Leading the Fight

From election rigging to BLM to Hamas on campus, David Horowitz warned us about every leftist plot and taught us how to fight it.

December 21, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield

[Order David Horowitz’s new book, The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left: HERE.]   

Twenty years before states from California to New York were exploring racial reparations for slavery, David Horowitz was campaigning against them. Reparations, he warned in ‘The Death of the Civil Rights Movement’, “is fast becoming the next big ‘civil rights’ thing.”

That was in 2001.

College papers, including at Harvard and Columbia, rejected his ads which laid out, “ten reasons why reparations for slavery is a bad idea — and racist too”. Campus events scheduled for Black History Month turned violent and newspapers that published the ads were burned.

That didn’t stop David Horowitz. It never did. He held public debates, made personal appearances and never backed down. His battle against racial reparations was covered by media outlets around the country and was described in his own book, ‘Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery’ which is still the definitive response to the policy.

But Horowitz was doing more than fighting against a policy, he was attacking the corruption of a movement that he had once supported. Anticipating BLM, he wrote that there’s no longer a civil rights movement searching for justice, “there is only a self-righteous, fact-denying lynch mob looking for white victims and law enforcement officials to make the targets of their wrath.”

Thirty years later, the David Horowitz Freedom Center continues exposing the leftist racists, from BLM and critical race theory to our series on racist mayors because of that guiding vision.

“When the guerrillas of the New Left marched off the streets and into the universities at the end of the sixties” they created “fortresses of ethnic and gender politics”, David wrote in 1990.

After taking on racism in academia, David went back to war against campus indoctrination, putting out an “Academic Bill of Rights” and launching Students for Academic Freedom with chapters on 160 college campuses. Once again he was attacked, threatened and condemned.

And once again he took an issue that hardly anyone had been paying attention to and made it into the national crisis that it was and still is.

David Horowitz uniquely understood the Left’s methods, mindsets and organizing principles.

In 2006, he introduced conservatives to the Cloward-Piven strategy for overwhelming the system in his co-written book, ‘The Shadow Party’. Today, his warning of the “strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis” can be seen all around us.

The nation’s greatest cities are toppling under a flood of illegal aliens brought here “to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.”

Out-of-control crime, homeless encampments and perpetual social justice activism are examples of the Cloward-Piven strategy in action.

Then, David Horrowitz helped expose Alinsky’s methods in ‘Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model’ which sold over 2 million copies and laid out what made Obama so dangerous.

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution,” he quoted another radical.

While many took Obama at face value, David Horowitz understood that, as he wrote, “the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.”

It was a lesson that conservatives would have to slowly, painfully and incompletely learn.

David Horowitz served as the Paul Revere of the conservative movement, who saw what was coming and traveled the country to warn us. If only more conservatives had listened.

It’s hard to find a leftist threat that Horowitz had not alerted us to early and often.

In 2012, eight years before Zuckerbucks and other schemes upended a presidential election, David Horowitz co-wrote, ‘The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future’ in which he warned that leftist nonprofits were going to fundamentally shift the balance of power, including elections, to the Left.

Horowitz and his co-author Jacob Laskin had written of “the Left’s dominance of another essential component of political success: election law. Encompassing everything from who is entitled to vote in elections, to voting procedures and challenges of election results, election law is increasingly shaped by progressive activists to provide the Left with a critical advantage.”

Had Republicans listened to that warning, 2020 would have gone very differently.

‘The New Leviathan’ highlighted that, “the Obama Justice Department has blocked requirements in Georgia that voters establish they are US citizens”. That failure to secure Georgia’s electoral system against fraud and illegitimate voters has cost America dearly.

Once again, David and the Freedom Center led the way by campaigning for a crackdown on leftist nonprofits and foundations. It’s a mission that continues with our series exposing the complicity of the IRS in allowing leftists to use their tax-exempt status to rig elections.

On an October that occurred sixteen years before the Hamas attacks, the David Horowitz Freedom Center announced that, “the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever – Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses” which exposed Islamic terrorist supporters at colleges.

It was 2007. Long before the presidents of major universities were telling Congress that calling for Jewish genocide could be acceptable, Harvard and Penn, along with Princeton, Yale, Columbia and many others were forced to host the Freedom Center’s teach-ins’ to confront “the academic left” which had “mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves.”

Under future Trump adviser Stephen Miller, then the national campus director of the Freedom Center’s Terrorism Awareness Project, college students on campuses across the country were shown, often for the first time, the truth about the terrorism against America and Israel, and the Islamic oppression of women.

Not only pro-Hamas groups like the Muslim Students Association rallied to oppose the ‘Week’, but so did liberal Jewish campus groups and even some College Republicans.

It didn’t faze David who continued to lead the way, speaking on campuses despite physical attacks and attempts to ban him from appearing. In 2008, he warned that there “is a movement for a second Holocaust of the Jews that is being supported on this campus by the Muslim Student Association.” It only took 15 years for his critics to admit he had been right all along.

David Horowitz and the Freedom Center were once again making waves and enemies by being far ahead of their time. A year earlier, Horowitz had gotten to the root of the problem with his incisive book, ‘Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam And the American Left’, which became a battle cry. Sixteen years later, we are still leading the way in taking the fight to Islamists and leftists.

We have exposed the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters who supported the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7 after years in which we targeted them with campus campaigns, and worked for their disbanding and their removal from campus, and taken on their tax-exempt status.

Recently a video of David’s 2010 confrontation with a Muslim Students Association member in which she admitted to supporting the extermination of the Jews in Israel has gone viral again.

That video, like all of his work, is a reminder of how important David’s work continues to be.

David’s consistent message over the years has been that the conservative movement does not know how to fight. The mission of a man who had cut his teeth on the farthest extremes of the Left was to teach us how to take on the Left and that’s why he always said that the David Horowitz Freedom Center is not a think-tank, it’s a battle tank.

And we are still a battle tank because David Horowitz showed us how to fight.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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