‘Anti-Racist’ Crusader David Horowitz Heads for Charleston, Citing Race Haters

In the years since the Al Qaeda attacks of 2001, David Horowitz, a former Marxist intellectual of the New Left of the 1960s, has been on a tear against Islam. He has savaged all kinds of Muslim groups and leaders, created a McCarthyite program aimed at driving university professors not sufficiently down on Islam out of their jobs, and insisted that progressives are working to subvert America.

Still, through much of that time, Horowitz, who as a leftist once crusaded for civil rights and racial equality, has tried to portray himself as a steadfast opponent of racism. Indeed, even while alleging any number of Muslim conspiracies, he has emphasized the alleged barbarity of the faith practiced by more than 1 billion people by describing it as an ideology dedicated to “hate, violence and racism.”

But Horowitz’s anti-racism credentials are weak at best.

Cracks have been showing for some time in Horowitz’s claim to oppose racism, no matter the source. In 2013, he published a pamphlet entitled “Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes” claiming that “it is okay in our politically correct culture to hate white people” and adding that “the leftist academy has a ready answer for every question about black racism: Only whites can be racist.”

And he more recently has taken on Black Lives Matter, the movement that began after last year’s shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer. Horowitz describes it as “a racist hate group founded by a core of radicals who have dedicated themselves to fomenting race conflict.”

Now, Horowitz has gone one better.

In an Oct. 28 fundraising letter for his DiscoverTheNetworks— a factually challenged site dedicated to mapping the alleged connections between progressives of all stripes — Horowitz brags about his work. “Want to find out the truth about taboo subjects such as interracial crime? Look it up on DiscoverTheNetworks. The entries themselves are impeccably sourced, rhetorically neutral,” he writes.

Impeccably sourced? Rhetorically neutral?

Let’s take Horowitz up on his suggestion and take a look at his sourcing on the “taboo” subject of interracial crime. Just last year, he added source links under that topic header to what certain people — the Ku Klux Klan, for instance — believe is a great source on interracial crime: the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). A direct descendant of the segregationist White Citizen Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, the CCC opposes “all efforts to mix the races of mankind,” describes black people as a “retrograde species of humanity,” and reprints, complete with lurid rewritten headlines, virtually any story it can find featuring black criminals.

Another link provided by Horowitz is to articles on a website known as VDARE — a racist anti-immigration site which is named after Virginia Dare, said to be the first white person born in America. The site is run by Peter Brimelow, who has ranted about America’s “demographic mutation,” pontificated on the horrors of multiracial crowds in New York, and fretted about his blond son’s future.

This week, in an ironic twist, Horowitz is taking his show — the annual anti-Muslim Restoration Weekend he’s been leading since 2012 — to Charleston, S.C., the site of June’s racist massacre of nine black churchgoers. In that town, Horowitz’s lauding of the CCC’s “Memorial Wall" page has special, horrific resonance.

That’s because Dylann Roof, the young man who carried out that massacre, left behind a manifesto describing his transformation into a racist killer — a change that began, according to the manifesto, after Roof typed the words “black on white crime” into the Google search engine and came upon the CCC website.

“I have never been the same since that day,” Roof wrote.

Let’s hope that the good people of Charleston, along with those of the rest of the United States, treat David Horowitz and his racist road show, which runs this Thursday through Sunday, with the same disgust and disdain that met Dylan Roof, another serious fan of the CCC.