TDR Interview: David Horowitz

By Alexander Talcott | Monday, April 9, 2001

After a flurry of late-night telephone calls, The Dartmouth Review managed to get in touch with David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and much-maligned campus rabble-rouser, between speaking engagements in Boston.

TDR: Linda Borg, in a column at Projo.com, labeled you an 'arch-conservative.' Given your moderate position on abortion, defense of gay and civil rights, and support of large government programs for inner-city minority children, do you consider yourself an arch-conservative?

DH: That's just one of the many slanders that've been thrown at me. I am pretty much a mainstream Reagan Republican.

TDR: Have any of these slanders particularly hurt?

DH: This is about a form of slander. It's what I call racial McCarthyism. The reason the papers have refused to print the ad is because they're intimidated by racial McCarthyites on the campuses. Everybody knows that at Dartmouth as at every school in the country people walk around on eggshells around race issues.

TDR: Why do people tend to do that?

DH: Everybody is afraid to talk honestly on the subject because they are afraid that no matter how well-intentioned they are, no matter what their records on standing for the equality of all people, civil rights for everybody, they could be accused of racism by unscrupulous campus fascists on the left. That would predict that we are in jeopardy. That is why people will be silent on these issues. You do not see professors leaping forward to comment on this issue at all. That is why I knew there would not be any anti-reparations arguments presented in college newspapers or in college venues, classrooms, or conferences throughout the public debate on reparations, even though only 11% of the Americans support reparations, even though it is a slatrycidal campaign and one African-Americans will lose because a majority will oppose them. Nobody is allowed to point out how counter-productive this campaign is. That's why I ran my ads, to provide for the other side. The fact that they are censored at all these campuses, Dartmouth included, just shows how necessary the ads were.

TDR: Were you disturbed that it was the Brown College Republicans, a group that generally promotes free speech issues, cancelled the speech you were to give tonight [April 4]?

DH: Yeah, I mean, cowardly Republicans. What else is new? I am glad The Dartmouth Review has a very different tradition, which you could be proud of.

TDR: Stephen Brooks [of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture] has said that your primary concern is that universities are 'asleep at the wheel, failing to ensure that an environment is maintained where all students will be heard.'

DH: And in which there is respect and tolerance for intellectual diversity. Look what happened at Brown. A criminal act was committed. Those papers were stolen and trashed as private property. Has one student been suspended, disciplined, or expelled—let alone, had charges lodged against them? Has one of the organizations that participated in obstructing the free exchange of ideas on campus been disciplined, had its funding removed, suspended? No. That shows the attitude of the administrators. They're basically fellow travelers of the campus totalitarian.

TDR: People would have liked to read those papers. The Crimson reports that you had a packed auditorium for your speech on Monday at Boston University. 200 people were turned away at the door. Once police left, twenty more rushed in. What does that say about people's interest level?

DH: And I had 600 students at UMass the next day. And tonight I'm speaking at MIT. There's a tremendous hunger for ideas that are suppressed, routinely suppressed, on our PC campuses.

TDR: At that lecture, 'Racism and the Intolerant Left Wing,' you addressed affirmative action, inner-city schools and vouchers, and other race-related issues. Do you think your ideas on these issues will get the same press as reparations has?

DH: No (laughs).

TDR: Is there any hope to have a dialogue with Jack White [Time columnist who called Horowitz a bigot two years ago and now supports vouchers]?

DH: Not with Jack White. But the door is open to Jack White. You reminded me I didn't respond to his e-mail but I will. But he seems like a hopeless case.

TDR: One of your most interesting quotes appeared in the New York Post.: 'The problem is that slaves and children are all dead and I think it is unfair to pit Mexican immigrants against Johnny Cochran.' Interestingly, Johnny Cochran will be on campus next week.

DH: I wonder if you'll ask him about that. What he'll tell you is they're suing the government and he'll evade the fact that the government has no money that the taxpayers don't provide. The other will be that it is not for him, it's for programs for the inner city. But this will also ignore that these programs have failed so miserably in the past.

TDR: In an article for Salon.com, you said your ad challenged a 'racial orthodoxy that is suffocating the promise of American pluralism and setting ethnic communities against each other.' Do you believe in this promise and would de Tocqueville for that matter today?

DH: Well I think it's a battle. And without seeming too self-aggrandizing, this is the battle. This is exactly what we're fighting for...the right to express reasonable ideas in an academic setting without being demonized, without being smeared, and without being made into a pariah.

The atmosphere at Dartmouth as at other schools is one of racial McCarthyism. The administrators are getting this but the spear-carriers are the campus Left. In the McCarthy period, of course there were communists. There were lots of them. But McCarthy abused. Communism wasn't evil. McCarthy used loose smears, saying someone had communist ideas or that somebody was associated with communists to silent his political opposition, to attack Democrats. Today it's not the 'communist' word that's a career-wrecker, it's 'racist.' And of course there are racists. Probably not a hell of a lot at Dartmouth. The campus Left uses the word indiscriminately as a club to beat anybody that disagrees with it into silence. That is why our campuses are less free today, campuses like Dartmouth, than they were in the 19th century when they were run by religious denominations.

TDR: The University of Wisconsin's Daily Cardinal interviewed a spokesperson for the Multicultural Students Coalition who offered a weak definition of racism as 'having the power to institutionalize prejudice.'

DH: That's a totalitarian definition—only whites can be racist. The Left is racist. Having said that, you shouldn't fling these terms around. I want to make very clear that I'm not flinging the term around. When you define racism so it only applies to white people, that's racist.

TDR: The Yale Daily News and the University of North Carolina's Daily Tarheel both gave you the opportunity to appear in their pages as a guest columnist. Rather than publishing ads or responding to rapid-fire questions, what is it like to be offered a forum to write?

DH: I'm very happy that I've finally been provided with an audience. It's like going behind the iron curtain to go to a campus today. When I go to Harvard or to Dartmouth, I get to talk with conservative and Republican students, the Left boycotts my appearances, it tears down the literature that advertises them, it steals the papers that advertise them, it denies student funds to underwrite a public debate, it refuses to debate me. It's almost impossible to get a professor to debate me. It's boycotted by the administrators. The first line of a totalitarian regime. Since you control the public square, you just pretend that nobody else exists. So here you have 11% that supports reparations.

TDR: That figure comes from a Fox News survey.

DH: Yes. But on campuses it's 100% because nobody gets to say anything or nobody did until the Left inadvertently made David Horowitz a celebrity. Now if I go to Dartmouth there will be 500 people there. (Laughs) The Left as punctured its own balloon as it were or breached a hole in its own wall of defense. So the next step is to smear the person, just the way McCarthy did so nobody will listen to them if they speak.

TDR: Richard Poe [FrontPageMagazine.com columnist] wrote an article, 'Do 'People of Color' Support Reparations for Blacks?' He wrote about the assumed solidarity between Koreans, Apaches, Eskimos...

DH: Or West Indian blacks or American-born blacks or Africans. The Left does not speak in the name of minorities. The Left has contempt for minorities, hence its paternalistic sensitivity that treats minorities as though they were children. They're not men and women enough to stand up on their own two feet according to the Left. They have to be protected by the sensitivity police.

TDR: At the University of North Carolina, protestors on Monday chanted 'Education is a right, not just for the rich and white.'

DH: This is just lies. American education system is open to all. Everybody knows it. They just don't appreciate what they have, going to UNC.

TDR: Looking into a crystal ball, is the front page of Front Page Magazine going to be race-related a year from now?

DH: The main issue for me is how do we get poor black and hispanic inner-city kids out of the school traps that the Democrats have set for them.

TDR Interview: David Horowitz

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