Former new left vanguardist David Horowitz placed a full-page ad in the June 2 Weekly Standard chastising the editors and producers at Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, 60 Minutes, the Today Show, Good Morning America, etc. for ignoring the revelations in his new memoir, Radical Son.
Horowitz’s revelation? That Democrats supported the Black Panthers and progressives funded them, and that the Panthers turned out to be murderous swine.
This is news? It’s the conventional wisdom, as was demonstrated a year ago when op-ed columnists and reviewers across the land repelled the attempts of the Hollywood movie Panther to romanticize the killers.
Horowitz is one to criticize the press. As one of the progressives who nurtured the Black Panthers and raised thousands of dollars for them in the early ‘70s, he didn’t go public with his suspicions about the Panthers until he co-wrote a March 1981 feature in New West magazine. That story came three years after New Times magazine printed its July 10, 1978, expose of the group. (To be fair to Horowitz, he was a source for the New Times piece.)
In his Standard ad, born-again conservative Horowitz resorts to the sort of rhetorical overkill that new leftists routinely deployed to silence their foes back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He writes, “Is it because these crimes were committed by progressives (and it is politically incorrect to notice such facts) that [the press has] turned a blind eye to this history and failed to report it to the public at large?”
