David Horowitz Exposes the Leftist Cult of Destruction
A review of ‘The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left’.
On Ivy League campuses radicals cheer Hamas while major corporations like Budweiser and Target lose billions by embracing woke agendas. What explains this cult of destruction that has overtaken our country and our culture? Why are so many so eager to destroy America?
In the 60s and 70s, David Horowitz defined the political spirit of the age in the New Left while in the 80s and 90s, he became the vanguard of the conservative campaign against the Left.
Nearly forty years after he not only publicly rejected the Left, but took the lead in warning conservatives and the rest of the country about the threat that it posed, Horowitz confronts the crisis we face, the abyss beyond and the road ahead in his latest revelatory book about the political war we’re in: ‘The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left.’
The Radical Mind is in some ways the story of David Horowitz and of America. It exposes the radicals who indoctrinated generations into their destructive ideology and the state of a nation where majorities of a younger generation are Jew-haters, socialists and terrorist supporters.
While many conservatives have become prone to despairing at such spectacles, Horowitz had seen worse and come out of worse. The Left had never been concerned with numbers. Its extremist positions were once so far on the fringe that no one would have imagined they would become mainstream dogma. What the Left had was passion, aggression and a plan of action.
In The Radical Mind, Horowitz continues to develop the message that he has carried for nearly two generations to the conservative movement. And that is that the movement all too often lacks these things: it doesn’t know how to fight and does not even realize that it needs to fight.
“From the moment I joined the conservative right forty years ago, I was impressed – and also alarmed – by the disparity in political rhetoric used by the two sides fighting this fateful conflict. My radical comrades and I had always viewed these battles as episodes in a war conducted by other means – even as our opponents failed to understand that they were in a war at all,” he writes in The Radical Mind.
The conservative movement has traveled a long way since the 1980s and David Horowitz played a major role in waking it up to the reality that leftists were not just political opponents, they were sworn enemies bent on destroying America. Long before it was fashionable, he was out there warning about Marxist indoctrination at universities and the vast network of leftist foundations, including those of George Soros, who were using the nonprofit sector to seize control of the commanding heights of our country. Now, Horowitz is still urging us to fight.
And fight hard.
In The Radical Mind, Horowitz urges “defenders of America” to deploy “stronger rhetoric, along with a more realistic attitude towards the enemy they are facing if America is to survive at all.” He points out that we are still mired in talking about “issues” and complaining about “double standards” rather than recognizing that the Left is not misguided, but maliciously destructive.
Typical of this is the tendency by Republicans to describe Democrats as being“soft on crime.” But, “Democrats – progressives – are not soft on crime, they are pro-crime. They regard crime as a primitive form of ‘social justice.’” This is the kind of bracing rhetoric that made David Horowitz the fighting spirit of the conservative movement whose voice is still badly needed.
And The Radical Mind once again displays Horowitz’s great gifts of describing the reality of the war in enemy as it is, unflinchingly and unapologetically, and tracing the origin of the crisis back to radical figures like Bill Ayers and a leftist movement that had set out to tear down America.
What is the mindset of such people? That is one of the questions that Horowitz tackled in Radical Son, a book that changed lives and made conservatives out of some radicals, and it is the question that he returns to once again in The Radical Mind, writing that, “envy and resentment” are “the key passions of the progressive mind”.
False claims of racism, sexism and all the various forms of oppression channel that envy and resentment, the private passions of the dissatisfied (but often materially wealthy) leftist, into ideologically approved categories making personal resentments into a power grab.
The radicals masquerade in a perpetual state of victimhood because it licenses their destruction. Oppression justifies violence, terrorism and then a total takeover. In The Radical Mind, David Horowitz breaks down the various issues in whose name the leftists are destroying America, especially false claims of hatred and oppression, and exposes the lies behind them.
“For progressives the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution,” he writes. “Every revolution begins with destruction. Every revolutionary is focused on the means to ‘dismantle’ the existing social order, not on devising workable blueprints for the future. Consequently, they are experts at destruction, but criminally incompetent at construction.”
David Horowitz has witnessed and documented the revolutionary destruction across eras and The Radical Mind clearly shows how the Stalinist era, the New Left and now the Woke Left are committed to the same politics of destruction. It is not the poor or the oppressed that they love, but their fantasies of power. The victims of the moment, real or imagined, are just tools to justify their crimes. And once the destruction is successful, the Left does not spare a thought for them.
The Radical Mind documents the Anti-War Left’s abandonment of Cambodians to genocide and the abandonment of black teens in inner cities to gang violence. Americans are being divided in workplaces and on college campuses into identity politics groups to tear apart the country. But once the destruction is done, the Left will have no more use for black lesbians or transgenders than it did for millions of murdered Cambodians or the 8 teens shot in an urban ghetto over the weekend.
To the radicals, people are means to an end. And that is where Radical Mind vitally distinguishes the leftist worldview from that of the Constitution its members hope to destroy.
“The attack on the social contract under which Americans have lived for more than 200 years is the core of the current crisis,” Horowitz argues. The Left wants to get rid of the Constitution, not because it actually believes that it’s the illegitimate product of dead white men, but because it wants to dispense with all laws and systems that interfere with the advancement of its revolution.
Horowitz points out that in the case of Roe v. Wade, the leftists were “uninterested in the Roe argument itself – i.e., the actual merits of the case” because they are “ready to dispense with due process – with the agreement to live by a neutral set of rules and deliberative resolutions when an impasse is reached” because their only goal is the “pursuit by any means necessary of a “re-imagined” future, based on untested and discredited ideas.”
The radical goal is revolution. And as David Horowitz comprehensively demonstrates in The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left’, revolution means destruction.
Is it a wonder then that student radicals and extremist academics cheer Hamas, not despite its atrocities, but because of them, or that woke CEOs shrug off billions in losses? Woke military brass continue to champion racist and divisive policies even as recruitment falls drastically.
The Left does not turn back in the face of destruction because that is exactly what it desires.
The Radical Mind is another invaluable contributor by America’s master chronicler of the Left who, like no other, has shown us what it is and what it intends for us, not in the abstruse language of academia, but in no holds barred testimony ripped from the heart of the beast.
No one understands the radical mind like David Horowitz. And no one can describe it half as well. The Radical Mind is not just a book, it’s another punch in the face of the Left.
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