The California crusades of commie-turned-conservative David Horowitz
If there were a Mt. Rushmore of people who exemplified the California art of reinvention, author and commentator David Horowitz would be the face furthest on the right.
The son of bona fide communists died last week at 86 as one of the most consequential figures in the modern-day conservative movement.
He supported the Iraq war, accused Muslim activists of supporting a second Holocaust against Jews and claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump — and that's just a piece of lint on the ball of whine that was Horowitz's career (I'm a columnist, so I'm allowed to have opinions). The raspy-voiced provocateur reveled in demonizing his opponents. He perfected the politics of grievance and victimization — ironic, since that was the cudgel Horowitz accused opponents of employing — and relied on straw man arguments so much that I'm sure the Scarecrow from 'The Wizard of Oz' is wondering where his royalties are.
He perfected his craft in the Golden State.
His 1996 autobiography 'Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey' tracked the evolution of a red-diaper baby from working as an editor for the pioneering progressive magazine Ramparts and palling around with the Black Panthers to identifying himself as a 'Lefty for Reagan' to waging well-funded wars through his Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center) against anything with the slightest patina of liberalism.
Long before the likes of Andrew Breitbart and my fellow former Daily Bruin columnist Ben Shapiro figured out that politics is downstream from culture, Horowitz was busy trying to conquer that realm.
He assailed Hollywood while also offering salons for conservatives in the industry. He was a prolific writer of books and articles, and someone who lectured across the country with the zest of a circus barker. He especially tried to change the hearts and minds of young adults — or at least troll them.
One of Horowitz's favored fronts was university campuses.
He defended fraternities at Cal State Northridge and Occidental College accused of racism and sexism in the name of free speech. That's how I first heard of his work: As a student activist at Chapman University in the early 1990s, I wondered why so many of my friends loathed the guy who used to do the 'Fight Back!' consumer-fraud show my parents so enjoyed when I was a kid (their David Horowitz wasn't mine, alas).
I was a senior in 2001 when Horowitz pulled off one of his most notorious collegiate projects. That spring, he approached student newspapers across the country and offered to buy full-page ads attacking reparations for Black Americans. Those who didn't take his money were accused by his supporters of squelching free speech; those who did were attacked by progressives for platforming a person they felt was a racist and inevitably apologized. The move made national headlines and allowed Horowitz to harrumph about wokeness before wokeness was even a term.
'I see the left as being at war with human nature,' he told The Times in a 1997 profile. 'The left thinks you can change people profoundly.'
That same piece said opponents dismissed Horowitz as a 'bitter graybeard loon,' with legendary Times columnist and fellow Ramparts alum Robert Scheer sneering that Horowitz was 'fighting battles that most people don't care about anymore.'
Well, we live in Horowitz's world now.
His motto of 'begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth' is gospel in the Trump White House. And his most famous acolyte has the president's ear: Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
The teenage Miller invited Horowitz to speak at Santa Monica High School in the early aughts, entranced by his bromides against multiculturalism. Horowitz returned the favor by publishing Miller's essay 'How I Changed My Left-Wing High School' in his FrontPage Magazine. Miller then started a chapter of Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom at Duke as an undergrad.
This ping-pong of flattery culminated with Horowitz connecting Miller to jobs on Capitol Hill before he joined Trump's 2016 campaign — and here we are.
New polling has some bad news for Newsom
The Real ID deadline is finally here
The LAPD is investigating killings that went undiscovered
Botched California State Bar tests
L.A.'s $1-billion budget deficit
National Endowment for the Arts cuts
Facing an existential threat from President Trump, the NEA canceled grants for L.A. Theatre Works, L.A. Chamber Orchestra and other groups.
The grant cancellations marked the latest salvo in Trump's battle to claim the landscape of American arts and culture, including his takeover of the Kennedy Center.
What else is going on
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After the Eaton fire, they didn't think prom would happen. Now these teens are ready to dance. About 175 students from John Muir High School in Pasadena lost their homes in the January fire. For many, prom night offered a rare sense of normalcy.
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Miami Herald
8 hours ago
- Miami Herald
U.S. citizen dies following Israeli settler arson attacks in the West Bank
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Politico
9 hours ago
- Politico
She wants Zohran's seat
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The Hill
11 hours ago
- The Hill
There's no magic number of deaths that makes it a genocide in Gaza
There is a famous scene in 'Schindler's List,' where Liam Neeson, playing Oskar Schindler, looks at his personal possessions and realizes that he could have saved more Jews from death. Schindler looks at his gold Nazi Party pin and laments he could have saved one more person if he had sold it off. The Jews he did save, however, quote from the Talmud, telling him, 'He who saves one life, saves the world entire.' Countless books, movies, tv shows, plays, documentaries, museums exhibits, speeches and more have been dedicated to teaching Americans about the Holocaust and how to identify the warning signs so that it can never happen again. So it is perplexing and angering to many Americans that they should see the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and be told that this doesn't qualify as a genocide. The New York Times ran a column by Bret Stephens in which he argued that it is not a genocide, on the grounds that a genocide would be 'more methodical and vastly more deadly.' But the idea that a genocide can only qualify as a genocide if it mirrors the horror of the Holocaust goes against the very teachings that countless survivors, professors, scholars and artists have warned us about. Martin Niemöller's poem ' First They Came ' was an explicit warning that you cannot wait to hit some magic number before a mass killing becomes a genocide. The Rohingya genocide has resulted in 43,000 deaths at most, and yet we have no problem calling it a genocide. The same goes for the Yazidis, Bosnians and other victims of death campaigns over the years. It's a bizarre argument for the Israelis and their supporters to make, that the killing of Palestinians is not genocide just because it could be so much worse. Even stranger is the notion that genocides have to be 'methodical.' Yes, the Holocaust showed a new level of human hatred when the Nazis turned executions into an organized process like something one might see in a factory. But as we saw in Rwanda, that is not always the case. The same can be said for the Armenian genocide, where forced deportations included death marches and mass starvation in addition to mass executions. And speaking of mass starvation, we turn to Gaza. After the horrific Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Israel did kill thousands of civilians (mostly women and children) via bombings while claiming it was fighting the terrorist group. This was an already weak argument, because many other countries have fought terror groups and insurgencies over the last two decades while going out of the way to minimize civilian deaths (or at least trying to). Today, even Israeli organizations are accusing their government of making little effort to differentiate between civilians and terrorists and allowing the civilian population to be starved to fight terrorism. In the history of the world, sieges have been used to break people's will. But in the modern era, one has to question the morality, let alone the effectiveness, of starvation as a tool of war. Even now, historians are even looking back to reevaluate man-made famines or forced starvations to see if they qualify as genocides. During the Siege of Leningrad, the Germans used mass starvation as a weapon to force the capitulation. One million Russians were said to have starved to death during that siege. The Holodomor famine in Ukraine is labeled a genocide because it was man-made, by the Soviet regime, used in part as a weapon to weaken Ukrainian independence movements. One can even make an argument that the British mass-export of foods away from indigenous people, as in the Irish famine and Bengal famines, qualifies as genocide. The Israelis have every justification to fight a war against Hamas. The organization has always governed Gaza in bad faith, and the people who suffered the most were the people who voted them in during the 2000s, thinking that it would help them. But Israel's argument that as a consequence anything goes — that withholding food and medicine from Gaza and shooting at people who try to get food somehow hurts Hamas — is ludicrous. It is even more insane to insinuate that those who are looking to end the suffering of civilians are Hamas supporters. Is Mandy Patinkin a Hamas supporter because he has spoken out against Israel's actions? Hamas, a terrorist organization, will be a threat as long as it has a supply of weapons and the illusion of political power. A great way to undermine them would be to provide Palestinians with the security, prosperity and peace Hamas has failed to deliver. Families in Gaza don't care about politics — they care about keeping their children alive. It's these pictures of starving children that Israel can't argue with. The control of access points and reported massacres of civilians at food stations fall in line with many of the genocides mentioned above. We can argue about one-state versus two-state solutions all day. We can argue the best way to combat Hamas and eradicate its power. We can easily agree that Israel has every right to defend itself. But, because most Americans received the education we did about the Holocaust from survivors, teachers, artists and academics, we can also argue that what's happening in Gaza qualifies as a genocide against the Palestinians. We were taught 'Never Again' to make sure it never happens again. That's why millions of Americans, from all backgrounds, have accused Israel of genocide.
