There’s a reason why most Republican wingnuts don’t venture outside of the safe confines of Fox “News” or other venues where they won’t have to face actual, reality-based information and questions from outside of their comfortable, fact-free bubble.
My conversation on air Thursday with RW “voter fraud” fraudster, commie-hunter, and fact-challenged Fox fave David Horowitz illustrated that point with crystal clarity once again. The result wasn’t pretty. At least for him.
When asked for actual facts to back up his extraordinary claims about “Democratic voter fraud” — specifically, that caretakers at his brother-in-law’s residential care facility “committed fraud” by helping the brother-in-law, and purportedly sixty others at the home, to vote — Horowitz had nothing.
He was, however, able to call me a “communist wanna be”, a “liar” and an “extreme partisan” for having displayed the temerity to ask him for such facts. He was even able to pile on top of all of that by claiming (falsely) that I’d called him all sorts of names and even that I had accused him of committing fraud!
That’s why these guys don’t leave the Fox Fantasy World bubble.
As I say, it wasn’t pretty. But the audio of yesterday’s radio “interview”, and the background on what happened, all follows below. I think you may enjoy it…
Thanks to technical problems during the show, Fairness Radio with Patrick O’Heffernan, the beginning of the audio posted below is cut off. But most of the good stuff is there.
What you will have missed was about 20 minutes of me and O’Heffernan discussing various issues of election integrity — like my advocacy in favor of Republican Rep. Allen West’s recently aborted challenge to his reported election loss in Florida’s 18th Congressional District — and the beginning of Horowitz’ litany of allegations about “Democratic voter fraud”, as he detailed in his post-Thanksgiving column last week.
O’Heffernan is a progressive and, until recently, had co-hosted the show (which I’ve been on several times, and always enjoyed) with a Rightwinger friend of his. Instead, on yesterday’s show, Horowitz was to have been O’Heffernan’s guest co-host. It didn’t really work out that way, however.
Thanks to the myriad tech probs on the show, the producers had trouble getting Horowitz on until about 20 minutes into the hour (thus, my time with O’Heffernan by myself at the top of the show which you won’t hear below).
The audio picks up as Horowitz, who was given the “mic” to ask me a question once he finally came on, was detailing the allegations from his column.
Among the allegations you won’t hear him discuss, thanks to the truncated audio, is the one which I responded to first — wherein the conversation went immediately down hill (or, up hill, depending on how you may see it.)
Since you won’t hear him tell the story that I immediately asked him questions about, here are the key elements of that story, as published in his column last week:
…
So we know that Democrats have little respect for the election process, and we should assume they will attempt to pursue their victories by any means necessary.
But even knowing this, I was not prepared for a conversation I had at Thanksgiving dinner today with my brother-in-law, Henry, who has lived most of his life in a home for the mentally disabled, and though now in his forties has the intelligence level of a six-year-old.
“Obama saved me,” he said to me out of the blue.
“What do you mean?”
“I voted for him for president and now he’s saving me.”
I was taken aback by these words, since Henry had no idea who Obama was, or what a president might be, and would be unable to fill out a registration form let alone get to the polling place by himself. So I asked him how he knew that and how he had registered and cast his vote. In halting, impeded speech he told me that the people who take care of him at the home filled out “the papers” to register him to vote, told him how Obama cared for him, even taught him the Obama chants, and then took him to the polling place to vote. They did the same for all of the mentally disabled patients in their care, approximately sixty in all.
This is so appalling in its contempt for the voting process, which is the very foundation of our democracy, and in its cynical exploitation of my brother-in-law and the other patients in the home, many of whose mental capacities are even more limited than his that I am at a loss for words to express it.
Horowitz goes on in the column to express his hope that “poll-watching groups like ‘True the Vote’ will comb the rolls of residents at other homes for the mentally disabled, and attempt to stop this particular abuse.”
Though Horowitz claimed during the show that he is “not a crusader on this issue”, back in 2010 he appeared in the video used to launch the Rightwing, Republican-funded “non-partisan” True the Vote outfit (who, by the way, were found by an Ohio county to have committed fraud themselves in the 2012 Election!) He was seen in the video offering unsubstantiated claims such as “ACORN is a voter fraud machine” and asserting that “our elections are being manipulated by the radical Left.”
We covered that video and True the Vote’s pretend claims to be a “non-partisan election integrity” organization when they first appeared along with that video (which also included a fraudulent, Photoshopped photo of an African-American woman holding a sign reading “I ONLY GOT TO VOTE ONCE!”) when they first emerged in 2010. You can read our coverage of that here, and see the faked photo. Unfortunately, the video that featured it — and Horowitz — has been “removed” from the Internets by True the Vote for some reason.
The non-crusading Horowitz also created a website, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, which includes dozens of scammy, disinformative articles on “Democratic voter fraud”, including those purported to be about “ACORN’s Continuing Pattern of Voter Fraud” (they actually committed none) and “Voter Fraud & Voter ID Laws”.
He is also proudly featured on fellow GOP “voter fraud” fraudster and Master of Misinformation Matthew Vadum’s website endorsing comrade Vadum’s phony “investigative” book about ACORN this way: “The criminal enterprise called ‘ACORN’ is the largest, most elusive, and most dangerous radical organization in America. If you are wondering about the operations and influence of a vast left-wing conspiracy, this is it, with tentacles that reach right into the heart of the Obama White House.”
Other than that, of course, he’s “not a crusader on this issue”.
With all of that in mind, you’ll have to listen to the audio to hear what happened after Horowitz told the story above (the audio below begins as he finishes that story from his column, and explains that, after publishing, he received many emails from others claiming “similar experiences” elsewhere), when I then politely responded to ask Horowitz for the name and location of the facility where his brother-in-law, and “approximately sixty” others were allegedly directed to commit fraud by their caretakers, and whether or not he’d at least reported this seemingly very serious crime to any law enforcement officials.
There is one moment in the audio where Horowitz appears to have hung up. Apparently his cell phone dropped the call and he rejoins us a few moments later. But then, a few minutes after that, the cross-talk got so ugly that the producers were forced to go to a break. When we came back, Horowitz was gone for good.
Apologies in advance for the less than stellar audio, due in part to the tech problems. It’s a bit over 30 minutes, in all, but Horowitz is gone for good after about 20. The stuff that came after he left was fun too, though!
Enjoy!…
As revealed by Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber in Banana Republicans, at the outset of the 2000 campaign Tom Delay provided every Congressional Republican with a copy of David Horowitz’s Art of Political War, each bearing a Karl Rove endorsement on the cover.
In it, Horowitz, a former 1960s Marxist who has since become an unapologetic screed for the hard right, invoked Lenin’s maxim: “Politics is war conducted by other means,” Horowitz proclaims. “In political war you do not fight just to prevail, but to destroy the enemies’ fighting ability…In political wars, the aggressor usually prevails.”
Horowitz approached this interaction as if it entailed a “political war” but with someone as knowledgeable as Brad Friedman, Horowitz’s aggression was analogous to the guy who brings a knife to a gun fight.
What Ernie said.
Well, if they can’t talk over you, they duck out quick. Seems to be a virus of the RWNM.
After 2000, Dems were surprised to find that the Republicans had been using, in old age homes, the procedure Horowitz described, since the late 1960s, along with a number of other standard dirty practices. My guess is that Horowitz simply took the long-standing Republican procedure for old age homes, and changed the nouns to generate this tale.
Brad v Right Wingers? Bet on Friedman every time!
“…many of whose mental capacities are even more limited than
hismine…”This Hotairowitz is the kook that didn’t even use the gate before jumping the fence from Marxist to Stalinist.
To be fair to David Horowitz (besides all the crazy shit he said) his jumping off point–someone was taking advantage of his brother-in-law–was never really addressed. It was a bit of a clusterfuck in there what with the bad audio, the wide-ranging unsubstantiated GOP talking points, and the volatility of Horowitz but if you take away all the crazy shit(and you’d probably need a couple of front loaders to do that)what may have been a simple human concern sorta got plowed under.
I’m probably dreaming (and possibly being too much of a perfectionist) but I wonder in a case like this if the full-out crazy might have been avoided by a little acknowledgment of the part of the story that might have been deserving of some sympathy. You know, find the little millimeter of common ground and then deconstruct.
I used to be a big fan of David Horowitz. Decades ago his book “The Free World Colossus” had a huge impact on my way of looking at the world and the U.S. Sort of a Zinn effect before I became acquainted with Zinn. I was very curious when he underwent his radical shift of politics. I struggled through his long explanation of that transformation in a later book. I found it pretty incoherent.
Something bad happened to that guy. It seems he became sorta tortured and very angry. Or maybe he was always that way, even when I agreed with his politics.
David Lasagna –
I took his claims about what happened to his brother-in-law on their face. If he, or anybody else offered such a serious claim, I’d ask what facility it was and have they reported this serious crime, etc. That’s exactly what I did with him.
The fact that he was unable or uninterested in responding — was so hostile, in fact, to such questions — suggestions that maybe, just maybe, something else is going on. The fact is, those similar stories (usually, it’s an elderly family member being told how to vote by the caretakers in the supposed nursing home, or having their ballots voted for them, etc.) are told all the time by folks on the right. Just like the “busing in XXXXX voters from YYYYY”. Yet there never seems to be any hard evidence offered to support the stories.
Nonetheless, I took his allegation seriously, and that’s why I was asking for details so it could be investigated and/or reported.
His response, however, may have been very telling. That’s up to you and others to determine.
I’m with you Brad. I wish I lived there(L.A.). This conversation I started, which you were so gracious to continue, I fear is a little too nuanced to take place through the ethers of email. Too much chance for misunderstanding. Not worth it. And as per usual, I thought you were great on that show.
Rightwing media & radio shows exist so they can just “say shit” without evidence, unchallenged by anyone. Like calling in radio shows and saying they saw someone on food stamps buying lobster.
ps Brad @8–
I was not aware that his story may have been just a variety of standard issue from the vast underground storage facilities at Bullshit Mountain.
So I hadn’t considered that his whole narrative might be fictitious. Thanks for pointing out that possibility. I’m still a little naive.
Even after all the bullshit.
Kinda stupid. Kinda endearing.
faithfully yours,
Dave
Re David Lasagna @ various and Brad @8.
There is no reason why claims made by Horowitz or anyone else should be accepted “at face value.” The devil is always in the details.
In pressing Horowitz for the facts, Brad did no more than he has often done with me in editing one of my articles, or, for that matter, in editing one of his own. The standard is objective journalism based on verifiable facts.
Horowitz’s hysterical reaction to a simple request for the evidence to verify his care facility claim typifies what one might expect from a right wing smear merchant who operates in a fact free environment like the Glenn Beck show depicted in the above photo.
Dear Ernie,
I agree with what you(and Brad)are saying. At the same time, I was coming at the radio exchange from a slightly different angle. My initial comments(and as you know I used to do this a lot here)were an attempt to get at the psychology of the guy(Horowitz) and perhaps where his tripping point into cuckoo world might have been in the context of that particular conversation. He, like many Foxers, seems to me unusually angry, volatile, and unaware that he is unusually and inappropriately angry and volatile.
So while I agree with what you and Brad are saying, it’s not quite getting at what I was trying to bring up. To really do this(if anybody ‘sides me was inclined to) I think we’d have to be in the same room listening to the audio and stopping it frequently and deconstructing what was happening on an interpersonal level. I thought maybe I heard some things on an interpersonal communication level that might have been contributing to Horowitz losing it so weirdly. But even if either of you WAS interested in such a pursuit, there’s a continent between us.
That guy used to have a really good brain. Really insightful. Something happened to him.
You know, I’ve read history. I’m old enough to have seen a North American Maoist in the wild, and I remember the ’60s when the New Left was underway. Some of those people were noble, and they tended to live difficult lives. The best of them were splendid and noble; the worst were mad in the way that Lenin and Stalin were mad, Darkness-at-Noon, glinting eyeglasses crazy. But most were harmless cranks. Now David has switched sides. But he’s still crazy, and still in the same way he was in his Marxist days.
Jim H @ 14,
Okay, maybe he is. I didn’t know him before and I don’t know him now. But he used to write coherently and back up his points with reason, logic, footnotes and research. That seems to have changed.
I liked David Horowitz so much better when he was a consumer advocate.
WOW!
Whenever you can bring somebody down with words; that’s what it’s all about!
You humiliated this guy. I almost feel bad for him. Almost.