Former Black Panther Decries 'Cynical' Left
By Cory Forsyth
A&F Associate

If you assume that everyone on the other side of the political spectrum from you is wrong and only operating out of greedy, selfish motives, David Horowitz told the crowd packed into Rose Hills on Wednesday evening, you only hurt yourself. "When you invest in a political cause," he continued, "your mind closes, in a sense."

Horowitz, the son of two card-carrying Communists, described in his introduction as a "radical activist turned right," is a man that has traversed the political spectrum. During his youth he edited a leftist magazine called Ramparts, sympathized with the Black Panthers and once even met their leader, and organized anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the sixties in Berkeley. These days, however, he's a conservative activist.

His talk was titled, "The Political Bias on Campus and the Anti-American Left." Horowitz, who clearly knew he was walking into a lion's den, spent the first ten or twenty minutes massaging his audience into being receptive to views other than their own. "You should, for yourselves, … keep your minds open as much as possible," he stated early on. "There's a big difference between what theory says and the real world," he continued.

Horowitz outlined several instances in his own life where real-life experiences had contravened on his theory-driven beliefs. He spoke of his takeover of the magazine Ramparts and alluded to disastrous consequences when he instituted an equal-pay-for-everyone-because-everyone-is-equal pay structure. "I've read a library of socialist books," he told us. "They all tell you how to spread the wealth. Not one of them says anything about generating wealth." Horowitz explained that the nation's schooling system is in the state of disrepair that it is due to a socialist business model controlled by the Democrats.

Halfway through his lecture, Horowitz paused at the podium. He cleared his throat and said, "This is the way I look at the way [the Iraq war]." Horowitz, who admitted that he had opposed the Vietnam War (although he decried this mistake of his, saying, "How wrong, and wrong, and wrong I was") told the assembled crowd that the Communist Vietnamese Generals had held on for as long as they had-seven years-because, though they knew the war couldn't be won on Vietnamese soil they held out hope that the war could be won on American streets. They saw how American protests were fracturing the country and, bolstered by this show of insurgent support, held on in Vietnam. Similarly, Horowitz blames American anti-war protestors for protracting American involvement in Iraq. Looking particularly perturbed, Horowitz cried, "The left is always calling America an imperialist colony and does not let us [help out other countries]."

"War is the natural state of human beings. … Peace is an aberration," Horowitz said. He believes peace is achieved primarily by intimidating would-be aggressors to stay away, and is impressed by Bush's handling of Iraq. America has, in the last half-decade, been much more effective in fighting cold wars than hot wars, Horowitz said, and the terrorists know this. That's the reason Saddam Hussein provoked us as he did: "He knew full well that his allies in the U.N.-France, Russia, and China-would veto any way resolution.

Horowitz then moved to the domestic state of the nation. He sees many leftists as being too cynical. "America is a very decent country, given the world we live in," he said. "Black people here are the richest and freest in any nation on the face of the earth," Horowitz proclaimed. He also sees Americans as leading the world away from slavery with the Civil War in the 1800s. "It's too easy to see the glass as half empty," he said. "It's harder to see it as half full."

As is usually the case with controversial speakers, the question-and-answer session was the most exciting part of Horowitz's talk. A series of righteously indignant students came forward with poorly-formed question-attacks that Horowitz skillfully and graciously handled, which did little other than make Horowitz come across as an articulate genius. One student delivered a very sarcastically phrased attack on Horowitz that ironically only underscored Horowitz's previous points that students are too close-minded to consider viewpoints other than their own.

Horowitz gave an interesting and controversial speech. He presented a lot of information that certainly does go against the grain of the dominant liberal thinking at Pomona, but it seems that most students took so much issue with what he had to say that they couldn't respectfully consider his opinions or hear him out. The moral of this story? It takes more than twenty minutes to warm up a Pomona audience to receive a conservative viewpoint.