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  • The Black Book of the American Left
    • Volume I: My Life and Times
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    • Volume II: Progressives
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    • Volume III: The Great Betrayal
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    • Volume IV: Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews
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    • Volume V: Culture Wars
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    • Volume VI: Progressive Racism
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    • Volume VII: The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama
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    • Volume VIII: The Left in the University
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    • Volume IX: Ruling Ideas
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  • Radicals
    • Radicals – Portraits of a Destructive Passion
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    • Unholy Alliance
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    • The Politics of Bad Faith
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    • Radical Son
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    • Party of Defeat
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    • The Shadow Party
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    • Destructive Generation
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    • Left Illusions
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  • Universities
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    • Indoctrination U
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    • Reforming Our Universities
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    • Enemy Within
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    • The Art of Political War
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    • How to Beat the Democrats
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    • Take No Prisoners
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    • Dark Agenda
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  • Horowitz Memoirs
    • Mortality and Faith
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    • Radical Son
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    •  A Cracking of the Heart
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    • Radical Son: 2nd Edition
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  • Race
    • Uncivil Wars
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    • Volume VI: Progressive Racism
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    • Hating Whitey and Other Radical Pursuits
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    • I Can’t Breathe
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Reviews

Review –  Left Illusions; an Intellectual Odyssey

by David Horowitz

Spence, 2003.

Like Whittaker Chambers before him, David Horowitz must have thought he was abandoning the winning side for the losing side, when he embraced conservatism. Chambers left Communism for Christianity, at a time when, in the eyes of many, it was not expedient to do so.  So too, Horowitz, a leading leftwing intellectual of the 60s and 70s, had second thoughts. For both men, the change in thinking was costly, with severe reactions to their defections.

This book, a collection of articles, most of which were published before, gives us an intellectual history of Horowitz’s rise in the Left, and his eventual disaffection with it. Thus it includes some of his earlier leftist pieces, including some published in the radical Ramparts, which he formerly edited. But the bulk of the articles here come from his new found conservatism, and feature some of his best writings from the late 70s to 2003.

Horowitz has already covered his second thoughts in book form, especially in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (co-written with Peter Collier in 1989), and Radical Son (1997). Here he covers a wide range of issues, with all of the conservative battlegrounds given a run. Thus some three decades worth of controversy are covered, with articles on Solzhenitsyn, Nicaragua, racism, political correctness on campus, AIDS, free speech, multiculturalism, the Middle East crisis, terrorism, and the Clinton years all given judicious treatment.

Unlike Chambers, it was not a religious conversion that prompted this change of heart. It was a growing awareness that the Left was simply hypocritical, constantly denouncing supposed atrocities of capitalism and American foreign policy, while ignoring or condoning the barbarism of socialism and leftist dictatorships. An enormous amount of human blood had been shed on the altars of leftist utopianism, Horowitz discovered.

Thus as someone who has been there and done that, his criticisms of the left deserve to be heard. Not many have renounced their leftwing past. I happen to have been one to do so, but there are not that many around. Irving Kristol once said that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. It seems that many leftists prefer to live with their illusions than take a stand for reality.

Horowitz chronicles the extreme reaction of fellow leftists to his realignment. He was hoping that others would see the light, but instead he received vitriol, censure and abuse. He had hoped that other radicals would make this acknowledgment: “We greatly exaggerated the sins of America and underestimated its decencies and virtues, and we’re sorry”. But such confessions were few and far between. Most leftists clung to their utopianism, to the “god that failed”.

Like Chambers, his new found conservatism is still a minority position. There exists a left-liberalism hegemony in the US and the West that makes it hard for countering views to be heard. Horowitz documents the uphill battle in promoting a conservative voice in such a climate.

For example, on US college campuses there is a new McCarthyism, but a McCarthyism of the left. Having visited 200 such campuses in the past decade, Horowitz knows that most have repudiated their liberal arts origins (which saw freedom speech and genuine intellectual inquiry as virtues)  and have embraced political radicalism instead. Now a fog of censorship, political correctness and leftwing ideology covers these campuses. Thus for a conservative, and a former leftist at that, to speak at such an institution, one takes very real risks indeed.

Radical socialists, feminists, gay rights activists, and detractors of America and democracy can all freely speak their minds at American campuses, but conservatives do so at their own peril, if they do manage to get a speaking engagement. Horowitz has received more hatred and abuse when speaking as a conservative than he ever did as a Communist or socialist.

Indeed, the university has become a hotbed of leftism, As an example, at the University of Wisconsin (a school which I once attended) Horowitz notes that while a $500 grant was given to a conservative student group, a million dollars in grants was given to various leftist extremist groups.

Discriminatory funding policies is just part of the injustice conservative students and staff face. Horowitz documents the very real difficulties conservatives face on campus, and the overwhelming leftist slant arrayed against them. As another example, Horowitz examines the faculty of a number of leading universities, and shows that on average only around five per cent of faculty identify as Republicans. No wonder why it is so difficult for conservative students on campus. They are up against a stacked deck.

The media of course is no better, with a left/liberal domination that routinely censors out conservative voices. The prejudices of a leftist media are well-documented in this volume as well. Of course this leftwing domination of the institutions of power and influence is not just accidental. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s urged fellow communists to do this very thing. And they have succeeded very well in achieving these goals.

Thus one has to ask why anyone would want to surrender a seemingly winning position for what appears to be a lost cause. Horowitz has asked himself this question many times, as had Chambers. His last lines in this book address the question again, as he asks whether the truth will continue to remain in the shadows. He hopes that it won’t.

And for those like myself who have followed a similar road, and have taken similar U-turns, one’s hopes are buoyed by knowing that one is not alone, and that others have made similar journeys. Horowitz retains his Jewish faith. Chambers, and I, embraced Christianity. But all three of us know that truth is powerful, and truth will prevail. This volume provides solid meat for those who have made the change, and for those who have not yet done so. May it result in many more second thoughts.

Filed Under: Left Illusions, Reviews

Review: Radical Son 

by admin

Radical Son is one of the best political memoirs I’ve read. Though it is really a love story—one man becomes passionately enamored with freedom, responsibility, and reason. Or maybe it’s a book about faith healing, a true account of how belief in human dignity and individual rights cures blindness, folly, and hatred. Anyway, everyone who was ever involved with or influenced by the New Left should read David Horowitz’s words, and then eat their own. I think the last political book that affected me this strongly was Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.” — P.J. O’Rourke, Author of “Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut”

“David Horowitz’s political pilgrimage from a Sixties radical to a Reagan conservative—and the friends and enemies he has made along the way—makes for a very interesting, very compelling story. Speaking as a conservative: it’s much better to have David Horowitz with you than against you. Radical Son demonstrates why.” — William J. Bennett, Author of “The Moral Compass”

“Watch out all of you statist shills and racialist hucksters out there who think you have gotten away with murder and mayhem over the last five decades, with alibis and applause from the media and the academy: David Horowitz has got your number and your jugular. In the first great American autobiography of his generation, this ardent writer on the ramparts remorselessly tracks them all down, going deep into the lairs of the professional liars of the left—the guilty and the gulled, the sadistic and the philanderous, the vain and the vicious—and strips away their tawdry veneer of glamour and idealism to reveal the vile truth—about the Black Panthers and the rest of the revolutionary felons and felines, and finally, in gut-wrenching candor, himself.”  — George Gilder

Filed Under: Radical Son 2nd Edition, Reviews

Review : I Can’t Breathe

by admin

David Horowitz delivers a new masterpiece on the racial hoax that is killing America.Thu Oct 21, 2021 

Mark Tapson

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

After a few years of the widespread tearing-down of statues honoring American heroes such as the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, Founding Father George Washington, and anti-slavery giant Frederick Douglass, recently a few new statues went up for a change. Massive golden busts of the late, far-left Congressman John Lewis and Black Lives Matter icons George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were erected in Manhattan’s Union Square.

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Filed Under: I Can't Breathe, Reviews

Review: I can’t Breathe

by admin

David Horowitz Exposes the Past Hoax and Future Threat of BLM

“I Can’t Breathe” courageously confronts the big racist lie that is terrorizing a nation.

Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

In the spring of last year, a nation already staggering under the burden of lockdowns and shutdowns suddenly faced a shocking wave of violence as Black Lives Matter riots destroyed businesses, brutalized law enforcement and random bystanders. The violence was swiftly backed by corporate endorsements of the racist movement and its big lie about “systemic racism”. Those who spoke out lost their jobs, those who protested the protests were locked up.

The physical violence unleashed cultural violence with critical race theory and revisionist history like the 1619 Project swiftly moving from the media and into schools for rapid indoctrination.

Most Americans were taken by surprise to see their workplaces politicised, social media lynch mobs claiming people’s jobs left and right, and the rise of woke political terror everywhere.

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Filed Under: I Can't Breathe, Reviews

Review: I Can’t Breathe

by admin

David Horowitz delivers a tour de force.Mon Nov 29, 2021 

Jason D. Hill

Consider the following facts outlined in David Horowitz’s new book, I Can’t Breathe: How A Racial Hoax is Killing America:

Every year, more than 10 million arrests are made by police departments nationally. In 2019, 14 unarmed blacks and 25 unarmed whites were killed by police. A 2001 Justice Department report stated that “when a white officer kills a felon, that felon is usually a white…and when a black officer kills a felon that felon is usually a black.” Nothing has changed in the years since then, the report states.

Autopsy reports show that George Floyd could not breathe at the time of his containment by police because of the lethal dose of fentanyl that he had voluntarily ingested into his system.

A 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics study showed that of all suspects killed by police from 2003 to 2009, 41.7 percent were white, and 31.7 percent were black. In this period, blacks accounted for 38.5 percent of all arrests for violent crimes—that is, the type of crime most likely to trigger potentially deadly confrontation with police.

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Filed Under: I Can't Breathe, Reviews

Review:  David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: Volume IV:  Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews

by admin

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.

[Read more…] about Review:  David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: Volume IV:  Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews

Filed Under: Reviews, Volume IV – Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews

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