The crowd rose to its feet and roared its approval as Sen. Jeff Sessions bounded onto the stage at the Breakers, an exclusive resort in Palm Beach, Fla. Stephen Miller, an aide to the Alabama Republican, handed him a glass trophy honoring his bravery as a lawmaker.
“Heyyyy!” Sessions yelled out to the crowd.
The ceremony that day, in November 2014, turned out to be a harbinger: It brought together an array of hard-right activists and a little-known charity whose ideas would soon move from the fringes of the conservative movement into the heart of the nation’s government.
The man behind the event was David Horowitz, a former ’60s radical who became an intellectual godfather to the far right through his writings and his work at a charity, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Since its formation in 1988, the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration: Attorney General Sessions, senior policy adviser Miller and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
Long before Trump promised to build a wall, ban Muslims and abandon the Paris climate accord, Horowitz used his tax-exempt group to rail against illegal immigrants, the spread of Islam and global warming. Center officials described Hillary Clinton as evil, President Barack Obama as a secret communist and the Democratic Party as a front for enemies of the United States.
The Freedom Center has declared itself a
“School for Political Warfare,” and it is part of a loose nationwide network of like-minded charities linked together by ideology, personalities, conservative funders and websites, including the for-profit Breitbart News.
Horowitz’s story shows how charities have become essential to modern political campaigns, amid lax enforcement of the federal limits on their involvement in politics, while taking advantage of millions of dollars in what amount to taxpayer subsidies.
In interviews with The Washington Post
, Horowitz, 78, acknowledged the Freedom Center’s partisan mission and said its aim is to protect “traditional American values” against adversaries on the left, who operate their own network of charities. “This is a shadow political universe,” he said.
Horowitz makes a good living as the Freedom Center chief executive, earning $583,000 from a charity that received $5.4#million in donations in 2015, according to the latest available records. But he said he has come to believe that his group and others across the political spectrum ought to be reined in to ensure they fulfill the original spirit of the Internal Revenue Service’s charitable rules, even though such overhauls would be “personally devastating for me.”
“They should redefine what a charity is,” he said. “A charity should be something that helps everybody.”
The IRS prohibits charities from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, for or against candidates.
In an essay he published online in response to The Post’s questions after refusing further interviews, Horowitz wrote the center “does not engage in political activities in the narrow sense used in the I.R.S. code.”
A lefty moves right
Horowitz looks like a professor, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and small oval glasses. He speaks with a scratchy voice that carries strong hints of his New York roots. He is quick to use fiery rhetoric and no-holds-barred tactics he had learned as a student radical.
Horowitz was a “red diaper baby” of communist parents in New York City. After attending Columbia University in the 1950s, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, an anchor of leftist thinking.
Over the next two decades, he took on prominent roles in the New Left. He served as an editor of Ramparts, an influential muckraking magazine in San Francisco.
But by the late 1970s, he had decided that the left represented a profound threat to the United States. On March#17, 1985, he and a writing partner came out as conservatives in a surprising Washington Post Magazine article headlined “Lefties for Reagan.”
In August 1988, Horowitz launched the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that would become the Freedom Center.
Charities have been around since the nation’s beginning, as citizens sought to help schools, churches and the poor. Decades ago, Congress created a special section of the IRS code to define and regulate charities, which are known as 501(c)(3) groups under the code. They have a special allure for donors: They can deduct contributions from their taxes.
IRS rules give charities wide latitude, but they may not devote a “substantial part” of their resources or activities to lobbying or “carrying on propaganda.” And they “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.
In his IRS application for tax-exempt status in August 1988, Horowitz wrote his center would be “entirely non-profit, non-partisan,” according to records obtained through a public records request. “It will not be organized to promote any particular political program.”
Twenty years later, a brochure for one of the charity’s events would sharply contradict that claim: “In 1988, Horowitz created the Center for the Study of Popular Culture to institutionalize his campaigns against the Left and its anti-American agendas.”
From the start, Horowitz was supported by contributions from stalwart conservative groups, including the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, along with donations from the wealthy Scaife family of Pittsburgh.
In 1989, he co-wrote “Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties,” a harsh critique of the radical left. He also began hosting events. A gathering called the Wednesday Morning Club catered to conservatives in liberal Los Angeles. In the 1990s, one of the regular guests was Bannon, then a former Wall Street investor seeking to make his mark in Hollywood, according to Lionel Chetwynd, the event’s co-founder.
“Conservatives are nervous around me, and they’re nervous because I’m very outspoken,” Horowitz told The Post. “Steve Bannon was not nervous because he’s like me.”
Bannon did not respond to requests for interviews.
The origin of Stephen Miller
After the Sept.#11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Horowitz and his center argued that liberals had been too tolerant of radical Islam and illegal immigration.
Open to that message was Stephen Miller, a 16-year-old high school student in Santa Monica, Calif. In the fall of 2001, Miller asked Horowitz for help in disputes with administrators at his school. Miller complained his teachers and classmates were insufficiently patriotic and refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Horowitz’s charity launched a group called Students for Academic Freedom, framing it as a counterweight to the dominance of the left in high schools and on college campuses. Miller formed a chapter and sought permission from school officials to invite Horowitz to the school to speak. When administrators delayed, Miller and Horowitz accused them of stifling free speech.
Horowitz eventually spoke at the school, and in November 2002, Miller wrote about the visit in an essay in Frontpagemag.com, the online news and opinion site run by the center. Miller portrayed himself as the victim of indoctrination and called on the system’s superintendent to ensure “that his schools stress inclusive patriotism, rather than a multiculturalism.”
When Miller went on to Duke University, he formed another chapter of Students for Academic Freedom and again invited Horowitz to speak. At the time, Horowitz had just published “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” a book some condemned as a political blacklist.
After graduation, Miller wanted to work in Washington. Horowitz reached out to conservatives on Capitol Hill who had supported his group. He helped Miller land jobs with four lawmakers, including former representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Sessions. “I highly recommended him to Jeff,” Horowitz told The Post.
Miller did not respond to requests for interviews.
Continued-
The meet-and-greet
On Nov.#12, 2013, Bannon hosted a book party for Horowitz at a Washington, D.C., townhouse that served as Breitbart’s capital office and Bannon’s living quarters. Horowitz had just published a compendium of anti-liberal writings called the “Black Book of the American Left.”
As Horowitz mingled, Bannon introduced himself to Ronald Radosh, a prominent conservative intellectual and historian. Radosh had known Horowitz for a half-century and also worked his way through the ranks of the New Left before becoming a conservative.
Continued....
“I’m a Leninist,” Bannon said, according to Radosh. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Continued.....]
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