April 9, 2001
Toogood Reports
(With an April, 2010 “Where are They Now?” update at the conclusion!)
The Horowitz Maneuver, Part III
Part I: The Anti-Reparations Ad
Part II: The New Free Speech Movement
Since the late 1980s, conservatives, libertarians, and even a few leftists who cherish the First Amendment, have decried the wave of censorship that has engulfed our nation’s campuses. Many observers have prayed for relief from campus Torquemadas who have made higher education more nearly resemble academia in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, than that of a free republic.
It now appears that those prayers have been answered.
David Horowitz, the man whom college student newspaper editors and criminals, er activists, have sought to silence, is performing a one-man road show against reparations at campuses across the country. His material: The living Constitution. Not the fictional “living Constitution” that socialists of all stripes, including Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe invoke, in order to project their personal prejudices on to the laws of the land, but the one written by the Founding Fathers, and periodically amended, according to the rules they laid down in 1787.
Horowitz’ web site, frontpagemag.com, calls his speaking tour “The Freedom Tour—David Horowitz Does American College Campuses.” Horowitz came up with a brilliant idea to publicize his speaking tour. He would take out full-page advertisements in campus papers around the country, including schools where he would be speaking, opposing the demand by many black leaders and their white “allies” that non-black Americans pay “reparations” for slavery.
The tour began on March 15, at Horowitz’ alma mater, the University of California-Berkeley.
To grasp the significance of Horowitz’ tour, one must understand that for the past ten-to-fifteen years, speakers with non-racial socialist views have been invited to speak on college campuses, only to be shouted down, or forbidden by administrators from speaking. Authorities at private campuses have routinely broken contracts, while their public campus counterparts have routinely broken the law, in violating speakers’ First Amendment rights.
Libertarian University of Pennsylvania historian Alan Kors, and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, have devoted an entire book, The Shadow University : The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, to academia’s repression of freedom of speech, religion, and the press. Kors and Silverglate’s 400-page book could as easily have been 4000 pages long.
And on March 16, Dan Flynn, the editor of the conservative magazine, Accuracy in Academia, wrote “12 Affronts to the First Amendment.” Flynn has published articles on hundreds of such outrages, and has material on thousands more. He collects instances of repression, the way other people collect stamps.
David Horowitz’ Berkeley talk didn’t go perfectly, but then, freedom of speech is never perfect or pretty in practice.
He had to be flanked by some thirty armed, campus security officers. Such a precaution should have been unnecessary; after all, is a university campus not the one haven, where one may peacefully debate mutually incompatible ideas?
And the event ended prematurely, when his jittery host pulled the plug on him. As Steve Sexton reported in the March 16 Berkeley Daily Californian,
The question and answer session had just begun, when Horowitz and another man began yelling at each other. Ben Carrasco, the emcee of the event and editor of the California Patriot, a conservative publication, pulled the plug on both microphones after the crowd became raucous, yelling and cheering on both sides of the aisle.
Horowitz was quickly ushered out of the building by his body guards, who flanked him the entire time.
The crowd booed as Carrasco and other members of the California Patriot and Berkeley College Republicans tried to figure out what to do next. “It was getting out of hand, and they told me to pull the plug,” Carrasco said. “Obviously from a PR standpoint, that wasn’t the right thing to do. I wasn’t expecting Horowitz to leave like that.”
How could a haven for intellectual freedom have been taken over so easily by totalitarian, racial socialists?
The original Berkeley Free Speech Movement was started in 1964 by leftists, who —with the exception of the late Mario Savio—killed freedom, as soon as they had won it. This time, it was a Republican student group that won for Horowitz the right to speak, and whose fearless leader pulled the plug on him.
Since Berkeley, Horowitz has spoken without incident at Texas A & M University (March 20), the University of Texas/Austin (March 21), Boston University (April 2), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (April 3), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (April 4).
Another April 4 date, however, at Brown University, was cancelled.
According to Horowitz’ web site, this talk was “CANCELLED BY BROWN,” but in fact it was the campus organizers who killed the date. As Andy Golodny reported in the April 2 Brown Daily Herald,
David Horowitz was scheduled to speak at Brown Wednesday, but the College Republicans rescinded its invitation to the conservative author for fear that violence would break out. “We thought that it would be very productive and educational to have him come to a debate on campus,” said Todd Auwarter ‘01, chair of the Rhode Island Federation of College Republicans. “We thought it would send a strong message for debate and dialogue and would hold Horowitz accountable for his ideas.”
[Horowitz was to have debated Cliff Montiero, the president of the Providence NAACP.]
Oh, it sent a strong message, alright.
Auwarter told Golodny,
“We wanted to have an intellectual debate, but many people have deep and intense emotional reactions to” Horowitz and his ideas... “There is the possibility that simply bringing him to campus may result in violent protests.”
Todd Auwarter’s “explanation” was seconded by Abby McEwen, a junior and the vice-president of the College Republicans, who told Golodny, “We didn’t want to be responsible for inviting him because of the potential for violence.... Many people, especially in the minority community, would have felt threatened by his presence on campus.”
At press time, neither Auwarter nor McEwen had responded to my interview requests.
Blacks would have felt “threatened” by David Horowitz’ presence on campus? I believe that the proper psychiatric term for Abby McEwen’s fears is “projection.”
Note that Brown’s administration had already scheduled a series of teach-ins for early May, on the subject of “race relations” (read: affirmative action, reparations, racial profiling, etc.).
Let us not forget, that Brown University has recently been the site of great heroism. The editor of the Brown Daily Herald, Brooks King, published David Horowitz’ anti-reparations advertisement in the paper’s March 9 edition, refused to apologize for doing so, and together with his staff, physically fought off attempts by the Third World Newspaper Thieves’ Coalition, which had already stolen the entire, 4,000-copy press run, to break into the newspaper’s editorial office, and rob the staff of the last 100 copies.
You would think that the heroism of Brooks King and his staff might have inspired Todd Auwarter and Abby McEwen. After all, the folks at the Brown Daily Herald had done all the heavy lifting. Instead, Auwarter and McEwen’s craven cowardice managed, almost impossibly, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Note that while most people vote for Republican candidates to RID THEMSELVES of affirmative action, and to PROTECT THEMSELVES from reparationistas, Bob and Liddy Dole have long supported affirmative action, and the present leaders of the Stupid Party put the greatest part of their energy into genuflecting before those pillars of the party, black and Hispanic voters.
Let them eat tax cuts!
And let us not forget, that had Pat Buchanan not self-destructed, President Albert Gore would presently be negotiating the release of 24 American servicemen [taken hostage by China].
Remember these names: Ben Carrasco of the University of California-Berkeley, and Todd Auwarter and Abby McEwen, of Brown University. These intrepid young leaders are the cream of the crop of future Republican congressional aides, journalists, think tank staffers and elected officials.
This, after all, is the party from which two allegedly rock-ribbed, conservative governors, George and Jeb Bush, took a moral outrage—affirmative action—that was legally dead in the water, and not only gave it new life, but in making it invulnerable to Constitutional challenges, outdid the Democrats! The same party took a classic race hoax, “racial profiling,” and instead of exposing it, had an allegedly far right-wing attorney general, John Ashcroft, pander to the Congressional Black Caucus.
Earlier, I asked how it could be possible for racial socialists to take over America’s campuses. The answer is, they had help. The bad guys succeeded through the connivance of their alleged opponents, the “conservatives” who wouldn’t dare hurt any blacks’ feelings.
Mr. Jefferson said that the tree of liberty must periodically be watered with the blood of patriots. If the Ben Carrascos and Todd Auwarters and Abby McEwens are the best that America’s youth has to offer, then we’d best get an ax, and chop down the tree’s rotting hulk.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?!
Update: April 5, 2010
Where are They Now?
Todd Auwarter became a consultant at globalist business consultancy, Bain & Co., which rakes in blood money through helping businesses profit via the trinity of evil business practices: outsourcing, offshoring, and H-1b visas.
Abby McEwen became a graduate student of politically correct, obscurantist art theory at NYU.
Ben Carrasco also continued his formal education, attending Stanford Law School, and is currently an associate at the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP.
While at Stanford Law, Carrasco wrote a balanced, sophisticated, app. 8000-word, eminently readable seminar paper on the role of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) and state prison reform, “Assessing the CCPOA’s political influence and its impact on efforts to reform the California corrections system,” that was much better than most of what I read nowadays from tenured professors. If you’re interested in the subject, it’s a joy to read.
However, the paper did have two weaknesses: 1. Echoing the biases of Carrasco’s professor, liberal penologist Joan Petersilia, it assumed the validity of reducing recidivism through “prison reform” in terms of no jail time, little jail time, and “rehabilitation,” that was all the rage in the 1960s and 1970s, and which caused the crime explosion that wracked this country at the time, and 2. It never mentioned the easiest and surest way to reduce the cost of California’s prisons: End California’s illegal sanctuary policies, and aggressively go after, arrest, and turn over to federal authorities the illegal aliens who, rather than the prison guards’ union, have been the driving force in the explosion in California crime, and thus, prison costs.
Not once in the paper does Carrasco ever mention “immigration,” “immigrants,” or “aliens,” and only once, in passing, did he mention “demographic changes.”
Even if the liberal reforms weren’t discredited, they would be beside the point, if California continues to be inundated by millions of hostile, violent illegal aliens who refuse to follow California’s laws, indeed, who see themselves as “conquerors.”
Auwarter, McEwen, and Carrasco were what passed for good Republicans at Berkeley and Brown, respectively, and appear to be what now passes for good Republicans in their present stage of life. More’s the pity.
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