Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript to David Horowitz’s introduction to Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke’s speech at the Freedom Center’s 2015 West Coast Retreat. The event was held March 6-8 in Palos Verdes, CA.
When Peter Collier and I left the Left 30 years ago we took an inventory of what their successes were so we would focus our efforts on fighting them where they had essentially won ground, and we saw that they had captured already our universities and our schools and the media, but I also noted because I had spent years fighting for civil rights since I was a child that the Left had taken over the political structure of the black community. It was totally dominated by the Left, which is how two race hustlers and extortionists managed to succeed Martin Luther King as the head of the so-called civil rights movement. I knew that the Left’s domination of the black community was very bad news for African Americans in this country.
Progressives and Democrats control every major city of any size and every major inner city of any size in America, as you’ve heard me say before. Everything’s that’s wrong with the inner cities of America, that policy can affect progressives, leftists, Democrats are responsible for. They have monopoly control in all these cities: Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis. There’s not a Republican in sight. Progressive welfare policies destroyed the black family beginning in the 1960s. Seventy-five percent of African American children were born to two parents at that time. Now, 80 percent in the inner cities are born out of wedlock. The absence of a father and authority figure in the home, often complicated when the mother works as well as raising her children, has produced a series of pathologies which we summarize as the underclass, which were predicted by Daniel Moynihan in 1965, of violence, drug abuse, and criminality.
David Horowitz from DHFC on Vimeo.
Leftists controlled all the public schools in which inner city kids are failing, all these failed schools that year in and year out don’t teach the kids basic tools they need to succeed, so that 30 to 40 percent of inner city kids don’t graduate and 30 to 40 percent of those who do graduate functionally illiterate and will never get a shot at the American dream, and yet, all the Democrats in Congress send their kids to private schools. They fight vouchers. They won’t let these kids get a private school education, including the President of the United States, they get it for their kids, and it’s always very, very frustrating to me to watch this taking place and not know exactly what could be done about it, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Now, we’re witnessing a war against the police conducted by the same Left. I can tell you exactly when that war began. It began with the creation of the Black Panther party in the 1960s, who patrolled the streets with loaded shotguns and harassed police officers making arrests, and started this mythology of a vast police oppression in the inner cities. I was a radical as you know at that time and I bought into this, and when the police were investigating the Panthers, I bought the argument that it’s a racist police force and they’re harassing the Panthers because they’re militant black leaders. I raised a lot of money to buy a school for the Panthers. They used the school money to buy drugs. They conducted drug deals in the school. There was a fatality. A friend of mine, whom I had recruited to keep the books in the school, was murdered and that was the end of my career in the left, but I did investigations for many years after that. They had killed 13 people that I could identify, all of them black except this woman.
When I left the Left, I joined the Open Athletic Club and my workout partner was a recently retired head of homicide, and I said to him why didn’t you guys ever nail Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, and he said, oh, we never wanted to get a call from that side of town because you guys would be on our ass, calling us racists, saying, “police brutality,” and you’d have your lawyers all over us and your press all over us, and I had an epiphany in that moment that the left, the progressive left, the civil rights left is a protection racket for black criminals and for criminals generally.
We witnessed in Ferguson a 4-month modern-day lynch mob convict the cop because he’s white, convict him in advance of the evidence or else, and then when the evidence comes in and shows that this individual was resisting arrest — I mean how many people would attack an armed police officer in his police car, and that police officer was fighting for his life — and yet so powerful is this leftist ideology that you have sports athletes, hero figures to American youth, “hands up, don’t shoot,” or “can’t breathe,” an assault on the police force.
Eric Holder, a leader of that lynch mob, had just issued his report from Ferguson. Even though he had all these leftwing lawyers looking for evidence, anything they could twist into saying that the cop was racist, they couldn’t find any evidence whatsoever for the incident that triggered their investigation, but they have indicted the whole police force. And how are they indicted? Sixty-seven percent of Ferguson residents are African American. Ninety-three percent of the arrests are of African Americans. That disparity is their evidence of racism. Well, I’ve got news for them. There’s other statistics. Black males constitute 6 percent of the population and they are responsible for 40 to 50 percent of all violent crimes. That explains that other disparity. If you’ve committed a crime, you’re going to be arrested. And there’s another statistic. Ninety-five percent of the victims of black criminals are blacks.
What the Left has done, what the Democratic Party is doing is making African Americans, who are unfortunate to have to live in the inner cities, victims of crime. You see that in New York already. Because of De Blasio stopping the stop and frisk policy, murders are up 20 percent. Now, another thing the Left has done — they’ve done it to us nationally in many areas like our universities, but to the black community as well — is to create a one-party state, which means if you stand up to them, you are going to be cut down. I have a lot of scars to show, but it’s nothing compared to what black conservatives or blacks who challenge this orthodoxy — they don’t have to be even conservative, just challenge this orthodoxy — have to bear.
In the midst of these terrible national events and this incredible tragedy for the black community, because there is suffering doing on right now because of what Eric Holder and Barack Obama and his advisor on race relations, the chief lynch mob leader in the country, Al Sharpton, and a criminal himself, have done, is there is so much suffering going on. Our guest today, in the midst of this wave of bigotry against police — I mean they attacked the New York Police Department whose majority are Hispanics and blacks, not even a white majority, as racist. Suddenly, you see on your television screens a voice speaking reason, speaking the truth, defending the facts, and not backing down doing it.
Our guest today has been a Sheriff of Milwaukee for 13 years, and because Milwaukee is one of these cities that has all these pathologies, but is controlled politically and has been for I can’t remember, I think it’s a hundred years, by the Democratic Party, Sheriff Clarke runs as a Democrat, just to give you an idea of the environment that he has to operate in. I’ve learned in politics, if Victor Davis Hanson was here, he would tell you in words, to turn a tide, to turn a battle, you need people who are ready to stand up and fight. It’s very, very difficult to be the first ones out there, standing up and taking the fire.
Our guest today, David Clarke, is an American hero. I wrote a book called Hating Whitey and other Progressive Clauses, and I learned from that experience that there’s no way that, even though I had spent my life fighting in civil rights struggles, even though I had supported the Black Panther Party, there’s no way my voice would be listened to because this ideology of the left is a racist ideology, so as a white person, none of my words mean anything, but on the other hand, if you were black, as my teachers, Tom Sowell, Walter Williams have experienced, you get the worst kind of attacks, or Tim Scott, our Republican Senator from South Carolina, you’re called a race traitor and other ugly, ugly names.
So I am really proud and honored to introduce to you today this man who has stood up and I will tell you there were many, many young African Americans watching him on television who will hopefully turn the tide in the next generation, David Clarke.
SOURCE: FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE
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