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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Will the real David Horowitz please stand up? |
Current rating: 0 |
by The Univ. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Post
Email: bgp (nospam) uwm.edu (unverified!)
Phone: 414-229-4578
Address: 2000 E. Kenwood Blvd., Union Box 88, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201 |
13 May 2001
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David Horowitz, formers left wing radical turned right-wing conservative, tried to get the ad "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea-and Racist Too," published in scores of college newspapers. Only a few papers published the ad including UW-Madison's the Badger Herald (and, eventually, the U of Illinois’ Daily Illini.) Find out here about Horowitz's connections to Bradley and other right-wing foundations. |
The UWM Post University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee March 14, 2001 editorial www.uwmpost.com
Last week the student newspapers The Badger Herald at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Daily Californian at the University of California-Berkley, The University of Chicago-Crimson and others published an \"ad\" written by David Horowitz, the former 60s left-wing leader turned right-wing conservative.
The ad, \"Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea-and Racist Too,\" sparked protests at all three campuses. The Badger Herald and the Crimson refused to issue an apology for the \"ad\" while The Daily Californian ran a front-page retraction. Discussion continues concerning the merits of publishing the \"ad\" and the issue of free speech. But what seems to be missing from the discussion is: Who is the real David Horowitz and why are his views getting such an airing?
Before we get to this we’d like to remind readers of the words of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X). He once said \"History is best qualified to reward our research.\"
In the case of David Horowitz and others of his kind, this is especially apt. After all, one can’t expect to have an accurate reading of the present without knowing some history.
Horowitz is a former leader of the student movement at Berkley and former editor of the leading left-wing magazine Ramparts. He also worked with the Black Panthers briefly in the early 1970s.
Beginning in the mid to late 70s, Horowitz began his traitorous move to the right. By the mid 80s he and Peter Collier, another left defector and Horowitz’s writing partner, were writing speeches for Bob Dole and were dining with Ronald Reagan, William Bennett and Newt Gingrich according to the article \"David Horowitz’s Long March,\" in the July 3, 2000 issue of The Nation. Later Horowitz, along with Ward Connerly, launched the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in California.
As is the case with many of the so-called conservative leaders today, Horowitz is funded almost entirely by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and other right-wing think tanks.
The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is the country’s leading right-wing foundation. Its money was behind the development of W-2, the state’s welfare \"reform\" program, the school voucher movement, nationwide anti-affirmative action attacks, and the arch-racist book \"The Bell Curve\" by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein.
\"The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is likewise devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles and values that sustain and nurture it. Its programs support limited, competent government; a dynamic marketplace for economic, intellectual, and cultural activity; and a vigorous defense at home and abroad of American ideas and institutions,\" says the foundation’s website, www.bradleyfdn.org.
The Foundation has influence at the highest echelons of state and corporate power. Michael Joyce, Bradley president, formerly worked for President’s Nixon and Reagan and began his foundation connections by leading the right-wing John M. Olin Foundation.
Summing up the Bradley foundation and its activities, Joyce once said, \"It\'s true that many people do not know where certain ideas come from, but the important thing is that they agree with them.\"
Horowitz is one of Bradley’s favorite sons.
He is the president and founder of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) which has received $9.3 million from the Olin, Bradley and Sarah Scaife foundations since 1989, according to www.mediatransparency.org, a website that tracks foundation grants.
The mission of the CSPC, according to one of its recent direct mail appeals, is to \"change the leftist, anti-American, elitist culture that is dominant in the entertainment industry [and to expose] the idiocies and the viciousness of the radical leftism in universities, the media, mainstream churches, and everywhere else this modern plague is found.\"
CSPC focuses on \"political correctness\" and publishes a newsletter, Heterodoxy, full of racist, sexist and bigoted rants about Blacks, feminists, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered persons.
In December of 1986 Bradley gave a $150,000 grant to Horowitz and Collier to start the \"Second Thoughts\" project. Thus far grants have totaled $950,000. With this money Horowitz and Collier have written books titled \"Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties,\" \"Deconstructing the Left,\" \"Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes,\" and \"The Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win.\"
Collier is the editor-in-chief of the non-profit Encounter for Culture and Education Inc. This is Bradley’s publishing arm. In the year’s 1991,1992,1995, and 1998 the non-profit received 14 grants totaling $520,000 from the Bradley and Olin foundations, according to Right Watch, a project of the Milwaukee-based A Job is a Right Campaign. Horowitz works closely with Collier on numerous projects.
Although Joyce says of Horowitz, \"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,\" others have another point of view.
Jack E. White, a columnist for Time magazine, named his Aug. 30, 1999 column after Horowitz. In \"A Real, Live Bigot,\" White lambastes Horowitz’s article \"Guns don’t kill black people, other blacks do.\"
Horowitz’s article is a \"blanket assault on the alleged moral failures of African Americans so strident and accusatory that it made the anti-black rantings of Dinesh D’Souza seem like a fair minded social analysis,\" wrote White.
This should sound the alarm considering Horowitz’s influence.
NewsMax.com’s Christopher Ruddy says: \"If you read David Horowitz\'s booklet Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win, the first thing that will catch your attention is the endorsement on the booklet\'s cover by Karl Rove, George W. Bush\'s campaign manager, chief strategist and one-man think tank.\"
The above should clearly illustrate that David Horowitz isn’t just any individual trying to get a racist ad into student newspapers.
He is supported, endorsed, encouraged, and paid for by the biggest right-wing think tanks and the White House itself. He has the right to free speech because he can pay for it. He has the right to free speech because he is trying to fracture the delicate unity between students of different colors and backgrounds that exist on college campuses. He has the right to free speech because he is a white heterosexual male with powerful connections.
In an illuminating editorial decision, The Badger Herald refused an ad by the Multicultural Student Coalition at UW-Madison that labeled the Herald \"a racist propaganda machine.\" It seems only those with right credentials can advertise there.
The national debate over Horowitz’s \"ad\" can be a valuable one if the discussion focuses on class and race. Asking questions like the following ones will help students and the working class move away from the bankrupt \"everybody has a right to speak no matter how horrible the speech is\" argument.
Why is the Klan protected by hundreds of riot clad cops when they have recruitment rallies while our union friends are beaten bloody and even killed by the cops when they strike?
Who owns the media and who is speaking on the various mediums? Who can purchase a TV or radio station, or newspaper to have their views aired? Who really controls so –called \"free speech\"? Why is racist, sexist and homophobic content allowed on virtually everything we see hear or read while unity and class solidarity is mocked or ignored? Where are the labor pages in the local paper? The labor report on CNN?
These questions and more should be raised when the so-called free speech argument comes to the fore.
Because free speech ain’t free.
David Horowitz, Bradley and their apologists know this.
It’s time we do too.
(C) 2001 The UWM Post
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See also:
http://madison.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=326
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Good background |
by Joe Futrelle
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
14 May 2001
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Indeed, the argument that everyone has the right to speak, when applied to David Horowitz, is particularly specious. In fact, David Horowitz gets plenty of space in a variety of publications, and has for years. I've mostly encountered him in Salon, which seems to have selected him to "balance" their centrist cast of political commentators, but in my view has badly miscalculated and slanted the entire publication to the right. He provokes plenty of angry discussion on their letters page, but it's the same discussion over and over again, and in the end demonstrates how profoundly antisocial his posturing is. Which I think is psychologically what has driven him to both of the political extremes over the length of his career. Of course the right is safer and more lucrative, so it's no wonder he's ended up there for the long haul. |
