David Horowitz’s Archives: The Surreal World of the Progressive Left
You may disagree with this point of view but only a moral illiterate or someone who hasn’t read my article would describe it as bigoted against blacks. My book Hating Whitey (which is about the left’s hatred of white people) is an argument in behalf of black people not against them. The ad I ran against reparations also originated as a Salon article which was titled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea — for Black People, and Racist too.” I thought it was a bad idea for black people because it isolated them from all other Americans including Hispanic immigrants who were being asked to assume responsibility for slavery and pay reparations for a system that was ended 100 years before.
Campus Progress doesn’t join those who say Horowitz doesn’t have the right to speak. We just think his speech is ill-mannered, ill-considered, and ill-informed. It should be met with rational, firm, strong arguments and real facts. Horowitz came under fire again for aJanuary 26, 2005, posting on the History News Network website about “Why I Am Not Celebrating” the 90th birthday of the esteemed African-American historian John Hope Franklin. Franklin is the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke Universityand chairman of President Clinton’s Commission on Race. Horowitz launched an attack onFranklin for his response to Horowitz’s anti-reparations ad, denouncing him as “a racial ideologue rather than a historian” and “almost pathological.”
5. Franklin attacked me as someone who was pro-slavery, an easily disproven lie. Which you repeat:
In the piece, Horowitz tried to defend his claim that “free blacks and the free descendants of blacks … benefited from slavery.”
What this fragment of a quote really said was this: Proponents of reparations argue that all of America’s wealth is based on slavery and that’s why everyone alive today, including Hispanic immigrants whose ancestors weren’t living in America during slavery, should pay reparations. My response was that if all Americans today benefit from slavery as the proponents of reparations argue, then blacks alive today also benefitted from slavery, which undermines the argument. To represent this as being pro-slavery or as saying slavery was beneficial to blacks is dishonest or merely ignorant. For a historian to make this claim is inexplicable.
Through it all, Horowitz has found a smarmy, backhanded way of misrepresenting himself as a defender of civil rights – he baselessly brands his ideological opponents as “racist” to deflect criticism of his own racially inflammatory remarks.
6. If I have called opponents racist it is either in response to their attacks calling me racist, or a description specific to their racial beliefs. It is not a label I carelessly or baselessly ascribe to my ideological opponents. This is something the left does, as I have just demonstrated.
A contributor to numerous right-wing publications, Horowitz is the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a think tank financed by conservative funders that serves as an incubator for right-wing radicals. The group’s online journal, Front Page Magazine, began running Ann Coulter’s column after her post-9/11radical anti-Muslim comments got her fired from The National Review. Horowitz is a regular on TV and radio shows, where he mindlessly attacks the supposedly liberal media and denounces it for its “falsehoods.”
7. Ann Coulter was never employed by National Review. They merely dropped her column. Her remarks about 9/11 were obviously satire. The left apparently has no sense of humor. If Jonathan Swift were alive today the left would accuse him of suggesting we eat babies.
Horowitz continues his campaign against supposed “liberal bias” on college campuses through his organization Students for Academic Freedom. According to Horowitz, America’s schools are moving towards a “one party academic state” that is governed by a ruthless liberal dictatorship.
8. I have never campaigned against “liberal bias,” never use the word “bias” (since everyone has one) and wrote — in so many words — in The Professors that academics have a right to express their points of view (I can give you the quote if you want it).
He regales campuses with tales of liberal outrages, some of which cannot be documented despite diligent efforts by researchers and may never have occurred at all.
9. This is false. There have been no such diligent efforts, and I have refuted this canard on many occasions which you can find on my website, Frontpagemag.com, if you go to my article archive and look up “Replies to Critics.”
Horowitz also authored the “Academic Bill of Rights,” a misleading manifesto already introduced in eight state legislatures – and in the U.S. House of Representatives – touting the need for “academic diversity” in university faculty.
The Academic Bill of Rights would prohibit professors at both public and private colleges from introducing “controversial matter” into the classroom.
10. This statement is false. I have never called for the prohibition of controversial matter in the classroom. I have said that if a controversial issue is being discussed, it is a professor’s obligation to make students aware that it is controversial and provide them with critical material so that they hear at least two sides to the question. This is what used to be called a liberal position and has been part of the academic freedom tradition articulated by the American Association of University Professors since 1915.
The bill would shift oversight of college course content away from trained professors and administrators and into the hands of state governments and courts.
11. This statement is false. I have never sought such legislation, nor have I ever suggested that government should have oversight of college curricula.
While it has not been formally adopted anywhere yet, it has inspired legislative policiestoward “intellectual diversity” in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Inter-University Council ofOhio has reached an agreement with Senate sponsors of the Ohio Academic Bill of Rights to implement key principles of “academic freedom” in Ohio public and private universities.
Despite fierce objections from the American Association of University Professors, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the PennsylvaniaHouse of Representatives passed a resolution that required a Select Committee to “examine, study and inform the legislature about the condition of academic freedom in the state’s universities” on July 5th, 2005.
Horowitz smugly declared that if the liberal school boards had not refused to adopt his non-legislative Academic Bill, government intervention would be unnecessary. Horowitz and his overwhelmingly right-wing supporters insist that the grievance procedures in the OhioAcademic Bill of Rights and the Pennsylvania resolution protect all students from discrimination based on political/ideological affiliation. After nearly a year and countless hours of testimony, the committee concluded that there were few if any academic freedomviolations in Pennsylvania, and that no legislation was necessary. Horowitz has continuously mischaracterized the hearings.
12. The above says very little and what it implies is misleading. I refer you to my account of these matters in my writings on the Pennsylvania Hearings. The Committee conducted no investigation whatsoever of academic freedom abuses. What the committee found was that students had no academic freedom rights in Pennsylvania and no grievance machinery, so it is no wonder that the administrators who testified said that there were no abuses. The Committee’s absurd conclusion was the result of a political coup by the teacher unions and their legislative guns.
