David Horowitz, ROT IN HELL!

When civil rights worker and activist Kwame Ture passed away in 1998, David Horowitz wrote he “was a bad man, and the world will not miss him.” Those words may apply to Horowitz more than Ture, or anyone else that Horowitz hated.

David Horowitz’s pathological hatred of Black people led him down some bizarre roads, like in 2018 when he tried the All Lives Matter routine in response to the Equal Justice Initiative’s “Lynching in America” project (which documented over 4,000 lynchings of African Americans in the US from 1877 to 1950). Calling the EJI initiative a, “real racist project,” because it focused on lynching’s use as a tool to terrorize and intimidate black communities, and reinforce White Supremacy, he fired out a tweet; “A third of the victims of lynchings were White. How many of them do you think this memorial features.”

That sparked a lot of outrage, but was just Horowitz maintaining his life’s work of demonizing people of color. Eleven years ago, on neo-fascist activist Phyllis Schlafy’s radio show, he said in regards to Black people, “They’re racist, for crying out tears. They are racist. There’s no community that’s more racist in America than the Black community. And everybody knows it, but nobody will say it.”

Horowitz died on April 29 in his Colorado home of stomach cancer at the age of 86, ironically on the 33^rd anniversary of the L.A. Rebellion, which was often used in his anti-Black campaigns.

While few talk of him today, many of today’s fascists worship at his feet. Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and presidential advisor Stephen Miller were groomed by him. Just before he took office, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was a speaker at a conference held by Horowitz, which generated controversy for the racist hate-mongering promoted there.

Born and raised Queens, NY, Horowitz spoke of his leftist leanings in his younger days, his parents both being members of the Communist Party, and he in the sixties, while living in London, began working with the human rights advocacy organization Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. When he returned to the United States he became one of the editors of the magazine Ramparts, with was part of the New Left movement. In the 1970s, he was working with the Black Panthers. However, when his friend and colleague at Ramparts, Betty Van Patter (who although she was White was a bookkeeper for the Panthers), was found beaten to death on a beach on San Francisco Bay, he believed that the Panthers were responsible. Her murder remains unsolved, but Horowitz often cited this as being what started him to lean toward the right. With that came a belief that, “the real race war,” in America was against White people.

In the 80s, David Horowitz co-founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture with Peter Collier. The Center is a propaganda mill that targets those whom conservatives considers threats, such as people of color, Democrats, the LGBTQ+ community, women, and their allies. Among pamphlets authored by Horowitz, one is titled, ‘The Feminist Assault on the Military and Multicultural Mafia.’ Another essay by Horowitz was a publicity stunt against reparations for descendants of slaves titled ”10 Reasons Why Reparations are Wrong–And Racist Too.” In the essay, he questioned where was “the gratitude of Black America and its leaders for those gifts,” of freeing them from slavery, and further said, “Arabs and black Africans were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African Americans,” ignoring how Europeans established chattel slavery in the Americas, and “Reparations to African Americans have already been paid … in the form of welfare benefits and ‘racial preferences.’” He attempted to have this essay published in college newspapers, but when a number of them refused, Horowitz would then accuse that newspaper of violating his free speech. It was a stunt that afforded publicity, with appearances on various news outlets.

Horowitz, via the Center and its website Frontpage, promoted other far right figures including White Supremacist Jared Taylor. Horowitz and Taylor went back to the 1990s, when the Council of Conservative Citizens, of which Taylor was a board member, reviewed and praised Horowitz’ writings and other work. In turn Horowitz featured on his website articles by Jim Lubinskas, who at the time was with Taylor’s New Century Foundation and wrote for the Foundation’s American Renaissance. Frontpage also made a tract from the New Century Foundation titled, “The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Violence in America,” which is presented as a study of crime that uses carefully selected FBI statistics to conclude that Black people (as a race) are responsible for the majority of crime. It was eventually dismissed as biased propaganda. The public relationship with Horowitz ended in 2002, when he published an article about the 2000 brutal murders of five Whites in Wichita, Kansas committed by Black men Reginald Carr and his brother Jonathan, a case that White Supremacists have been attempted to make it an racial issue. “Taylor is a very smart and gutsy individualist, but he is also a man who has surrendered to the multicultural miasma that has overtaken this nation and is busily building a movement devoted to white identity and community,” Horowitz wrote after the outrage Frontpage received from sourcing American Renaissance.  “We do not share these agendas.” Horowitz later defended the article, which concludes that the crime was, “a particularly brutal expression of the savagery that finds daily expression in American crime statistics and African tribal wars,” as, “an accurate and profoundly important report.”

In 2006, the Center became the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and while they still went to the same groups, they especially trained their sights on those of the Muslim faith. Horowitz began to get pushback from college students opposed to his coming to their campuses for hate mongering, either himself or via surrogates, such as Islamophobic activists Pam Geller and Robert Spencer, or neo-fascist editor Milo Yiannopoulos. In recent years, he still made regular appearances at conferences and podcasts, as well as organized conferences promoting his agenda. Still, as just a few weeks ago in an op-ed published on Fox News’ website, he seemed to suggest that even with Trump in the White House the fascist may still fail in their efforts. “If the commander in chief is dismissed as an “agent of chaos” what moral authority is left to defend us?” he wrote in the piece, later lamenting how the opposition is prepared for them. “It’s time for accountability and remedy. But when the Trump administration attempts this – unless Democrat patriots stand up – there will be an army of saboteurs working to resist them.”