Reviews

Review of Radical Son

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The Left He Left Behind
Review of Radical Son By Richard Gid Powers
Originally published in The New York Times
February 16, 1997

A former editor of Ramparts reflects on a life after radicalism

David Horowitz’s warmly human and abrasive memoir, ”Radical Son,” carries on its jacket the phrase ”A Generational Odyssey.” As with the rest of this fine autobiography, the choice of phrase is artful. Born in New York City in 1939, the child of Communist parents, Mr. Horowitz moved to England after attending Columbia and Berkeley, drawn by the quality of Marxist intellectual life. There, he completed ”The Free World Colossus,” which he calls here ”the first account of the cold war written from a New Left perspective,” a book whose toxic impact on attitudes toward anti-Communism and containment Mr. Horowitz now regards as pernicious. After the book came out he was approached by a Russian agent to spy for the Soviet Union. Back in Berkeley in 1968, he joined the New Left’s leading magazine, Ramparts, and later produced (with Peter Collier, also of Ramparts) best-selling biographies of the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford families. He is now a so-called ”second thoughts” conservative, a militant foe of 60’s radicalism in its academic, entertainment and news-media strongholds.

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Review of Radical Son

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Commentary Magazine: Review of Radical Son by David Horowitz

By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL /  Originally printed in Commentary Magazine

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey
by David Horowitz

In the mid-1980’s, at a rally in support of Nicaragua’s Communist government, David Horowitz was for some reason invited to speak. Whatever the organizers may have had in mind, Horowitz did not tell the crowd what it wanted to hear. For Horowitz, a prominent radical in the 1960’s, had recently broken with the Left. Instead of denouncing the United States and singing the praises of the Sandinistas, he proceeded to warn those in attendance at the Berkeley, California, gathering that if they were “to pause for a moment and then plunge their busy political minds into the human legacies of their activist pasts, they would instantly drown in an ocean of blood.”

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Many Intellectuals have made the voyage from Left to Right in recent decades. But few have come from as deep inside the hard Left as Horowitz, and none has retained more of the 60’s style. Horowitz, in fact, prides himself on his determination to continue speaking “in the voice of the New Left—outraged, aggressive, morally certain.” This quality is conspicuously on display inHeterodoxy, the broadsheet which Horowitz edits and which presents the conservative case in the most willfully incendiary way—its cover photos have sported Karl Marx in drag, Charlie Chaplin in Nazi garb, and, for a Clinton reelection issue, a bullet-riddled American flag. Horowitz also runs an institution in Los Angeles called the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which monitors political correctness and serves as a watchdog against extremism on the Left.

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Review of Mortality and Faith 

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The Big Subjects, Brilliantly Pondered: David Horowitz isn’t just a repository of political wisdom

By Bruce Bawer

Although I was delighted when David Horowitz’s savvy treatise on Donald Trump, Big Agenda, became a top bestseller during the first days of the Trump presidency, I vividly recall wishing at the time that as many readers were acquainted with the other, equally invaluable side of Horowitz – the side that has produced, among other things, a trio of short, remarkable autobiographical works, The End of Time (2005), A Point in Time (2011), and You’re Going to Be Dead One Day (2015). Reviewing the last of these books – using words that apply equally well to the other two – I described it as “a poignant, bittersweet, captivating” volume that “mesmerizes from beginning to end, capturing with rare artistry the day-to-day musings of a man who is at once an intellectual and a poet” and who is at once capable of conveying “profound thoughts in restrained, unadorned, and unpretentious language” and of communicating “intense emotions while utterly eluding sentimentality or mawkishness.”

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Kirkus Review: The Art of Political War: And Other Radical Pursuits

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With this latest set of incendiary essays, Horowitz (Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, 1999, etc.) carves out his niche as the St. Augustine of the American Right—a convert from the Left who sees the world as a struggle between the faith he has embraced and the one he has rejected.

According to Horowitz, the cardinal law of American political war is that “the side of the underdog, which is the side of the people, wins.” Democrats have mastered this lesson, along with the art of the devastating soundbite. But Republicans are so inept at this that they have not only lost the last two Presidential elections, but they also have had their clocks cleaned time and again by unscrupulous Clintonites over impeachment, national security, crime, and budget cuts. The last pitched battle over the education budget ended in a typical GOP disaster, Horowitz observes: “they managed to look mean-spirited, stupid, and weak, all at the same time.” After finishing Horowitz, unwary readers might believe that the GOP practices unilateral electoral disarmament. At times, when his broadsides taper off, Horowitz makes points that are not overtly partisan (e.g., Democrats and Republicans share a tendency to censor free speech). He can be properly outraged that a Time columnist tarred him as racist, and he is insightful on the rightward turn his career took after the Black Panthers’ murder of his radical friend Betty Van Patter: “It was a need to escape a death of the spirit that caused me to alter my course.” But more often, the columnist’s self-described “in-your-face” style distracts from his message, as when he charges that “racial ambulance-chasing” has sustained the career of Jesse Jackson.

Politics may indeed be “war by other means,” as Horowitz claims—but who would dare to argue otherwise with an author so addicted to name-calling and the frontal assault?

Review of Dark Agenda 

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The War to Destroy Christian America

David Horowitz’s new book examines the secular left’s dark agenda.

A review by Mark Tapson
Originally published at Frontpagemag.com

Today, the free exercise of religion has ceased to be a guaranteed right in America. Instead, it has become a battlefield. – David Horowitz

For years, Morris County in New Jersey had been giving historic churches money to make repairs under an historic preservation program. In 2015, the State Supreme Court ruled that taxpayer funds should not be used to repair places of worship. A challenge to this ruling recently went before the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out that “[b]arring religious organizations because they are religious from a general historic-preservation grants program is pure discrimination against religion.” This “would raise serious questions under this Court’s precedents and the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee of equality.”

This seems like a relatively minor, local issue but it is yet another instance of the fierce conflict referred to in Horowitz’s quote above. As the Freedom Center’s founder notes in his brand new book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, we are engaged in “a war against this nation and its founding principles: the equality of individuals and individual freedom. For these principles are indisputably Christian in origin. They are under siege because they are insurmountable obstacles to radicals’ totalitarian ambition to create a new world in their image.”

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Review of Dark Agenda 

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The Best Book in Politics for Christians in 2019

By John Zmirak
April 04, 2019
Reprinted from TheStream.org.

If you read The Stream regularly, you’ve waded through tens of thousands of words that aim to explain what we’re up against. The power of social media to censor and silence. The corruption of our courts. The completely unearned sense of superiority which ignorant, sneering 20-year-olds display toward seasoned believers. The slow-motion train wreck of the Democratic Party, which has ceased to be a patriotic or even a sane organization. The rise of a new, inquisitorial religion, which worships a flittering shadow called “social justice.” The slow grind of laws meant to persecute our faith.

I write about these topics five days a week, every week of the year. (At about 1,000 words per column, that’s a 250,000 words I write per year — the length of four decent-sized books.) It sometimes feels like I’m fighting a swarm of wasps. Because those who hate Christianity, the nation it helped to make, and the civilization it built, are tireless. They never stop. Let’s say we find an honest court that debunks one cobbled together attack upon our freedoms. They shop for another venue, and relaunch the same offensive. We rouse ourselves to repeal some profoundly evil policy of the government’s. So our enemies cozen or bully massive corporations to impose it on us instead. It. Is. Relentless.

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