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David Horowitz Is Homeless: The 1960s Radical Decades Ago Switched His Politics. Then the Right Wing Left Him Behind

7 thecommodore5/07/2012 11:57:32 am PDT

Horowitz responded to the full Tablet article in the comments:

The Tablet assigned this profile of me to a 24 year old Nation writer
and credulous supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Its  text is
as accurate a portrait of me as the caricature they chose to accompany
it (I suspect even Ahmadinejad would get a more respectful treatment
from the Tablet editors). I wasted my time with this young man, and am
sorry I did. He read a lot of my work, appreciated some of it — in
particular Radical Son — but hasn’t a clue as to what the conservative
dimension of my life is about, and therefore  who I am. I am not
“homeless,” as the title and much of the article implies, or a cynical
propagandist as he suggests. There is in fact precious little  in this
piece that accurately reflects what I think or even what I have said,
that is because the writer has no respect for conservative ideas or
thought generally. Aside from the ideas, among the obvious facts he
could have checked but didn’t, my Center never occupied a “tony
high-rise” let alone on the 12th floor, as the author claims — and
never “in downtown L.A. My present staff is not three but fifteen (and
my Center far from being in pathetic decline as he also suggests) has
three times the budget it did in 2000 and about ten times the following
or more (the Alinsky pamphlet I wrote has been read by 2.5 million
people but you would never guess it from his description); there is no
security guard in our present offices, the Olin Foundation no longer
exists, I have 100,000 conservative financial supporters — not three
foundations, and so forth. The Center’s pamphlets are only “lurid” to a
far left kid who has absolutely no feel or respect for conservative
ideas. And this is the main problem with the piece. A serious writer
would have tried to understand the connection between the radical half
of my life and work, and the conservative one. Instead the conservative
Horowitz is merely a caricature, and while a caricature is built around
recognizable features of individual it also distorts them beyond
recognition. This is exactly what this caricature of text does so that
it  misrepresents what I think even when the words it quotes are
correct. Liberal commentators have not “learned to tune [me] out” — 
for example. They never considered my work (something I foolishly hoped
The Tablet would do). Instead they have snatched quotes from blogs I
have written or — in the case of this article ads I have published —
or titles of public events (like “Islamo-fascism Awareness Week) and
used them to aggressively misrepresent what I have stood for and
believed, much in the manner of the repulsive illustration which is
attached to this text. I could go on but what’s the point? I don’t know
of a single conservative magazine that would treat a comparable
intellectual on the left as shabbily as the Tablet has treated me in
this article.   

Later, in response to another commenter he said this:

This is just another instance where the author of the article was out of his depth. I’m not sure I even said what he claims I said. In any case I have written about this at length in A Point In Time. Yes I believe that it is more than likely that in time we all vanish and everything about us, just as like the ancient civilizations that Marcus Aurelius laments. But that doesn’t mean that what we do in this life is a waste. I have battled the left because it is a reactionary force that will sweep us all back into a totalitarian dark ages. And if unopposed it will destroy the state of Israel and usher a new Holocaust of the Jews. I misread Gottleib and treated him like an earnest and honest inquirer. But I knew I was taking a gamble. Any Jew who can write for the Nation which is a supporter of and apologist for the Hamas Nazis, whose stated goal is to exterminate the Jews, has to be morally defective or just blinded by his leftist faith.