Appearing on the August 24 edition of the Christian Broadcasting Network's The 700 Club, right-wing activist David Horowitz joined host Pat Robertson in smearing Media Matters for America and billionaire philanthropist George Soros. In discussing Horowitz's new book, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Have Seized Control of the Democratic Party (Nelson Current, 2006), Robertson asked Horowitz to discuss the “sort of a shadowy group called Media Matters.” Horowitz responded, claiming: “I've been attacked for many years. I have never encountered a group with lower ethical standards than Media Matters.” Horowitz and Robertson also attacked Soros, repeating the baseless slur that Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew, collaborated with the Nazis as a 14-year-old boy. Horowitz also claimed that the newly launched Colorado Media Matters was part of a Soros plan “to take over the political structure of the United States.”
Media Matters for America's August 2 critique of The Shadow Party exposed the book's “doctored quotes, shoddy scholarship, factual errors, and baseless insinuations on matters both small and large.” Both Horowitz and Poe promised three weeks ago that they would provide “exhaustive” and “full-blown” rebuttals to Media Matters. As of this date, neither Horowitz nor Poe has posted such a rebuttal.
From the August 24 edition of The 700 Club:
ROBERTSON: Well now, you've got -- I just want to read some of them. MoveOn.org, Center for American Progress, America Votes, America Coming Together, The Media Fund, Joint Victory Campaign, the Thunder Road Group, and then there's another group that's sort of a shadowy group called Media Matters. Tell me about that one.
HOROWITZ: Media Matters is run by David Brock, who made a career, by his own account, out of lying and smearing people. It's a site that anybody in media, I'm sure that you're up there --
ROBERTSON: Oh yes.
HOROWITZ: -- knows is the lowest -- you know, I've been attacked, like you I've been attacked for many years. I have never encountered a group with lower ethical standards than Media Matters. Soros and John Podesta, who was [former President Bill] Clinton's chief of staff and runs the Center for American Progress, set this group up and funded it. It is now -- they've opened a new office in Colorado. This is part of a Soros plan to take over the political structure of the United States, to end the war on terror as we know it, and to, as he puts it, burst the bubble of American supremacy. These are people -- this is really the left-wing agenda, that America is the problem, that America has to be defeated. But now, it has behind it -- it's not just the [filmmaker] Michael Moores and [anti-war activist] Cindy Sheehans. It has behind it a billionaire who has put together the most powerful juggernaut in the history of American politics.
ROBERTSON: You know, you sound like somebody on the conservative side who was writing about the Council on Foreign Relations or the Trilateralists. I mean, but this may be worse.
HOROWITZ: Exactly, because, you know, the Council on Foreign Relations people who -- that was always behind-the-scenes power. This you can trace the actual power. They have the money. You can't run as a [Connecticut Democratic Senate candidate] Ned Lamont, a nobody, and defeat a sitting U.S. senator, unless you have the money and the ground troops to get out the vote. And that's what happened in Connecticut. They brought in 30,000 new voters. They have a whole -- it's in effect a party apparatus which they can deploy so that they can control the Democratic Party.
[...]
ROBERTSON: Last question. Soros, who I understand he's a Hungarian Jew, who should be against communism and socialism, wants to create a socialist world under the United Nations? Is that what you're saying?
HOROWITZ: That's exactly right. And there's really no mystery. He's also said that the capitalist system is the number one problem. Soros, when he was young, the family name was Schwartz. It was changed to Soros in 1936. And when he was a young man in fascist Hungary, he came under the protection of one of the fascist leaders of Hungary, and they went around -- he was a young man, to be said in his defense, there -- but he went around confiscating Jewish property prior to sending the Jews who owned it to the gas chambers. Now, he was asked on 60 Minutes by [co-host] Steve Kroft if he felt any guilt over that, and he said none whatsoever.
This is a man who is used to power and is a megalomaniac. I mean he said his ambition is to be the conscience of the world. How mania -- megano -- megalomaniacal is that? He wants to be the conscience of the world, that means he wants -- that is the socialist idea, that they are going to reorder all of us, and make us, you know, create God's kingdom on earth by political means. That's why they're dangerous.
[...]
ROBERTSON: Terry.
TERRY MEEUWSEN (co-host): Shocking.
ROBERTSON: Are you shocked?
MEEUWSEN: I am shocked.
ROBERTSON: Imagine a Jewish man going around confiscating the property of fellow Jews in Nazi-dominated Hungary. It's horrible.
MEEUWSEN: David said that it's pretty easy to follow this power trail. You hope that people are smart enough to see that.
ROBERTSON: Well, they're not, unfortunately.