http://www.americanpolitics.com/editorialbydate.html Is Salon.com playing Russian Roulette? David Horowitz: A One-Man Plague on American Values By Jeff Koopersmith Thursday, June 13, 2001 - Palm Beach (APJP) -- As a political commentator for nigh on twenty years now, I've seldom come across a bigger blowhard than David Horowitz, who today finds himself happy as a clam pumping his Neonazi rhetoric into the veins of age-young Americans stupid enough to believe anything they read, courtesy of Salon Magazine. However, his latest trash -- "THE PLAGUE ABETTORS" -- served up by the ever-astounding bad taste of this well-known Internet rag -- only rivals the on-air swill of Rush Limbaugh and online dreck of professional he-bitch Camille Paglia. In fact, it drove me to my keyboard so that I could ream him a new journalistic orifice. If I ever actually meet this bastard, I promise to clonk his chubby bearded head in as many places as possible before the Gestapo rips me off him. "THE PLAGUE ABETTORS" is a George-DumbBellYuh-Bush-kind-of-tribute "memorializing" the 20th "anniversary" of the onset of AIDS in the United States. Whoever came up with such an "event" -- even if it was a leader in the gay community -- should have their heads examined; so stupid is it to celebrate or even decry the disease that has killed so many of our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers and friends -- and with some fictional anniversary date. But leave it to pudgy Horowitz to seize the opportunity in order to display the sad fact that he outshines even Goering in his ability to lie and twist the truth into something desecrate except in Hades. Horowitz gleefully points out that AIDS levels are reaching the epidemic proportions of the late 1980s and are highest amongst blacks and Hispanics. He doesn't bother to explain that this is likely because blacks and Hispanics are undereducated -- by fiat from a decade of a Republican-controlled Congress -- and that most young people populating this underclass seem to give up on life before the age of nine, so stunned are they by the poverty and paucity of opportunity that yet surrounds them. Horowitz twists statistics with the artfulness of Adolf Eichmann. He tells us that 50 percent of the AIDS-dead are blacks and Hispanics -- but when the epidemic was young, only 10% were members of minorities. Of course, gay men and women have always counted themselves as a minority and well they should. They have certainly been treated similarly, and sometimes worse than ex-slaves and the men and women our "proud farmers" use as slave labor in the fields of California and Texas today. The worst aspect of Horowitz's sleazy diatribe is that the period he writes of witnessed less than one thousand cases nationwide. Horowitz cautions us that this month, we may learn that all the research done over the past two decades has not yet produced a vaccine for AIDS. Naturally, he fails to point out that the AIDS survival rate is at an all time high nonetheless. He calls the higher AIDS infection count (among a greater population, I remind you) a "failure" which HE predicted at the very outset of the epidemic -- and then applauds himself for writing about that prediction at the time. Horowitz, of course, was at the time most likely cooking up a palatable scheme to lock all homosexuals in camps a la Americans of Japanese heritage during World War II. He cloaks this subliminal scheme in the assertion that AIDS should have been handled through "public health" methods. Let's examine those methods -- as Horowitz reports them. He claims that gay activists blocked any and all "tried and true" methods used by public health agencies to combat epidemics through the ages. He sneers at the education campaigns favored by a gay community that had already been besieged by the minions within the Reagan Administration at the time, and their fear that the federal government would step in and begin to control their lives. Horowitz wants us to believe that Democrats and what he depicts as those filthy gay activists were actually able to dictate their formulae to Ronald Reagan and the conservative-leaning federal department heads and secretaries he controlled. Naturally, this is premeditated nonsense. Reagan was himself a gentle man who had little or nothing to do with AIDS policy -- in fact, he may well have been oblivious to the problem. Nancy Reagan was privately stunned and profoundly saddened not only by the growing AIDS statistics but by the loss of friends in the arts, couture, and film. Meanwhile, George H. Bush and the rest of the morons from Connecticut-via-Texas quietly celebrated with their football-jerseyed sons as one after another gay man fell six feet into a dirt ditch. Horowitz, in an amusing jaunt into Left Wing Conspiracy Lunacy, claims that public health officials gave gays and the Democrats a "veto" over the correct methodologies they had chosen to fight this terrible killer and "colluded in subverting the system that had proved so successful in the past." This slug actually wants you to believe that hunting down, tracking and isolating the gay community was the inevitable answer -- and, of course, remains the only answer today. Horowitz, who has never shed a tear for minorities in this nation, now uses the black and Hispanic community as his beard, writing, "politically correct billion-dollar campaigns have failed miserably to contain the epidemic or to prevent it from spreading into other communities; particularly the African-American and Hispanic communities." That statement is akin to Hitler writing that the Jews would never have gassed and burned had he been allowed to round them up and ship them to England in the 1930s. At times Horowitz writes as if he believes that AIDS is nothing more than a good case of the clap or worse syphilis. But gonorrhea and syphilis were quickly cured because "straight" white people with active sex lives were open targets for the diseases. White people got it -- and white people had to be spared. That's why it worked. No more, no less. Meanwhile, witness the lack of a cure for sickle-cell anemia, a killer of black families, to make my case. And here's another point for the moronic Horowitz to mull: did your so-called "public health" methods stop the spread of polio or tuberculosis? Did the diseases that antiquated public health methods "halted" require almost a total cessation of sexual activity from libidinous males whose culture was steeped in open sexuality because there was little else in the offing by a society steeped in suspicion of anything not white and Christian? Horowitz naively thinks that testing, reporting, "contact-tracing," and infection-site closing would have stopped the AIDS epidemic in its tracks. Yeah, right. What in the world is an "infection site?" Well, Horowitz thinks it was the public bathhouse -- all public bathhouses where gays could be themselves. I hate to tell you this, David, but AIDS was reported, AND tracked -- and dozens of sites where AIDS infections could easily be passed were and remain closed. In addition, is was the DEMOCRATS who, on the whole, sponsored all legislation at the federal, state and local levels that would provide hypodermic needles to addicts free of charge to halt the spread of aids through "shared needles" and into the very populations you now pretend to regret -- the black and Hispanic communities. It was the Republican Party, controlled by young Neonazi elements nurtured and introduced by Newt Gingrich that -- in a nationwide exhibition of inanity and hatred -- stopped such legislative attempts in their tracks wherever they could. Horowitz worries that we won't read that the AIDS contraction rate is rising, yet we are all aware that it is -- and especially on the African continent, where it began and where the death rate is also rising out of control, with some nations reporting 40 and even 60 percent infections rates among their populations. Did gay activists stop these nation's "public health" methodologies as well? Hitler closed Jewish businesses and synagogues; Horowitz -- a Jew himself -- tells us we should have shut down all the "sex clubs" and "other potential sites of infection." Well, David, you idiot, why not simply shut gays out of all housing and move them into concentration camps where they could only infect each other? I bet that idea makes you salivate. Horowitz writes that he has "paid attention to the course of this contagion and... watched in disbelief the criminally ineffectual efforts that have been deployed in the name of political correctness to contain it." Well done, David! Spoken like the greatest adulterer of them all -- Henry Hyde -- as he castigated Bill Clinton for his dalliances with a White House whore when he himself ensconced more than one slut in private apartments given him by those who controlled him. Where was Horowitz during the debates over how to stop this insidious disease? He was mentally masturbating to such a small readership that he wouldn't have been and was (thank God) never noticed. Horowitz opens himself to personal attack, which I now engage in with delight, as he continues his diatribe -- next molesting Linda Marsa, then the Los Angeles Times health writer who wrote, truthfully, that it was sheer accident that AIDS first struck a relatively cohesive group - namely, young homosexuals. Horowitz calls this commentary brazenly ignorant and entirely false. Yet Horowitz's own ignorance is underscored by worldwide statistics gathered by the UN showing that gay populations are only a small slice of the hideous AIDS pie, and that women, babies and straight males are in the majority of infected third-world populations. Horowitz never mentions them - an omission indicative of his own narrow-mindedness. Horowitz then makes his biggest mistake, and reveals his homophobic passion, as he writes that AIDS is "more accurately described as a product of the gay rights movement of the 1970s, inevitably concentrated in the very centers of gay life in America -- San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles..." Huh? The "very" centers of gay life? How about the Florida Keys? How about Provincetown, Massachusetts? How about Philadelphia, Saint Louis, Chicago, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Dallas? What about Miami, and Asheville, and Beverly Hills, and all the cultural centers of the world? Or, for that matter, all the desert towns of the earth, and all of our suburbs? Are these gay strongholds? The pathetic little worm just can't face the fact: gay people live everywhere, and are treated poorly almost everywhere. He actually goes on: "It was the gay radical left that defined promiscuous anal sex with strangers in public urban environments -- the primary cause of the AIDS epidemic -- as 'gay liberation.'...it was the gay movement that thought nothing of the massive epidemics of amoebiasis, rectal gonorrhea, syphilis and hepatitis B that swept through gay communities in the decades preceding AIDS, producing astronomical infection rates and depleted immune systems in the process. It was the gay movement that regarded any intrusion by public health authorities to close the public sexual gymnasiums called 'bathhouses' as a 'threat' to gay liberation (both before and after the onset of AIDS)." Horowitz, so blissful in his ignorance, actually supposes there is some "gay radical left" movement that "defines" the sexual activity of ALL gay men. Really, Mr. Horowitz? Does Trent Lott -- who irons his own shirts in his Senate office AFTER they come back from the laundry -- look to Pat Robertson to define HIS sexual proclivities? Horowitz again shows himself a silly ass -- and a liar. There is no person or group that defines what goes on in public urban environments, gay or not, except the privileged class, in this case the Grand Old Party -- your party, I suspect - a party that forced gays, from the mid-1800s through the present, to hide from the rest of society, to live like caged animals, to marry lesbians as cover just to be able to work. It is you and men like you, Horowitz, who "defined" the gay lifestyle and the seamier side of gay culture. It was you and men like you with your smirks and shouted insults that forced gay men and women underground -- unable to earn as much as you do until recent times. It was you and men like you whose bigotry created gay bars with music so loud it drowned out the hatred these men and women abided for so long under your enthusiastic direction. It was you and men like you, all the David Horowitzes of the nation, who stood and stand idly by as whites, blacks, Hispanics, and all Americans who lose their footing slip into drug-induced stupors and lie in alleys using spent needles to inject themselves with heroin or worse. It is men like you, David Horowitz-- so filled with hatred against anything that doesn't measure up to YOUR values -- that help fill our jails with minorities at obscene ratios. It is men like you, preaching disgust for anything not "Biblical" that has "contaminated" our children. It is men like you, who lobby for open and unregistered weapons to fight these "lowlifes" that kill our children in high schools across the nation. It is scum like you who create and perpetrate the myths that average moronic Americans, living in their trailers and drinking a case of beer each night while admiring each other's swastika tattoos, believe in. Blame yourself, you worthless human being -- for there is no one else to blame. Horowitz brings up his gay alter ego, the despised and conveniently dead Michael Callen (a gay homophobe himself, I opine), who headed up a tiny group of American gay Neonazis that blamed the "radical left" for all their problems. Callen, who almost eclipsed Horowitz with his own high ignorance quotient, supposedly told Horowitz (at a Turkish bath, I wonder?) that Edmund White, a gay leader, made him feel that every time he got a sexually transmitted disease he should wear it "like a red badge of courage in a war against a sex-negative society." But Edmund White never spoke those words, or anything close. Edmund White stood for freedom from oppression -- all oppression, including that of right-wing gay Americans that Horowitz leads, besmirches, and applauds simultaneously. To demonstrate just how dim Callen was, he reportedly told Horowitz, "Every time I get the clap I'm striking a blow for the sexual revolution." For the biggest snicker of all -- Horowitz now turns to the over-read, over-applauded King of taking the ignorant stance, Camille Paglia, who pointed out what Horowitz calls "the obvious truth" -- "Everyone who preached free love in the Sixties is responsible for AIDS. This idea that it was somehow an accident, a microbe that sort of fell from heaven -- absurd. We must face what we did." For Paglia to have written or said this is incongruous. Anyone reading her earlier, more truthful, and less financially rewarding philosophical rants will easily see that Paglia wouldn't have believed there was anything called the "free love movement" in the 60s or anytime in American or World history. The fact is that "free love" has been around and going strong since the beginning of recorded time. Yes, it was free -- but never exposed until the mid-20th century. The movement to openly choose one's sexual partners, without benefit of covering wedlock, was what Horowitz and perhaps Paglia now label as "sexual promiscuity" or even perversion between the lines. Yes, promiscuous we are and were - the only difference today being that fifteen years ago we didn't have to lie as much about it. Yes, gay men and women could then (and even now with some trepidation) openly kiss in public places -- except in Wyoming, of course, where thugs will tie one to a barbed wire fence and murder you for it. The truth is that men like Horowitz and his political champions are humiliating our children now, putting them back in unsound and unsafe marriages for the sake of some queasy philosophy they label "family values." Yes, Mr. Horowitz, if only "those fags" were in monogamous relationships living in Levittown, not raising children. If only that could have happened -- then AIDS would never have spread. Never. Horowitz's detestation wells up as he writes more carelessly toward the end of his vitriolic screed. Now he tells us that sexual diseases and the spread of them among gays and now, horrors, into the straight white population, is a " function of a microbiological... certainty, [and that] this level of sexual activity resulted in concurrent epidemics of syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, amoebiasis, venereal warts and, we discovered too late, other pathogens." Ask any family doctor when these Horowitz-labeled "gay" diseases took root in the USA. You might find they've been around since the 18th Century and before, unrecognized. He bleats, "Unwittingly, and with the best of revolutionary intentions, a small subset of gay men managed to create disease settings equivalent to those of poor Third World nations in one of the richest nations on earth." Disease settings? What exactly IS a "disease setting" -- a new type of art? Can you think of much else more hilariously reckless? Notice Horowitz's Goering-like use of the world "revolutionary." Horowitz moves on to tell us this is all "a tragedy." Who are these fags who pioneered "gay rights now addicted to a radical illusion that they could also change the world -- including the laws of nature" What is this cretin talking about? Well, here's a clue: it's all gobbledygook, newspeak and brash pathological lying from Horowitz. He begins his retreat by calling this a "tragedy," when secretly he seems to be celebrating the death of 450,000 "losers," to his mind. He cannot control himself, and rises to a new level of stupidity, by blaming the "left" because they controlled the battle against AIDS -- even though Horowitz is fully aware that is was the radical right that halted the battle even before it began. "This left went on to exert a controlling influence on the battle against AIDS, which sabotaged it from the start and has been directly responsible for the killing fields left in its wake." There you have it -- a single sentence summing up not only Horowitz's lack of intellect but also his inability to write a single cogent perjury. What is "this left," and how banal is the term "killing fields," and how does the "left" "leave" in its wake? So what exactly are the purposes of Horowitz's article in Salon? Well they are two-pronged. First, he sets out to flog some rage by other Neonazis and idiots against gays, whom he sees as some sort of cohesive mass of undulating butt-ramming young fleshpots hell-bent on dying from AIDS and taking the rest of society with them. Second, he attempts -- poorly -- to create a rift between the black and Hispanic populations and gay people. Blacks and Hispanics do not think that gay men or women are responsible for AIDS. They think that the people who get it are. It's that simple. If one asked a random hundred thousand Americans with I.Q.s over 80 whether gays knowingly or in conspiracy caused the AIDS epidemic, the vast majority would simply laugh -- and rightly so. But laugh my friends -- at Horowitz and his so-thinly-veiled attempt at creating an all-time classic diatribe in the arena of sick, moronic commentators of the ilk of William Safire. Horowitz, who is thick enough to believe that policymakers actually read anything he writes at all, tells us that he "offers" his observations with hope that they will have an effect. He then plugs his boring tome "The Politics of Bad Faith" -- which reads like a poorly-cloned memoir of a Fascist operative. I should know -- I tried in vain to read it. He then has the nerve to compare his cheap political commentary to the writings of Gabriel Rotello -- who never offered, as Horowitz infers, that gay people spread AIDS as some badge of courage to celebrate themselves. He also lists three-out-of-three right wing gay leaders, who weren't really leaders at all -- only to shore up his weak and incoherent arguments, telling us that even they have had "second thoughts" about their "former attitudes" and have "faced" what they did. I hate to tell them -- and you Mr. Horowitz -- but nothing they said, did, or even offered to say made an iota, not even a scintilla, of difference in the culture of this nation, or the so-called "cohesive" group of gay men and women who make our world a little more interesting and a lot more enjoyable, enough so as to make up for the ugliness you spread. In fact, Mr. Horowitz, every one of your patently adolescent and prevaricative theories falls flat on its face under your own witless pen. There is not a Cohesive Gay Population. Like all Americans, the opinions of gay men and women vary, as do the assorted words in the OED. There was never a charismatic leader of the gay movement who could take credit for much more than organizing a gay pride parade here and there. So, Mr. Horowitz -- what in God's name are you talking about? I must offer that Mr. Horowitz and I do share one common loathing -- and that is for the mainstream media -- now controlled by three of four rich white men who aren't even Jewish. He calls them the "chief obstacle" to any change along the lines proposed in his miserable, sick, and pitifully written piece. I must disagree, however. Even these men aren't lame enough to entertain or even read what you write, Horowitz -- thus they couldn't possible stand in your self-righteous way now, could they? Horowitz wants Americans to "wake up" and finally decide, "Enough is enough." They will, David, they will. And when they do, you and your kind will be on the first boat to join the skinheads in Germany -- or better yet Austria, where you most assuredly belong.
