David Horowitz, conservative writer and founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, speaks at LHU Monday. PHOTO PROVIDED
LOCK HAVEN — There is a political civil war raging over control of the U.S. presidency, said David Horowitz, conservative writer and founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, to an audience of about 100 students, faculty and community members in Lock Haven University’s Parson Union Building on Monday.
Four armed policemen and a personal bodyguard provided security during Horowitz’s speech, entitled “Identity Politics are Dangerous and Totalitarian.”
Lock Haven University’s Department of Sociology and The Young Americans for Liberty sponsored the event.
“Every person in this room has had a moment where they want to snuff out somebody who disagrees with them; it’s a normal human feeling. Fortunately, we don’t act on it,” Horowitz said. “We have respect for the electoral process and we understand that if the other person wins, we have the next few years to organize.”
However, Horowitz said, the type of scrutiny surrounding President Donald Trump–a duly elected president, according to Horowitz–was last seen when Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860.
Horowitz said presidents are traditionally given a “honeymoon” period, a time of around seven months where they enjoy favorable public opinion.
“Donald Trump didn’t get seven seconds; they were already talking about impeaching him,” he said. “America has a tradition, we’re about compromise because our views are so different. In other countries, people are at each other’s throats.”
The reason for this divide, according to Horowitz, is identity politics, an informal term for what he calls “cultural Marxism.”
Cultural Marxism, in his view, is the division of people into oppressors and the oppressed, within historical context, by their race, sexual orientation and gender, then prioritizing those oppressed people’s feelings and socio-economic standing.
Particularly, Horowitz said, cultural Marxism is found in the education system, and he lamented over Lock Haven University for its lack of conservative professors.
“That doesn’t happen by accident and it robs you of having a decent education. You have to hear both sides of any controversial issue and every issue that you are presented,” he said. “So even if you have well-meaning leftists, you still are being indoctrinated and deprived of an education.”
A philosophy that stigmatizes people based on their race, their skin color, their ethnic identity, their origin cannot co-exist with a free country, he said.
Horowitz said the founders and the writers of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence created a remarkable new political formation in which the goal was to give all people individual and equal rights because “all are equal under God or Nature’s God.” According to him, it was due only to the slow change of human nature that slavery was allowed to continue for another 200…
