One year ago, right-wing activist David Horowitz seemed convinced that Lawrence Auster, an occasional contributor to his FrontPage Magazine website, trafficked in "racist" ideas. And he seemed to cast Auster out.
I had sent Horowitz and Jamie Glazov, FrontPage's managing editor, an 11-page letter detailing Auster's views on race, as expressed on Auster's own blog. (For example, his description of black people collectively as "the savages.")
Concerning my letter, Horowitz emailed Glazov and me on May 14, 2006: "I think it's a persuasive argument for not running Auster unless he publicly repudiates these positions which are racist and offensive."
Sure enough, Auster's essays didn't appear in FrontPage Magazine after that.
Until today.
Yes, Lawrence Auster is back, alerting David Horowitz's readers to an epidemic of black-on-white rape.
Pulling from U.S. Justice Department data, Auster makes the following declaration in boldface type: "[E]very day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man."
He assails the American media for ignoring "the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists."
Auster, of course, seems unconcerned about the 136 white women a day raped or sexually assaulted by men classified as white. Just as he's not losing any sleep over the 100 black women a day raped or sexually assaulted by black men.
Auster's thesis -- pegged to the Duke lacrosse team fiasco -- concerns "the truth of interracial rape in the United States." White-on-black rape is a rarity; black-on-white rape happens every day.
Fair enough. The disproportion of black violent crime is a problem confronting all Americans.
But Lawrence Auster isn't dealing in good faith. And David Horowitz knows that Auster isn't dealing in good faith. Because Auster's record of bigoted horseshit reaches back to the mid '90s.
His assessment of "black inferiority" was spelled out in an essay originally written in 1995 but published in 2003 in a racialist journal called The Occidental Quarterly. (It is archived on Auster's blog.)
Auster, convinced of "an inherent, dangerous weakness in black ways of thought," argued that blacks are profoundly different from white people.
"Through numerous experiences and observations, I started to have the sense that blacks are more 'non-objective,' they understand things in a much more personal, subjective way than whites," Auster wrote. "They seem to have much less interest in knowledge or beauty for its own sake." Which means that "blacks are in fact less endowed with the qualities that make civilization possible, particularly Western civilization."
Auster went on to discuss the "moral passivity of blacks," their "demonstrably lesser orientation toward the common political good and a moral and stable social order." Granting that "there are many decent, upright black people," Auster asserted.
"The personal decency of individual blacks does not translate into the ability to resist public evil, the aspiration to enforce social order. Those things require a degree of moral will, intelligence, and organizing energy that blacks, collectively, do not possess."
These deficiencies are, in Lawrence Auster's words, "inherent" and "intrinsic" in blacks as a race. And "so long as the truth of racial differences is not recognized, whites will always end up being blamed... for a black inferiority that is not whites' fault."
I have corresponded with Auster in the past, sometimes amicably. I like mixing it up with white nationalists; call me nutty. I even donated money when Auster passed the hat online to raise funds for the completion of his latest anti-immigration tract. That is something I now regret.
On subjects other than race, Auster's "traditionalist conservative" blog is interesting to read, and the man is undeniably intelligent. But he is majorly hung up on black people. He just can't help himself.
As to why David Horowitz would choose to provide a platform for Auster's race-baiting, I have no clue.