Close Encounters of the Horowitz Kind

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Close Encounters of the Horowitz Kind: Part 1

by Alan Goodman

There were some surprises in store for me when I heard David Horowitz speak recently at the University of Chicago. For one thing, I didn’t necessarily anticipate ending up being encouraged by a Republican student into an impromptu debate with Horowitz himself—which I’ll tell about later. But even beside that, there were surprises in store. I've been writing in Revolution about how Horowitz is a self-described “battering ram” for an agenda that would turn academia in the U.S. into a deathly reactionary, airless vacuum. I've been among those raising the alarm that Horowitz has powerful backing from the White House, a dangerous cadre of campus brownshirts dedicated to turning in professors who make an “off topic” comment in class. I’ve been exposing his racism and his efforts to forbid some well-established truths about this society and its history from being taught—or even discussed—on campus.

So, I know some things about Horowitz. But it was an eye opener to see him “live,” and to observe (and interact with) the response he got at an “elite” university. Surveying the audience—something like 300 people, almost all UC students—was interesting in its own right. The guy in front of me wore a shirt saying “But does it work in THEORY?” Not exactly a hotbed of good ol' boy pragmatism! Next to me, a row of five or six students had all opened the current issue of Revolution to the first installment of the series, “The Basis, The Goals, and The Methods of the Communist Revolution,” by Bob Avakian. And they filled the twenty-minute wait for Horowitz by reading through it. I learned during and after the event that at least most of them were far from radicals. Quite a few other students were reading the article on Horowitz in the last issue of Revolution (and at least one drew on the articles to confront Horowitz during the Q & A that followed his talk).

But Bob Avakian wouldn’t be the only one talking about communism that night. I actually wasn't quite prepared for how much anticommunism figures into Horowitz's spiel. Horowitz began his one-hour talk with an updated version of the “I Was A Commie Dupe” ’50s movie confessional. It starts with a young David Horowitz, idealist, activist, Marxist, and supporter of the civil rights movement, who thought that Black people were oppressed. Ah...those values don't sound so terrible...at first! But as we follow the “reefer madness”-like story, it ends with Horowitz's bookkeeper, who he says he had assigned to assist a Black Panther program, being murdered. “I knew that the Black Panther Party had murdered her,” Horowitz asserted to his audience.

Do you find it intolerable, or at least very disturbing, that Black people are living in oppressive conditions in this country? Well, once upon a time, David Horowitz did too—and then “they” killed his bookkeeper. “Everything I believe about social justice,” Horowitz summed up, “about oppressed people in inner cities, everything I said...about the Panthers, that the police were fascists and were attacking them...was a lie.” No, instead the Panthers were a “murderous gang.” You don’t believe it? Well, “I was there,” claims David Horowitz.

A few things have to be said here. First, no criminal charges were ever brought against anyone associated with the Black Panther Party for the death of the woman Horowitz refers to. Second, the Black Panther Party—in the face of incredible repression and with tremendous personal sacrifice—put revolution on the agenda in this country for millions of people. Several dozen members of the BPP were killed—including, in the very city where Horowitz was speaking, Fred Hampton. Hampton, as Horowitz ignores, had been drugged by a police informant and then slain in his bed by police while he slept. And many more were framed up for long terms in prison, with some—like Geronimo Pratt—only released decades later when active government frame-ups were brought to light. Third, the Panthers, for various reasons, could not sustain their revolutionary direction; by the time this incident took place they had long since given up on revolution and were involved in opening shoe factories, and their strategy for change had gone from revolutionary to relying on and working within the system. To impute anything they did or did not do in this period to revolutionary ideology is conscious distortion.

But as I surveyed the room while Horowitz told this story, the atmosphere reminded me of experiences as a kid at camp, when the counselors would scare the shit out of us with stories of young campers who wandered off into the woods to be eaten alive by some monster, ghost, or dead former-camper. Over two million people in jail, a majority of them Black or Latino or other oppressed nationalities? The epidemic of police murder and brutality, with the stories of Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, or Rodney King concentrating the experience of millions? The whole shameful history of slavery and Jim Crow and the terrible inequality and oppression that exists today, as exemplified in what happened after Katrina? “Don't go there! Stop thinking about that! Black thugs will kill you,” says counselor Dave. To say that Horowitz had a subtext is almost giving him too much credit—it was a very blatant attempt to get his audience to identify with Horowitz’s younger, white liberal self and to walk them into a very ugly, very racist place. And this became even more clear later.

From Racism to Anticommunism in a Single Bound

But first Horowitz went somewhere else. His experience of momentarily aligning himself with the Black Panther Party, he told us, was part of a much greater horror: “All my leftist writers and prophets were telling me that there was going to be a revolution in the world and on the other side of that rainbow was going to be what? ‘A future of social justice. Equality. No more poverty. No reason for war, because people would have gotten rid of private property, which of course is the root of all evil.’ That's why I devoted my services to a street gang.”

And, where does that all lead? “The utopias of the left, the illusion which every leftist who is a faculty member of this university put their energy behind, ended up in absolute catastrophe. One hundred and twenty million people slaughtered since 1917 in the name of social justice. Billions made poor, poor behind anyone's imagination, artificially poor.”

Let me turn around here, and address readers who do have some sense of what Horowitz is about. To you, there is a challenge to confront, one that was driven home to me by both Horowitz's opening tirade, and the widespread confusion this seemed to create in what is, after all, a very well-educated audience. There is a critical need for a scientific atmosphere of investigation and debate about the actual experience of the world communist revolution on college campuses, and on opinion-making, influential campuses in particular. You can't evade that. Fundamentally, you can't evade it because it is an experience that represents the highest achievements of humanity so far, by far, and if you flush it down the toilet, you give up all that. That’s the main thing. But in addition, unless the hegemony of lies, distortions, and a ruling out of scientific inquiry into this experience is challenged, very broadly, Horowitz and those he represents will pound this into people's heads, and in the process, by “logical extension,” rule any questioning of or opposition to the status quo out of order.

The Set the Record Straight project is sponsoring Raymond Lotta's speaking tour “Socialism is Much Better Than Capitalism, and Communism Will Be a Far Better World.” Revolution has been serializing that talk, and it is interesting that the very excerpt in the issue students were reading as they waited for Horowitz's act to start addresses the lie of the “100 million deaths” issue, exposing that if the same methods and standards were applied to deaths in capitalist countries, and countries dominated by imperialism, then the “democratic capitalist experiment” in India alone killed more people since 1947 than all the deaths anti-communists (falsely) claim were caused by communism.

But Horowitz had a “scared straight” type impact with the anti-communist horror stories. During the Q & A period, at least a couple of students who wanted to challenge Horowitz felt compelled to preface their objections to his talk by disassociating themselves from communists and their alleged misdeeds.

Channeling George Wallace

Once Horowitz had linked any concern for the oppression of Black people to an inevitable murder of innocents, he spent a substantial portion of his talk attacking Black people.

Particularly ugly was his attack on the progressive Black intellectual Cornel West. Here he combined the old Dixiecrat race-baiter George Wallace's attacks on “pointy headed intellectuals” and Black people. Of West, Horowitz sneered, “There isn't an idea in that head. And yet he charges like $35,000 a speech.” That stupid comment was met with a disturbing amount of laughter, as well as visible anger on the faces of the small number of Black people in the room. There was less applause, and some murmurs of disagreement when Horowitz called West “lazy,” and awkward silence when Horowitz called West an “overpaid, underworked fool.”

I have to say that my blood boiled. It shouldn’t need to be said—but evidently it does—that Cornel West is remarkable for the breadth of his scholarship and his thinking, his concerns for justice, and his continual attempts to link up with masses of people who are locked out of the world of ideas by this system. No ideas? I don’t have to agree with everything Cornel West writes to find him provocative, engaging, and challenging. To be called someone with “no ideas” by a demagogue like Horowitz, who specializes in hackneyed and recycled McCarthyism, would almost be a compliment—if it were not the fact that Cornel West has been under attack from numerous quarters in recent years in an attempt to deprive him of his platform, and if it were not for the fact that Horowitz is not some iconoclast but a very highly connected and well-supported ideological hitman of the rulers of this country. On top of that, to descend into the most ugly racist stereotyping, to pander to and stir up whatever resentment might exist in his mostly white audience, was even more ugly. It is frankly only a step or two, if that, to the demagogue in the movie “Rosewood,” who whips up a lynch-mob against a Black man because the man has “taken on airs” and owns a piano!

Just as there is an intolerable amount of ignorance about what communism is about, there is also a tremendous amount of ignorance—even on an elite campus like UC, and in a crowd like this—of the reality of national oppression and white supremacy. Horowitz told the story of the lynching of Emmett Till, only to contrast it with a fabricated account of how Kobe Bryant was supposedly treated as a hero for being charged with raping a white woman (a Latino student later challenged and refuted this in the Q & A). Horowitz claimed that “In America, in the 21st century, a Black man accused of rape, or a big Black man accused of rape by a little white woman will get his day in court, and innocent until proven guilty.” And, on the other hand, Horowitz claimed that white Duke students charged with raping a Black woman got “hung in the media.” “You have a better chance,” Horowitz claimed, “if you're accused as a Black person, in certain settings, than you do if you're white.”

To take just a very brief reality check, the following from the Rush Limbaugh show is typical of the way the victim and the Duke Lacrosse team have been treated in the media:

LIMBAUGH: “[Al Sharpton is] trying to figure out how he can get involved in the deal down there at Duke where the lacrosse team—

CALLER: Yeah.

LIMBAUGH:—uh, supposedly, you know, raped, some, uh, ho’s.

One could find similar examples, including going back to the hysteria created around the case of the “Central Park jogger” in New York in 1989. A white woman was brutally raped, and a group of Black and Latino teenagers, ranging in age from 14 to 16 years old, were seized by police, interrogated (in some cases without lawyers or parents present), and tricked and coerced into videotaping false “confessions.” Intense racist hysteria against Black and Latino youth was whipped up and Donald Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page ads calling for the youth to be executed! Though there was no physical evidence and the youths' “confessions” did not match known details of the case, they were convicted and one youth served nearly 13 years in prison. Not until 2002 did the truth come to light when another man confessed to the rape—it turns out he had raped another woman in similar fashion only two days before. There was good evidence that the police themselves knew about this, had refused to investigate it, and instead proceeded with their frameup. The state was finally forced to expunge the youth's records.

But there is method to the madness. On the other hand, Horowitz wants to utterly distort the history of communism and lump it together with any progressive impulses at all, in order to rule out of order any dreams of a better future. All in the service of shutting down critical thought on the campuses. Nothing less than the truth can answer this—and we have to fully master and muster that truth.

In part 2 of this article, I’ll talk about what happened when I began to bring out some of the truth to his followers—and ended up confronting Horowitz himself.

Horowitz got over to a great degree with both the anti-communist lies and the racist stereotypes, distortions, and outright lies about Black people. There was a tense and sharp divide in the audience between how the small number of Black and Latino students reacted to his racist rants, and the way most of the other students reacted.

Very few in the audience seemed to agree with him on the war in Iraq, his sexist attacks on feminism, or his claims that he is under siege and denied the right to express himself. But the racism and anti-communism that he ran was and is poisonous in its effect and besides, people don’t have to agree with everything Horowitz runs in order for him to set the terms of debate.

The Shtick... and THE STICK

Beyond the way he played on and whipped up anti-communist mythology and racist stereotypes, most students I spoke with after the event were not aware that Horowitz is not just full of shit—his agenda is about silencing critical thinking and dissent. Nor was there much, if any, awareness of his connections to Bush, Karl Rove, and the top officials of the Republican Party. Students I talked to had no idea that Horowitz's tract “The Art of Political Warfare,” was assigned reading for 2,000 key players in the last Bush election campaign and to top Republican congressmen. They didn't know that he and his followers are demanding dissenting professors get fired and prosecuted. And Horowitz didn't bring any of that up in his talk.

As dozens of students milled around after the Q & A ended, I was able to share some of the things I learned reviewing his book [see Revolution #42, April 9, 2006]. No student I talked to, including several of the campus Republicans, had read his latest book, The Professors (and I called out for anyone who had to speak up). They didn't know that he wants people who disagree with him fired, and that his followers have called for prosecuting professors under California's law against “communist indoctrination.”

As discussion developed in the lobby after the event, many students—including some of the campus Republicans—were quite disturbed by what they learned from what has appeared in Revolution about the essential repressive edge of Horowitz's campaign. He's not trying, mainly, to argue with his opponents; he wants them fired and jailed. As I pointed to things in Horowitz's book that prove this, one of the campus Republicans asked me to “raise what you are saying to David.” So off we went.

Horowitz was chatting with a group of students, accompanied by a couple of bodyguards. I introduced myself and explained I was very familiar with his book, and I told him that his own followers didn't know that he calls for firing teachers who disagree with him.

“Why don't you and your followers,” I asked, “debate and argue with people you don't agree with instead of demanding they get fired? If there is anything to what you are saying about how Black people owe a debt for being enslaved, which there is not, then why won't you argue that out. Why do you demand that people who disagree with you be fired and prosecuted?”

“You didn't read my book!” Horowitz cut me off. I said yes, I read the introductory “disclaimer” that you don't care about a professor's politics. And I read what you wrote about how you just want professors to keep politics outside of the classroom. But those are lies. I said: “You attack most of the professors in the book for things they say outside of class, and you have overtly called for firing Ward Churchill and the Colorado high school teacher who was taped by a snitch inspired by your so-called Students for Academic Freedom.”

I pointed out that Horowitz called for firing this high school teacher, among other places, during an appearance with Pat Robertson on the 700 Club. I told the students there that Horowitz had said that Robertson was doing important work for the same cause as him.

“If Robertson is doing important work for your cause,” I said to him, “what does it tell us about your cause? Robertson's Christian fascist university does not allow gay students, gay visitors, or any discussion of homosexuality (in any kind of rational way) on campus, and when a group of gay rights activists symbolically stepped onto school property, the school had them arrested. Is this your model,” I asked, “of free speech and academic freedom? And then you call for the firing of a Colorado high school teacher who engaged his class in discussion of capitalism, the causes of the Iraq war, and comparisons of Bush and Hitler.”

This teacher—according to the tape provided by a snitch student and played on a Colorado radio station—repeatedly provides an opportunity for a student with Horowitz's views to argue his case in class. And this teacher tells his students, “I'm not in any way implying that you should agree with me...but what I'm trying to get you to do is to think about these issues more in depth.” What does it tell you when Horowitz says that Pat Robertson is doing “important work” for academic freedom (!), and then demands this teacher be fired? People listening had never heard any of this. “Horowitz wants professors fired? Isn't he for free speech?”

Horowitz defended calling for the firing of the Colorado high school teacher (on Robertson's 700 Club show, Horowitz called the teacher's classroom discussion “child abuse”). Horowitz lied about what the teacher said in class. One of the UC students commented that it would seem hard to believe this teacher was a tyrant when 150 students walked out of school in protest when he was suspended.

Horowitz sensed that the association with Robertson was not playing well here at all, and that even his own people were somewhat freaked out that he called for firing this Colorado high school teacher. Horowitz said he doesn't agree with Pat Robertson on gays. I said, “That may be true, but so what? Did you go on his show and call for the firing of this Colorado teacher or not? And did you applaud Robertson's work as contributing to your cause? How is that anything but upholding a model of draconian repressive censorship, and opposing free speech that questions authority and encourages student discussion? Did you join Robertson in inciting his audience saying things like the professors attacked in your book are killers, beat children, are ‘sexual deviants’ and terrorists?”

Horowitz claimed that one professor in his book advocated sex with children. I said, “You know as well as I do that what Robertson means is that these teachers are openly gay, or they explore homosexuality in a way that does not start from Christian fundamentalism, and that is what Robertson was inciting his audience about. And that is just one example of what you would ban in classrooms.” This is a very uncomfortable area for Horowitz, and before we could explore other examples of his alignment with the Christian fascist agenda, his “bodyguards” placed themselves about six inches in front of my face, while Horowitz wheeled around and stormed out of the room.

After this exchange, the level of turmoil went to a whole other level. Even before my encounter with Horowitz, the campus Republicans had placed the issue of Revolution with the review of Horowitz's The Professors on their table, and it stayed there until they packed up. One guy, who described himself as a math geek, an evangelical Christian, and a conservative campus activist, wouldn't let go of me. He kept insisting he didn't agree with what he had learned Horowitz stood for. He thought students should be exposed to different ideas, and didn't feel threatened by political arguments in class. He was upset that by being an evangelical Christian Republican, he would be perceived as agreeing with Robertson. I told him that if he is concerned about that, he should draw a sharp line of demarcation between what he believed in, and Horowitz, Robertson, and Bush. He was in a great deal of angst when I finally said goodbye, and told me he would think about what we talked about and read Revolution.

Lessons

There is much to try to process from this live encounter with Horowitz, but a few things stand out in my mind. One is that if anyone thinks Horowitz is a marginalized liar, they're only half right. Three hundred students turned out to hear him at University of Chicago, and they weren't, overwhelmingly, there to expose and refute him.

Second, Horowitz's full repressive agenda, which is serious and dangerous, is something he feels he needs to keep in the closet in front of audiences like the one at University of Chicago. This is an Achilles heel for him when it is exposed.

Third, we have to take on Horowitz with substantial, hard-hitting arguments that expose what he is all about. We have to go after him with facts, using his own words to damn him, and drag out and expose his real agenda to his followers. Anything less than that won’t cut it and will even play into his hands.

I was impressed by the openness on this campus to engaging in big questions. This was evidenced by the students who challenged Horowitz, and by the interest in a communist newspaper, and exposure of Horowitz that does not just refute what he says, but exposes what he serves. It struck me how important it is that we do the work to get a positive dynamic going, where on the one hand the right to critical thinking on campus is fought for, and Horowitz is exposed and refuted and his campaign to suppress critical thinking is beaten back; and on the other hand, there needs to be—in concert with this—much more engagement in academia with what communist revolution and socialism are really about.

And finally, very central to Horowitz's mission are his racist attacks on Black people. A substantial part of his speech involved upholding the enslavement of Black people by this system, and denying and reversing the present-day reality of racism, white supremacy, and the oppression of Black people. I'll return to this, and its dangerous implications, in future articles and meanwhile I encourage reader correspondence on this component of the Horowitz agenda.

http://rwor.org/a/048/close-encounters-horowitz-2.html

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Thanks for Nothing

An Open Letter to David Horowitz

Mr. Horowitz,

I find your stories of leftist “persecution†of conservatives to be a joke. Why? Because I live in America, the real America, and I have gone to public school for 13 years, and I know where the bias lies.

You say you are for Academic Freedom, but where were you when I got called to the office and threatened with disciplinary action simply for arguing about the Iraq war with another student?

Yes, Mr. Horowitz, this actually happened my freshman year. I certainly didn’t hear you screaming in defense of my freedom.

Mr. Horowitz, where were you when I came out? When I got threatening notes calling me a “faggot,†and a teacher took me aside and gave me a social-Darwinist lecture about why “homosexuality is a weakness�

Where were you Mr. Horowitz, when my fourth grade teacher read us “The Chronicles of Narnia,†and followed each reading selection of it with a lecture about how the book preached values similar to the Bible, which we should follow?

Where were you when my first-grade teacher started school everyday by reading us selected Bible passages, along with pre-written sermons from a Sunday school book?

Where were you Mr. Horowitz, when my government teacher called four other students' parents, hoping to intimidate them into standing for the pledge of allegiance, even though they didn’t believe in God?

Where were you Mr. Horowitz in my Jr. High Social Studies class where we learned about how at Kent State in 1970, the students were to blame for getting shot and got what they deserved?

Where were you when Marine recruiters came into my senior Government class and preached about how the media was lying about Iraq, and why students should sign up to go fight over there?

Where were you when a preacher came to my school right before the 2000 election, and told a group of us who were getting out of study hall that Lieberman shouldn’t be allowed to run for vice-president because he was “a Jew who didn’t believe in our lord Jesus Christ�

Yeah, your rhetoric about how the educational system in America is run by a liberal conspiracy is on the same level with those who think Wall Street is run by a Jewish Conspiracy. That level is called hate-sponsored insanity.

If you were really in favor of academic freedom, you would be in the small towns across America getting religious indoctrination out of the classroom. You would be challenging the teachers who bully and harass anti-war students and call them “traitors.â€

You would be out trying to make sure kids knew the truth, and weren’t being told lies about how “condoms don’t work†and “homosexuality causes AIDS.â€

I look at the number of girls at my high school who have been knocked up thanks to mis-education about birth control and I know where the bias is, and I know who you are really serving.

Thanks for Nothing.

http://rwor.org/a/048/horowitz-correspondence.html

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MOre proof how the "Bush Corp" and the far right, cheerleadered by David Horowitz and other morons like him and the asshats who bottom feed from their bile hate america.

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MOre proof how the "Bush Corp" and the far right, cheerleadered by David Horowitz and other morons like him and the asshats who bottom feed from their bile hate america.

this coming from a fucking flag waving communist.

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This coming from a jingoistic flag waving anti american bush bot.

this coming from a fucking flag waving communist.

Translation:

I hate my country, therefore I embrace republican fascism.

You know, the above valid data concerning horowitz is comparable to the nazis of the 30s but you don't care because you, hate freedom and you hate your country. Time to get back on the boat, yeah? YEAH!

I bet you're an illegal immigrant anyhow. You don't belong in America. Get the fuck out.

And no, I won't shut up. What are you gonna do about it?

Fucking dumb spic with a stolen computer.

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I know igloo is reading this and crying himself to sleep every night!

FUCK YOU IGLOO!

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This coming from a jingoistic flag waving anti american bush bot.

coming from a supporter of organized slavery. how does it feel to know that you support a failed ideology that has killed over 100 million people and subjugates people and free will?

I bet you're an illegal immigrant anyhow. You don't belong in America. Get the fuck out.

wrong asshole, 100% American citizen. Communist wet farts like you dont and never have belonged here. As I said, try Pyongpyang or Havana. 'Workers paradise'

Fucking dumb spic with a stolen computer.

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coming from a supporter of organized slavery. how does it feel to know that you support a failed ideology that has killed over 100 million people and subjugates people and free will?

I don't support organized slavery unlike you who supports a fascist government who allows US corporations to manufacture goods in countries where slavery is legal but you don't have any problem with that as long as it's the good ol' USA doing it, do you?

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I know igloo is reading this and crying himself to sleep every night!

FUCK YOU IGLOO!

Igloo can't read. Igloo can't think. His brain is controlled by the likes of nazi reich wing nutters named David Horowitz.

Or he may have ran out of insults then jumped off a skyscraper.