Below is Richard Baehr’s review of David Horowitz’s new book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama(reprinted from American Thinker with permission). The book is volume 7 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of David Horowitz’s conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.)We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com which features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-7 of this 9-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.

Every year, there is some report of the blissful ignorance of American history demonstrated by the supposedly best and brightest at elite American universities. Suffice it to say the collected writings of David Horowitz on the American Left, which constitute part of a solid foundation for understanding the last half century of American politics, are nowhere to be found on any college or high school reading list.

Horowitz’s latest book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama, is the seventh volume in his nine-volume collection, The Black Book of the American Left. This new volume provides a collection of his writings over the last quarter century, focusing primarily on the Left’s control in our government and culture. As Horowitz reveals, even during the Bush years, conservatives were on the defense and leftists controlled the narrative as they attempted to destroy Bush and his chances for re-election in 2004. Their primary mode of attack was to undermine America’s efforts in Iraq almost from the start of the conflict, when just months earlier a majority of Senate Democrats and near half of House Democrats had supported the President. The Left then destroyed Bush’s second term with bogus charges of racist neglect in the handling of Hurricane Katrina. There was plenty of incompetence in the response to Katrina, but local and state officials — all Democrats, of course, and many of them African American — were the principal operators on the ground during the crisis.

The immediate abandonment of support for the Iraq war effort was a signal event in American history, sending a message that a large part of the Democratic Party was not remotely concerned about the morale of our men and women fighting overseas. The weak effort by some Democrats to hold onto an ounce of patriotic resolve — “end the war, support the troops” — was designed more for campaign speeches than any meaningful attempt to convey national unity for the effort underway by our armed forces. So too, the obsession with Abu Ghraib gave the lie to the Democrats’ “support our troops” message, as a broad brush was used to paint the incident as somehow what you would expect from our military on a routine basis.

Horowitz outlines this narrative, faulting the Bush administration for failing to fight harder to present its story of why we went into Iraq and the risks if we had done nothing.  Regrettably, the Bush administration never had a chance to get a better defense of the Iraq war out to the media. Most in the media considered the Bush administration illegitimate due to its narrow victory in the 2000 presidential contest, a lie to be sure. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly true that the media today are far more in the bag for the left than ten or twenty years ago and work harder at pushing the left’s agenda. The soft liberalism of Walter Cronkite has been replaced by cable and national network anchors who routinely bury stories embarrassing to their side and focus on those that can do damage to the other side. During the current Presidential election cycle, we have seen the most prestigious media organs explain why it is necessary and appropriate for them to be biased this year.  It is a special time, they argue, because Trump is, in their view, a unique threat to the Republic.

On the other hand, the media have been loath to consider the damage to the country caused by Barack Obama — the loss of respect abroad for America’s will to fight, the degradation of our military readiness, the fraying of ties with allies, and the near obsessive outreach to America’s enemies that led to agreements such as the nuclear deal with Iran, best described as an abject surrender of American interests that will lead to the funding of fanatical nuclear regime. About 85% of those supposedly sensible pro-Israel Democrats walked the plank behind their great leader on that deal, with no visible regrets to date. There was simply too much political risk to oppose the first black president of their party. The media were happy to parrot the administration’s talking points for the nuclear deal, something the manipulators crowed over at the White House.

At least in the propaganda use of Abu Ghraib, the Left was honest in revealing what it thinks about the military. As Horowitz outlines in article after article, the Left is fighting a war that most Americans do not see, disguising its intentions through its aggressive, unceasing promotion of “progressive” policies “to make America a better place.” This commitment to deception emerges, Horowitz reveals, from the allegiance to the ideology of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” a formative doctrine for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The progressive goal is to achieve a new society that has never been seen before in this country, though it has been promised and has catastrophically failed in many places around the globe. In America, the Left is not only unconcerned with selling their program to the public, but also, Horowitz argues, it is fearful of the result of voters knowing what it is pursuing. One prime example was the admission of MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber that health care law would never have made it through Congress if it had been presented honestly.

The Left is also busy at work making it easier for itself to win politically. Horowitz provides chapter and verse on the Left’s efforts to rapidly change the composition of the voting pool — motor voter registration with no birth certificate required, fighting every effort to combat voter fraud with charges of racism and “turning the clock back,” even when  states were willing to pay for potential voters obtaining the needed documents to register, support for open borders, expansion of legal immigration, and amnesty and citizenship (and voting rights) for more than ten million already in the country illegally. Here the Left’s mentor and financier is George Soros and his buddies, who have funded dozens of organizations which fight on multiple fronts every day to advance the left politically. And Horowitz has done a great public service by his Discover the Network listing of the people responsible for America’s steady drift to the radical Left.

The Left uses the racism charge in many of the confrontations it creates. Of course, the problems of America’s inner cities, all under complete control of one political party for half a century, have never been of even near equal interest to the Democrats as their ability to continue to win enormous majorities among inner city voters, particularly African Americans.   The Left has fully endorsed the teacher unions’ opposition to charter schools, and voucher programs, though both are popular with minority group parents and children. The two major teachers unions are simply too powerful a support group for the Democratic Party (campaign cash, votes, and volunteers) for the Left to support policies that might lead to a better future for kids as opposed to continued growth in expenditures for the teachers unions and their workforce.

In the last two years, the Soros-funded Black Lives Matter movement has created a near national hysteria over the alleged systematic effort by police to kill unarmed black men.  Between two and three dozen unarmed blacks are killed by cops each year, many of them in situations where the ”victims” were almost certainly responsible for what happened to them — Michael Brown in Ferguson is a prime example. One wonders where the news media are to report on the police shooting of unarmed whites, which greatly outnumber those of unarmed blacks. Perhaps because there are no riots, or looting, these incidents have no cachet. More likely, they do not fit the systemic racism charge now routinely thrown around by everyone from the current President to Hillary Clinton.

In Chicago in 9 months this year, over 400 blacks, mostly men, have been shot and killed, almost exclusively by other black men. By year end, over 4,000 Chicagoans will have been shot. One might think this was a bigger story of urban calamity and civil society breakdown than a shooting in Charlotte.  Chicago’s mayor says that police “have gone fetal,” avoiding making stops in crime ridden neighborhoods, with the ACLU looking over their shoulder demanding a report for every stop, and activists in the neighborhoods treating the police with scorn and abuse, following a bad police shooting captured on video and kept hidden from the public by Chicago’s mayor to protect his re-election bid. Rahm Emanuel must also have read Alinsky, for he knows whose hide to protect first and foremost. The victims of the police pullback in Chicago, Baltimore, St, Louis and other cities, called “the Ferguson effect,” are many more dead black men, killed in crime waves that are reminiscent of the 1990s.  Even the FBI Director admits the Ferguson Effect is real, when not covering for Hillary Clinton.

Horowitz’ latest book is full of insights and straight talk on the goals and the mission of the Left, and how it has advanced its cause this last quarter century. He provides the kind of arguments that keep his books from getting reviewed by the New York Times. And there is always a horrible slur available from the Left to describe a viewpoint that counters one of its missions. The Left chooses to ignore the argument and uses character assassination for the people making it. It argues that these are people (Horowitz included) unworthy of serious consideration, or respect.

Silencing the critic or the dissident or limiting his visibility has been a long time weapon of the Left.  So far, Horowitz keeps writing, and America is free enough that the Left, though it clearly wants to, cannot ban his books.  George Soros and his family have another $20 billion to spend on changing America. The Alinsky acolytes have their mission laid out to make use of the funds and create an America where the smart bureaucrats can organize society and distribute its wealth, so results are all equal. And we can all sing along with the Pete Seeger songs as we turn away from any role overseas (where of course we have primarily been an agent of evil) and disinvest in defense every year.

Let’s hope that some of America’s young will read Horowitz’ books,and learn what their professors and teachers won’t teach them.

We’ve all heard the venomous tirades of grievance mongers like Farrakhan, Sharpton, Jackson, Mfume, and Bond. And we’ve all heard the stern lectures of buffoonish, self-congratulating white progressives who dutifully remind us of the racism that allegedly sits at the very heart of our national character. But we’ve heard precious little about the quiet dignity of Oseola McCarty and others like her. In Progressive Racism, David Horowitz explains exactly who America’s real racists are.

Review of “The Great Betrayal” by J. Christian Adams
Originally published at Frontpagemag.com 
December 2, 2014

Volume III: the Great Betrayal, the latest installment of David Horowitz’s Black Book of the American Left (Second Thought Books, 2014), does what George Bush wouldn’t do: defend himself from a personalized left-wing onslaught. Horowitz’s book provides an understanding of the order of battle the Left used during the Bush administration to delegitimize Bush’s foreign policy and ultimately destroy Bush’s brand, and why it happened.

How this happened, and Bush’s ineffective response, isn’t just a nostalgic journey through the last decade. Bush’s ineffective response to the Left holds lessons for the incoming Republican congressional majority as well as GOP White House hopefuls who will face the same progressive buzzsaw. But the Great Betrayal also has tough lessons for American voters. Modern political debate isn’t conducted between two camps seeking the same goals through different means. It is a debate between two wholly opposed worldviews, and if Americans fail to realize the true nature of the Left, liberty is threatened. Will voters support candidates who understand this, or pick yet another nominee for President who seems not to understand?

As President Bush fought wars against Islamic terror from 2003-2009, first the institutional Left, and then the institutional Democratic Party fought a rhetorical war of destruction against Bush. “Yet the president has blundered in one particular way that cannot be attributed to internal foes,” Horowitz writes. “He has failed to sell the war adequately to the American people, and to answer the charges coming from his left flank. In the presidential television debates, for example, he chided Senator Kerry for saying the war in Iraq was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘This confuses people,’ the President said. It does more than that,” Horowitz chides.

Here we see classic Bush-clan caution with language. Deflecting Kerry’s charge with kind prose might be appropriate at the Kennebunk River Club, but in the modern national debate, something sharper is required. I encountered the same public relations strategy when I worked at the Justice Department during the Bush administration. One favorite tactic included – Responding to the attack will just prolong the story. That approach obviously failed because ten years later the story that President Bush was a failure is still going strong.

Another tactic was – Responding will just lend legitimacy to the story. The Bush administration failed to understand that the media environment was transforming in fundamental and permanent ways. The attack by a left-wing blog, purportedly not worthy of response, became a headline in the New York Times months later. Narrative was germinating amongst the activists on the far left, implanting among the many new left-wing blog sites, and eventually reaching full maturity in the papers and network media the Bush administration took seriously. Instead of confronting the leftist narrative in the seemingly outlandish blogosphere, the Bush administration allowed the attacks to mature unimpaired. What’s worse, when the attacks matured, as it did with Senator Kerry’s attack, Camp Bush seemed more comfortable debating intellectual points than responding with a mighty rhetorical fist in the nose.

Unfortunately, the failure to fully comprehend the nature of the leftist attacks still haunts us. Those unrebutted attacks on Bush defined the 2008 election. “The domestic divisions over both wars were initiated by a radical left whose agendas went far beyond the conflicts themselves,” Horowitz begins the Great Betrayal. “[I]n 2008, the party nominated a senator from its anti-war ranks who became the 44^th president of the United States.”

The history described in the Great Betrayal is particularly relevant over the next two years. Many in the Republican Party, particularly in Congressional leadership, seem not to understand the Left’s order of battle. Instead of recognizing the power of the new conservative media, they still seem to care what the New York Timessays. Instead of recognizing the malignant pedigree of the current gang governing in Washington, some still use rhetorical slogans from a vanished time, such as making Washington “work” or “finding common ground.” Many in the GOP fully understand the new media battlespace and the genuine radicalism of the modern Democratic Party. Unfortunately, not everyone does, and the Great Betrayal documents the unashamedly radical anti-constitutional core of the modern Democrats.

The Great Betrayal makes it clear that something more than differences of opinion characterize the dispute between left and right. Congressman Ron Dellums provides one example of many contained in the book. Horowitz takes readers back to the Reagan administration, when a communist regime, with Soviet oversight, was elongating runways on the Caribbean island of Grenada. The threat of a new Soviet client state able to launch bomber and fighter forces so close to America was too much for President Ronald Reagan. American military forces in 1983 invaded and extinguished the threat.

What the Marines found in Grenada is astonishing. Documents seized showed that Dellums had coordinated his domestic opposition to Reagan’s Grenada policy with the communist junta in Grenada, going so far as to provide draft reports for the regime to edit before being published by the House of Representatives. Horowitz describes the materials found on Grenada by the Marines, including a letter from Dellums’ chief of staff Carlottia Scott. The letter to the communist dictator said Dellums was “really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn’t want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong.   . . . The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel.”

The emissary for these pro-communist efforts to undermine America? Current Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA). “Another document liberated by the Marines contained the minutes of a Politburo meeting attended by the Communist dictator and his military command. ‘Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport that was done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make the changes,’” records the Great Betrayal.

There is no common ground to be found with someone like Barbara Lee. There is no language too strong to condemn the Left’s open collusion with the enemies of America, whether in 1983, 2004 or in the years ahead.

Dellums’ collusion with America’s enemies served as a taste of what was to come. Horowitz notes Dellums was “the first Sixties radical to penetrate the political mainstream.” After colluding with the communist enemies of America, Dellums went on to serve as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, complete with the requisite security clearances.

The Left is still playing the long game against America. Why? Horowitz:

“America is revolutionary because it is a society based on institutions and values that are inclusive, tolerant, democratic, anti-authoritarian, libertarian, and conservative (skeptical of majorities, based on a deeply held moral individualism).”

I would submit it is even worse. There is now a clear and undeniable correlation between secular hostility toward religion and political ideology, excluding the small Muslim population in the United States. Those who tend to believe (or respect) in universal religious truths, tend to be on the right side of the spectrum. Those who demean, attack and deny universal religious truths tend to be leftists. Because America was founded on universal truths regarding the dignity of man, our nation is in the crosshairs domestically, and around the world.

In the past, particularly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, these attacks were directed elsewhere, and not as directly at core American institutions like the Constitution, religious liberty or the family. “What has changed is that the enemy is so nakedly the aggressor against us and not, for example, a hapless Third World people like the South Vietnamese,” notes Horowitz. “What has changed is not that our declared enemy is more evil than the Soviet enemy, but that he is more transparently failing to pay even lip service to ‘social justice’ and other left-wing values as the communists did.”

Horowitz can decode the left in ways natural Republicans cannot. He was of the left. What are unrecognizable sounds to Republicans are familiar melodies from Horowitz’s youth. The Great Betrayal examines the unbroken pedigree of the modern Left, the radical Islamists, those who drove the anti-Bush narrative of the last decade, and the Soviet apologists of a generation ago. Unless conservatives, constitutionalists, and American voters understand what Horowitz describes in the Great Betrayal, a timid approach to this threat may produce disasters anew we can’t yet contemplate.

Below is Mark Tapson’s review of David Horowitz’s new book, “Progressive Racism,” which is volume 6 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of David Horowitz’s conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) 

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in no small part because of the compelling possibility that this biracial harbinger of hope and change would finally bring America into an epoch of post-racial unity.

But over seven years later, America is on the verge of a race war. Particularly since August 2014, from the shooting of black suspect Michael Brown by white officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement which has wedged its way into national prominence, racial unrest in this country under Obama’s reign has gone from a tense simmer to a churning boil.

The left want to pin this ugly decline on what they perceive to be the right’s racist refusal to accept a black man as President; but in fact, it is left’s own corrosive, inherently racist, identity politics, spearheaded by Obama himself, that has exacerbated rather than healed our racial divide.

Progressive Racism, the sixth, just-published volume of The Black Book of the American Left, looks at a wide range of David Horowitz’s thoughts on the topic over the course of the last twenty years. Divided into five parts – “The Reds and the Blacks,” on the Marxist roots of progressive racism; “Decline and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement”; “Racial Correctness”; “Reparations for Slavery”; and “Progressive Racism” – the nearly fifty essays in this book expose leftist hypocrisy about race and dismantle the false narrative that the left is fighting for justice and equality against an irredeemably racist right, the guardians of a supposedly systemic white supremacism in America.

In “The Reds and the Blacks,” an essay written in 1999, Horowitz notes that although the left may not embrace the Marxist label anymore, Marx’s vision is alive and well at the core of the “contemporary leftist faith.” A central article of this faith is the notion that blacks and other minorities are “the new stand-ins for Marx’s proletarians,” and they are under the thumb of a “trinity of oppressors” – class, gender, and most of all, race. Thus “racial grievance is the spearhead of the modern radical left,” which couches itself as warriors for social justice while successfully demonizing as racist those “who defend the constitutional framework of individual rights, and attempt to guard it against the nihilistic advocates of a political bad faith.”

In subsequent sections of the book, Horowitz chronicles the degradation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil rights vision into “civil wrongs.” “Progressives support racial division,” reads the title of one piece. In another essay, Horowitz points out that liberals don’t want racial dialogue; they want a racial monologue, in which blacks “express displeasure at a status quo that denies them equality” and whites simply acknowledge their racist guilt. Hate crimes can be multicultural too, Horowitz writes in another piece.

The book features a parade of racial characters and themes such as O.J. Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran, affirmative action, Louis Farrakhan, celebrated academic and “affirmative action baby” Cornel West, black-on-black crime and gun control, talk show host Phil Donahue’s “casual racism,” racial McCarthyism on campus, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, perennial race hucksters Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and reparations for slavery, a topic on which Horowitz has devoted a great deal of his energy in the past (see his slim 2002 book Uncivil Wars, for example). In “Ten Reasons Why Reparations Are a Bad Idea,” published in 2000, he sums up this demand as “factually tendentious, morally incoherent and racially incendiary. Logically, it has about as much substance as the suggestion that O.J. Simpson should have been acquitted because of past racism by the criminal courts.”

In the section “Progressive Racism,” Horowitz addresses the left’s agenda to recreate “a race-conscious political culture in which blacks and a handful of designated minorities were singled out as the groups to be racially privileged,” while “whites were made targets of exclusion, suspicion, and disapprobation.” In “The Death of the Civil Rights Movement,” he writes that there is no such movement any longer, and in its place “there is only a self-righteous, fact-denying lynch mob looking for white victims and law enforcement officials to make the targets of their wrath.”

In “Freedom From Race” in the final section, Horowitz takes on the left’s hypocrisy about racial profiling, which leftists favor when it suits their agenda (job placement, school admissions, scholarships, and the like), and which they decry when it does not (in law enforcement and deterring terrorism). This hypocrisy is due to the left’s obsession with power: “Whatever serves their need for power is right; whatever frustrates it is wrong.”

Progressive Racism includes a couple of essays some might find surprising: Horowitz’s controversial essay “Second Thoughts About Trayvon,” for example, in which he sets himself against general conservative opinion about the shooting of black Florida teen Trayvon Martin by “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman, who ultimately was judged to have acted in self-defense. “Is the Zimmerman case really open-and-shut?” Horowitz begins. He goes on to question whether the incident was quite so black-and-white, so to speak, as both the left and the right viewed it: “Might it not be possible that the toxicity of the racial environment also infected Zimmerman, so that he saw in Trayvon a caricature” from the racial and political melodrama surrounding the incendiary case?

Another piece that might run against the grain in some conservative quarters is “An Argument with the Racial Right,” in which Horowitz distinguishes himself from the white “Euro-racialists” of the right who have “surrendered to the idea that the multiculturalists have won” and who demand “a white place at the diversity table.” This runs counter to Horowitz’s brand of conservatism, which is grounded in “the fundamental truth of individualism” and “the good old American ideal of e pluribus unum.”

The book closes on Horowitz’s knockout-punch collaboration with John Perazzo, a lengthy essay titled “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream,” originally published in booklet form by the Horowitz Freedom Center. That essay concludes that progressive racism – racial privilege enforced by government – “tears at the very fabric of the social order… Building racial bias into the framework of the nation compromises the neutrality of the law that governs us all… and creates a racial spoils system that is the antithesis of the American Dream.” Horowitz correctly identifies the drive to “level the playing field” – the left’s utopian justification for government intervention – as a totalitarian one and a threat to freedom:

In a free society, composed of individuals who are unequal by nature, the highest government good is neutrality in the treatment of its citizens before the law. One standard and justice for all. This is the only equality that is not at odds with individual freedom.

“It is the only equality,” David Horowitz concludes in Progressive Racism, “that can make a diverse community one.”

Mark Tapson is the editor of TruthRevolt.org and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Way Stations on Marxism’s ‘long march through America’s institutions’ in the 20th century.
By Barbara Kay

Some months ago, joining an online discussion initiated by a gay Facebook friend on the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, I countered a bitter remark about Ronald Reagan’s “homophobia” and his primary role in causing so many deaths by (as tactfully as possible) observing that gay activists had to bear their share of the blame for the epidemic in having obstructed public health measures to curtail its spread.

The hostile blowback to this remark startled me in its denialist fury, but the salient point here is the sneering tone in which more than one critic on the thread accused me of merely reiterating talking points raised by conservative polemicist David Horowitz. I was taken aback by the rapidity of the redirect to Horowitz in particular, as though nobody else at that time had raised the question of gay-liberationist complicity in maintaining a cone of silence over the elevated HIV risks inherent in unprotected, promiscuous anal intercourse. (Others did, but nobody else with the persistence, straight-talking candor and politically incorrect judgmentalism of Horowitz).

I conceded that my information about the role played by the gay liberation movement in the AIDS crisis was indeed based in Horowitz’s many public criticisms; but since, like all his writings, his accusations were evidence-based, what difference did it make, so long as his information was accurate? This question elicited anger of an even greater ferocity, and my original Facebook friend finally intervened to end the debate.

That was the last time I ever posted a remark on my friend’s page about anything (he didn’t “unfriend me,” a testimony to our real friendship, even though he expressed private sorrow about my reference to Horowitz), but it remains a sobering reminder of the tenacity of ideology over fact on the Left, and the demonization that is the truth-teller’s lot when attempting to set the record straight on identity-politics myths. When stakeholders in one of our culture’s official victim categories have invested themselves in a self-serving narrative, the last thing they want to think about are facts and statistics that threaten the comforting duvet of the rewritten past in which they have chosen to wrap themselves.

Such historical amnesia, arguably the single greatest besetting sin of the Left and the reason leftist illusions are so difficult to dislodge, is only held in check by the dogged, often thankless determination of objective witnesses to history who record unpalatable truths, and then patiently insert them at regular intervals into the slow-grinding mills of the historical archive until a Day of Reckoning forces respectful attention on them.

That day has not yet arrived. The illiberal liberalism known as progressivism remains ascendant in the West, winning battle after battle in the Culture Wars. Every day, more precious freedom to express one’s opinions is lost, as convenient ideological narratives are privileged on university campuses and in the media, while inconvenient truths are fed into the oubliette of Political Incorrectness.

As the little Facebook fracas I unwittingly set off demonstrates in microcosm, there has been no more determined witness to America’s ideological history in the last half century than David Horowitz, a superior intellect and skilled investigative journalist, whose most formidable weapon is his own history as a hard-left political insider turned apostate, and forensic specialist in the pathogens of his own childhood disease.

Or, for another metaphor, Horowitz might be compared to a political archaeologist for whom no potsherd, no coin, no amulet is too imperfect or humble to warrant respectful assessment as a clue in reconstruction of a culture. Horowitz has excavated his life and times with a patience and thoroughness that gives new depth of meaning to the words “second thoughts” in exposing the irrationality, hypocrisy and self-righteousness that characterize the intolerant and punitive mindset that dominates our culture.

Now aging, but with his passion for exposing the Left’s sins undimmed, this happy heretic has for the past few years been re-issuing his essays, speeches and newspaper columns in a series of 10 books under the general title of The Black Book of the American Left: the Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz.

With the comprehensive Index that will fill the last book, the series will endure as the definitive prosecution of the Left’s subversion of American freedoms, ideals and willingness to lead in spreading the blessings of democracy that have been the greatest, and sometimes the only, hope for a world struggling to emerge from a variety of totalitarian regimes, from godless Communism to God-drenched Islamism.

Volume Five, Culture Wars, amasses Horowitz’s writings from the 1990s and very early 2000s that explore the Left’s transmogrification of American culture in the second half of the 20^th century by means of “the long march through the institutions.” This phrase, coined by Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, references a dramatic change in Marxist tactics that was conceived in the 1930s, but only took root with a vengeance in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Before then, Marxism had concentrated on the working class – the proletariat – as the great hope for revolution ordained by historical necessity. When that hope failed to materialize, Gramsci and other radical-left intellectuals looked for a new strategy. They decided that the key to power resided not in the means of material production, but in the means of “mental production” – the dissemination of Communist ideology through the educational system, mass media and the arts – but above all through attacks on the bourgeois family, where traditional marriage encouraged personal loyalty, sexual fidelity, and the intergenerational passage of prevailing values and moral absolutes, all anathema to an envisaged cultural utopia in which the state dispensed the only valid truths, the only desirable ends and the only acceptable means for fulfilling them.

The bedroom, rather than the factory floor, became the locus of revolution. Sexual liberation, divorced from procreation, would (did) corrode the family as the stabilizing pillar of society. Over time and under the relentless intellectual assault by Marxist ideologues on the allegedly oppressive institution of marriage, both marriage and two-parent families receded as social norms. That the corrosive promiscuity, banalization of porn, rampant sexually transmitted disease and fatherlessness which followed as night the day came with high physical and social costs became a truth that dared not speak its name.

Horowitz has dared to speak that name and many others in his writings: on sexual politics like AIDS activism vs public health; public media that launder past evils of the Left; gender politics under the iron fist of radical feminism leading to policies that devalue men, discourage love and undermine military unity; and most consequentially, in his writings on the entrenchment of moral and cultural relativism in the universities by the “tenured radicals” with whom Horowitz had militated in his leftist youth.

Relativism was most perniciously applied to the philosophy of multiculturalism, which remarkably spread throughout the entire university network in less than two decades, its trajectory well described in “Up from multiculturalism” (1998). Here Horowitz explains how the liberal arts divisions of the academy were transformed “into crude indoctrination platforms and recruiting centers for the crypto-Marxist left,” through pseudo-academic conduits like Black Studies (which became “African-American” Studies), Women’s Studies and Queer Studies.

These identity-politics hubs had their origins in “area studies,” but the original area studies, like the Russian Institute at Columbia and the Asian Studies Center at Berkeley, had been conceived by the CIA as greenhouses for producing specialists qualified for military intelligence, i.e. graduates whose careers would help America to win the Cold War. The multicultural variants of area studies were bent on subverting the idea of a multi-ethnic, but culturally unitary nation joined by a common adherence to the principle of of individualism and equal rights, and protected by the constitution and a color/gender blind legal system.

The goal of those in identity studies was to deconstruct the melting pot into racial, gender and ethnic components and make “out of one, many.” In these pseudo-disciplines we find the cultural determinism, the rejection of individualism, the centrality of ethnicity or race, and the reduction of all social relationships to negotiations for power that echo themes from 1930s fascism. In the course of its transition, Horowitz says, the left “has degenerated from a Stalinist universalism to a neo-fascist tribalism, which is what multiculturalism and ‘identity politics’ are really about.”

Horowitz wrote this almost 20 years ago. What he describes, accurately, as a gathering force then, has only metastasized in the intervening years, as recent show-trial reminiscent campus events at the University of Missouri and Yale have demonstrated. At Harvard this past Christmas, holiday placemats were given out to students returning home for Christmas, detailing correct conversational talking points to use in response to politically incorrect remarks by relatives (example: if a family members expresses fear that terrorists may be present in the ranks of incoming Syrian refugees, the student is instructed to reply, “Racial justice includes welcoming Syrian refugees.”) Welcome to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Gramsci-style.

A common lament of progressives is that promoters of the conservative perspective have an advantage over liberal writers, because media conservatives are supported by a vast right-wing complex of wealthy supporters like the Koch brothers. In “Intellectual Class War” (2000), Horowitz puts that canard to rest by comparing sources of partisan financial support. The big three conservative foundations are Olin, Bradley and Scaife. Foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, and Pew, as well as MacArthur, Markle and Schumann all lean left. The MacArthur Foundation alone, Horowitz, notes is three times the size of all three conservative foundations combined.

The fact is that with few exceptions the media is solidly liberal, and it is worth reading “The Leftist Media” (2003) for proof, as well as “Harvard Lies” (2003) to understand the extent to which the liberal political class is materially supported by liberal universities. Most newspapers lean left. Even the Wall Street Journal has only four conservatively skewed pages, its opinion section, but, as I was surprised to learn, in terms of traffic on the worldwide web, the WSJ was rated 3,583 (in 2003) while Slate – progressive in spirit – was ranked second (it helps that it is a Microsoft product). Universities subsidize liberal media in many different ways. Academics write for magazines like The Nation, which according to Horowitz has a university-subsidized editorial board and staff, a perk no conservative magazine can boast.

One of the unique features – and the most difficult to “review” – of Horowitz’s writings are the personal case histories he chronicles to illustrate his themes. They’re hard to review because the fascination lies in the gradual emergence of the point – through the “he said, I responded, he protested, I rebutted” of the affairs – that is impossible to effectively condense. A good example of the type is “Wasserman’s Revenge,” in which Horowitz proves that, as editor of the L.A. Times Review, former radical colleague Steve Wasserman pursued a demonstrably biased policy of marginalizing conservative writers, even those of Horowitz’s stature, and his virtual blacklist was supported by his superiors.

Another worthwhile read along these lines is “PBS Promotes the Black Panthers” (1991), in which Horowitz takes PBS to task for a series of unbalanced documentary films on the 1960s, most misleadingly a one-hour KQED-produced documentary, “Black Power, Black Panthers.” The assiduous laundering by a willfully amnesiac Left of the murders and other criminal depredations of Black Panthers, as any reader familiar with Horowitz’s life and career well knows, ranks high on his personal list of myths in need of a reality check. The KQED “documentary” was, according to Horowitz, a hagiography of Panther veterans that completely ignored the dark side of their well-documented record. In a letter to KQED president Anthony S. Tiano, Horowitz called the film “a disgrace to KQED and a public outrage.”

The Public Broadcasting Act stipulates that current affairs programming must be “strictly fair, objective and balanced.” Yet Horowitz’s well-founded complaint that KQED had ignored this rubric in his appeal to Tiano went nowhere. Ultimately Horowitz gained the opportunity to speak to the KQED board of directors regarding the need for an ombudsman to handle complaints of bias with objectivity. His eloquent speech to the board is included in its entirety, and no review can do it justice. It must be read to fully appreciate the fecklessness of the board in failing to respond to its forensically irrefutable proofs of arrant bias, and to accept Horowitz’s reasonable request to appoint “a permanent committee to handle questions of fairness, objectivity, and balance in KQED’s programming.” Worse, its pusillanimity in failing to respond at all.

PBS has never aired a program celebrating America’s victory over the Soviet Union, even though, as Horowitz points out, it is the most significant (pre-9/11) historical event since World War Two. To this day, PBS documentaries apparently roll on in their wonted merrily left-leaning way. (I say ‘apparently’ because I rarely watch PBS documentaries. But I asked a friend who does make a habit of it if the bias was still as strong in 2016, and he obligingly sent me a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of the kind of films he sees regularly on PBS: “The Right is evil, the Left will save the earth”;  “The Conservatives/Republicans are evil and the Liberals/ Democrats will save the earth”;  “Climate change is a fact and anyone who disputes this is either stupid or uninformed, possibly criminally so and must be wiped from the face of the earth which they are killing by the way”; and “Immigrants describe the horrors of adapting to the rotten, evil, discriminatory North American way of life.” Thanks, Stuart Brannan.)

And if you have ever wondered how then-comedian Al Franken was able to combine an active career in the entertainment world with the labour-intensive research needed to produce his 2003 book, Liars and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, the answer is here. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government offered Franken a “fellowship,” which provided for a “study group” studying the racism and duplicity of Republicans, to which end he would be provided with the use of fourteen graduate students for both research and ghostwriting.

No such offer would ever be extended rightward, it goes without saying. Horowitz was able to find only five Republicans out of 155 faculty members at the Kennedy School of Government, a disparity very much in line with the ratios in excess of 25-1 at Brown, Wellesley and Wesleyan universities. Between the universities’ lucrative and academic partisanship, and the government’s billion-dollar support for leftist propaganda distributed by PBS and NPR, there was motivation a-plenty for Horowitz to take media gadflyism to the next, more organized and influential level by creating the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1988, which later became the formidably multi-faceted David Horowitz freedom Center conservatives know and admire today.

In “Telling It Like It wasn’t” (2002), Horowitz returns to a theme that has never stopped haunting him: the terrible fate of Indochinese peasants, more of whom were killed in three years by the Communists to whom they were handed on a platter by the American retreat from Vietnam “than had been killed on all sides in the thirteen years of the anti-Communist war.” Here his vehicle is a critique of left-wing filmmaker Steve Talbot’s PBS documentary, “1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation,” a homage to the protesters who brought the Vietnam adventure to its ignominious end.

Horowitz demurs from Talbot’s “paean to his revolutionary youth” and its view of his 1968 comrades as a “fable of innocents,” reinforced by a cherry-picked cast of commentators that included self-righteous former activists Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden (who called the murderous Black Panthers “America’s Viet Cong”), but excluded any dissenters, notably Horowitz himself, who would have offered balance to the film.

Such was the solipsism of Talbot’s memories that he imagined the primary objective of the “system” (‘they’) was “to kill ‘us’.” But, as Horowitz points out, Presidents Nixon and Johnson were actually mainly focused on preventing a Communist takeover of South Vietnam and Cambodia, to which they had committed American power, and to preventing the bloodbath they knew was inevitable if they left. They left because the democratic system worked. They left because the Left successfully mobilized such massive opposition to the war – a war that could have and would have been won and the carnage prevented – that they acceded to the popular will.

The Left wanted America to lose the war, and it did. But at a terrible price to the powerless people who paid it. That the Left has so reflexively applied their penchant for historical amnesia to their complicity in that egregious crime against humanity is a disgrace, and it is thanks mainly to David Horowitz that future generations will have the option of hearing the other side of what is generally considered a story with one side only. (If it were not for Horowitz, would anyone remember that Jane Fonda once said, “I would think that if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would someday become communist”?)

Perhaps the worst of PBS documentaries, aired in 1989 on WNET, was “Days of Rage,” a 90-minute account of the first Palestinian Intifada that failed to mention Palestinian terrorism even once as a cause of Israel’s tough security measures. It was so unbalanced that WNET Vice-President Robert Kotlowitz was moved to say, “I thought the intifada program was a horror. It was a horror. And I wasn’t happy with having it on the air.” Well, that’s nice. But then he added, “But I’m still happy we made the decision to go with it.” That’s because PBS sees its real mission as social justice, just like the universities, and thinks a lack of balance is the price that must occasionally be paid in order to advance what the Left considers a righteous cause. Not so nice.

Of Horowitz’s several essays on feminism, the most remarkable is “Tailhook Witch-Hunt” (written with Michael Kitchen)” (1993), a long account of the series of incidents at a Las Vegas convention of naval aviators that resulted in careers and reputations destroyed in a “travesty worse than anything that had resulted from the infamous McCarthy investigations.” Since what really happened was a stain on the feminist copybook, the media avoided critical coverage. A good reason to read this essay and get the actual facts of the case.

I began with the AIDS epidemic and want to end with it. For many young people, who have grown up with the image of AIDS as, thanks to drug advances, a manageable disease rather than the death sentence it invariably was in the 1980s, AIDS has lost its power to terrify. The cascade of articles Horowitz wrote when the epidemic was raging and victims were dying in numbers reminiscent of the Bubonic Plague in medieval times may seem to be merely of historic significance now that the existential danger has passed. But to me they are as important, perhaps more, than many of the articles that deal with topics that are still in active play.

I say that because nothing better illustrates the folly, the self-destructive tendencies of human beings in the grip of ideology who, when faced with certain danger and presented with a path to safety, will refuse to take that path if it means admitting their ideology was flawed.

As the epidemic gathered form and strength, and as it became dazzlingly clear that – in the West, anyway – AIDS was overwhelmingly linked to promiscuous anal sex and casual needle-sharing, with gay men far and away the victims most at risk, with risk to sexually prudent heterosexuals statistically nugatory, political correctness took precedence over lie-saving precautions.

Institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were more concerned with their compassionate and progressive attitude to homosexuality, more concerned not to be thought of as anti-gay, than they were to preventing the spread of disease by the tried and true (and the truly compassionate) methods of testing to find the carriers, separating them from those in the path of the disease and reporting findings. In its third decade, the subverted public health system still wasn’t requiring reporting of individual cases or contact tracing or the closing of sex clubs. As for the media, equally keen to be gay-friendly and progressively non-judgmental, Horowitz blasts them with “AIDS is without question the worst-reported story in the history of American journalism.”

And so by 2002, 800,000 Americans were infected with AIDS and roughly 500,000 had died. Those numbers could have been decimated by proper public health protocols, but political correctness overwhelmed common sense and the responsibility to protect. The AIDS epidemic was corpse-strewn proof that Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” had succeeded brilliantly.

As I write, Europe finds itself in the grip of a migratory crisis that is producing the social equivalent of AIDS. The pernicious doctrine of multiculturalism, whose Big Lie – that all cultures are equal, and equally assimilable to western societies – has blinded western leaders to the unhappy reality that is playing out in Cologne and other German cities, and in Paris and Scandinavia, as migrants from the Middle East and North Africa indulge the brutally misogynistic shibboleths of their upbringing in what truly are “rape cultures,” bringing rational fears of harm to every woman who rides a subway, walks alone at night or attends a festive public event.

Yet, like Gramsci-powered zombies, the police, the politicians, much of the media and – notably – the feminists have refused to surrender their cultural-equivalent fantasies, and insist that it is racist to lay blame on any particular cultural group, as if what happened in Cologne were equivalent to a fraternity keg party gone sour, and as if it could have happened amongst any agglomeration of people anywhere.

Camille Paglia said, “Everyone who preached free love in the Sixties is responsible for AIDS.” Well, everyone who preached multiculturalism in the Sixties is responsible for the rape of Europe today and possibly the U.S. tomorrow. It is often said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, it is also true that those who remember history, but are in thrall to an ideology that commands them to ignore history’s lessons, are also doomed to repeat it. And that is why this series is so necessary and so precious. David Horowitz’s writings continue to stand athwart history, give comfort to the intellectually afflicted and re-invigorate the draining spirit of resistance in those who fear we have reached the point of no return.

One of my least favorite modern phrases is “gets it.” So-and-so “gets it,” and so-and-so “doesn’t get it.” But sometimes I find the phrase handy. And David Horowitz gets it. Gets what?

Well, many things, but he certainly gets the Left, from which he comes. As readers of this magazine don’t need to be told, Horowitz made one of the most famous, and consequential, journeys from left to right in recent history. He knows the Left from the inside out. He has their number, as we used to say. (“Gets it,” frankly, was sexual.)

Abigail Thernstrom is another intellectual who traveled from left to right. During the 1990s, she told me that she’d had an interesting conversation with an academic associated with the Clinton administration. He said that he would no longer engage in public debates with her. Why? “Because, Abby, you know what I’m going to say before I say it, and you know why I’m going to say it.”

Any leftist who debates David Horowitz is taking his life into his hands. Maybe that’s why so few agree to do it.

Horowitz is embarked on a tremendous publishing project: The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz. I remember how glad I was in 1997 when The Black Book of Communism came out. It documented the crimes of that gang, worldwide. In his collection, Horowitz is now up to Volume V, headed “Culture Wars.”

The volume is organized in five parts: “The Progressive Party Line”; “Media Culture”; “Sexual Politics”; “Feminist Assaults”; and “The Government’s Left-wing Network” (i.e., public broadcasting). It all begins with an introduction by Horowitz, which is worth the price of admission alone.

In this introduction, Horowitz says that Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist, had an idea: Forget trying to take over the means of industrial production; instead, take over the means of cultural production. “In Gramsci’s conception,” writes Horowitz, “this meant infiltrating and then subverting universities, churches, media and the institutions of the arts.”

I am both a political journalist and a music critic, and sometimes musicians come out to me — that is, they confide to me that they are conservative. “Don’t tell anyone!” they make me swear. “If it were known that I lean right, I’d be in big trouble. I could even be fired.” Really? Why should it matter to an orchestra whether an oboist voted for Romney or Obama? In any event, it does. And the Romney voter had better keep her mouth shut.

“In Gramsci’s vision,” Horowitz later says, “radical subversion of these institutions and therefore of the culture would make radical ideas the ruling ideas, which would result in radicals’ becoming a political ruling class.” That’s what has happened, right?

The campuses are now erupting in political correctness, which is really too benign a term for the phenomenon. I’ll let Horowitz speak to the matter:

The phenomenon of “political correctness” is, in fact, an updated version of the “party line” — a stock feature of the organizations of the Communist-progressive left. The utility of a party line lies in the way it demonizes opponents, converting dissent into deviancy, while requiring its adherents to reduce complex realities to political formulas, which deprives them of the ability to learn from their experiences.

A neater description of the campus situation, I can hardly imagine. A few weeks ago, a Yale official apologized abjectly to students for offenses that the students had simply made up. I thought, “Oh, my gosh. As in the Cultural Revolution, the adults are afraid of the kids. The adults are trembling.”

Part I of Volume V opens with an essay that Horowitz wrote with Peter Collier, his longtime comrade (on both left and right). “It’s the Culture, Stupid!” the essay is called. They wrote it in late 1992, when the Bush 41 administration was giving way to the Clinton administration. The essay brought to me a flood of memories, and is especially interesting in light of the present day.

Horowitz and Collier discuss Johnnetta Cole, a key figure on Bill Clinton’s transition team. She was a veteran leftist, a robust supporter of Fidel Castro and other Communist dictators. Now she is the director of a Smithsonian museum. Donna Shalala was a similar sort. She had been chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, and, in the Clinton administration, would be the secretary of Health and Human Services. After government, she became president of the University of Miami. Now she is the head of the Clinton Foundation.

In their essay, Horowitz and Collier mention the president-elect’s “promise to lift the ban on HIV-infected Haitians now quarantined at Guantanamo.” In that way did Gitmo once make the news! The authors also say that, with the Cold War won, foreign affairs may be less critical, “at least for a while.” Horowitz and Collier were characteristically wise to include those words. The “holiday from history,” as people called it, ended less than a decade later, on a September day in 2001.

The authors do not fail to reckon with the incoming First Lady, Hillary Clinton — or was she Rodham or Rodham Clinton then? “It is the social agenda that is now at the center of American concerns, and this agenda is in danger of being handed to what we will probably soon be calling the Hillary Left.”

In early 2000, when Hillary announced for the Senate in New York, a journalist friend of mine said to me, “They’re going to be in our faces for the rest of our lives, won’t they be? We will never be rid of them.” He was speaking of the Clintons. I didn’t think it could be true. But maybe it is.

My favorite line of the Horowitz-Collier piece is this, and I bet it will be yours, too: “Hillary makes one wish for a Clintonectomy even before the administration takes power.”

In Part II, about media culture, Horowitz writes of Elia Kazan, the late film director, who “named names” in 1952 — who gave testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Kazan was a brave man, probably a great man, in addition to being a great filmmaker. Horowitz argues that Kazan endured a blacklist longer than any of the Communists who composed the Hollywood Ten: Thanks to his bravery, his testimony, he was shunned by his natural artistic community.

I had an encounter with Kazan a few months ago. The New York Philharmonic screened his 1954 masterpieceOn the Waterfront, for the purpose of playing the Bernstein score, as the movie unspooled overhead. Before the performance, a man came out and said that we should overlook Kazan’s sin in testifying before HUAC. After all, so much time had passed.

Meanwhile, the Philharmonic’s program notes instructed us that Kazan had “cooperated with dark forces.” Funny how the Communists — the allies, well-wishers, and agents of Josef Stalin — are never the “dark forces.” Just the anti-Communists. Also, the program notes referred to “rabid” anti-Communists. Long ago, Orwell pointed out that no one ever said “rabid anti-Nazi” or “rabid anti-fascist.” Only “rabid anti-Communist.” It’s still true.

At the moment, there is a movie celebrating the life of Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten. He loved Stalin, of course, and he also defended Hitler, as long as the Nazi-Soviet Pact lasted. And after the war, he heralded Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Would Hollywood ever make a movie celebrating the life of Elia Kazan?

In a piece about multiculturalism, Horowitz says something that made me sit up straight:

Like most of the destructive -isms of the 20th century, multiculturalism is an invention of well-fed intellectuals. It did not well up from the immigrant communities and ethnic ghettoes of America as an expression of their cultural aspirations or communal needs.

So true, bracingly true — and it reminded me of something that Thomas Sowell says about income inequality: The only people who care about it are well-fed intellectuals (to borrow Horowitz’s term). The poor don’t give a damn about income inequality. They just want to be less poor, regardless of what those above are making.

In 1992, Horowitz wrote a piece called “Homo-McCarthyism.” So early? Yes, that early, although this kind of McCarthyism would increase. Horowitz notes that Joseph Epstein, the writer, was upbraided by GLAAD, the gay activist group, for saying “homosexual” rather than “gay” or “lesbian.” Two years ago, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times began a column, “I’m worried about the Supreme Court.” Farther down, she quoted a friend of hers, who said, “Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’”

Antonin Scalia, one of the most refined and cultivated men alive, as George Wallace? So it is in the mind, or at least the propaganda, of the Left culture warriors.

The final part of Volume V, as I mentioned, is about public broadcasting. And you might wonder why the United States, a liberal republic, should have state media. You might also wonder why they defend, and even glorify, the Black Panthers and other such “political” killers. Horowitz is a master of this kind of analysis.

One of the killers is Assata Shakur, née Joyce Chesimard, who killed a New Jersey trooper — Werner Foerster — in 1973. For several decades, she has been a guest of Castro (and his brother). In 1997, Essence magazine published an interview with her under the title “Prisoner in Paradise.” (“Paradise” was totalitarian Cuba.)

In 2011, President Obama invited the rapper Common to perform at the White House. Police organizations protested — because Common had composed a piece glorifying the killer, “A Song for Assata.” Sample lyric: “All this shit so we could be free, so dig it, y’all.” Obama was deaf to the protests, and hugged the rapper, for good measure.

Speaking of cop-killers, Horowitz notes something that surprised even me: National Public Radio invited Mumia Abu-Jamal to give a monthly commentary. Abu-Jamal is the Philadelphia Panther who in 1981 murdered Officer Daniel Faulkner. He has been behind bars ever since. But he is a “social justice” hero to the Left, very much including NPR, it would appear. But the hiring of Abu-Jamal proved too much even for a softened-up America, and the deal never came off.

Auden called the 1930s a “low dishonest decade.” Since the 1960s, we have had nothing but. I have an octogenarian friend who sometimes asks me, “What has happened to us?” Why has America fallen into illiberalism and self-loathing? David Horowitz explains. It may be painful to read the answer, but he has it.

For some 35 years, he has been screaming at us, “These people really hate you!” (“These people” being the Left.) “They are intent on destroying you. Don’t you realize that?” I realize that, yes, and one of the people who helped me to, many years ago, when I was learning about the world, was Horowitz.

Reading Volume V of his magnificent collection made me sad, for two reasons. First, I thought, “Those who need to read this, won’t. Those who need to know this, won’t. David is preaching to the choir. I wish he could preach to the nation at large.”

But then I remembered that I found him — as I found Norman Podhoretz, Bill Buckley, and many others. No teacher or professor assigned them to me. But I found them. And maybe other people will find David, and these volumes?

The second thing that made me sad was this: Après lui, qui? After David, who? Who gets the Left like this, who has its number, who remembers everything that happened, who remembers where they bodies are buried (literally, in the case of the Panthers’ victims), who will scream at us, when we need screaming? Who? But at least we have The Black Book of the American Left, a repository of vital information and thought, indeed of truth.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior editor of National Review and the music critic of The New Criterion. His most recent book is Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators.

By Lee Bender
June 15, 2015
Originally published in The Philadelphia Jewish Voice

Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews: The Black Book of the American Left Volume 4 is indispensable for anyone who cares about the so-called “War on Terror” and identifying who the real enemies are of the United States and Israel — and nothing less than our Judeo-Christian culture and values are at stake. David Horowitz is an unfairly maligned writer by the mainstream press, liberal-leftists and academia in particular, but he is fearless, daring to go right into the “belly of the beast” and speak at dozens of college campuses about topics that opponents cannot refute on the merits, resorting to name-calling, and lying about his facts, sentiments and record instead.

This quick reading volume, which contains many short chapters and speeches on Islamo-Fascism, The Middle East Conflict, and the Campus War on the Jews, will horrify readers unfamiliar with how academia perverts the very essence of what the university should stand for: freedom of expression and the open market of ideas. Instead, Horowitz shows how he is consistently vilified and misportrayed- to the point he needs armed guards to even enter assembly halls because of the threatening behavior of Muslim student groups in particular, and even some Jewish ones, who only want to shut him down and brand him a racist hater. Why? Because he challenged them to confront the jihadists (he is not afraid to use proper identifiers), who are in a disturbing alliance with anti-American radicals, who cannot stand his use of concepts to counter their empty cries of “Islamophobia” when he points to Islam’s oppression of women and homosexuals, its true goals of Islamizing the world, creating dhimmis (second class citizens) of Jews and Christians, and ultimately to destroy our freedoms and democracy. Their plans to destroy Israel and deny Jews a sovereign state of their own are shown as naked anti-Semitism. And Israel is merely the canary in the coal mine.

Horowitz is a rare, brave and original thinker, and unlike most of his critics, he has the street “cred” to prove it: he himself became a leading Marxist “theorist” in the early 1960s and one of the founders of the New Left. It was after Vietnam, however, that he began to re-examine the damage these views had inflicted upon the country and realized that the Left had left him. But you cannot afford to leave him. This book deserves a serious read by any honest broker.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

In 1956, Nikita Krushchev, then the leader of world communism, gave what was supposed to be a secret speech about the crimes of Josef Stalin, including millions upon millions murdered. As David Horowitz has often recounted, the page-one publication of that speech byThe New York Times shook American communists to the core. These included such self-styled “Progressives” as Horowitz’s own parents, who were devastated by the news that validated claims long posited by anti-communists of the political right.

Yet, the discredited movement for “social justice” – which Horowitz defines as “equality enforced by government” – did not perish. The next generation, the “destructive generation,” launched a “new left,” fatuously believing its adherents would be untainted by the Soviet legacy of totalitarian repression and unlikely to repeat such crimes. Later, the Soviet empire’s collapse spawned predictions of the movement’s death that have proved greatly exaggerated. Instead, as Horowitz has observed, the collapse proved liberating (perhaps the only thing about social justice that can be said to be liberating) “because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an existing socialist state,” enabling the modern left to “indulge its nihilistic agendas without restraint.”

The result has been predictable: The new left, Horowitz explains, is “no different from the old – embracing Communists in Vietnam and Central America and, eventually, Islamic totalitarians in Gaza and the Middle East.”

The last of this group, the vanguard of sharia supremacism, is the focus ofIslamofascism and the War Against the Jews, the recently released fourth volume of Horowitz’s conservative oeuvre, the collection called The Black Book of the American Left.

In it, the author expertly diagnoses Islamo-fascism, a term he undertook to popularize in 2007, amid the remarkably successful campaign by the Islamist-Leftist alliance to suppress examination of the scriptural moorings of jihadist terror. He also relates counter-offensives executed by the indispensible David Horowitz Freedom Center, taking the battle to the alliance’s home turf, America’s universities. The author also explores the alliance’s war of anti-Semitism – not of anti-Zionism, but an unremitting war of hatred for the Jewish people – the top agenda item of modern Islamo-fascism and the fuel for much of its agitation on campuses across the nation.

The neologism “Islamo-fascism” was made necessary by the United States government’s obtuse determination not to acknowledge, much less examine, the ideological basis of Muslim terrorism. This willful blindness has hardened into unbending policy – indeed, into farce – during the Obama years. Horowitz, however, correctly traces its origins to the George W. Bush administration’s preternatural indulgence of Muslim sensibilities even after jihadists killed nearly 3,000 Americans in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Of course, it was not Muslim sensibilities the administration was seeking to placate; it was the cleverly orchestrated grievance-mongering ofthe Muslim Brotherhood.

Since its founding in Egypt in 1928, Horowitz relates that the Brotherhood has been the world’s most influential font of sharia supremacism, sharia being classical Islam’s repressive societal framework and legal code, rooted in Muslim scripture – the Koran, as well as sacralized accounts of the prophet Mohammed’s life, words and deeds. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the Brotherhood has methodically built an infrastructure of satellite organizations in the United States, much of which was laid bare in the Justice Department’s 2007-08 prosecution of a Hamas financing operation, the Holy Land Foundation case. Hamas self-identifies as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian jihadist wing, and support for its war to eradicate the Jewish state has been a top priority of the Brotherhood’s American network since the late 1980s.

Among the most significant of the Brotherhood satellites have been the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The MSA, which now boasts hundreds of chapters in universities throughout North America, is a Brotherhood breeding ground, indoctrinating students in organizational protocols as well as the virulently anti-Western, pro-jihadist writings of Islamist thinkers. Several top MSA leaders have gone on to become prominent members of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Chiefly, though, the MSA colludes with the left to undermine support for policies that promote American interests in the world and security at home.

The most effective gambit of the Islamist alliance with the left has been the promotion of an illusion, “Islamophobia.” As Horowitz illustrates, this contrivance was born in Islamist think-tanks for the specific purpose of smearing as racists commentators who engage in negative criticism of Islam – in particular, any effort to demonstrate Islamic doctrine’s straight-line nexus not only to jihadist terror but to the repression of women, the killing of homosexuals and apostates, and deep-seated animus against non-Muslims, especially Jews and Christians. Because these are undeniable features of their scripturally-rooted ideology, Islamists knew it was imperative to discourage public examination of their principles. The “Islamophobia” canard, exploiting the founding American tradition of religious tolerance, was an ingenious strategy to discredit and thus silence the messengers.

It worked to a fare thee well. Not only was the examination of our enemy’s ideology vilified on campus and in the media; the government – even as it fought jihadists on the battlefield and prosecuted them in the courts – accepted the fraudulent premises of Islamophobia. Turning for guidance to “Muslim community leaders” (i.e., Brotherhood-connected organizations like CAIR), law-enforcement and intelligence agencies suppressed mention of such terms “Islam” and “jihad” in connection with, well, Islamic jihad.

Moreover, as Horowitz shows in various contexts, nothing serves the Islamist-leftist alliance like a vacuum. With examination and discussion of the actual cause of jihadist terror – sharia supremacist ideology – muzzled, Islamists and leftists had an open field to offer their competing version of terrorism’s causes: American support for Israel, American counterterrorism policies, American aggression, American support of pro-Western dictators in Muslim countries, and the lack of social justice, which, of course, we are to believe is the beating heart of Islam.

Horowitz’s promotion of the term “Islamo-fascism” was a vital pushback against this onslaught. As he posits, the term “properly identified the religious nature of the jihadist threat along with its totalitarian implications – two hitherto-suppressed realities that were vital to understanding the enemy we faced.” The government retreated from the effort when a single utterance of the term by President Bush produced uproar from the Islamist-leftist alliance. Horowitz decided the best response was to take the fight to the source: the universities where the MSA was succeeding in banning scrutiny of the Islamists’ tyrannical creed.

Much of the book details these efforts and the unvarnished anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism they were met with on campuses across the country. At Columbia University, which happily played host to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – the then-president of Iran with decades of American blood on his hands, Islamists and leftists rabidly protested against Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” Making space for “Islamophobic” arguments in the marketplace of ideas, they fretted, would prompt “hate crimes” against innocent Muslims and justify America’s wars of “aggression” and “occupation” – not liberation – in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the University of California at San Diego, which has made an academic icon of Angela Davis (a lifelong communist, Soviet apologist, Black Panther confederate, and spewer of anti-white, anti-Jew and anti-American bile), Horowitz appeared during the libelous “Israeli Apartheid” week. In a post-speech question-and-answer session, he engaged a Muslim student with whom, following her commonplace refusal to condemn Hamas’s genocidal aspirations, he had the following exchange:

 Horowitz: … I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For it or against it?

Student: For it.

Horowitz thanked the student for showing anyone who cared to see exactly what is really going on in America’s universities. He could equally well have thanked her for clarifying what the jihad in Israel is really about: not the vindication of Palestinian human rights but the extermination of Jews.

For decades, and with singular clarity, Horowitz has exposed what is popularly rendered as “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” In reality, it is a continuation of the jihad seeking the Jewish state’s destruction begun in 1948. From the start, Arab Muslim states sought Israel’s annihilation, and the failure to achieve it in a war of naked aggression was considered the nakba – the catastrophe. With the help of the American left, Islamists have falsely portrayed the ceaseless jihad as a political conflict over disputed territory and a struggle against “occupation.” In point of fact, Islamists will be satisfied with nothing less than Israel’s destruction – and leftists with nothing left than the eradication of a liberty success story where Arabs live with more freedom and dignity than in any Islamic state.

Israel, Horowitz underscores, is the canary in America’s coalmine. Islamists and leftists seamlessly confederate in the West, notwithstanding significant differences (on, e.g., women’s rights, gay rights, and abortion), because our liberty culture is the chief obstacle to their totalitarian designs.

Islamists and Leftists see the war clearly and understand the imperative of keeping us blind, or at least silent. David Horowitz has made a career of unmasking our enemies, who cannot be defeated absent recognition of who and what they are.

In this spirited and savvy collection of recent essays and speeches, David Horowitz argues that progressives, that is, left of center politicians, journalists and intellectuals have contributed to “undermining the defense of Western civilization against the totalitarian forces determined to destroy it.” Specifically, the threat comes from “the holy war or jihad waged by totalitarian Islamists in their quest for a global empire.” (p.1) These essays, many of which are lectures at university campuses or reports about those lectures, will reinforce the views of those who already agree that “Western civilization” is a good thing, that Islamism is a form of totalitarianism and that its Jihad is quest for a “global empire.” They may not convince those who think Western civilization is another name for racism, imperialism and war, that totalitarianism is an ideological relic of the Cold War and that an otherwise peaceful and tolerant Islam has been “hijacked” by violent extremists who misconstrue its texts and their meanings. Yet they may strike a nerve with those liberals who think it is absurd to deny the clear links between Islamism and terror and who, especially after the murders in Paris in January, understand that Islamism is a threat to the liberal traditions of Western politics and culture.

This volume addresses a by now much discussed paradox of our political and intellectual life. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, the liberal intellectual Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism made the compelling case that the Islamist ideology that inspired the Al Qaeda terrorists emerged from a profoundly reactionary set of ideas which had lineages to Nazism and fascism. In Germany, Matthias Kuentzel, in his Jihad and Jew-Hatred:  Nazism, Islamism and the Roots of 9/11 examined in more detail the illiberal views of the 9/11 terrorists as well as the political and ideological connections between Islamism and Nazism. A number of us historians have documented those connections. The irony of the years since 2001, and especially of the Obama years, is that, with some exceptions, much of the sharpest criticism of the reactionary nature of Islamism and defense of classically liberal values has not come from the historic home of anti-fascism among leftists and liberals. Rather, as the 55, mostly short essays in this collection indicate, that critique has migrated to centrists and conservatives or those who are now called conservatives.

“Islamophobia,” the longest essay in the collection is co-written with Robert Spencer, also importantly draws attention to the international connections of Islamist organizations in the United States. The authors write that “the purpose of inserting the term ‘phobia’ is to suggest that any fear associated with Islam is irrational” and thus to discredit arguments that suggest a connection between Islamism and terror as themselves forms of bigotry. Horowitz and Spencer connect this criticism of the concept to discussion of the organizational connections between the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2005, the FBI seized the Northern Virginia headquarters of the Holy Land Foundation, then the largest Islamic “charity” in the United States. In a trial in 2007 that led to the conviction of the Foundation’s leaders on charges of supporting a terrorist organization, the prosecution entered a seized a remarkable document entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”(18)  The group’s goal was the establishment of “an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopts Muslim causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at directing and unifying Muslim’s efforts, presents Islam as a civilizational alternative, and supports the global Islam state wherever it is.”  Muslims, it continued “must understand their work in American is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” Horowitz and Spencer perform an important service in drawing attention to this document and to the political campaign that it has inspired.

The memo called for the creation of front organizations including the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Students Association, and the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Association for Palestine and the parent group of the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR. Another front group identified in the Holy Land memo was the International Institute for Islamic Thought, said to have invented the term “Islamophobia.” Horowitz and Spencer’s discussion of CAIR’s “Islamophobia campaign” is particularly interesting. In the Holy Land case, the US Department of Justice named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator and produced evidence that it has received $500,000 dollars from the Holy Land Foundation to set itself up.  CAIR was created in 1994 as a spinoff of a Hamas front group, the Islamic Association for Palestine, a group that the US government shut down in 2005 for funding terrorism. CAIR has defined Islamophobia as “closed minded prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims” and has described anti-terror measures adopted by the US government as forms of “prejudice” and “hatred.” The authors argue that the use of such terms has been an effective instrument in blunting or stifling criticism of Islamism.

On American university and college campuses, the Muslim Students Association and “Students for Justice in Palestine” have sponsored “Israel Apartheid Weeks.” In recent years, the MSA has been particularly active at the campuses of the University of California in Davis, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles in the anti-Islamophobia campaigns. Remarkably, such efforts have received support from coalitions of leftwing student groups active in student governments. The authors write that “perhaps the chief asset possessed by the jihadists is a coalition of non-Muslims-European and American progressives—who support the anti-Islamophobia campaign,” one that “had a venerable antecedent in the support that progressives provided to Soviet totalitarians during the Cold War.” (p.48) Again, the remarkable aspect of the current coalitions between Islamists and leftists was that these leftists were making common cause with organizations famous for anti-Semitism, subordination of women to second class status or worse and deep religious conviction, a set of beliefs at odds with some of the classic values of the radical left in the twentieth century. Then again, in view of the anti-Zionist campaigns of the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War and the hostility of the global radical left to Israel in recent decades, such “Red-Green” leftist-Islamist coalitions of recent years are not so surprising.

Horowitz sees a parallel between the “secular messianic movements like communism, socialism and progressivism” and the religious creeds they replaced. “It is not surprising therefore, that the chief sponsors of the blasphemy laws and the attitudes associated with them have been movements associated with the political left. It is no accident that the movement to outlaw Islamophobia should be deeply indebted to the secular left and its campaign to stigmatize its opponents by indiscriminately applying repugnant terms to them like ‘racist.’”  The invention and application of the concept of Islamophobia “is the first step in outlawing freedom of speech, and therefore freedom itself, in the name of religious tolerance.”(55)

The remainder of this volume elaborates on these themes with twenty essays on Islamo-fascism, thirteen on the Middle East Conflict and eleven on “the Campus War against the Jews.” Horowitz’ reports on his many speeches at various campuses where some of the above mentioned Islamic organizations turn up to protest. There the front organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially the Muslim Students Association, emerged to challenge his arguments about the links between Islamism and fascism. Two essays are particularly important—and depressing. In “Suicidal Jews” and “”Hillel”s Coalitions with Israel’s Enemies,” Horowitz describes instances in which liberal and left-leaning Jewish undergraduates turn their criticism towards him rather than towards the anti-Israeli activists on campus.

This fourth volume of Horowitz’s essays depicts the bizarre nature of our contemporary political culture in which leftists make common cause with Islamists, Israel is denounced as a racist entity while the anti-Semitism of the Muslim Brothers, Hamas and the government of Iran are non-issues for leftists, and the United States government refuses to state the obvious about the connection between Islamist ideology and the practice of terrorism. The defense of liberal principles has liberal advocates but as this valuable collection indicates the core of the defense has become a preoccupation of the center and right of American intellectual and political life. This volume is an important document of that endeavor.

Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book is Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. His work in progress is entitled “At War with Israel: East Germany and the West German Radical Left, 1967-1989.”