The IRS is putting David Horowitz’s Freedom Center out of business

Nobody likes the IRS, but Americans always assumed that the IRS was an equal opportunity government pest, bedeviling people across the political spectrum. The belief in the agency’s non-partisan status vanished in 2013 when we learned that the IRS had deliberately withheld tax-exempt status from Tea Party organizations, severely hampering their ability to share information during the 2012 presidential election. Now, David Horowitz contends that the IRS is trying to destroy his long tax-exempt Freedom Center, which, among many things, publishes Frontpage Magazine.

David Horowitz is an interesting person. He was raised in the Belly of the Beast, a “red-diaper baby” who was viewed as the great red hope for bringing communism to America. However, after working closely with the Black Panthers, Horowitz concluded that his former beliefs were completely wrong and that America’s founding principles were the best way to bring about maximum happiness and prosperity to the greatest number of people.

In 1988, along with Peter Collier, another former leftist radical, Horowitz founded the Freedom Center, which has been dedicated to exposing leftism in American institutions. As Horowitz writes (and all quotations in this post are Horowitz’s),

Guided by our understanding of the Left, we were the first conservative institution to alert Americans that their universities and school systems had been captured by radical idealogues who had no respect for American achievements and communities and were transforming these educational institutions into indoctrination and recruitment centers for an anti-American left.

We were the first conservative institution to organize Islamo-fascism teach-ins, to champion the rights of Muslim women, and to warn others about the unholy alliance between the Islamic terrorists and the American left. We managed to give speeches on these threats on 400 campuses and to expose Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as a creation of the Hamas Nazis whose goal is to aid the terrorist enemies of the West and to bring about a second Holocaust of the Jews.

The Freedom Center sounded the warning tocsin long before others were aware that there was a problem. The organization writes books, maintains databases, and publishes one of my favorite outlets, FrontPage Magazine, all of which are aimed at making Americans aware of leftism in America’s institutions—including the peccadillos, foibles, and illegal acts of politicians advancing Marxism in America.

During the 2016 election, the Freedom Center used its outlets to report on a major news story, namely, Hillary Clinton’s self-admitted national security violations. According to Horowitz, for the IRS, this reporting was the “gotcha!” moment. By opining about Hillary’s criminal activities when she was a presidential candidate, the Freedom Center had gone from being an information outlet to being a partisan political outlet…which meant it was no longer tax-exempt. Writes Horowitz,

In 2019, the IRS informed us that they were conducting an investigation of the Freedom Center to see whether we were a legitimate “non-profit” deserving of the tax-deduction subsidies we had been granted 31 years before. Five years later, the I.R.S. dropped the other shoe, informing us that they had reached a “determination” that we were not a non-profit, and if we did not respond within 30 days, and persuade them they were mistaken, our tax-exemption would be revoked.

The key rule we were alleged to have violated was to have participated in a political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. In our 35 years, we have never endorsed a political candidate, nor did the IRS claim we had. Our thought crime emanated from our mission to defend free societies under attack from forces without and within.

But these facts did not deter the IRS. From the viewpoint of the government behemoth, we were guilty because we expressed the journalistic opinion in our online news site, Frontpagemag.com, that Hillary Clinton had violated U.S. espionage laws and obstructed justice by destroying 30,000 emails subpoenaed by the United States Congress, putting classified data on an unsecured home server which could be read by our enemies, and had gotten away with it with the aid of a corrupt attorney general.

Of course, it’s possible that Horowitz’s statement errs and that, as a matter of law, the IRS is right—but history suggests that the IRS has become politicized and that we should take seriously the effort to end the Freedom Center’s tax-exempt status. The Freedom Center is currently seeking donations, saying that it’s already lost several donors simply because of the investigation.

Image of the IRS building in D.C. made using a public domain photo.