<David Horowitz -- the right-wing pundit who has recently sought to defend himself against charges of racism by baselessly branding one of his critics, radio host Al Franken, a "racist" -- paid nearly $300,000 to Rotterman & Associates, a Republican media consulting firm that helped run the racially divisive campaigns of former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), a review of the tax filings of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture shows.
The financial records tying Horowitz to the Helms political machine specify only that the payments to Rotterman were for "consultant" services to Horowitz's center. In North Carolina, Marc and Karen Rotterman, who head Rotterman & Associates, have worked for Republican campaigns using race- and gay-baiting political tactics.
Horowitz has penned a series of racially provocative attacks that have caused critics to conclude he is a bigot, including an August 16, 1999, column for Salon.com titled "Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do," a February 2001 campaign to publish an ad titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea -- and Racist Too" in college newspapers across the country, and his 1999 book, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes.
More recently, in a January 26 posting on the History News Network website about "Why I Am Not Celebrating" the 90th birthday of the African-American historian John Hope Franklin, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University and chairman of President Clinton's Commission on Race, Horowitz referred to Franklin as "the most honored and generally revered African American historian of slavery," then attacked Franklin's response to his anti-reparations ad by characterizing his writing as that of "a racial ideologue rather than a historian" and "almost pathological." In the piece, Horowitz, who has no academic credentials as a historian, sought to defend his claim that "free blacks and the free descendants of blacks" benefited from slavery.
Through it all, Horowitz has sought to portray himself as a strong supporter of civil rights. In a November 30, 2004, column, he wrote that "there is no single cause -- except America's wars against totalitarian foes -- to which I have devoted myself more consistently that than that of racial equality. Not a shred of evidence exists to the contrary.">
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20050214165124523
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