Activism On The Right
For nearly a decade, Horowitz's rejection of Marx remained a private matter. In the spring of 1985, however, Horowitz and longtime collaborator Peter Collier wrote an article for the Washington Post entitled, Goodbye to All That. The article explained their change of views and recent decision to vote for President Ronald Reagan.
In 1987, Horowitz co-hosted a "Second Thoughts Conference" in Washington, D.C., described by Sidney Blumenthal in The Washington Post as his "coming out" as a social conservative. According to attendee Alexander Cockburn, Horowitz related how his Stalinist parents had not permitted him or his sister to watch Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies. Instead, they were required to watch propaganda films from the Soviet Union.
In May 1989, Horowitz, Ronald Radosh, and Peter Collier travelled to Poland for a conference in Kraków calling for the end of Communism. After marching with Polish dissidents in an anti-regime protest, Horowitz declared,
"For myself, my family tradition of socialist dreams is over. Socialism is no longer a dream of a revolutionary future. It is only a nightmare of the past. But for you, the nightmare is not a dream. It is a reality that is still happening. My dream for the people of socialist Poland is that someday you will wake up from your nightmare and be free."
In 1992, Horowitz and Collier founded Heterodoxy magazine. The magazine focused on exposing excessive political correctness on American college and university campuses. About the decision, Horowitz has stated,
"As an undergraduate at Columbia in the McCarthy Fifties, I had written papers from a Marxist point of view, but had never been graded politically by my anti-communist professors. Nor had I ever felt that the lectures I attended were veiled indoctrinations. As a student, I was invariably presented with both sides of an argument. When I visited university campuses now, however, the contrast was striking. Courses were often baldly ideological. Many left-wing professors gave one-sided presentations of subjects, expecting their views to be parroted on papers and exams. Students were graded poltically, and frequently intimidated from expressing their own perspectives. The atmosphere of political terror was far greater than anything which I had experienced, as a Marxist, in the McCarthy era. Although there was no statistical evidence to prove it, I would estimate that more academic careers had been aborted for political reasons during those post-Sixties decades than during the entire Communist 'witch hunt' of the McCarthy period. The reason for the lack of statistics was the same as for the effectiveness of the purge. Unlike the McCarthyites, whose base was government, the left-wing witch-hunters were inside the academy, were they could operate in secrecy and to far greater effect."
Horowitz has also opposed reparations for slavery as something inherently racist against blacks. He argues that applying labels like "descendents of slaves" to blacks would damage their self-esteem and segregate them from mainstream society. Horowitz purchased, or attempted to purchase, advertising space in school publications in order to publicize his opinion that African Americans are not entitled to reparations for Slavery in the United States. Many of these offers were refused and, at some schools, papers which carried the ads were stolen or destroyed.
While he supported the interventionist foreign policy associated with the Bush Doctrine, Horowitz opposed American intervention in the Kosovo War, arguing that it was unnecessary and harmful to U.S. interests. He has recently been critical of libertarian anti-war views.
In 2004, Horowitz launched Discover the Networks, a conservative watchdog project that monitors funding for, and various ties among, leftists and progressive causes. In his 2004 book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Horowitz contends that leftists support, intentionally or not, Islamist terrorism, and thus require ongoing scrutiny.
In two books, Horowitz accused Dana L. Cloud, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin, as an “anti-American radical” who “routinely repeats the propaganda of the Saddam regime” and, along with all of the 99 other professors in his book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Horowitz accuses her of the “explicit introduction of political agendas into the classroom.” (pp. 93, 377)
He felt his claim was substantiated when Cloud stated after 9/11 that: "the United States military has, in recent years, been the most effective and constant killer of civilians around the world."
Cloud replied in Inside Higher Ed that her experience demonstrates that Horowitz does real damage to professors' lives—and that he needs to be viewed as such, not just as a political opponent.
Horowitz's attacks have been significant. People who read the book or his Web site regularly send letters to university officials asking for her to be fired. Personally, she has received—mostly via e-mail—"physical threats, threats of removing my daughter from my custody, threats of sexual assaults, horrible disgusting gendered things," she said. That Horowitz doesn't send these isn't the point, she said. "He builds a climate and culture that emboldens people," and as a result, shouldn't be seen as a defender of academic freedom, but as its enemy.
After discussion, the National Communication Association chose not to grant Horowitz a spot as a panelist at its national conference in 2008, even after he agreed to forego the $7,000 speaking fee he had requested.
Horowitz replied, "The fact that no academic group has had the balls to invite me says a lot about the ability of academic associations to discuss important issues if a political minority wants to censor them." An association official said the decision was based in part on Horowitz's request to be provided with a stipend for $500 to hire a personal bodyguard. Association officials decided that having a bodyguard present "communicates the expectation of confrontation and violence."
While Horowitz was on the Riz Khan television show with Hussein Ibish, he was reported by Ibish to have published on his Frontpage Mag website: Arabs do nothing on impulse, Muslims have no allegiance to their countries, their only allegiance is to Islam, that’s what they have been taught since birth that’s all they know, Muslims have no borders”
In the same television program, Horowitz claimed that the Prophet Muhammad called for the “extermination of Jews,”. Horowitz also states that he supports the “creation of a Palestinian State in Jordan” in opposition to the prevailing “two state” model
Horowitz appeared in Occupy Unmasked, a documentary film that contends that the Occupy Wall Street movement is a sinister, violent, and organized with the purpose of destroying the American government.
Read more about this topic: David Horowitz