David Horowitz’s Negro problem

For someone who wants the world to believe he’s not an anti-black bigot, David Horowitz sure does some dumb shit.

I’m not talking about his decision to publish Lawrence Auster’s wildly distorted wannabe-exposé of the “phenomenon” of black rapists targeting white women. (“The Truth of Interracial Rape in the United States” – grabby title!)

Don’t get me wrong, that was mighty dumb. Especially since Horowitz had agreed with me a year ago (by email) that Mr. Auster held some “racist and offensive” positions and should no longer contribute to Horowitz’s website, FrontPage Magazine.

I’m not even talking about Horowitz’s decision yesterday to keep that interracial rape article on FrontPage – even after Auster publicly acknowledged he had misread the crime statistics. (That bonehead play resulted in this ridiculous and foul assertion: “There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States.” On second look, it might be more like 3,000 per year.)

What I’m talking about is this here.

Unbeknown to me, Horowitz all along has been hosting, on another of his right-wing websites (DiscoverTheNetworks.org), an essay by Lawrence Auster which displays the fullness of his animus toward black people.

Titled “The Evolution of One Person’s Views on Racial Differences in Intelligence” – and proudly archived on Auster’s blog – this disquisition on inherent “black inferiority” pulls no punches:

“Following the arguments and actions of black leaders, listening to black callers on talk radio, led me over several years to an increasingly bleak view of black thinking styles. … [I] became increasingly aware of the ‘hustle,’ the way many blacks at all levels… did not use ideas as ideas, but as a hustle, as a way of manipulating people’s feelings.”

(Auster is confused. That’s not the “Hustle”; that’s the “Bus Stop.”)

“… the preponderance of irrationality among the black population is hard to ignore.”

“… I started to have the sense that blacks are more ‘non-objective,’ they understand things in a much more personal, subjective way than whites. They seem to have much less interest in knowledge or beauty for its own sake.”

“… it means that blacks are in fact less endowed with the qualities that make civilization possible, particularly Western civilization.”

On and on it goes like that. Mr. Auster believes that the impulse toward social order and the means to suppress crime “require a degree of moral will, intelligence, and organizing energy that blacks, collectively, do not possess.”

These deficiencies are, according to Auster, “inherent” and “intrinsic” in the black race. “[S]o long as the truth of racial differences is not recognized, whites will always end up being blamed… for a black inferiority that is not whites’ fault.”

Ironically, I quoted from this essay at length in my May 2006 letter to David Horowitz – the letter that led Horowitz to agree that Auster trafficked in “racist” ideas. (I have uploaded the complete text of that letter, by the way; it is here.)

So why does Auster’s slag heap of insults, conjectures and neurotic projection reside under the banner of David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks – a “database” pledged to “maintaining the highest possible standard for the accuracy of [its] information”?

Well, Lawrence Auster has written around 35 articles for Horowitz over the years; Mr. Horowitz must believe that Auster is a man worth listening to… even on the subject of intrinsic black inferiority.

Here I was, thinking he published that black-on-white rape article by mistake. Apparently Horowitz is quite happy to provide a platform for Larry Auster’s pungent social criticism on the World Wide Web.

I was a fool to think he could be shamed into doing anything.

P.S.: Re-reading my 2006 letter to Horowitz, I wondered what set of life experiences had brought Larry Auster to his grim assessment of the Negro people. Had he been a street cop in Harlem? A school teacher in the South Bronx?

Turns out, he’d watched an ABC News special.

I’ll let him explain it, the way he did in his essay on black intelligence:

“What really convinced me of an inherent, dangerous weakness in black ways of thought… was their widespread belief in Afrocentrism and the notion that whites were committing ‘genocide’ against blacks.

“In September 1989, ABC News did a program on the condition of blacks in America, followed by a special edition of ‘Nightline’ with a panel consisting of several of ABC’s black correspondents and other noted blacks. With the exception of Professor Shelby Steele, these accomplished, successful blacks all endorsed the notion of a white conspiracy to commit ‘genocide’ against blacks.

“The discovery that it was not just ignorant street people, but successful, articulate black professionals who believed these insane and wicked conspiracy theories, made a devastating impression on me. Indeed, with the exception of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, I was more traumatized by this program than by any other public event in recent history. It shook my former belief that blacks and whites could more or less get along in the same society.

“(I wrote an article about this program, saying the same things I’ve said in the present paragraph, which New York Newsday rejected because, as the editor put it, it showed an ‘odd lack of compassion.’)”

Lordy. At least one editor somewhere, at some time, had the good sense not to egg on Lawrence Auster – a nutty extremist who deserves to be on the outermost fringes of our civil discourse.

(For a better look at the above page capture from DiscoverTheNetworks – especially in case Horowitz pulls the essay down and tries to deny it was ever there – just double-click it.)