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Black Book of the American Left

The Series Explained
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Volume IV
Volume V
Volume VI
Volume VII
Volume VIII
Volume IX
Universities
Radicals
Politics
Videos
Horowitz Memoirs
- Mortality and Faith
  - Overview
  - Introduction
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- Radical Son
  - Overview
  - Introduction
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- A Cracking of the Heart
  - Overview
  - Introduction
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The Life and Work of David Horowitz by Jamie Glazov

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The Blood on Obama’s Hands

When conservatives consider the casualties of Obama’s national security policies, their attention is drawn quite naturally to Benghazi. In this shameful episode, the Obama administration sacrificed an ambassador and three American heroes to protect a deceptive presidential campaign message in which Obama claimed that the war against al-Qaeda was over and won.
The facts are these: Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American heroes were sent into an al-Qaeda stomping ground that the British and other diplomatic consulates had already evacuated; they were denied the security they requested; they were then left to die during a seven-hour firefight when their compound was attacked; and finally they were betrayed in death, when Obama and his representatives lied to the world about what had taken place and when he failed to bring their killers to justice as he had mendaciously promised he would.

Chris Matthews: White and Blind

Sometimes the easiest truths to understand are the hardest to actually learn. “Thinking doesn’t make it so,” is one. “Just because it feels good doesn’t mean it is good,” is another. The failure to learn this distinction is actually the cause of liberalism, and it lies at the heart of the liberal confusion about race.

The liberal view begins with adopting a morally correct tone, which is actually quite easy. All it involves is taking a correct stand against evils like racism. The liberal view then goes on to something like this: “Even though it’s hard to find an actual racist standing in a schoolhouse door anymore, and even though white people won’t admit it, there’s still a lot of racism in American society, and it’s an obstacle to the progress of black citizens.” There’s a corollary to this moral posture: The more racism you think there is, and the bigger the obstacle you think it presents, the more liberal you are. And the better you feel about yourself. You are the sensitive one. You are the one who can imagine yourself shoulder to shoulder with the civil rights soldiers of the past, who faced down police hoses in Alabama and lynch mobs in Mississippi. Detecting racism, even where it may not exist, heightens the sense of one’s own virtue and links one to the heroes of the past.

A Radical Catastrophe

To the rest of humanity, the institutional forms of capitalist democracies appear as liberating environments that enable individuals to breathe free and pursue their desires, without descending into anarchy and chaos. It is the Hobbesian dilemma resolved: liberty ordered by the rule of law and by market constraints. But to the alienated radical democracy is a particularly diabolical form of tyranny because it only appears to be free and is not. Liberal capitalism, in the celebrated words of Herbert Marcuse, is a system of “repressive tolerance.” To the post-modern left, America’s ordered liberty is not “a reflection on human nature” and an appreciation of its limits, as the authors of the Federalist maintained, but an instrument of race/class/gender oppression that they are obliged to destroy. In this malevolent confrontation, it is the principle of tolerance for those who differ from them that queer revolutionaries and radicals most reject, and it is this rejection that defines them as radicals. For them, tolerance is repressive because it denies their most cherished illusion – that they are the authentic voice of humanity, and theirs the universal political solution.

Jews Who Stand With Their Enemies

Last week I travelled to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to speak about the Middle East and the campus campaign to demonize Israel as an apartheid state. I was invited by Christians United for Israel and the Committee for a Better Carolina, a conservative student group whose leaders also are not Jewish. I mention this otherwise irrelevant fact because they asked me specifically to speak about the war against Israel in the Middle East; and when I asked their leader Brandon Hartness why, he said to me, “because there is no one making a strong argument for Israel on this campus.”

The Great Betrayal

Four years ago I co-authored a book with Ben Johnson called Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Sabotaged the War in Iraq. In it we documented the Democrats’ bad faith in supporting the decision to go to war and only four months later to turn their backs on the war while American troops were still engaged in battle. For the next five years Democrats conducted an unprecedented campaign against the war, describing it as an illegal aggression, both unnecessary and immoral. They accused America’s commander-in-chief of lying to them in particular and to the American people in general, in order to manipulate support for a war that should never have taken place.

Noam Chomsky: Guru of the Anti-American Left

Without question, the most devious, dishonest and, in this hour of his nation’s grave crisis, treacherous intellect in America belongs to MIT professor Noam Chomsky. On the 150 campuses that mounted “teach-ins” and rallies against America’s right to defend herself after 9/11; on the streets of Genoa and Seattle where “anti-globalist” radicals have attacked the symbols of free markets and world trade; among the demonstrators at Vieques, Puerto Rico, who wish to deny our military its training grounds; and wherever young people manifest an otherwise incomprehensible rage against their country, the inspirer of their loathing and the instructor of their hate is more often than not this man.

Why I Am No Longer a Leftist

My life as a leftist began with a May Day Parade in 1948, when I was nine years old, and lasted for more than twenty-five years until December 1974, when a murder committed by my political comrades brought my radical career to an end. My parents had joined the Communist Party along with many other idealistic Americans in the 1930’s, before I was born. Just as today’s leftists believe that the seeds of justice have been planted by the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, my parents and their radical friends saw them blooming in Soviet Russia, which many of them visited during Stalin’s purges. Not even the testimony of a Bolshevik legend like the exiled Trotsky could persuade them that they were deceived about the “new society” they thought they saw under construction in the socialist state. Confident that their own ideals were pure, my parents and their political friends dismissed Trotsky and others whose experience had caused them to know better, smearing them as “counter-revolutionaries,” “anti-Soviets” and “renegades.”

A Universal Aspiration

Excerpt from Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion by David Horowitz
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All the totalitarian movements of modernity have been inspired by the same fantasy of a world made right and finally brought into harmony with itself. This utopian delusion is not restricted to aspiring commissars or religious fanatics. In one form or another, it is the ideal of every believer in a universal progress, including those who would be dismayed to think of themselves in such destructive company.

The desire to make things better is an impulse essential to our humanity. But taken beyond the limits of what is humanly possible, the same hope is transformed into a destructive passion, until it becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of the beautiful idea. Nihilism is thus the practical extreme of the radical project. Consequently, the fantasy of a redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive radicals pursue their impossible schemes. It is an enduring irony of the human condition that the urgency to make the world “a better place” is also the chief source of the suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other from the beginning of time.

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Reviews: Volume I

WSJ: Notable and Quotable – “What it Means to be a Conservative”
The Weekly Standard: “A Good Fight”
WND: “A Life Transformed”
The Blaze: “The Horrific Story That Prompted David Horowitz’s Conservative Transformation
Daily Caller: “How the American Left Lost Its Nerve”
NRO: “A Witness”

Reviews: Volume II

Review: The Black Book of the American Left, Volume II by Janice Flamengo, PJ Media
On Horowitz’s New Book: Progressives – Paul Hollander
The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 — The Progressives – Barbara Kay
David Horowitz Exposes Why Progressives Must Lie: Spyridon Mitsotakis
Understanding Today’s Campus Left

Reviews: Volume III

‘The Great Betrayal’ Defends Those Who Won’t Defend Themselves
May 31, 2016

Reviews: Volume IV

Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews by David Horowitz–Review by Lee Bender
June 16, 2015
Review of Volume IV – Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews
May 15, 2015
Review: David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: Volume IV: Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews
April 14, 2015

Reviews: Volume V

Review of Culture Wars: Volume V by Barbara Kay
January 18, 2016
Review of Volume V: Culture Wars by Jay Nordlinger
November 30, 2015

Reviews: Volume VI

America’s Real Racists: Review of “Progressive Racism” by John Perazzo
June 20, 2016
Review of Progressive Racism (Volume VI) by Mark Tapson
May 12, 2016

Reviews: Volume VII

Black Book Matters: A Review of Volume VII by Lloyd Billingsley
July 17, 2017
Review of The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama by Barbara Kay
December 27, 2016
Review of The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama by Richard Baehr
October 28, 2016

Reviews: Volume VIII

The Left in the Universities: A Review by Mark Bauerlein
October 17, 2017
The Ideological Hijacking of the University and the Betrayal of its Traditional Mission
September 25, 2017

Reviews: Volume IX

Destructive Legacy of the Left: A Review by Barbara Kay
January 14, 2019
David Horowitz’s Curtain Call?: Review of “Ruling Ideas” by Richard Kirk
June 25, 2018
The Left’s Ruling Ideas: A Review of Volume IX by Mark Tapson
May 29, 2018
Inside the Mind of the Left: A Review of Volume IX by Michael Ledeen
May 1, 2018
David Horowitz Explains the Ruling Ideas of the Left: A Review by Richard Baehr
April 25, 2018

David Horowitz Discusses the Project

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