion of scholarship with propaganda, and therefore the widespread debasement of the academic enterprise. What is extreme is the general comfort level of the academic community with this travesty of scholarship and, worse, with the practice of indoctrinating students in the classroom.</div><div>
</div><div>The ramifications of this reversion to doctrinal instruction and pre-scientific standards of scholarship have been destructive not only to higher education but to society at large. Since collegiate institutions are the training grounds for all professions, this corruption has adversely affected a widespread array of policies, both foreign and domestic; it has warped cultural attitudes towards race and gender (see volumes 5 and 6 in this series); and it has intruded political biases into such civically crucial professions as the law, journalism and secondary school education.</div><div>
</div><div>The contents of this volume were immediately inspired by a campaign I conducted to counter these trends and promote a restoration of the academic values associated with the modern research university, in particular the identification of scientific standards of inquiry with academic professionalism.5 The goal of the campaign, which lasted for roughly seven years and ultimately failed, could also be viewed as an attempt to restore a professional standard appropriate to education in a democratic society—that teachers should teach students how to think and not tell them what to think. This standard was established in a famous “Declaration on the Principles of Academic Tenure and Academic Freedom” issued by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915, and until recently verbally embraced by all reputable academic institutions.</div><div>
</div><div>The campaign I organized to defend those principles was ferociously opposed by the tenured left, most strikingly by the very organization that had devised the original standard: the American Association of University Professors, whose governance had fallen into radical hands. Although my campaign failed, it revealed the extent of the AAUP’s defection from its original purposes and its determination to protect a new professorial “right”—the “right” of faculty to indoctrinate their students. This was made indisputably clear in the AAUP’s opposition to a crucial passage of the Declaration that I regularly cited in my campaign, and which had been adopted verbatim by Penn State University as its academic freedom policy. There can be no better introduction to the present volume than to recount the fate of this policy at the hands of the AAUP and its academic agents.</div><div>
</div><div>Known as HR 64, the Penn State policy read: “It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials, which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.”</div><div>
</div><div>The AAUP’s attack on this specific policy was launched in the winter of 2010, just after events in Pennsylvania convinced me of the futility of my reform efforts. Legislative hearings to inquire into the state of academic freedom in Pennsylvania—hearings in which I played a seminal role—were effectively subverted by the AAUP and the teacher unions, while the Republican Party and conservative groups that should have supported the reform effort sat on the sidelines. Without their active involvement there was little more that I could do.</div><div>
</div><div>The AAUP’s attack was led by its leftist president, Cary Nelson, whose book No University Is an Island, was published that December. In his book Nelson assaulted me personally and followed his assault with an attack on the Penn State policy I had championed. Nelson described the Penn State policy on academic freedom as an attempt to restrict faculty speech and curtail academic freedom.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>This was the same Orwellian position the AAUP had advanced throughout the controversy; but it was the first time anyone had made that argument specifically against the Penn State policy I had praised. Nelson and I had debated each other on several occasions, so he was thoroughly familiar with my campaign and the fact that I had made HR 64 and the 1915 Declaration its cornerstones. His attack also targeted the “Academic Bill of Rights” I had attempted to persuade universities to adopt, which was an attempt to codify the principles of the 1915 Declaration. Nelson did not merely criticize the Penn State policy but condemned it as “especially bad” and an example of “McCarthy era rhetoric.” His objection to the policy was that it denied professors the right to advance their political agendas in the classroom.</div><div>
</div><div>According to Nelson: “Like Horowitz, Penn State failed at the time to conceptualize the sense in which all teaching and research is fundamentally and deeply political.” This was a candid admission of the anti-academic agendas of both Nelson and the AAUP. To them, “academic freedom” meant a license for professors to use their classrooms as political platforms to indoctrinate their students.</div><div>
</div><div>Political agendas aside, Nelson’s smear of the Penn State academic freedom policy and my efforts made no logical sense. Far from seeking to suppress dissenting ideas, the 1915 Declaration, the Penn State policy and my Academic Bill of Rights stipulated that faculty were obligated to present conflicting opinions on controversial matters in a fair-minded manner. In other words, they were statements in behalf of intellectual diversity. Neither document denied professors the right to express their views, or to freely draw conclusions from their research. They did require them to observe a professional standard in the classroom; in particular, to be mindful that students were in the process of forming their opinions and should be allowed to do so. It was only in this sense that it restricted professors’ “freedom of speech”—specifically the&nbsp; “right” to use their classrooms for political attitudinizing. But this was no more restrictive than the codes governing doctors or lawyers in their professional settings. And it was in accord with the views of the leading academic authority on academic freedom: Robert C. Post, dean of the Yale Law School.</div><div>
</div><div>In dismissing Penn State’s policy, Nelson suggested that the AAUP had “more nuanced” methods of determining such matters than the Penn State officials, and that “what Penn State ended up with is nothing less than thought control.” The absurdity of this was transparent. To require professors to present divergent views to their students, and to do so in a fair-minded manner, was hardly “thought control.”</div><div>
</div><div>Shortly after Nelson’s book appeared, the Faculty Senate at Penn State went into action to implement his agenda, voting to formally eviscerate policy HR 64 and rewrite it to permit the abuses it was designed to prevent. Specifically, the Penn State Faculty Senate removed the following sentence: “It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects.” The Senate then rewrote the policy, restricting professorial fairness to those controversial viewpoints that were part of the discourse of the academic professions—professions that had effectively purged themselves of non-leftist viewpoints. The revised version read: “Faculty members are expected to present information fairly, and to set forth justly, divergent opinions that arise out of scholarly methodology and professionalism.” (emphasis added) In other words, practically speaking, only the divergent opinions of left-wing academics need be presented fairly and justly.</div><div>
</div><div>Other opinions—notably conservative opinions—which were not part of existing “scholarly methodology and professionalism,” would not be covered by this fairness requirement. The instigator of these changes, Cary Nelson, applauded the revision in a statement that made no sense at all: “Penn State had one of the most restrictive and troubling policies limiting intellectual freedom in the classroom that I know of. It undermined the normal human capacity to make comparisons and contrasts between different fields and between different cultures and historical periods.”</div><div>
</div><div>Incoherent as this explanation was, Nelson had successfully engineered a policy that formally permitted professors to indoctrinate their students. This remains the policy of the AAUP and faculty throughout the liberal arts academy today. In short, I had to face the reality that my seven year campaign to restore the concept of academic freedom as defined by the AAUP in its 1915 Declaration had led to the formal repudiation of its principles by the same organization.</div><div>
</div><div>Part I of the present volume is an essay selected because it frames the subject, a practice I have adopted in previous volumes. It is an edited version of the introduction to The Professors, a book I wrote in 2005 about the unprofessional classroom attitudes of over 100 prominent professors. In the controversy generated by the book, the substance of this introduction was completely ignored. Not a single response from my academic opponents addressed the substantive critiques contained in its text.</div><div>
</div><div>Part II recounts my experiences on college campuses in the five years preceding the creation of the Academic Bill of Rights, along with my observations regarding the decline of academic discourse under pressures from the academic left.</div><div>
</div><div>Part III describes my campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights. This document was a codification of the principles set forth in the 1915 Declaration. It was inspired by the idea that if professors have an obligation to act professionally in the classroom, then students have a right to expect a professional instruction; in particular, to hear fair-minded presentations of divergent views on controversial issues, along with the freedom to draw their own conclusions.</div><div>
</div><div>Part IV continues the account of the campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights and describes the attacks against it by the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and faculty senates like the one at Penn State.</div><div>
</div><div>Part V recounts the controversies surrounding two of the books I wrote, The Professors and Indoctrination U., and more of my failed attempts to persuade the academic community of their obligation to present contested issues as controversial and to observe a professional decorum in the classroom.</div><div>
</div><div>I have concluded the text with an epilogue containing a proposal for reforming universities and re-establishing standards of instruction in the classroom. I wrote this proposal in 2010, before the AAUP eviscerated the Penn State academic freedom policy. I did not publish it then because I knew that any proposal associated with me would be dead in the water because of the war the AAUP had declared on all my efforts, however modest and reasonable. I publish it now because I have given up any hope that universities can institute such a reform. The faculty opposition is too devious and too strong; and even more importantly there is no conservative will to see such reforms enacted. Therefore there seems to be no harm in publishing the document now, and it does serve to clarify my goals in undertaking my campaign.</div><div>
</div><div>ABOUT DAVID HOROWITZ</div><div>[For Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov's essay on David Horowitz's life and work, click here.]</div><div>
</div><div>David Horowitz is the author of Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America, now in its tenth week on The New York Times’ best-seller list.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz is founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture) and author of many books and pamphlets published over the last twenty years.&nbsp; Among them: Hating Whitey; Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left; The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America; and The End of Time.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz is now publishing The Black Book of the American Left, a multi volume collection of his conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. The Left In Power: Clinton To Obama, the seventh volume of this projected nine volume work, has just appeared. (For information on The Black Book of the American Left, click here.)</div><div>
</div><div>David's latest book is Big Agenda, which has been on the NYT best sellers list for over 10 weeks. (to order click here)</div><div>
</div><div>READ MORE</div><div></div><div>http://www.scottgsherman.com/profiles/davidhorowitz.php</div><div>
</div><div>DAVID HOROWITZ'S LONG MARCH</div><div>(The Nation, July 3, 2000)</div><div>
</div><div>On October 19, 1959, Frederick Moore Jr., a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, climbed the steps of Sproul Hall and began a hunger strike to protest the university's compulsory military-training requirement through ROTC. "I am a conscientious objector," Moore declared. "I object to killing and any action aiding war." David Horowitz, a 20-year-old graduate student in the English department, was so moved by Moore's stance that he volunteered to defend him at a campus debate. Horowitz's opponent, a young military veteran, insisted that ROTC's detractors simply lacked the guts to fight the Communists; Horowitz disagreed. "Wearing a uniform with a million other guys is easy; hiding behind a gun is even easier," he proclaimed. "All you do is what you're told; you and a million others." Concluded Horowitz, "Was not patriotism of this sort questionable?"</div><div>
</div><div>Many years later, in the fall of 1987, Horowitz received a phone call from the office of Elliott Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State. It was time to fight the Communists. "Are you willing to serve your country?" one of Abrams's young assistants jauntily inquired. A few weeks later, Horowitz found himself in Managua, Nicaragua, where, at the expense of US taxpayers, he offered tactical advice to anti-Sandinista labor unions, politicians and journalists, and, in the dining room of the Intercontinental Hotel, thundered, "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!"</div><div>
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</div><div>These days, not much remains of the student who stood up to defend a conscientious objector in the twilight of the Eisenhower era. The years have transformed Horowitz into a steely gladiator, an indefatigable pugilist in the culture wars, the right's very own Ahab. "Lapsed radicals like ourselves are always condemned to regard the left as their Great White Whale," Horowitz and Peter Collier confessed in their 1991 anthology, Deconstructing the Left. "This book is a record of our sightings of the beast. We may not yet have set the final harpoon, but we have given chase."</div><div>
</div><div>Throughout the nineties, Horowitz spent much of his time combating "political correctness" in American universities. His weapon in that crusade was Heterodoxy, the tabloid-sized monthly he founded with Collier in 1992 and which, Horowitz has written, "is meant to have the feel of a samizdat publication inside the gulag of the PC university." But the spirit of Havel and Michnik is noticeably absent; Heterodoxy is a garish, surreal compendium of Horowitz's obsessions and demons, neatly packaged for right-wing consumption. There are lists ("The Ten Wackiest Feminists on Campus"), odd cartoons (Karl Marx in drag) and admiring letters from the next generation ("I am 11 years old and I cannot thank you enough for publishing this wonderful paper...my schoolmates are a bunch of feminist, liberal, PC, vegetarian multiculturalists"). In 1993, when the literary critic Catharine Stimpson told a reporter that frequent attacks in Heterodoxy had transformed her into the magazine's "centerfold," the editors replied with a pornographic pastiche of her in its April 1993 issue, under the caption "ms. april."</div><div>
</div><div>But the PC "gulag" is just one of Horowitz's targets. His self-appointed mandate is to sniff out and expose leftist chicanery--real and imagined--wherever it may exist. He is a busy man. "One has to stigmatize the left and segregate it," Horowitz told Insight magazine in 1989. Last year, when the anthropologist David Stoll challenged the veracity of Rigoberta Menchú's autobiography, Horowitz rushed to purchase advertisements in six college newspapers announcing: rigoberto menchu nobel laureate and marxist terrorist now exposed as an intellectual hoax.</div><div>
</div><div>Such crusades have hardly damaged his career. He has a column in the online magazine Salon, he contributes Op-Ed pieces to leading newspapers and rarely a day goes by when he doesn't appear on television or talk-radio. He is currently involved in efforts to create a conservative talk show on PBS. His funders admire that tireless spirit. "He's an extremely articulate man and a very determined fighter. I think he brings a great deal of intellectual power and energy to his work," says Michael Joyce, president of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which has given Horowitz more than $3.5 million since 1988.</div><div>
</div><div>Lately, Horowitz has stepped into a new role: Republican Party theoretician. His pamphlet The Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win, is causing a stir on the right: Thirty-five state Republican Party chairmen have endorsed it, the Heritage Foundation sent 2,300 copies to conservative activists and House majority whip Tom DeLay provided copies to every Republican Congressional officeholder, with a cover note praising its contents. On April 5, Senators Arlen Specter, Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, plus a dozen members of the House, hosted a soiree for Horowitz in Washington, at which $40,000 was raised for his activities.</div><div>
</div><div>In addition to political alchemy, Horowitz has another new fixation: race, exemplified by his recent book, Hating Whitey and Other Progessive Causes. Last August, in a piece titled "A Real, Live Bigot," Time columnist Jack White took issue with an essay Horowitz wrote for Salon. In that piece, Horowitz excoriated the NAACP's class-action suit against gun manufacturers and wondered, "Am I alone in seeing this as an absurd act of political desperation by the civil rights establishment? What's next? Will Irish-Americans sue whiskey distillers, or Jews the gas company?" White, who is African-American, retorted that Horowitz's column was so repellent that it "made the anti-black rantings of Dinesh D'Souza seem like models of fair-minded social analysis."</div><div>
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</div><div>When you enter Horowitz's office, in a tony highrise on the West Side of Los Angeles, the first thing you notice on the wall is the New York Times's framed and weather-beaten front page for March 6, 1953. STALIN DIES AFTER A 29-YEAR RULE, reads the six-column headline. Welcome to the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, Horowitz's burgeoning empire, which generates a remarkable range of products and services. There is Heterodoxy. There is his daily online journal, FrontPageMagazine, whose features include a "Left Alert" ("Chevy Chase Says Socialism Works" was one recent item) and an "Intellectual Rogue's Gallery" with unflattering articles about Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Eric Alterman. There is a publishing imprint, Second Thoughts Books, which brings forth titles like P.J. O'Rourke's Why I Am Not a Conservative, pamphlets like Liberal Racism: The College Student's Common-Sense Guide to Radical Ideology and How to Fight It, and collections of essays by...David Horowitz.</div><div>
</div><div>That's not all: There is Horowitz's legal arm, the Individual Rights Foundation, which represents police officers and college professors who see themselves as victims of affirmative action policies; there is the Wednesday Morning Club, which brings speakers like Newt Gingrich, George Will and William Kristol (plus the occasional liberal) to a monthly networking lunch hosted by Horowitz at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There is the Matt Drudge Defense Fund, which raised $50,000 for the online gossip columnist's defense against a libel suit and which provided him with two pro bono lawyers. To burnish the center's image, there is even a charity organization.</div><div>
</div><div>The center's annual budget is approximately $3 million, roughly a third of which comes from the Olin, Bradley and Scaife foundations. But Horowitz also has 30,000 small donors who send checks of varying sizes. The center is his war room: His direct-mail campaigns, his endless media appearances (he employs a full-time publicist), his forays to college campuses, his charity work--all of it is coordinated under this roof. Of the fifteen people employed here, some are reluctant to communicate with a visiting reporter; others speak their mind. When I phoned the office a few weeks before my arrival to inquire about its proximity to public transportation, I was informed by one of Horowitz's young assistants, "The bus system is awful, but you don't want to ride with those people anyway."</div><div>
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</div><div>Horowitz occupies the corner office, which affords a stunning view of downtown Los Angeles from the twelfth floor. It is a cluttered, cramped space, overflowing with unruly piles of books, pamphlets and magazines. Photographs of Horowitz with Bob Dole, Colin Powell and Henry Hyde adorn the walls, along with an admiring 1986 letter from Richard Nixon. Stout and compact, attired in a chic navy-blue suit, Horowitz appears relaxed and cheerful as he ruminates on his favorite themes: leftist domination of Hollywood, the press and higher education. "Hollywood keeps celebrating Communists," he grumbles, in reference to the recent film The Hurricane. "Where's the Hollywood film about Whittaker Chambers?"</div><div>
</div><div>Academia, too, is suspect: "I want to know," he snaps, "how many reading lists have von Hayek on them as opposed to Chomsky." But what about the UCLA survey of 35,000 professors cited by Robert Hughes in his book Culture of Complaint, which revealed that only 4.9 percent called themselves "far left," while 17.8 percent put down "conservative." Horowitz's voice rises to a shout. "Norman Podhoretz cannot retire and be a professor anywhere! Clancy Sigal, the novelist, is a fucking professor at USC! He has no degrees. He's written books that nobody reads, and he's got a sinecure."</div><div>
</div><div>Is the fractured, demoralized US left really the colossal monolith depicted in Horowitz's voluminous writings? "Leftists will always think of themselves as powerless," he replies cryptically, adding, "The actual views of Nation readers are reflected in the White House today, and in the DNC." Still, those who find themselves on the receiving end of his wrath should not take it personally. Says Horowitz with conviction: "I harbor no ill will toward leftists."</div><div>
</div><div>Some Horowitz-watchers beg to differ, and they attribute his rancor to a complex ideological journey that began in Sunnyside, Queens, in the fifties. His parents were Communists who taught Negro history in their spare time, and he recalls a boyhood home filled with prints by William Gropper, back issues of the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker and books like Stalingrad and Scottsboro Boy. In 1952 his father, a high school English teacher, came under attack for his political views. When he refused to answer the question of whether he was a Communist, he was fired for "insubordination," despite his twenty-eight years of service to the school system. His relations with the party were poisoned, and he quit shortly thereafter. But he remained a fellow traveler, and David grew up in a milieu of red summer camps, Paul Robeson concerts and May Day parades. In 1953, at the age of 14, he was present at the Union Square Park death vigil for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When the execution was announced, mounted police moved in to quell the demonstration. In his compelling, infuriating memoir, Radical Son (1997), Horowitz recalled, "I scrambled with the others to avoid the hoofs of the oncoming beasts, thinking: This must be fascism."</div><div>
</div><div>Following his graduation from Columbia University, Horowitz began graduate work at UC-Berkeley, arriving just in time for the anti-HUAC protests in San Francisco, which ended in massive police violence against the demonstrators. Horowitz chronicled those events in a slender 1962 book titled Student, which was one of the first texts of the New Left. It begins with a line from Ingmar Bergman's The Magician: "I have prayed just one prayer in my life: Use me." Student contained some Howl-like riffs against the conformity and ennui of the fifties, and it sold 25,000 copies. In 1982 Mario Savio, leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, told Horowitz that he devoured the entire text standing in a New York drugstore, and it inspired him to go to California because "Berkeley is the place."</div><div>
</div><div>In 1962 Horowitz and his young family moved to Europe, spending most of the next six years in London. He became affiliated with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; fell under the spell of Ralph Miliband, the socialist intellectual, and Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky's biographer; and wrote several bombastic and forgotten volumes whose ambition was "the reconstruction of socialist theory after Stalin."</div><div>
</div><div>In 1968, at the behest of his old Berkeley comrade Robert Scheer, Horowitz returned to California to work at Ramparts, which, under Scheer and Warren Hinckle, had become one of the New Left's most vibrant publications. But internecine conflict quickly erupted, and Scheer was ousted by Horowitz and Peter Collier. Today, Scheer attributes his removal to the fact that he wasn't "left enough" for the fiery insurgents. In Radical Son, however, Horowitz argues that Scheer was expelled in a popular revolt by beleaguered staff members. In the fall of 1969 Horowitz and Collier took over Ramparts, but they lacked their predecessors' journalistic and literary imagination, along with their ability to raise funds from wealthy individuals. The magic was gone, and the New Left's flagship publication perished in 1975.</div><div>
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</div><div>In early 1974 the French writer Jean Genet phoned the Ramparts office and got Horowitz on the line. Genet, who had taken up the Black Panther cause in the Bay Area, needed a translator. Might Ramparts provide one? One thing led to another, and it wasn't long before Horowitz found himself in the Oakland penthouse of Panther leader Huey Newton, who had just returned from China. A heated argument about the revolutionary virtues of Maoism erupted between Horowitz and Newton, and the latter concluded the debate on a conciliatory note. Horowitz was delighted: "I had found a political soul mate," he recalls.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz's intellectual seduction by Newton constitutes some of the most fascinating pages in Radical Son. Newton made Horowitz his confidant, took him to glitzy parties and published his essays in the Panthers' official newspaper. When Newton asked him to raise money for a new Panther school in Oakland, Horowitz eagerly obliged by creating a tax-exempt foundation that eventually netted more than $100,000 for the project.</div><div>
</div><div>Attaching himself to the Bay Area Panthers in 1974 was, it turns out, a colossal mistake: Their heyday was over, and the leadership had become increasingly violent and deranged. The educator Herbert Kohl, who was then involved in several Panther education projects, warned Horowitz that Newton was abusing cocaine. ("He had a cold," Horowitz replied.) Uncomfortable being a white man in the upper ranks of the Panther hierarchy, Horowitz attempted to recruit qualified blacks to replace him, so he invited Troy Duster, a sociologist at UC-Berkeley, to meet Newton. But Duster was suspicious of Newton's mercurial behavior and fled. Horowitz then denounced Duster as something of a bourgeois "Uncle Tom." "I must have been insufferable," Horowitz says, reflecting on his younger self.</div><div>
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</div><div>On July 22, 1974, Huey Newton shot a young prostitute, after which he fled to Cuba. "I should have left [the Panthers] then," Horowitz says. In fact, many of his black friends in the party did depart at that very moment--a turn of events that enraged Newton's successor, a striking, charismatic and voluble young woman named Elaine Brown, who, according to Horowitz, said the party was under attack and "the rats were leaving the ship." Horowitz says he felt trapped. When Brown asked him to recommend someone to oversee the party finances, he suggested Betty Van Patter, a 42-year-old bookkeeper who had worked at Ramparts. Van Patter, who was white, eagerly accepted the position. On December 13, 1974, she vanished. A month later, her body, with a massive head wound, was discovered in San Francisco Bay.</div><div>
</div><div>It is a case, according to veteran Panther-watcher Kate Coleman, that has "haunted the Bay Area left for two decades." A lengthy investigation by Coleman revealed that Van Patter had discovered questionable activity--rackets, dope, prostitution--at a Panther-run bar in Oakland called the Lamp Post and had reportedly complained about it to Brown, who then fired her.</div><div>
</div><div>Van Patter's death plunged Horowitz into "a really clinical depression," he says today. "For a good year, I woke up in tears every day because of Betty." What inspired the guilt was not simply that he'd recommended Van Patter to the Panthers but that he'd been too frightened to warn her about the dangers she faced. But he was in a bind: Van Patter, delighted to be employed by the Panthers, was completely enamored of Brown and wary of Horowitz, whom she did not trust. So he let her proceed with the job.</div><div>
</div><div>"Today I can't even justify it," he says wearily. "I have no idea why I did it." Horowitz and I are seated in his office. The room is tense and completely silent, except for the sound of his hand nervously striking the table. His voice, normally firm and confident, sinks to a barely audible mumble.</div><div>
</div><div>"It was inconceivable to me that the Panthers would kill Betty Van Patter," he whispers. "I was nervous about what was going on there, but if I told Betty what I actually felt, I was afraid that she would tell Elaine, and that Elaine would harm me or my children. I was completely unprotected."</div><div>
</div><div>If he could do it over again, what would he say to Van Patter?</div><div>
</div><div>"I would tell her flat out--get out of there," he replies. "But the consequences for me would have been awful. I didn't have any money. How was I going to move my family?"</div><div>
</div><div>Today, Tamara Baltar, Van Patter's daughter, does not consider Horowitz in any way responsible for her mother's death. "David didn't kill my mother, and David didn't participate in the killing of my mother," says Baltar, breaking a long silence on the case. Is there something curious about the fact that he holds himself responsible? "No," she replies. "I think I would, too, if I were him." Not until 1984, however, did Baltar, who was a leftist and a supporter of the Panthers, accept the view that they committed the crime. "David Horowitz kept at it from the beginning," she says. "And I was mad at him for keeping at it. But he kept at it."</div><div>
</div><div>In the late seventies, relying on his old Panther contacts, Horowitz quietly began to reconstruct the crime, and he was a primary source for a lengthy exposé on Newton's criminal activities that Kate Coleman published in New Times in 1978.</div><div>
</div><div>"I stayed on the story," he says. "It's a minimal atonement."</div><div>
</div><div>For her part, Elaine Brown vehemently denies Horowitz's accusation that the Panthers were involved in the murder. "I didn't have anything to do with this woman's death," Brown insisted in a recent telephone interview, noting that no arrests have ever been made in the case. "White people," says Brown, "always want me to tell them about fucking Betty Van Patter, but not one person from The Nation has ever called to ask me who I think killed George Jackson." From her point of view, Horowitz and Coleman have waged a relentless vendetta against her. But the available evidence strongly suggests Panther involvement in the death of Betty Van Patter. In 1984, when Van Patter's family engaged the services of the renowned private detective Hal Lipset, he reported back, "You should have no doubt that your mother's death was Panther-related--that they killed her."</div><div>
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</div><div>In the wake of Betty Van Patter's death, Horowitz's life came apart. Surrounded by "personal darkness," he began a series of affairs, which led to the collapse of his marriage. He launched a new career, with Collier, as a dynastic biographer; eventually they would produce thick histories of the Rockefeller, Ford and Kennedy families. "Without question, David Horowitz was extremely traumatized by what happened with Betty Van Patter, as I think anyone would be," says Hugh Pearson, author of The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America. "As a result, David just totally went berserk with regard to the left-liberal community."</div><div>
</div><div>In 1979 Horowitz published an article in The Nation ["A Radical's Disenchantment," December 8] lashing radicals for their supposed moral indifference to repression and genocide in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old friends from the New Left began to fall away. In 1984 he cast a ballot for Ronald Reagan. In 1986 he informed a Berkeley audience: "You are in fact in league with the darkest and most reactionary forces of the modern world, whose legacies--as the record attests--are atrocities and oppression on a scale unknown in the human past." By 1989 Horowitz was comparing himself to Gifford Maxim, the Whittaker Chambers character in Lionel Trilling's novel The Middle of the Journey, an ex-Communist who confronted the radical tendencies of his time "with what he knew, from his experience, of the reality which lay behind the luminous words of the great promise." Horowitz had arrived at the final destination of his journey. Now, he ridicules the idea of utopia: "Every leftist should watch the Jerry Springer show," he says today. "How are you going to make a new world out of that material?"</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz spent the nineties securing funding for the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, coming to grips with his family history, writing his memoirs and consolidating his status as a conservative pundit. That was accomplished with freewheeling attacks on homosexual promiscuity, multiculturalism, the ACLU, Angela Davis, the Russian Revolution, John Kenneth Galbraith, postmodernism and Winnie Mandela, to name but a few targets.</div><div>
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</div><div>By the end of the decade, however, Horowitz had more or less exhausted his arsenal, and the political world beckoned. He was not a complete stranger to the corridors of power: In 1988 he and Collier wrote speeches for Bob Dole and had the pleasure of dining with Ronald Reagan, William Bennett and Newt Gingrich. Later, Horowitz was part of the brain trust that launched anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in California. Last summer, he released The Art of Political War, printing 80,000 copies. It argues that the Republicans have been utterly vanquished by a President who has mastered the art of triangulation. In the public's mind, Horowitz writes, "the Clinton Democrat Party is now the party of economic vibrancy, anti-crime laws, welfare reform laws, budget surpluses and free trade. That's what the American people want."</div><div>
</div><div>To regain the political initiative, says Horowitz, Republicans must overturn the public perception that they are coldhearted and beholden to the rich: "'Tax breaks for the wealthy on the backs of the poor.' This is the Democrat sound-bite that defines Republicans as mean-spirited fat cats and enemies of the poor. What is the Republican chant? There is none." He proposes his own mantra: taxes for bureaucrats out of the pockets of the people. Republicans, in his view, must aggressively depict their opponents in starkly different terms: "Democrats label Republicans right-wing. But Republicans have no label to pin on Democrats to fight back." Horowitz to the rescue: "Here, then, is a label for Democrats: Leftists. The Democrat Party is a party of the Left."</div><div>
</div><div>Finally, Horowitz argues that the Republican Party must, through a massive legislative push for school vouchers, reposition itself as "champions of working Americans and minorities," the "party of the underdog." The Art of Political War appears to be having an impact: A recent letter from the head of the Missouri Republican Party reported that Horowitz's suggestions proved decisive in a recent Congressional election in the state's 32nd District: "We prevailed," she wrote, "by implementing 'political war' a la Horowitz."</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz's other current project is rather more controversial. No longer content to hammer away at the usual suspects, he has trained his sights on a new target: Afro-America. Hating Whitey's thesis is that contemporary black leaders--ranging from Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton to Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond--have "squandered" the moral legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. by their "restructuring of the civil rights agenda as a radical cause" with policies like affirmative action and multiculturalism. "Whereas the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King's leadership," he writes, "achieved its aims with the support of 90 percent majorities in both houses of Congress, a majority of Americans--roughly 70 percent--oppose the current civil rights agenda that embraces racial preferences." The "moral abdication" of black civil rights leaders can be explained, he insists, by "their close association with a radical left whose anti-white hatred is a by-product of its anti-Americanism." Consequently, "ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry not only in the African-American community, but among white 'liberals' in elite educational institutions as well."</div><div>
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</div><div>Hating Whitey is filled with assaults on leading black thinkers (Harvard Professor Cornel West is dismissed as "an intellectual of modest talents whose skin color has catapulted him into academic stardom with a six-figure income") and giddy celebrations of the American past: "The establishment of America by Protestant Christians...was historically essential to the development of institutions that today afford greater privileges and protections to all minorities than those of any society extant."</div><div>
</div><div>The book is littered with inaccuracies large and small. Writing about the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Horowitz says he saw Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, who was "showing his parents around the event." (Hitchens's parents are deceased.) More troubling is the way Horowitz wields statistics. "In 1994," he writes, "there were twenty thousand rapes of white women by black men, but only one hundred rapes of black women by white men"--a statistic he lifted from Dinesh D'Souza's book The End of Racism. D'Souza's assertion, however, is based on a gross misreading of Justice Department figures.</div><div>
</div><div>Hating Whitey was rejected by Horowitz's regular publisher, the Free Press, who told him they would never publish a book with that title. Spence Publishing, a tiny outfit in Dallas, was pressed into service. To propel sales, the author purchased more than 100 advertisements, but sinister forces derailed the campaign. In October the Center for the Study of Popular Culture issued a press release titled horowitz book on race hits roadblock despite public demand, which proclaimed that some bookstores were reluctant to stock it, while others mistakenly listed the book as Hating Whitney. His media appearances have been turbulent. In a debate with Michael Eric Dyson on Black Entertainment Television, Horowitz seemed overwhelmed by Dyson's rhetorical finesse, and by his repeated insistence that, given escalating levels of intermarriage, "black folks are loving whitey!"</div><div>
</div><div>Hating Whitey and The Art of Political War offer sharply divergent strategies on how to wage political combat. The latter insists that the Republican Party "can only win" by linking its agendas to the downtrodden, and it laments the GOP's unwillingness to "reach out to African Americans." In Hating Whitey, however, Horowitz whips up a frenzy about a multitude of black rapists. Is that the way to entice black voters into the Republican Party? "Sometimes my tactical agendas conflict," Horowitz shrugs.</div><div>
</div><div>As a young man, Horowitz was enamored of socialist revolution and the Black Panthers. His leftism has vanished; but the fervor remains. In that sense, he is not so different from the ex-Communists whom Horowitz's mentor, Isaac Deutscher, dissected in his famous 1950 review of the anthology The God That Failed. The apostate from Communism, Deutscher wrote, "continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colors are differently distributed." The most dignified attitude for the ex-Communist, Deutscher believed, was "critical sense and intellectual detachment." But many apostates found that an impossible road to follow, and, in Deutscher's phrase, ended up doing "the most vicious things."</div><div>
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</div><div>Critical sense and intellectual detachment have never been Horowitz's forte. As he embarks on a new set of battles, the stakes are somewhat lower than in the past. Lives are not on the line; only jobs and reputations are. Take Horowitz's campaign against China expert and writer Orville Schell, dean of the UC-Berkeley Journalism School. In 1998 Horowitz's legal arm, the Individual Rights Foundation, filed suit against the Regents of the University of California on behalf of Michael Savage, a conservative radio commentator who had applied unsuccessfully for the deanship. Schell got the job, but the IRF suit contended that since he was selected through an old-boy network of New Leftists, his appointment constituted political patronage and was therefore illegal under California labor law.</div><div>
</div><div>Why was Schell, whom Horowitz has labeled a "Gucci Marxist," unfit for the position? "Although he has written several books on China and authored some op-ed pieces," Horowitz affirmed in Hating Whitey, he is "not a working journalist." Schell's curriculum vitae lists twelve books and 206 articles, including contributions to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. The case eventually collapsed when Savage refused to be deposed.</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz's crusade against Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, was conducted with similar methods. When Wasserman arrived at the LA Times in 1996 Horowitz spread rumors about his youthful relationship with the "Red Family" commune, "a group of Berkeley urban guerrillas." In an interview with Buzz magazine Horowitz repeated a story he says he heard in the sixties--that Tom Hayden taught the young Wasserman how to manufacture explosives. Horowitz later withdrew the charge in a letter to Buzz: "Steve now informs me that the story is untrue and I have no reason to disbelieve him." (Wasserman says he was never a member of the Red Family.) Subsequently, Wasserman asked Horowitz to contribute a 250-word essay to a symposium on Marx's Communist Manifesto, but he shortened the piece for reasons of clarity and coherence. When Horowitz saw his tiny essay alongside a lengthy commentary by Eric Hobsbawm, he dispatched a letter to Times publisher Mark Willes, lecturing him about Hobsbawm's Communist past and insisting that "Wasserman has an agenda in defending Marx." Willes passed the letter to Wasserman, who communicated his displeasure to Horowitz. That prompted Horowitz, writing in Salon, to once again dredge up the old charges about the rifle-toting Red Family: "They hoped to launch a 'war of liberation' in America, and Wasserman was one of their foot soldiers."</div><div>
</div><div>For Horowitz, it's not only journalism schools and newspapers that harbor subversives; the Democratic Party itself has been invaded. One of the many people pilloried in Hating Whitey is Carlottia Scott, who was an aide to former Representative Ron Dellums and is currently political director of the Democratic National Committee; Horowitz labels her a "communist." Is Scott a member of the CPUSA? "I don't know that she's a member of the CPUSA," he replies with irritation. "Small 'c,' please."</div><div>
</div><div>In leveling such charges, Horowitz knows he is being outrageous, but it's all part of the high-stakes game he is playing. He seems to accept the fact that something in his character propels him toward the edge, wherever it may lie, and it's a risk he accepts wholeheartedly. He is a man willing, maybe even eager, to play with fire. Perhaps that is the surest way of saying to the Olin, Scaife and Bradley foundations, "Use me." At one point, in discussing his long campaign against Elaine Brown, he confesses that for a while he was afraid to turn on the ignition of his car in the morning. I asked him if he meant that seriously. He does. "Hating Whitey has returned the apprehension," he admits. "But when I am out there," he says, "talking about the violence that is committed against whites in America by blacks--which is huge and largely unreported--I know there are black people out there who see me as...somebody standing in the way of justice for them. And that means they hate me. And I need to just recognize that." Thus far, he hasn't received any threats.</div><div>
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</div><div>In an article in the New York Times Magazine last November about the new cold war scholarship, Jacob Weisberg interpreted Horowitz's career as a "fierce Oedipal struggle entwined with radicalism." That is ultimately a question for psychohistorians, but what is certain is that Horowitz craves approval, and that underneath the fiery demeanor is an insecure human being. More than anything, he wishes to be taken seriously as an intellectual and an apostate. In 1998, when Smith College Professor Daniel Horowitz published a biography of Betty Friedan--one that delved into her political affiliations in the forties and fifties-- Horowitz tore into the book in Salon, demanding that Friedan come clean about her "Stalinist Marxist" past. But he also purchased an advertisement in a Smith College newspaper that proclaimed: "An Invitation to Professor Daniel Horowitz (No Relation) or Any Member of the Smith Faculty or Administration to a Debate on Any One of the Following Subjects: 1. The Fibs of Smith Alumna Betty Friedan. 2. Smith's Political Hiring Practices that Result in a Liberal Arts Faculty Overwhelmingly on the Political Left. 3. What has happened to Students' Academic Freedom? (As in the Right Not to be Ideologically Indoctrinated in the Classroom) --David Horowitz." No one accepted his offer.</div><div>
</div><div>He talks openly about his quest for intellectual respectability. Here is Horowitz on The New Republic: "[Literary editor] Leon Wieseltier, for some reason, hates me. I have no idea. They not only don't ask me to write for them, but they don't review my books." On lunch with Steve Wasserman, months before his invitation to the Marx symposium: "I found myself wondering whether a leftist writer of reputation comparable to mine would have been invited to lunch by Wasserman and not asked to write a review for his magazine." On being snubbed by the sociologist Alan Wolfe at a conference: "I invited him to breakfast. I wanted to speak to Alan. I think a lot of what he does is good work. He was afraid to get near me. I could see him drawing back. I think he's afraid of the taint. I ate alone."</div><div>
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</div><div>At 61, Horowitz shows no signs of exhaustion; indeed, Hating Whitey is his most incendiary work to date. His guilt over Betty Van Patter is an unrelenting source of anguish, and consequently there is every reason to believe that his crusade against the "Great White Whale" will continue, in all its peculiar sound and fury. Horowitz strenuously rejects allegations that he is a neo-McCarthyite. But his zeal and righteousness, his passion for lists and old political affiliations, his use of gossip and innuendo, his endless feuds and vendettas make him a creature of the fifties--not Whittaker Chambers, as he would have it, but something closer to Walter Winchell. "Stigmatizing" and "segregating" the left has brought him financial security in addition to a host of other benefits. His beloved column in Salon is a platform from which he can launch guerrilla raids deep into enemy territory; his recent marriage to a much younger woman has finally brought him some domestic tranquillity; and his burgeoning reputation in the Republican Party reduces the likelihood that he will have to eat alone, at least in Washington.</div><div>
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