BY JOHN K. WILSON
The David Horowitz Freedom Center this month announced yet another campaign aimed at censoring free speech on college campuses. The latest effort is a Facebook ad targeting four left-leaning “America-hating” professors that the Horowitz Center claims has reached 100,000 people.
One ad warns the University of Washington, “You have an AMERICA HATER on campus.” It declares, “Robin DiAngelo, despite being white herself, seeks to profit off of condemning all whites as guilty of racism and demonizing America as built on ‘white supremacy.’” The ad, showing DiAngelo’s picture superimposed upon a burning America flag, calls upon people to “demand that the school take action against this hateful person!”
This call for punishment and censorship of a professor simply for criticizing racism is a shocking example of the cancel culture on the right. For years, the Horowitz Center has been calling for all colleges to ban Students for Justice in Palestine, a campaign that was successful at Fordham University. Earlier this year, Horowitz’s group issued a report demanding the removal of 10 professors for their criticism of Israel: “The following report describes the poisonous views of ten Jew-hating and terror-promoting professors who should have no place in the universities of a democracy, but unfortunately do.”
It’s especially ironic that the Horowitz Center complains that DiAngelo should be fired because she “seeks to profit” from demonizing people, since that perfectly describes David Horowitz himself. Horowitz’s assault on academic freedom is hypocritical, unprincipled, and dangerous to free expression, but it is certainly lucrative for Horowitz himself.
The tax forms for the Horowitz Center reveals an organization that is raking in vast amounts of money from taxpayer-subsidized donations, and handing out huge salaries to Horowitz and his friends.
In 2018, the Horowitz Center had $6.85 million in revenue and expenses, and David Horowitz’s hand-picked Board paid him $598,049 ($622,862 in total compensation). Horowitz isn’t the only employee of the Horowitz Center getting rich from these campaigns for censorship. President Michael Finch had total compensation of $245,863 in 2018, Vice-President Peter Collier made $223,258, and “Jihad Watch” director Robert Spencer made $237,177.
Horowitz has literally made millions denouncing the left. Horowitz’s David Horowitz Freedom Center paid Horowitz vast sums of money for years, including 2001 ($251,556), 2002 ($251.950), 2003 ($310,167), 2004 ($337,000), 2005 ($336,000), 2006 ($509,000), 2007 ($475,204), 2008 ($468,260), 2009 ($402,667), 2010 ($435,963), 2011 ($459,691), 2012 ($459,691), 2013 ($495,805), 2014 ($566,977), 2015 ($553,374), 2016 ($569,756), and 2017 ($539,275).
From 2001 to 2018, Horowitz was paid more than $8 million in salary. Add on 2019 and 2020, and Horowitz’s center has paid him over $9 million in the past two decades. It’s a good racket if you can find enough suckers willing to fund you.
Even by the dubious standards of right-wing nonprofit self-enrichment, Horowitz is pretty extraordinary. Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was paid $292,435 in 2018 for an organization with over $28 million in revenue, four times the size of the Horowitz Center. Peter Wood made $188,692 as president of the National Association of Scholars (revenues of $1.5 million). The American Council of Trustees and Alumni president Michael Poliakoff made $219,399 (revenues of $3.5 million).
Although there is a small 501(c)3 AAUP Foundation you can (and should) donate to, the AAUP itself (whose staffers are paid far less than Horowitz) is largely funded by the dues of its members (which are generally no longer tax-deductible). Yet such is the power of wealthy right-wing donors that a national organization like the AAUP with more than 40,000 dues-paying members has a budget half the size of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a small fraction of Turning Point USA.
Horowitz said in 2006 that professors “work five hours a week, they work eight months a year, they have lifetime jobs.” Since telling that lie, Horowitz has made $6 million in his lifetime job with no teaching or research responsibilities, far more than almost any professor in the world.
On Dec. 23, Horowitz’s FrontPageMag praised Horowitz for revealing the secret plot by Democrats to take over the country with non-profit groups: “Democrats had become the party of the rich and of corporate America and were using that power to fundamentally transform the country using their ‘leviathan’ of massive tax-exempt foundations.”
Meanwhile, Horowitz has made himself a millionaire many times over from a taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit organization. In an email on Dec. 27, Horowitz called the Center “a vanguard institution setting the standard for how to conduct the political war” while asking for a “tax-deductible” gift for his non-political charity.
While Horowitz has denounced professors for being political (which is completely legal and protected by academic freedom), the Horowitz Center has been a political campaign masquerading as a 501(c)3 charity for years. The Intercept revealed in 2017 that the Horowitz Center had given huge sums of money to a far-right Dutch political party. And the Horowitz Center is explicitly partisan. Horowitz declared, “Democrats are not democrats; they are totalitarians.”
Money matters. While Horowitz has funneled a huge chunk of right-wing donor money into his own pockets, his organization has still had an enormous influence on pushing the Republican Party to the far right, training proteges such as Stephen Miller, and arguing that universities are controlled by the far left and need to be taken over by Republicans.
From the direct (and no doubt carefully selected) quotes I read here, I’m sure that I would not support the Horowitz initiative to somehow silence the professor in question — especially since I am a near-absolutist regarding Free Speech..
However, as usual, the heated rhetoric and spin can be found on BOTH sides. Was this prof singled out “simply for criticizing racism.? I doubt it; I’m sure that, given the chance, most of 90% liberal profs challenge racism in classes (well, maybe not in STEM courses) but in our social media and op-ed columns. Preaching the mantra of “white supremacy” without recognizing the nuances of that claim goes far beyond “simply criticizing racism.”
Likewise, showing a burning U.S. flag behind a picture of the prof is an overheated (pun intended) way to depict her as un-American. After all, aren’t “all [white land-holding] MEN created equal”? 🙂 As a non-profit (I assume), the Horowitz Center can certainly acquire tax-free donations, as can any left-wing group. If you want to challenge their credentials as a non-profit, then please take on the Catholic Church’s tax-exempt status — and Scientology too!
BTW, I believe that Horowitz was a leftist radical in his youth — as was I. I remain so, but have had MANY reservations about the fairly recent ways and means used by today’s pseudo-SJWs go to censor free speech (esp. in academia), use violence to achieve limited (often counterproductive) ends, and the whole over-the-top “cancel culture” mentality (and, yes, it exists — and I was a victim of it). Cf. https://www.academia.edu/23593134/A_Leftist_Critique_of_Political_Correctness_Gone_Amok_Revised_and_Updated
The problem of “political campaign[s] masquerading as…501(c)(3) [charities],” the frequently obscure nature of their funding, and the still more frequently impressive scale of their CEOs’ salaries, goes even further than Prof. Wilson can illustrate with this single example. Anything that sheds light on their workings is, in my book, a good thing.
However, I learned from this blog-post an important nugget of information that comes closer to home: the approximate number of the AAUP’s dues-paying membership. In a previous post, a contributor corrected me when I stated my impression that the organisation’s numbers had not been increasing in recent years, but provided no further details. This led me to look up what our membership figures were. Doubtless as a result of my deficient Googling skills, I was unsuccessful.
I now gather from Prof. Wilson than the current number is “more than 40,000.” This is indeed not encouraging, inasmuch as the Spring 1952 *Bulletin of the AAUP* gave the corresponding figure in that year as “well over 40,000,” at a time when the sector was, of course, much smaller than it is today—the same being true, very likely, even if only tenured and tenure-track faculty are taken into account.
Does the AAUP in fact publish its membership numbers? If so, can anyone direct me to where these might be found?