March 29, 2001
Toogood Reports
David Horowitz is a troublemaker. When they’re feeling civil, his critics call him a “racist.” Typically, they do not so much as mention his name, and try to keep other people from doing so. And so, when Horowitz sought to start a debate on the black reparations movement, a movement whose academic supporters have intimidated all their campus critics into silence, he was forced to buy space, and run his views as an advertisement. His ad’s title, “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea—and Racist Too,” is beyond the pale by the censored standards of today’s politically correct campus.
When student editors published Horowitz, his critics’ response was variously to steal and destroy all of the newspapers, as they did at Brown University, threaten editors with violence, and demand that the editors kick back to them all of the ad money Horowitz had paid, publicly apologize, and give the critics free space in the newspaper to vent. Amazingly, some editors have obliged them.
Time was, such criminals would be arrested, and carted off to the hoosegow; today, not only do they not get arrested, but they get to make demands. Brown University’s “Third World Student Coalition” of middle-class, black, newspaper thieves claims, anonymously, that in destroying the entire press run of the Brown Daily Herald, its members engaged in “civil disobedience.”
“Civil disobedience” involves publicly taking a stand against something, whereby one accepts, even embraces, going to jail over a matter of principle. Affirmative action (or postmodern, if you like) civil disobedience is done in secret, hiding behind the claim that the law does not apply to dissidents of color (or of gender, or of sexual identity).
But on March 21, the New York Times found Horowitz “fit to print.” And the ABC-TV news magazine, 20/20, devoted a March 23 segment to the reparations debate that was surely inspired by Horowitz, even if the folks at 20/20 refused to mention him.
Although over 80 percent of the American people think that the idea of paying reparations to American blacks is ludicrous, on college campuses across the nation, challenging the reparations idea can be harmful to one’s health. Nuremberg-style rallies — euphemistically called “conferences” — are held in which the only questions permitted are HOW MUCH should be paid. Four years ago, the same sort of “conferences” were held on behalf of so-called ebonics. The late John Wayne notwithstanding, you really can’t be a thief — or a supporter of thieves — without being a liar, too. Thus, supporters of affirmative action, which is not only a moral outrage, but a blatant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal treatment under the law (you know, that equality stuff?), have always had to lie. [Postscript 2010: AA also violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act.]
First, they lied about what was going on, claiming that, “all things being equal,” the black candidate would get the nod for a job or admission to a highly selective university, when in fact, affirmative action recipients were woefully unqualified. Then affirmative action supporters took to lying about the Constitution: Only UNEQUAL treatment before the law, based on one’s race, correctly fulfilled the Fourteenth Amendment’s equality requirements.
But lying about the Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t enough, because the disenfranchised Asians and white men could still complain about affirmative action. They needed to be silenced. That required more stealing, more lying—about both the First Amendment and the simplest matter of criminal law—more disfranchising. Newspapers were stolen, and books burned. Disagreement became “hate speech.” Dissidents were forced into sensitivity training, fired from their jobs, expelled from school.
The reparations “debate” is just the latest embodiment of affirmative action, both in terms of the economic demands blacks are making of whites, and of the attempts by black reparations supporters and their white allies to burn the Constitution. With each easy victory, blacks have raised the ante.
Note that I have yet to address the merits of the case for reparations. Although I shall come to those merits in a later installment, they are irrelevant at present. For one thing, advocates do not make a case; they make demands. The advocates’ postmodern idea of “dialogue,” is for blacks to tell whites how the latter can pay the former reparations.
Like other Horowitz critics, Sarah Turner, a white sociology major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has refused to address the merits of Horowitz’ argument. In her column in the Daily Cardinal, which refused to run Horowitz’ ad (the Cardinal’s competitor, the Badger Daily Herald, did) but which did run an ad denouncing Horowitz, Turner called Horowitz “a well-known right-wing hate monger,” whose ad “was designed to propagate misinformation,” and was “a thinly veiled racist attack against African-American students on campus, and has done irreparable damage to the campus climate.”
Turner exhorted, that
Whites must take up reparations for slavery as our issue.... A local grass-roots movement to begin a dialogue on reparations has begun in Madison and across the country.... Today at 2:30 p.m. there will be a Rally Against Media Racism on the steps of Bascom Hall. To reach the local reparations movement contact ...
During the entire history of Afrocentrism and affirmative action, black authority figures and their white allies have lied to younger blacks, telling the latter that legal obligations do not apply to them, and that they needn’t respect the legal rights of anyone white or Asian. Thus, Lewis Gordon, the director of Afro-American Studies at Brown, has sought to rationalize the crimes of the Third World Coalition of Student Newspaper Thieves,
If something is free, you can take as many copies as you like. This is not a free speech issue. This is a hate speech issue.
A popular figure bandied about by reparations activists is that each black adult and child be paid $1,000,000. By the media’s liberal reckoning of 34 million blacks in America, that would come to $34 TRILLION, not the billions that mathematically-challenged columnist Julianne Malveaux has claimed. The targets of the demands, America’s approximately 190 million white adults and children, would then have to pay $180,000 each.
As he has written in his memoirs, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, during the 1960s, Horowitz was a Marxist who ran with the Black Panthers. His comrades raised his consciousness, when they murdered his friend, Betty Van Patter, for asking too many questions.
Horowitz exited, stage right. In his book, Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes, Horowitz extended his criticisms of the left to black racism. David Horowitz is that rare white conservative, who has cojones grandes.
He could never be an academic. Most civilians don’t know this, but before an academic is granted tenure, he is given a medical examination, in which a certain organ is checked against academia’s highly circumscribed limits. Ideally, one should lack the organ in question entirely. Horowitz would get the academic equivalent of 4-F status.
And so, Horowitz fights the good fight through his website, frontpagemag.com, his organization, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, his book publishing outfit, Encounter Books, and his column, which is carried by Jewish World Review and Salon.
Did I mention that he keeps his office in the middle of Jim Snow Oakland?
David Horowitz is the one, widely-published American conservative I know of who writes unflinchingly about black racism, without being relegated to the fringe of white supremacism.
But not in academia. The typical tenured, racial socialist professor cannot distinguish between a David Horowitz and a William L. Pierce, the neo-Nazi author of The Turner Diaries.
That should give you an idea of how important David Horowitz is to the cause of free speech on college campuses, and how hated he is by campus censors. As some editors have emphasized with great pride, they would NEVER have published Horowitz’ ad as editorial copy. Susan Zucker, the general manager of the Yale Daily News, has proclaimed, “We aren’t printing anything written by David Horowitz.” Does that mean the YDN would publish me?
The Editor of the University of California, Berkeley Daily Cal, Daniel Hernandez, heaped scorn on Horowitz, based on the latter’s willingness to pay to air his views. Yet, the same Daniel Hernandez yielded to pro-reparations student goons, when they demanded that he give them space for free. Perhaps Horowitz’ mistake was in being too civilized.
Those who would “reform” campaign finance laws through banning soft money, take note. Better yet, those who have been indifferent to such reforms’ shrinking of the First Amendment, take note. Because those whose politics are unpopular with a media establishment dominated by the Daniel Hernandezes of the world, may only get their message out to otherwise censored audiences through buying ad space, and buying ad time.
So Horowitz bought the space. Or at least, he tried to. He has submitted his full-page ad to, at last count, 53 student newspapers. Only 13 editors have so far run the ad, and three of them—the UC-Berkeley Daily Cal, the UC-Davis Aggie, and the Arizona State University State Press, immediately caved in and apologized, following protests and threatened riots by black student activists. Two newspapers which rejected the ad, at Notre Dame and Penn State, had earlier run ads by neo-Nazis, which denied the Holocaust ever occurred.
Daniel Hernandez couldn’t carry David Horowitz’ jock strap. Someone needs to send the police to the office of the Berkeley Daily Cal, where a, um, man named Hernandez is impersonating a newspaper editor. And Hernandez isn’t the only one.
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