with Jews.
Kemp was prompted to embrace Farrakhan by his eccentric friend Jude Wanniski, a Wall Street economic advisor whose supply-side theories are highly influential in some conservative circles.11 But the two went much further earlier this month at Wanniski’s annual gathering for clients and admirers in Boca Raton, Florida. Lured by such stars as Kemp, conservative columnist Robert Novak and key legislators like Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Budget Committee, approximately 100 Wall Street and industrial movers and shakers came to hear a 90-minute talk by the gathering’s main attraction, Minister Farrakhan.
See also “Kemp Praises Farrakhan For His Focus on Family,” Jerry Gray, New York Times, September 10, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/10/us/kemp-praises-farrakhan-for-his-focus-on-family.html.
The Kemp-Wanniski agenda in Boca Raton was to introduce representatives of the white establishment to the “new” Farrakhan, a smooth-talking advocate of inner-city “self-reliance”—a nostrum dear to the hearts of some conservative theorists—and to promote reconciliation with the fanatic and his gullible followers. Novak, who moderated the event, described Farrakhan as “a man trying to transcend his past.”
While Farrakhan was supposedly undertaking that effort, his followers were distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of the March issue of his newspaper, The Final Call, to black communities across the nation. The issue accuses whites of “lynching” O.J. Simpson and insinuates that Jewish manipulators of the media deliberately scheduled NBC’s airing of Schindler’s List, the Academy Award-winning film about the Holocaust, during Black History Month as an insult to African-Americans. It also reprints an article by the late Elijah Muhammad about the coming “fall of America”—a fall ordained by God because of this nation’s irredeemable wickedness—and prints a message that Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi sent to Farrakhan’s recent Saviors’ Day Convention in Chicago.
What attracts these white conservatives—who presumably don’t read The Final Call—to Farrakhan? Like the Marxists of a bygone era, Kemp and Wanniski are convinced that economics is destiny, even in the poorer segments of the black community. Convinced that “enterprise zones” will cure America’s inner-city problems, they regard anyone who adopts such market-oriented solutions with favor. What they perhaps did not know was that only weeks earlier, Farrakhan had re-launched his crusade for an independent and separate black state to be carved out of America. This, it is true, would be a self-reliant entity, but one premised on the belief that white America is irretrievably racist—a belief that repudiates everything Kemp presumably holds dear.
If Louis Farrakhan wants to convince the objects of his venom that he is interested in reconciliation, he does not need Jack Kemp, Jude Wanniski or Robert Novak to act as interpreters for him. Any day Farrakhan wants to show that he has changed his malevolent tune, he can do so very simply and all by himself. He can begin by repudiating the creed that he preaches: that white people are “blue-eyed devils” created by a mad scientist named Yakub, that they are guilty of monstrous crimes against humanity and are therefore slated for destruction by God in order that the world may be saved. Then he can stop his publication and distribution of “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” which is the Nation of Islam’s home-grown version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, portraying Jews as the diabolical and conspiratorial enemies of blacks through history.
Until Farrakhan repudiates his abhorrent preaching, it is shameful for American conservatives to lend him credibility and support.
http://www.salon.com/1997/03/20/news_351/.
1 See also “Kemp Praises Farrakhan For His Focus on Family,” Jerry Gray, New York Times, September 10, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/10/us/kemp-praises-farrakhan-for-his-focus-on-family.html.
A Washer Woman Shall Lead Them
As someone who helped to create the radical New Left in the ’60s and became a conservative in the ’80s, I am often asked to explain how it is possible to make such a 180-degree turn. I have tried to answer this in a 450-page autobiography.11 But there is a short answer as well. I abandoned the agendas of the left because they do not work. Socialism, big government and economic redistribution have proven disastrous to the very people whom the left proposes to “liberate.”
David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Free Press, 1997.
I still believe in the “liberation” of blacks, minorities and the poor, as I did in the 1960s. Only now I believe in their liberation from the chains of “liberalism” and the welfare state—from permanent dependence on government handouts, from perverse incentives to bear children out of wedlock, from inverted ethics that imply it is better to receive than to give, and worse, to receive without reciprocity or responsibility and above all without work. The doctrines of the left teach those who have fallen behind in the economic scramble to blame others for their failure. This attitude stimulates resentment and deprives its holders of the power to change their condition. The left insists on race preferences, thus delivering the message to minorities that they cannot compete unless the system is rigged in their favor. This reinforces the sense of group inferiority, which is the essence of racism.
Leftist doctrine proposes double standards of intellectual, moral and professional competence, teaching minorities that they can get away with less. It is a crippling philosophy for those it claims to help, and a not-so-subtle expression of racial arrogance on the part of those are behind it. Under “liberalism” no one is responsible. Instead, something called “society” is the root of all evil. If a criminal strikes a prey, “society” is the root cause of his wickedness; if a person is poor, “society” has made him so. If conservatives seek to hold people responsible for their condition, it is out of a mean-spirited impulse to blame the victims. How could there possibly be all this opportunity conservatives talk about when America is saturated with racism and oppression?
I used to believe all this nonsense, but then I arrived at a worldview based on what I have recently come to call the Oseola McCarty principle. Oseola McCarty is a 75-year-old African-American cleaning woman from Mississippi. From her working life she was able to accumulate enough savings to donate $150,000 to a student scholarship program at the University of Southern Mississippi. In short, a black woman living in the most racist and poorest state in the union (almost half her life under segregation) could earn enough money washing other people’s clothes to save $150,000 and give it away. If Oseola McCarty can do that, what American black or white cannot?
Oseola McCarty’s example tells us that the poverty problem in America is not about lack of opportunity or jobs, or about racism. Poverty is about individual failure. It is about family dysfunction, character disorder and self-destructive behavior. That is what Oseola McCarty’s achievement means. It is no surprise that, while most self-appointed spokesmen get tongue-tied when asked if African-Americans have gained anything from the civil rights revolution of the last 30 years, Oseola McCarty has no hesitation. She says the world is a “much, much better place” than when she was a child. So it can be for anyone liberated from the philosophy of the left. The new mantra would be this: Spare us from the kindness of those who would cripple us with excuses
