ROSETTE GONZALES While addressing a crowd of 200 students
at Westwood Plaza Monday, right-wing speaker David
Horowitz denounced UCLA’s lack of political diversity as
depriving students of a balanced education.
By Dexter Gauntlett
Daily Bruin Staff
Conservative media magnet David Horowitz often finds himself in
the middle of controversy. His accomplished past, career in
journalism and activist nature has made the 15-time Emmy winner a
familiar face around college campuses.
And during a rally at Westwood Plaza Monday, he reiterated his
main concerns with what he called the extreme leftist university
system that “deprives every student at UCLA of a balanced
education.” He went on to ridicule “leftist”
policies of the last 10 years, which he said contributed to the
inability to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
In February 2001, Horowitz purchased space in the advertising
section of 20 college newspapers that listed the “Ten Reasons
Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks ““ and
Racist Too.” While many newspapers rejected the
advertisement, the act sparked a national debate and resulted in
some college newspapers printing apologies for running the ad.
Daniel Hernandez, then editor in chief of UC Berkeley’s
Daily Californian, printed a front-page apology on behalf of the
senior editorial board for the advertisement that ran in its March
2, 2001 issue and said the piece allowed the Daily Cal to
“become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry.”
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, protesters marched into
the office at the Badger Herald and denounced the paper as a
“racist propaganda machine.”
Horowitz said to the New York Times following the controversy
that the newspapers had a “positive responsibility not to
censor the advertisement.”
Reparations have already been paid, Horowitz said, in the form
of affirmative action and other programs, such as UCLA’s new
comprehensive review admission policy that considers criteria
beyond GPA and test scores, such as socioeconomic situations and
other life challenges.
“No one ever achieved greater results by lowering the
bar,” Horowitz said. “The new UC policy is not designed
to promote minority achievement but to get more minorities into the
UC system without improving the public schools.”
The self-described neo-conservative Horowitz, who now condemns
the “seductive lies of the Left,” hasn’t always
been a hardcore Republican.
Born to Communist parents, Horowitz received his master’s
degree from UC Berkeley in 1961. Soon after, he became a leader of
the New Left, a progressive anti-Vietnam War coalition. He also
edited Ramparts magazine, a popular left-wing Berkeley-based
student journal.
During the 1970s, however, Horowitz became dissatisfied with the
radical policies that were once his livelihood. And after a series
of award-winning biographies on U.S. presidents, including the
Kennedys, Fords and the Roosevelts, Horowitz defected to the
Right.
Horowitz formally expelled the last of his remaining liberal
beliefs in 1989 and published “Destructive Generation: Second
Thoughts About the Sixties.”
In the last five years, Horowitz has published a handful of
books. In 1997, he published his autobiography “Radical
Son” followed by “The Politics of Bad Faith” in
1998, “Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes” in
1999, and, in 2000, “The Art of Political War.”
Horowitz has condemned the New Left for what he sees as its
anti-American sentiment. In a paid advertisement that ran in dozens
of college newspapers, including The Yale Daily News, Daily
Californian and the Daily Bruin in late September 2001, he went as
far as to say that anti-war groups were responsible for the fall of
Saigon on April 30, 1975 ““ an event referred to as Black
April by some Vietnamese overseas.
Horowitz has appeared on almost every major news analysis
television and radio show in the country and is editor in chief for
the online newspaper frontpagemag.com and president of the Center
for the Study of Popular Culture ““ an organization he founded
in 1988.
He has spoken at more than 100 college campuses and is widely
known for his anti-slave reparation and anti-socialist political
beliefs.
“Socialism is the worst thing that has ever happened to
poor people,” Horowitz said at Monday’s rally.
He is quick to remind people that it was a white man 137 years
ago who signed the Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery.
He also describes a personal debt of gratitude to the West for
its role in ending slavery.
“I know that I have a debt to Christians who believed that
slavery was an immoral institution, and thanks to the U.S. and
Britain, slavery was ended,” Horowitz said.