How the Left hijacked the Democratic Party.

By Lloyd Billingsley

“Ever since I abandoned the utopian illusions of the progressive cause,” writes David Horowitz, “I have been struck by how little the world outside the left seems to actually understand it.” A key part of what they fail to understand is the subject of Volume VII of TheBlack Book of the American Left: The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama.  The story here is “the transformation of the Democratic Party from a party of the American center into a party of the political left.”

Going into the 2016 elections, “the views held by the Democratic leadership on national security were virtually indistinguishable from those of the Progressive Party, whose 1948 presidential campaign behind the candidacy of Henry Wallace defined itself by opposition to American ‘militarism’ and rejection of the Cold War policies, which the Democratic Party was then pursuing against the Communist threat.”

This transformation isn’t exactly clear to voters, candidates and, in particular, the establishment media reporters who, as presidential mouthpiece Ben Rhodes said, “literally know nothing.” As for David Horowitz, his vast knowledge of the Old Left, and first-hand experience with the New Left, comes through on every page. He knows, for example, that George McGovern, the Democrats’ candidate for president in 1972, launched his political career in the Wallace campaign. He knows that, with McGovern’s support, “the New Left radicals were able to take commanding positions in the party’s congressional apparatus, and eventually in its national leadership.”

David Horowitz doesn’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows, as Bob Dylan said. He does know, however, that Weatherman Bill Ayers, “organized a terrorist army in the 1970s with the intention of launching a race war in America and bringing down the ‘empire.’” The author shows how such radicals were able to colonize the Democratic Party, particularly during the two terms of Bill and Hillary Clinton. With a transfer of power from the current president to his designated successor Hillary Clinton a possible scenario in November, this material is highly relevant.

Hillary was converted to the Social Gospel at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. Wellesley undergraduate Hillary Rodham wrote a 92-page thesis on Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky, whom she had interviewed. For Alinsky, a leftist admirer of Capone mob hit-man Frank Nitti, gaining and keeping power is “the all-consuming focus.”

As the Black Book notes, Hillary jostled with New Leftists at Yale. Full of the spirit, she became a pro-Castro volunteer in the Venceremos Brigade, helping to prop up a loathsome sado-Stalinist dictatorship. She called her politics a “Third Way,” an “independent socialism located somewhere between the Soviet gulag and America’s democracy.” As David Horowitz shows, there is no “Third Way.” There is only “the capitalist, democratic way based on private property and individual rights; and there is the socialist way of group identities, group rights, a relentless expansion of the political state, restricted liberty and diminished opportunity.”

This volume of the Black Book does not mention Hillary’s work for Bob Treuhaft, head of the California Communist Party, whose firm was a legal asset for the CPUSA and the Black Panthers. On the other hand, the author does recall that partisans of Hillary’s views found a home in the Clinton administration. For example, acting deputy attorney general Bill Lann Lee had been “involved in supporting, protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad, like the Vietcong, and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers,” all in the name of  “social justice.”

Going into the 2016 elections, it may have been forgotten that the Clintons’ national security advisor Sandy Berger, “was a lobbyist for Chinese companies before being appointed to his post.” Berger was also fined $50,000 and forced to give up his security clearance for ripping off classified material on terrorism from the National Archives. He stuffed copies of the documents in his jacket, destroyed some of the documents, then pretended he never possessed them in the first place. Who knows what Berger, who died last year, had stashed away on his computer, or maybe on his private server.

The Black Book also recalls John Huang, whom the Clintons made a top official in the Commerce Department, where he could access, “all the information an agent would need to strip America of the supercomputer technologies vital to the development of advanced weapons systems.” Huang also “inexplicably retained his top security clearance in the Commerce Department when he left the government.” The author wonders whether this was connected to “the Chinese Communist cash-flow to the Clinton-Gore campaign,” and if not, “what was the payoff the Chinese expected?”

Hillary Clinton may be “America’s most prominent leftist,” as the author contends, but The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama does not come up short on the current president, “born, bred and trained in the progressive movement.” His mentors were “Communists and their progressive successors,” so no wonder he presided over “ the institutionalizing of the policies of the left in government” for eight years. His global “apology tour” conceded “guilt” towards the Muslim world “but also towards surviving members of the Soviet bloc in Central America.” His foreign policy featured “retreats from America’s battlefronts against Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Going into the 2016 elections, that should be evident but this volume recalls players such as Van Jones, the president’s “green jobs” czar. Establishment reporters who “know nothing” can learn that Jones, a self-described “communist,” served a prison term after being arrested in the LA riots and then became an activist with the Maoist organization STORM—“Stand Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.” This far-left radical was a 9/11 “truther” and a supporter of the Hamas view that the entire state of Israel is “occupied territory.” On this theme, the chapter “Obama and the War Against the Jews” will prove enlightening.

The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama documents how the current president has “transformed a nation that had been the world’s bulwark of democracy and freedom into an enabler of the very forces that are intent on destroying them.” The author finds it “hardly coincidental, therefore, that Obama’s tenure in office has been accompanied by a rash of terrorist assaults.” What was once the arsenal of democracy is “now under the command of an anti-American president.”

On the domestic side, the author does not neglect “the toxic bailouts, stimulus packages, and entitlement programs” that generate “increasingly unsustainable debt” and create dependency on big government. The president “and the leftists in his administration are fully aware of the effects of their actions, yet they are determined to stay the course they have set for themselves.” The strategy, devised by the radical left forty years ago, “is to dismantle America’s private enterprise system and implement a socialist redistribution of wealth.”  Going into the 2016 elections, that reality should painfully evident to all but the willfully blind.

Unlike some collections, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama delivers more than it promises. Readers will find helpful background on leftist bagman George Soros, Occupy Wall Street founder Kalle Lasn, Eric Foner, Edward Said and Reps. Ron Dellums and Barbara Lee, whom the author met in the 1970s, when she was an aide to Huey Newton, “Minister of Defense” of the Black Panther Party. The leaders of Black Lives Matter may be favored guests at the White House but for the author BLM is a “roving lynch mob whose premise is the claim that a systematic war is being waged on black people.”

Readers of The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama won’t need a Weatherman, or any of their friends and supporters, to know which way the wind blows. In the Age of the Tweet and a nation with the attention span of a hummingbird, it is helpful to recall that soi-disant progressives are congenital liars.

In 1917, for example, Lenin’s slogan was not “Socialist Dictatorship! Firing Squads! Gulags!” Rather, it was “Peace! Land! Bread!” In similar style, President Obama said “You can keep your plan, period,” but you can’t. “In sum,” Horowitz writes,  “it is necessary to lie to the people in order to pass progressive laws, and the lie is justified for the greater good.” His “Treason of the Democrats” chapter, meanwhile, will make exactly clear what’s happening here, why it happened, and where it came from.

“To the progressives seduced by Stalinism,” David Horowitz explains, “democratic America represented a greater evil than the barbaric police states of the Soviet bloc.” This happened because “the Stalin regime was identified with the imaginary progressive future,” and all its nefarious actions blamed on its enemies, primarily the United States. “Once a promise of redemption is juxtaposed to an imperfect real-world actor, all of these responses become virtually inevitable.” Hence “the gluing of the brain” Leon Trotsky associated with Stalinism remains evident on every hand.

“The Soviet Union is gone, and history has moved on,” Horowitz observes. “But the Stalinist dynamic endures as the heritage of a post-Communist left, which remains wedded to fantasies of an impossibly beautiful future that bring it into collision with the flawed American present. This left is now the dominant force in the Democratic Party.”

Going into the 2016 elections, and beyond, that may be the best takeaway from The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama.

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield and Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Film Industry.

December 27, 2016
Frontpagemag.com

After the federal election, an African-American child asked at a family dinner if he was now “going to be treated as three-fifths of a human being.” A teacher from a rural black elementary school reported her students were asking her if they would become slaves again. A black student told a guide on an outing to the nation’s capital he was afraid the new president was “going to round up all the black people and kill them.”

Understandable, progressives might say. Considering the racism we saw expressed during the campaign and the people the president-elect has surrounded himself with, who can blame these kids for their fears?

The problem is, these anecdotes did not arise from the 2016 election, but from the 2000 election. No reasonable person can believe George W. Bush is or ever was a racist.

Yet, just as in this election, incredulous that their preferred candidate might lose, there were many irresponsible progressives in 2000 who filled their children’s heads with this damaging nonsense and much other nonsense besides.

In 2004, after his hotly contested narrow loss to Bush, Gore told audiences that Bush had won by stealing a million black votes, even though not a single case of black voter fraud was uncovered by civil rights organizations. The left never really loses an election; elections are stolen from them. Sound familiar in 2016?

I found the anecdotal material above in a column, “How Leftists Play the Race Card,” in the recently-issued seventh volume of David Horowitz’s Black Book of the American Left, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama.

What Horowitz calls a “climactic place” in his series, this volume was released before the election that against all odds brought Donald Trump to power. Reading it under the assumption Hillary Clinton was going to be the incoming president produces a markedly different response from reading it today.

I know, because I read half before and half after. In my mind it is almost like two different books, as I experienced first despair at all the wrongheadedness and corruption Horowitz’s columns reminded me of that were likely to continue, followed by triumphant elation at the knowledge that the Obama-and-Clinton kakocracies were well and truly behind us.

I see in some of these writings prescience where I might have seen wishful thinking. For example, in his 1997 column, “Conservatives need a heart,” Horowitz addresses the “confusion in conservative ranks.” Conservatives, he writes, have demonstrated three tendencies in their polemics: the “leave us alone” mentality of those advocating for less governmental regulation and intrusion; the emphasis on family values and the re-moralization of society; and the federalists, wanting more power returned to the states. What is missing, Horowitz says, is “a conservatism committed to national greatness.”

It took a while for the American people to internalize the source of their discontent, but that is what has just happened. Volume VII delivers a great deal of satisfaction to right-of-center readers in combing over the glowing ashes of all that has been found wanting in the Clinton-Obama nexus, and why.

“The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama” traces the history of the Democratic Party from center – to hard left. From the muscular anti-communism, civil rights and balanced budgets of JFK, the Dems came to embrace the Marxist agenda of the nanny state, identity politics and retreat from foreign-affairs leadership.

In a word, the party shifted from classic liberalism to progressivism, a benign locution to deodorize the uncomfortably redolent Marxism that greases the wheels of the party’s mission. Under the aegis of Bill and Hillary Clinton (it was never less than a presidential partnership) and Barack Obama, the administration became stacked with far leftists.

Outgoing President Obama (“outgoing”: it dances trippingly off the tongue) marinated his entire pre-presidential life in Islam apologism and the politics of progressivism. Mentored by communists, he came to power with a negative view of America’s history and distrust of the nation-state as a vehicle for human progress. Conversely he held an exaggerated and largely uncritical respect for America’s enemies, like Cuba and Hamas, but Iran especially.

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton took lifelong inspiration from the writings of political guru Saul Alinksy (1909-72), whom students of left-wing radicalism in the U.S. will remember as the American version of Machiavelli. Horowitz devotes a long essay, “Rules for Revolution” in Part III of this book (the original pamphlet form of this essay has been distributed and sold to more than three million people).

Alinsky wrote the book Rules for Radicals, a how-to manual for revolutionaries, which emphasized strategies of deception rather than open confrontation as the best way to advance a Marxist revolution in the U.S. Don’t sell your agenda as socialism, he urged, sell it as “progressivism” and “social justice.”

Alinsky’s strategy was to work within the system while accruing the power to destroy it. Many of the student radicals who went on to influential political careers were well-versed Alinsky acolytes. In fact, in 1969, a certain Wellesley College student named Hillary Rodham wrote an admiring 92-page senior thesis on Alinsky, likening him in cultural stature to Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King Jr. Barack Obama followed Alinsky’s rules with assiduous attention when he worked for ACORN as a community organizer.

In his column, “Candidate of the Left,” Horowitz reminds us of Obama’s lies that were swallowed uncritically by his starry-eyed followers. Who were they? “[E]very anti-Israel, anti-American, pro-Iranian communist in America is supporting Barack Obama; every pro-Palestinian leftist, every Weatherman terrorist…all Sexties leftists and their disciples…every black racist follower of Louis Farrakhan…every ‘antiwar’ activist who wanted us to leave Saddam in power and then lose the war in Iraq; everyone who believes that America is the bad guy and that our enemies are justly aggrieved; every member of ACORN, the most potent survivor of the Sixties left…along with al-Jazeera and Vladimir Putin and the religious fanatics of Hamas and the PLO.”

Examples of Obama’s lies? One was that he really had no idea who Jeremiah Wright, his pastor of 20 years, was, because the optics of friendship with “a racist, Jew-hating, terrorist-loving acolyte of Minister Farrakhan” didn’t look so good. Another was that unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers was not just “a guy in the neighborhood” as Obama claimed. Obama launched his campaign for a senate seat in Ayers’s living room, it was Ayers’s father who was responsible for Obama’s job at the Sidley Austin law firm, and it was Ayers who “hired Obama to spend the $50 million Ayers had raised to finance an army of anti-American radicals drawn from ACORN and other nihilistic groups to recruit Chicago school children to their political causes.”

But the lie that will never lose traction as the others did, because it affected so many Americans, was “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Obama lied about his healthcare plan, because, as Horowitz has often stated, “[t]he first truth about progressive missionaries is that the issues they fight for are not the issues. What drives all their agendas is the fantasy of a social transformation that will lead to a paradise of social justice.”

And therefore, as MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber explained, “This bill was written in a tortured way…[because] if you make it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay? Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.” Lack of transparency has been the hallmark of Obama’s reign and both Clintons’ entire political careers.

The column “Obama’s Communist Czar” demonstrates the depth and complexity of the far-left networks that flourished under Obama’s nurturing hand. Van Jones, for example, now a respected media commentator who never speaks of his past as a self-described communist, was appointed Obama’s “green jobs” czar. Before he joined the administration, he was a longterm activist for the communist group (with the Maoist title) STORM: “Stand Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.” He was (is?) a 9/11 “truther,” as those who believe 9/11 was an inside job call themselves, and who supported (supports?) Hamas’s view that all of Israel is “occupied territory.”

All the “social justice” movements are connected at the root level of funding and protest organization, and this column shows in detail how it works. Whether it is a global demonstration against the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, or coordinated, worldwide “antiwar” protests, or the Occupy movement, none of these events can happen without planning and funds to ensure large turnouts, as well as resources to keep protesters fed, postered up and rehearsed. If you follow the money, you inevitably end up with George Soros and his Center for American Progress.

As the final act of his presidency and a f*** you gesture both to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and incoming president Donald Trump, Obama has, as I write, just instructed the U.S. to abstain on a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement building in “occupied” Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem and the Western Wall, Israel’s most sacred site, defying heavy pressure from long-time ally Israel and President-elect Donald Trump for Washington to wield its veto. If there was any doubt of Obama’s longterm bias against Israel, even to diehard leftists, this should dispel the illusion.

This is therefore a good moment to read Horowitz’s long essay in Volume VII, “Obama and the War Against the Jews,” written with Jacob Laksin in 2010. I cannot do it justice here, but urge it upon anyone who wants a clear and relatively concise summary of Obama’s attempt, from his initial “apology tour” at the beginning of his presidency forward, to enable Iranian hegemony in the Middle East at the expense not only of Israel, but of America’s traditional Arab allies, by appeasing terrorist Hezbollah and Hamas, and subverting Israel’s legitimate claims to their indigenous lands from time immemorial.

The media today can’t wax indignant enough over the choices president-elect Trump is making for key cabinet positions. They’re too wealthy; they’re too right-wing; they’re too cozy with Russia. The agitated media pearl-clutching is a sight to behold.

Former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon has the media reaching for the smelling salts, yet they never complained when the Democratic National Committee appointed Carlotta Scott, former mistress of the Marxist dictator of Grenada and supporter of Communists during the Cold War, as “political issues director.” Her longterm commitment to Soviet interests is laid out in “A Question of Loyalties.”

Nor did we ever see the media taking to its fainting couch over Bill Clinton’s disgraceful record with the Communist Chinese dictatorship. Bill Clinton was not the ideological leftist his wife is, but he came of age in the counter-culture, and was therefore tolerant of the hard leftists favoured by Hillary, whom she invited into the Clinton entourage.

The Clinton team became more than tolerant in the course of their reign though. They are responsible, Horowitz writes, for “the most massive breach of military security in American history.” In “The Manchurian Presidency” (a must-read), Horowitz exhumes sordid activities by Bill Clinton’s that should have galvanized media too preoccupied with a pretty intern, cigars and a stained blue dress to notice their president was overseeing the handover of America’s nuclear secrets to Communist China.

The publication of the Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, known as the Cox Report (Republican Representative Chris Cox chaired the committee that produced it), chronicled and assessed covert operations by the China within the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s.

The report revealed that Clinton had downgraded security controls at America’s nuclear laboratories, with the consequence that the Chinese were able to steal the designs of America’s nuclear-weapon arsenal, including her most advanced warheads, as well as the secrets of America’s intercontinental ballistic missile systems.

Horowitz writes: “In a little over five years [1994-99], the Chinese Communist dictatorship has been able to close a technology gap of twenty years and to destroy a security buffer that had kept America safe from foreign attacks on its territorial mainland for more than a hundred.” America became vulnerable not only to China, but to rogue states China has been happy to arm, like Iraq, Syria and Iran.

One of the more concerning aspects of Clinton’s cozying up to China was the Clinton administration’s failure to prosecute spies engaged in critical thefts of American military secrets.

Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-American scientist working for the University of California at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, downloaded millions of lines of computer code, revealing the designs of nuclear warheads. But after being held for nine months, he was released in 2000, without being charged with espionage, although he pled guilty to mishandling computer files. Notably, a request to wiretap Lee’s phone was denied by the Clinton Department of Justice, a virtual first for the DOJ.

Peter Lee (no relation), a physicist born in China who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, pled guilty to lying on security-clearance forms and passing classified national-defense information to Chinese scientists on business trips to Beijing, educating Beijing on warhead testing techniques and the radar technology to locate American submarines. But he served only a year in a halfway house.

A Wikipedia entry on the subject unironically notes, “The issue was a considerable scandal at the time.” Not unlike the Rosenberg ‘scandal,’ called by its real name, “treason,” one might add, which ended in execution. Autres temps, autres moeurs, as the French say: other times, other customs.

As Horowitz points out, the whole intricate, perfidious story is recounted in Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II’s book, The Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash (1998). These two national security professionals uncover a history leading backward from Clinton’s triangulation with Communist China to relationships begun back in Arkansas.

Summary accounts of two men favored by the Clintons for their funding help in tight situations who were deeply involved in the China network: Arkansas resident James Riady, a Chinese-American scion of a multi-billionaire financial empire in a working partnership with Chinas military and intelligence establishment; and John Huang, Far East manager for the Arkansas-based Worthen Bank, who became a top official in the Commerce Department, make for fascinating reading.

I mentioned the very different attitude shown to traitors in the days of Stalinist fellow travellers from those in the Clinton era. Of the contrast Horowitz writes that it could at least be said of the Rosenbergs “that they did not do it for themselves, but out of loyalty to an ideal, however pathetic and misguided. Bill Clinton has no such loyalties – not to his family, his party, or his country….The destructiveness of Bill Clinton has emerged out of a need that is far more banal – to advance the cause of a self-absorbed and criminal self.”

Until the night of November 8, Bill Clinton had every reason to believe he would be back in the White House again with Hillary, this time nominally as First Gentleman, but practically as the co-president Hillary was in his tenure.

Will Donald Trump “make America great again?” Maybe, maybe not. But just knowing that their new president has America’s restored national greatness as his vision has already given Americans what they were promised and never received eight years ago: real hope and real change. Reading Volume VII of the Black Book is a salutary reminder of the bullet America has just dodged.

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.