Horowitz, Mills, and me

Below is an e-mail I sent out this morning summarizing the Horowitz/Mills business. If you’ve been following it, there’s no reason for you to read it. It was basically written to inform people who know nothing about what’s happened.

Dear Reader,

If you regularly read my website, View from the Right, you’re aware of the incredible story of political correctness I’m about to tell; if you don’t, this will be news to you.

The other week, on Friday May 4, David Horowitz banished me from his publication, FrontPage Magazine, where I have been a contributor for the past five years, and he told me not to communicate with him again.

That, of course, is no big deal; editors fall out with writers all the time. So why am I telling you this?

Because there’s more to it than that. Horowitz’s banishment of me did not actually take place this past May 4. It took place a year ago, but Horowitz didn’t tell me about it. I only found out about it on May 4.

Here’s what happened.

In May 2006 Horowitz received a 3,500 word letter from someone named David Mills detailing at length my “racist” statements about racial differences in intelligence, black violence, and related subjects. Horowitz, without reading my actual articles from which Mills had culled out-of-context quotes, wrote back to Mills and to FP’s managing editor, Jamie Glazov: “I think it’s a persuasive argument for not running Auster unless he publicly repudiates these positions which are racist and offensive.” But, despite his saying that he was going to give me a chance to repudiate my statements, Horowitz did not tell me about Mills’s letter or about his own changed views of me; he did not give me a chance to defend myself or explain my statements; he did not even tell me which of my many quoted statements he found racist. He simply proceeded to close me out of FrontPage Magazine—rejecting my occasional article submissions without informing me of his decision to exclude me from FP. The truth only came out when, on May 3, 2007, Horowitz, as he put it, “forgot” his decision not to publish me any more and published my short article on interracial rape. That in turn led Mills to publish at the Huffington Post, a popular liberal website, Horowitz’s May 2006 letter calling my positions racist. (For the original facts on this story, see the blog entry, “Horowitz expels me from FrontPage.”)

Thus Horowitz’s forgetting his intention (of which he had told Mills but not me) not to publish my work anymore led Mills to publish at a popular liberal website Horowitz’s e-mail calling my work racist.

Grasp the significance of this: Horowitz gave to a leftist, who Horowitz knew was seeking to harm me (by getting me excluded from FrontPage, which he succeeded in doing), a weapon with which he could harm me further (by publishing at Huffington Post Horowitz’s e-mail calling me a racist).

But the story doesn’t stop there.

On May 4 I found out about this when I saw Horowitz’s letter accusing me of racism quoted at the Huffington Post. When I asked Horowitz to explain what this was all about, he refused to tell me anything and instead said that I was “attacking” him and “piling on” him. When I persisted in my requests for an explanation, he told me, “I want you to go away Lawrence,” thus ending all further communication between us. This e-mail exchange is contained in the above-linked blog entry.

Thus, to this moment, Horowitz has never given any account of the following behavior:

(1) Horowitz told a leftist hit artist in writing that I am a racist, which allowed the hit artist to publish Horowitz’s statement, greatly harming me;

(2) Horowitz, America’s leading crusader against political correctness, called my work “racist” not on the basis of my work itself but on the basis of out-of-context quotations of my articles which Horowitz has never read;

(3) Horowitz didn’t specify, either to David Mills last year or to me this month, which statements of mine he considers racist. This meant that I have had no opportunity to defend myself from Horowitz’s charge—either in response to Horowitz’s decision to exclude me from FP, or in response to the publication of Horowitz’s statement at Huffington Post—that I have “racist and offensive” positions. It also means that Horowitz doesn’t have to defend his view that I’ve said racist things .

(4) Horowitz excluded me from his website without telling me he was doing so, so that I continued making occasional article submissions to him in complete ignorance that he had closed me out and that I was wasting my time and efforts.

(5) When I simply asked for an explanation of all this, Horowitz cut me off and ended our relationship of five years’ standing.

When we remember, once again, that David Horowitz is America’s leading activist against political correctness and leftist political assassination, his uber-PC behavior toward me becomes even more appalling and incredible.

The issue here is not Horowitz’s right to publish what and whom he wants. If he doesn’t want me at FrontPage, that is his decision. But what he did here went far beyond that. Without telling me anything about it, Horowitz set me up to be harmed by a leftist who was out to get me. And when I asked him to explain, he attacked me and told me to “go away.”

Do you think it’s acceptable that a leading figure in the conservative movement should treat anyone in this fashion, let alone a long-time contributor at his magazine?

Also, the issue is not whether you agree with all of my views or indeed with any of my views. The issue is honest and honorable and decent behavior.

However, that’s still not the end of the story.

Over this past weekend I learned to my astonishment that Horowitz himself has published at his Discover the Network website my very article which was the main source of my “racist” statements. He never told me that he had published this article, and he has never paid me for it. (In the past, Horowitz had published several of my articles at Discover the Network, and had paid me for them.) The article, “The Evolution of One Person’s Views on Racial Differences in Intelligence,” is still posted at the DTN site. Given the highly controversial theme of the piece, which is plain from its title and opening paragraph, there is no way that Horowitz could not have known when he published this article that it dealt with racial differences in intelligence. And it is inconceivable that anyone on Horowitz’s staff would have published this article on such a forbidden theme without Horowitz’s ok. (The article was originally published at VFR in 2003 and has been linked on the main page ever since.)

And here’s yet another amazing development: I found out this morning that Eldridge Cleaver in an interview with David Mills in 1982 said the very things about black-on-white rape that are in my May 3 article that set off Mills’s attack on me. The interview is still posted at Mills’s website. For stating the same things about black-on-white rape which Cleaver said—and with which Mills himself did not take issue—Mills has been tarring me as a racist.

So, of my two accusers, David Horowitz himself published my article which he called racist and for which he excluded me from FrontPage, and David Mills published without demurrer the very views of black-on-white rape for which Mills attacks me as a racist.

Below I’ve listed some of blog entries at my site detailing and discussing these events.

Sincerely,
Lawrence Auster

Key entries

Horowitz expels me from FrontPage

The meaning of what Horowitz has done

Horowitz published my article that he attacked as “racist and offensive”

Correction of Horowitz’s “correction”

The truth of David Mills’s conduct toward me

Mills’s letter to Horowitz

Betrayal

Other entries

Eldridge Cleaver told David Mills the same things about black-on-white rape that I said in my article

Why Cleaver raped white women

Undercover Black Man’s first appearance at VFR

New perspectives on the DOJ data

Quick access to interracial rape data

Further thoughts on Horowitz’s folly

- end of initial entry -

Paul Gottfried writes:

I won’t remind you of your previous naive statements but I believe that you and I disagreed for years over the character and intention of DH. All neocons, including those who give the impression of being recovering ones, are NEVER to be trusted.

LA replies:

You get the “touchay” on this one, Paul.

While I’ve had problems with Horowitz, I never imagined he would have behaved like this.

And in his favor, you must give him credit for the articles of mine he’s published (as well as Robert Locke’s), which no other neocon would have done.

Paul Gottfried replies:

I agree that Horowitz was willing to put up with a lot from you and RL because of your strong pro-Israeli views and your attacks on the Islamicists. The problem is that like civil rights workers who tried to use the CP (pardon the analogy!), your usefulness to the neocons is quite limited and only marginally coincides with broader goals.

Howard Sutherland writes:

This is quite a saga, and while it’s tedious to recount it all, I think you are doing the right thing. It is quite an object lesson in the double-standards and duplicity of the Left. Unfortunately, and more revealing, it’s equally an object lesson in how little the neocon “Right” differs from the Left that gave it birth.

Most people who look at the political spectrum of the West are still drawing the main line between Leftists of the Democratic Party/Labour Party/Parti Socialiste variety and “Rightists” of the Republican Party/Conservative Party/UMP variety. Wrong place: there are blurrier lines between them, to be sure, but they are all together on the left side of the main line. That main line, as you point out all the time, is between liberals (see all of the above) and those who don’t accept liberalism (you, for example). Horowitz, especially, in this affair has shown that clearly by taking Mills’s (his ostensible adversary) side unquestioningly against you (his presumed ally) as soon as a Leftist taboo-word (“racist”) was tossed into play by Mills.

E. writes:

WITH FAME DAVID HOROWITZ HAS BECOME (if he wasn’t before) a prima donna…. Neverthless again I see it important to overlook his human frailties and bring him around. We do not have too many to spare and he is fighting the right enemy so why waste him when he is useful. So as tempting as it is how about swallowing the bullet and directing your fire outbound.—

LA replies:

Will you write an e-mail to David Horowitz telling him he should have followed the same advice regarding myself?

Barbara V. writes:

I don’t know if you ever watched “Seinfeld”, but this could be an episode about the Bizarro World, except this is not funny.

LA writes:

That’s good. Horowitz sort of turning into his own opposite. Though others say we’re just seeing the real him at last.

Karen writes from England:

You committed the cardinal sin of telling the truth about blacks’ animus against whites. Blacks know what they are like and they are aware of and understand their motivations for committing crimes against whites (and in parts of Africa, against Asians as well). Their chronic sense of inferiority and backwardness is blamed on others and rarely acknowledged to be the fault of themselves. This mindset is encouraged by their political and cultural leaders. Mills knows this. White South Africans and Zimbabweans know it too, but it is the great unspoken. It is taboo for a white person to say this fact regardless of how many blacks spontaneously admit it themselves. And liberals suppress it because it does not fit with their belief system which encourages them to think that the black crime epidemic against whites is a temporary phenomenon, if they even acknowledge it exists.

It is not just rapes. There are murders, kidnappings, abductions, thefts, assaults and fraud too if we consider the vast and often highly successful West African 419 fraud scheme as part of the array of crimes blacks perpetrate selectively against whites.

You have broken the taboo and highlighted black racist crime and thus demonstrated that blacks are not the benign persecuted creatures so deserving of the liberals’ guilt trips. This is why Mills pursued a vendetta against you. You seemed to be surprised but the habitual and predictable cries of “racism” when a minority’s aberrant behavior is discussed are ubiquitous and the vengeance with which the accusers pursue the charge is typical. You have now become the victim of anti-white racism. Just have the courage to fight it and publish even more.

A liberal relative of mine writes:

Your writing in this message is remarkable. Thank you for sending it to me.

I can’t now check the links, so I’m guilty of the same thing you accuse Horowitz of. But from your description, it certainly sounds as if he, and Mills, behaved badly.

If DH is, as you say, a foremost champion against political correctness, it must be painful to you that he behaved this way at all, on top of the fact that he behaved this way toward you. You’ve mentioned DH in the past as a colleague who respected you. I’m sorry, on a personal level, that you’ve had this impasse and have been treated so shabbily by people you respected.

Now, so as not to disappoint you about yet another friend, here’s my gratuitous dig about the reflexive right: I can’t say I’m shocked that a conservative can be nasty, brutish, short and inconsistent.

John Hagan writes:

This whole imbroglio between you, Mills, and Horowitz has come full circle. Horowitz has been stripped of his dignity on a personal and professional level, and still has not answered the question of what on earth he was doing publishing your articles without permission, or remuneration. Mills has been exposed as a third rate intellect of questionable racial credentials, and to add insult to injury, his own web-site contains an interview which discusses the rape of white women as a political statement by black males without Mills offering any condemnation. What an utterly disgusting display of cowardice and hypocrisy by Horowitz and Mills.

HJB writes:

I look at Horowitz in a new light now. He’s just another polite conservative.

Having read his autobiography it was clear that there were contradictions in his personal life. But, I didn’t judge them because we all have contradictions. But I never suspected that he would be hostile to discussions and views regarding anthropology.

Besides being a loyal reader of VFR, I also read, on occasion, AmRen. I am repelled by the antisemitic tinge of the Opinion Page, but I find most of their articles insightful and thought provoking.

Apparently I was misled by Horowitz rhetoric, and sadly he’s just a poseur.

LA writes:

Even now, after attempting so many times to get at the essence of Horowitz’s behavior toward me, I’ve still failed to bring out the “amazingness” of it. On the 3rd, FrontPage Magazine published a controversial article by me, an article that Horowitz had personally approved. On the morning of the 4th I wake up, and I see my own editor, Horowitz, being quoted at a popular left-liberal webmagazine saying that I have racist views and will no longer be allowed to publish at his magazine. I ask him what this is about, and he tells me to stop piling on him and stop attacking him, and then he tells me to “go way Lawrence.”

That was “beyond the beyond” behavior for him, and a “beyond the beyond” experience for me.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 16, 2007 09:55 AM | Send