[Order David Horowitz’s new book, The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left: HERE.]   

“Progressivism is ultimately a criminal mentality,” David Horowitz states bluntly in his latest work, The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left from Humanix Books. “The belief that the world is marching towards justice, and that to be a progressive means one is on ‘the right side of history,’ is a delusion that will justify any and every atrocity, and already has.”

It is this sort of direct, gloves-off assault on the Left that has always characterized Horowitz’s vast body of conservative writing, to which he has passionately devoted the last nearly four decades.

There is no conservative writer better than David Horowitz at explicating and exposing the radical Left’s power-hungry agenda and mindset, because as a former child of hardcore Communist parents, as a former far-Left activist engaged in revolution alongside the likes of the Black Panthers, and as a former radical intellectual well-versed in Progressive (i.e., Communist) theory, he knows the Left better than they know themselves. As he puts it himself in his new book, “Having been born into this political left and then rejected it, I am familiar with its seductive public message, and its sinister concealed intentions.”

This has made him a serious threat to the Left and their aims ever since his political conversion, documented so compellingly in his essential autobiography Radical Son and explored in other works such as Destructive Generation, co-written with his long-time writing partner, fellow political convert, and Freedom Center co-founder, the late Peter Collier. The Left hates and fears no one more than an apostate from the ideological faith.

One truth that Horowitz has tried for many years to convince the Right to accept is that the radical Left – the ideological wellspring of such totalitarianism as Mao’s Cultural Revolution and its current American incarnation, Cancel Culture – cannot be defeated through polite, fair-minded debate. The Right, Horowitz has always insisted, must abandon its preference of honorable defeat to messy victory; instead, it must cultivate a will to win and a taste for political brawling. This is why he has always described the Freedom Center as, not merely a think tank, but a battle tank.

As the Left’s ruthless pursuit of power has accelerated in recent years, Horowitz has responded with an urgent flurry of calls to arms. His most recent titles – including The Enemy Within, The Final Battle, I Can’t Breathe, Dark Agenda, Take No Prisoners, and now The Radical Mind – are tightly compressed but insightful, scorched-earth attacks on the Left’s corrosive agenda to dismantle our Constitution, our culture, and our country. The Radical Mind clocks in at a streamlined 140 pages of text (with another 20 of source notes) but its six concise chapters manage to address the entire wrecking ball of leftist destruction gaining momentum under the Biden administration.

In “Heading Towards the Abyss,” Horowitz identifies and dissects “the root cause of the lawlessness consuming America,” which is a party “under the control of a Marxist left that believes in breaking the law for the sake of ‘social justice’ and puts its faith in the supremacy of the state.” He also identifies the root cause of the conservative “self-destructive” reticence to recognize that Democrat “policies are criminal, racist and fascist” and to publicly call them out as such.

In “Ideology Uber Alles,” he reminds us that for progressives, “the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the ‘revolution’ against a Constitution that restrains their lust for totalitarian power, and thus their only morality is “the end justifies the means” – in other words, no morality at all.

“White Skin Privilege” traces the invention of that term in the era of the Weathermen domestic terror group and the radical SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, movement on university campuses during the 1960s. The SDS called for “an all-out fight against ‘white skin privileges’” and “pigs,” or police and military personnel. These terms are “racist poisons intended to dehumanize the enemy,” Horowitz notes. Fifty years later they have permeated the culture as part of a collectivist ideology “which erases the individual in favor of group identities based on race and gender.” The end result has been to smear AmeriKKKa, as the SDS referred to it, as a white supremacist nation.

In the chapter titled “Existential Threat,” Horowitz targets the anti-American Congressional radicals known as “the Squad,” including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, antisemitic “Palestinian-American” Rashida Tlaib, and Muslim immigration fraud enthusiast Ilhan Omar. Horowitz labels the Squad “a terrorist caucus in the Democrat-run House.”

“A Tsunami of Hate” addresses the division in our nation exacerbated by the Left’s deranged hatred for Donald Trump and his supporters. “If there is an existential threat to American democracy,” Horowitz writes, “surely the tsunami of political hate, the condemnation and dismissal of half the population as ‘white oppressors’ and ‘deplorables’ as a prime source of that threat.”

In “Progressive Blindness,” Horowitz examines the Left’s “sinister stupidity” and its “envy and resentment, which are the key passions of the progressive mind.” He picks apart the Left’s false construction of “a hierarchy of oppression,” declaring,

There is no hierarchy of oppression in America’s constitutional order. But there are such hierarchies in the socialist societies admired by progressives: Cuba, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Russia. The social hierarchy in these countries is determined by the hierarchy and the ruling party that bills itself as the savior of the people, which is precisely how progressives see themselves.

In a short coda titled “Defense of the Republic,” Horowitz warns, “the hour is late, and the forces of darkness are upon us.” We are embroiled in “a battle that pits America’s defenders – believers in ordered liberty – against the believers in the unlimited power and authority of the state.” He adds, rightly, that “the two institutions that will lead the defense of America’s constitutional order are the American family” – because the nuclear family is the first line of defense against the intrusions of the state – “and members – or respecters – of Judeo-Christian religions” – because that community pledges its allegiance to a higher power than the jealous state.

There is so much more depth to this book than the brief chapter highlights summarized above. The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left is loaded with ammunition for understanding and countering these subversive fanatics. Like virtually all of Horowitz’s books – certainly his most recent ones – his latest is a must-read battle cry to rally conservatives out of a defeatism and gentility that have plagued our side for too long, to stop playing defense, and to take the fight to the envious haters of American freedom.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior