For more information about the book fairs and festivals that booktv will be covering and to watch previous festival coverage, click the book fairs tab on our web site, booktv. Org. Good afternoon, everybody. We shall get the proceedings underway. When barack obama was first elected president of the United States, he was riding a swell of hope however illusory that hope may have been been across the country that our first black or at least halfblack president would usher in an era of postracial harmony. Seven years later, i think we all know how well that turned out. Obama has healed the racial divide about as successfully as his promised healing of the oceans. Racial unrest in this country has gone from a tense simmer to a raging boil. The left would like to pin the blame for this on what they claim is the rights racist refusal to accept a black man as president. In fact, what has exacerbated Race Relations in the United States is the inherent racism and grievance mongering of the lefts identity politics. Spearheaded by obama himself. Progressive racism, not the right, is the reason for todays heightened racial conflict. David horowitz needs no real introduction from me to this crowd, so let me focus, if i may, on his new book instead, progressive racism, which i recently reviewed for front page mag. Needless to say, i gave it two thumbs up. Its sixth and most recent volume of David Horowitzs collected conservative writings called the black book of the american left. This book collects nearly 50 essays of davids thoughts on the politics of race over the last 20 years. The book not to give away the ending, but the book concludes that the racial bias which the left demands, quote tears at the very fabric of the social order, compromises true equality and is the antithesis of the american dream, unquote. And if i could quote a little bit more from it, in a free society composed of individuals who are unequal by nature, the highest government good is neutrality in the treatment of its citizens before law. One standard and justice for all. This is the only equality that is not be at odds with individual freedom. It is the only equality that can make a Diverse Community one. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the founder of the freedom center, author of too many books to mention here including progressive racism, one of the few intellectuals willing to talk honestly about race and still the lefts most hated adversary, David Horowitz. [applause] sorry for all those words, but somebody has to do it. [laughter] president obama has said that racism is in the dna of america and transmitted through the generations. This is a malicious libel. It is, in fact, the most malicious libel ever uttered by an american president against his own country. Slavery existed in africa for a thousand years before a white person ever set foot there. Slavery existed in all societies for 3,000 years. Just it was a common, it was what you did when you conquered your enemy, you enslaved the men and the women. From the beginning of time, no one ever said that slavery was immoral, not aristotle, not moses, not jesus, until White Christians in england did towards the end of the 18th century. And in the british colonies at the time, a white slave owner named Thomas Jefferson wrote into americas birth certificate that liberty is a godgiven right that government cant take away. And equality too. Within just a little more than a generation and at the cost of 350,000 union lives, slavery was abolished in america and quickly then in the western hemisphere. Every black person alive in this country owes their freedom to america. That is the true dna of america. It is liberty, not racism. The libel that its racism has a second malicious effect which is to persuade, unfortunately, large members of the black community that that is the truth and to alienate them from this country and make them feel like outsiders. When black people are as american as any other group. They were here from, they were on this continent from 1619. You cant speak of American Culture without black culture. It doesnt exist. And one could go on and on. So this has a terrible effect on black people in this country and on the rest of us. It sometimes takes years to get a crucial fact like this right, and then it can be undone by the next generation of ignoramuses, people who come into this World Without any knowledge or experience. And it sometimes takes you a lifetime, and sometimes like the president you dont learn even over a lifetime. We have a saying in the 60s, you cant trust anyone under over 30. That was just youthful arrogance. Nobody should respect. The reality is you cant trust anyone under 30, because they just dont know enough. They havent had a life experience. When i was a youngster about 11 or 12, a book came into my progressive household. My parents, as you all know, were cardcarrying communists. And the book was titled we charge genocide. And what it was, in fact, was a petition. The book was published by an organization calling itself the Civil Rights Congress. And it was a petition to the u. N. To condemn the United States for genocide against black people. In the front of this piece, there was a photograph. Could we have that photograph projected . Is there a projector thats going to put the photographup . I guess, elizabethsome anyway, this is a photograph. Its a very its the most famous photograph of a lynching. Two black men hanging from trees and a white man facing the camera and pointing at them. Everybody whos seen any picture of lynchings has seen this photograph and, hopefully, well be able to get it up briefly. It was incredibly disturbing to me as an adolescent. And it still, its still disturbing. Disturbing enough that this hotel didnt want us to show it while the staff is present. So this hotel is a safe place. It could join any university, could be a subsidiary of a university. But it is a horrifying, horrifying photograph. It took me ten or twenty years before i read enough about read about lynchings to understand that lynching was not devised for black people. There is a racial dimension to lynching, and its a terrible, evil one. But, actually, lynching was just frontier justice. It was, you know, lets not waste time with the due process. Lets, you know, have the punishment before the trial. Like alice in wonderland. First the punishment, then we can have the trial. I also learned that a third of all lynch victims were white. And that tells you a couple of things. First of all, that it wasnt devised and wasnt a practice just against black people, but also that they were lynched because they had allegedly committed crimes that were worthy of hanging. So most of the lynching cases are not a bunch of white racists grabbing a black person and stringing them up from a tree, but were hangings to punish people for crimes for which they had been accused. In this particular case, the two men hanging were named thomas ship and abram smith. And there was a third, they had a companion named James Cameron who was 16 at the time who was not lynched, who was present. What had happened was and i learned this 50 years later listening, i just happened to tune in an npr program where they interviewed James Cameron who was then an old man about what happened. And what happened was the three of them had been accused, arrested for murdering a young white factory worker and raping his girlfriend. And the lynch mob had broken into the jail and took them out and then strung the two up from the tree. There, thats the famous picture. Thats thomas ship and abram smith. And you can see the crowd is white. But they had been accused of murder. According to James Cameron, they actually had committed the murder. According to the white woman who was allegedly raped, she hadnt been raped. So the rape charge was spurious which would have turned up in a trial. But murder charge was right. Now, this doesnt make lynching right. Lynching is wrong. And its evil. We have i due process in this country we have due process in this country for a reason. Its to protect the innocent. Another fact about this lynching is, you know, why they didnt, why didnt they hang James Cameron who was also black and was arrested with them . And the reason was James Cameron said that he didnt participate, he didnt want to commit the murder. It was a robbery, commit the murder. And he didnt participate. He stayed in the car. And he probably would have been hung for being black. There was a racial, obvious, dimension to lynching. Except that a white woman in the lynch mob stood up for him. And so they let him go. He was subsequently tried and convicted of being accessory before the fact, and he served seven or eight years and then spent his life fighting for civil rights. And in 1991 the state of indiana pardoned him. And you can find all this out on wikipedia if you look up just marion, indiana, lynching or indiana lynching. This is the most famous lynch picture. It was a picture on which an american communist wrote the song strange fruit that Billie Holliday sang. And its a symbol and, obviously, was used in this book we charge genocide as a symbol of white racism. Although, obviously, once you know the facts, its a lot more complicated than that. Another thing i learned late, years and years later probably when i had had become conservative, so itd be 20 or 30 years later was why this book we charge genocide and this petition was brought to the u. N. This was around 1950, 51 when america had been through the second world war, and we had fought the master race. The nazis were driven by a theory of the master race. And the conscience of america was awakened, and the barriers began being broken down. The military in 1947 was integrated. Truman integrated the civil service. Jackie robinson became the first black participant in Americas National sport. It was only a couple of years before brown v. Board of education integrated the schools. So why, in the first place the charge of genocide, that is a deliberate campaign to exterminate a people, whats going on with the jews today in the muslim world, was obviously not the case. Well, the Civil Rights Congress which authored the petition was a communist party front and, therefore, it was run from moscow as we also have learned through the opening of the soviet archives. Many in Eastern Europe there was a show trial taking place in czechoslovakia which the kremlin was behind. The kremlin had accused the top leaders of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party of being trotzkyites and zionists. Eleven of the thirteen leaders that they hung were jews. In other words, the we charge Genocide Campaign was not about black people at all. It was about using black people as a battering ram against the United States to neutralize the bad publicity the kremlin was getting for its campaign against the jews which then spread, as everybody knows, to the soviet union itself. A battering ram. This progressive tradition my parents who were communists never referred to themselves as communists, always as progressives this progressive tradition lives today in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party doesnt care about black people, it doesnt really do much for black people except throw them crumb cans and wine their crumbs and bribe their leaders to keep the community in line. Thats basically what goes on. The big perks go to the leaders. But the black masses as we would have called them when i was a leftist in our inner cities, they get crumbs. The Democratic Party controls every major inner city in america 100 , 100 . And has for 50100 years. Everything thats wrong with the inner cities in america, every oppression, every deprivationing democrats and progressives are responsible for. Destroyed School Systems that year in and year out dont teach these kids to read and write, massive failure works, nongraduation. The Democratic Party will go to the depths to defend the teacher unions which provide a slush fund for the party. I dont have to go on about this, though ill come back to it later maybe. But using blacks as a battering ram, thats what progressives do. And thats why every Election Year the Democratic Party will run on Republican Donald Trump is a racist, black churches will burn if the republicans are elected and so forth and so on. This is their bread and butter. Its disgusting, and its racist. I didnt well, as i say, i learned late about these facts. It took a lifetime. Ive done nothing but politics, basically, since i was 10 years old. I understand that most people cant devote themselves fully to political arguments, into investigating these things. And im sure the facts that ive laid out here are obscure or invisible to most of the people actually even watching cspan which are people who are probably high toly politically educated highly politically educated and informed to begin with. I went on in the 60s, i raised a lot of money, as you know probably. Ive written about this extensively for the black Panther Party. The black Panther Party was seen by the left as the vanguard of the black revolution. And i bought into that. And they were seen as a vanguard because they were, they would take up arms against the police, stand up for the oppressed. Actually, prior to the 60s in this period from the 1940 to 1960, the greatest social revolution in Race Relations ever in the history of mankind, was taking place. In 1940 4 of black americans were in the middle class and professionals. In 1960 the figure was 49 . Just a remarkable transformation. And it was still only the beginning of the transformation that was taking place. But we on the left, we progressives, saw blacks as an oppressed people, and revolution was the only thing that would transform their lives. And, therefore, the left which it likes to forget now despised Martin Luther king. We supported him in 1963, but then as things got more and more radical, the left despised Martin Luther king. Turned its back on him. He was a pretty isolated figure when he was assassinated in 1968. Anyway, i saw the black Panther Party as blacks willing to stand up for themselves. It didnt occur to me that the black Panther Party had no significant following in the black community of oakland and the areas where they were prominent be, that they were, in fact, feared by the local community. I had this progressive racism in me. I saw black people as symbols of everything that was wrong with america, and thats why i, thats why i raised the money for the black Panther Party and didnt Pay Attention to the signs. Well, in 1973, 1974 a woman i had i raised a lot of money to build a black panther school, and in 19 to buy a church and turn it into a black panther school. The woman i recruited to keep the books was a white woman named betty who had three children and who worked for me at ramparts. I was editing then the largest magazine of the left. And in 1974 betty disappeared, and by the time the police fished her body out of San Francisco bay, i knew the panthers had murdered her. And that was really the end of my career in the left because all of my progressive friends defended the panthers, and i knew that if i said what i thought, i would be denounced as a cia agent and a racist. And i had a family with four children, and it took me some years. I fed this information to journalists, and one brave leftist named kate coleman published the first story about the the panthers were a street gang. They were criminals. They murdered a dozen black people and got away with it. But this delusion, this progressive delusion, this melodrama of america having racism in its dna, actually, this delusion has metastasized if we come to the present. In 1999 or thereabouts, i was walking down a berkeley street. I had spoken on a hundred college campuses, and saw what the students were being taught and fed, which was america was a racist country. And it occurred to me, well, you know, and i was familiar with the curriculum, i was just struck by this thought that, you know, its politically correct to hate white people. And this became and i determined right then im going to write a book with the title its politically correct to hate white people. I did write the book which came out, i think, in 2000, maybe 199 i dont remember the exact date. The publisher had, first of all, when i told my new york publisher, i had one of the biggest, it was a division of simon schuster, new york publishers that i wanted to write a book called hating white people is a politically correct idea, my editor told me we will never publish a book with that title. Of course, if it had been titled hating blackie, it would have been a bestseller. So i had to go to a little texas publisher to get this, to get this book published. It was called hating whitey and other progressive causes. In 2001 i became aware of a campaign on american campuses. It was called repar rations awareness reparations awareness week. The it was a campaign to get reparations for slavery. This was 137 years after the fact. It would have been a Reasonable Campaign if, one, the reparations were to be paid by the confederacy and not by the United States government whose citizens lost 350,000 lives to end slavery and spent i dont know how much government spent but, obviously, it was