Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
To book an interview with Michael contact Sandy at sandy@mystic-art.com.
“I love America. Warts and all and with no apologies. I love her land, people, culture, history, literature, poetry — all of it.” So begins Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand, a collection of essays that serve as a testament of one man’s deep and abiding love for his homeland. It is a love rooted in recognition of America’s unique place in history as the world’s foremost defender of human liberty, individual rights, the rule of law, limited government, free enterprise, and freedom of thought. Indeed, these are precisely the principles to which Mr. Finch, as the longtime president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, has passionately devoted so much of his life.
But in recent decades, this beloved land has been afflicted by what Finch calls a “cultural crisis” and a “rot in our soul,” as evidenced by a proliferation of “people adrift, alone, lost connections, rising drug addiction, mental illness, depression.” Observing how these hallmarks of spiritual atrophy manifest themselves visibly on the streets of urban America, Finch writes that “the ‘uglification’ of American culture” is now routinely emblematized by “massive amounts of trash, filth, … burned buildings, graffiti, [and] boarded-up businesses.”
The cities where such totems of societal decline abound are almost all controlled politically by leftists, whose “insatiable lust for power” Finch decries. The power they crave is one that aims to “reshape, remake and reeducate the reactionaries, the retrograde, the masses” — all in pursuit of the “utopian ideal” of an “ever-progressive heaven upon this earth.” Finch observes that, tragically, the hearts of countless well-meaning, unsuspecting people have been charmed and captivated by the Left’s fanciful, grandiose pledge to “make perfect what is flawed” and “cure all that ails” the presumably benighted masses. “How easily we succumb,” the author laments, “seduced and drawn into these illusions” — illusions that commonly ensnare those who eschew religious faith and seek instead to fill the spiritual void in their souls with a devotion to leftwing political crusades. Such individuals are especially vulnerable to what Finch identifies as the very enticing “false virtue” of charlatans professing “to be like God, indeed to be God” – and thereby proclaiming their own right “to rule … by force of might.” It is a drama, he explains, that has been reenacted many times throughout human history, where “the cleansing blood of the innocents” rages like a river across the landscape of “a world decimated and barren” — and where “the guilty are never held to account” for their “unspeakable crimes.”
With specificity, Finch identifies particular monstrous evils that the Left has inflicted on our nation in modern times. He observes, for instance, that in the “grievance culture” of the Left, “race has become an industry” premised upon a venomous “hatred of white people.” He further notes that a denial of reality – even biological reality — has infected the leftist mind: “We can’t even discuss certain things anymore,” Finch writes. “What is a man, what is a woman?” The very fact that such questions need to be addressed at all, leaves the author feeling as though he is living in an unrecognizable, alien land:
“I don’t even begin to understand what this sexual identity crisis is all about. Just to say this, incurs wrath. Something isn’t right, or maybe I am just getting too old. Our hearts cry out, not in judgment, but for the lost souls, the confused and depressed, the anxiety and pain that so many feel.”
These are not the words of a scold shouting condemnations from a rooftop, but rather, of a gentleman extending grace and compassion to people who are obviously – and needlessly — afflicted by a psychological burden born of social contagion.
Finch further observes that the Left has expended inconceivably enormous energies on the task of tearing down and delegitimizing America’s founders, its founding doctrines, its history, and its institutions. As a result of those efforts, “all that was once held true and right has been torn and ripped and attacked as ghosts of an evil past.” “What had built this nation into a city on the hill and beacon,” he elaborates, “is now ridiculed as nothing, nothing but a graveyard wavering on the guilty carcass of a cancerous beginning and the Founders’ dreams that we are now taught are nothing but nightmares.”
Many profoundly destructive ramifications have grown out of the timorous self-doubt and self-flagellation that the Left’s contempt for our country has spawned in the hearts of so many Americans. People who do not believe in their own nation’s goodness, righteousness, and moral legitimacy, will certainly be disinclined to defend it in any meaningful way. We saw this deplorable mindset in action during the Biden years, when the President and his entire administration steadfastly refused to protect the sanctity of America’s borders – intentionally permitting what Finch calls an “invasion” by countless thousands of illegal aliens who entered the country unobstructed, month after month after month. “The complete negligence by the Biden administration” was “beyond criminal,” Finch declares in one of his essays, decrying the “full scale anarchy” of “a border land in chaos,” dominated by “lawless and armed gangs” conducting a veritable reign of terror.
And for what purpose did Biden and his cohorts permit those millions of illegals to make a mockery of America’s immigration laws? Clearly, the objective was to import millions of newcomers who, they hoped, would eventually coalesce into a massive, reliable Democrat voting bloc. Such diabolical schemes prompt Finch to remind us: “There is a reason our Founding Fathers agonized about what would happen with freedom in a society without virtue.”
But Finch’s work goes far beyond merely identifying, analyzing, and decrying the various crises that afflict America and its people. He is prepared also to engage in, and help lead, a passionate battle of ideas against the enemies of our nation. “We will not be sold, enslaved and controlled by utopian dreams of radical minds and from tyrant’s grasp of these poisoned serpents,” he writes, exhorting his fellow countrymen to join him in the “fight for our honor, our family, our homes, our flag, our heritage and God-given rights.”
During his more than 20 years as a leader at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Finch has been a staunch, indefatigable general in the battle to save America by proudly articulating the principles of conservatism and laying bare, in blunt and unapologetic tones, the toxic agendas of the Left. Finch’s comrade-in-arms, the late David Horowitz, gave voice to this mission when he said: “Over the years people would refer to my Freedom Center as a ‘think tank’ and I would correct them, ‘No, it’s a battle tank,’ because that is what I felt was missing most in the conservative cause — troops ready and willing to fight fire with fire.”
In 2015, Finch himself was quick to recognize the greatness that lay within one extraordinary, rising political figure who openly relished the opportunity to “fight fire with fire” by speaking plainly and boldly about the weightiest of issues: Donald Trump. Finch understood that Trump represented a welcome change from the many Republicans who seemed to believe that they only stood a chance of winning their party’s presidential nomination if they presented themselves to the public as mealy-mouthed milquetoasts whose every utterance was delivered in measured, inoffensive tones.
When Trump’s detractors in 2016 argued that he was too crude, undisciplined, and politically incorrect to win the White House, Finch used his pen to mount an impassioned defense of Trump and make the case for his election. “I will come right out and say it,” he wrote in an October 2016 essay that is reprinted in A Time to Stand. “I could give a damn what Donald Trump says in private…. [T]he false piety on display by so many Republicans and conservatives is nothing more than a symptom of the wussification of America and the American male and the selling out of our liberty…. George Patton, Ulysses S. Grant, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson and so many others were hardly saints…. Patton wouldn’t last five minutes in today’s army of political correctness…. But how many American lives and the lives in the German camps did he save by steamrolling into Germany months ahead of schedule? We are not electing a Pope — we need a leader. Conservatives fall into the trap of thinking that with a pious perfect Christian who is a moral saint, we are guaranteed the traits necessary to lead our country in a time of crises. I am sorry – they are not one in the same.”
At its heart, A Time to Stand is both a battle cry and a love song to one’s country. A blend of patriot and poet, Finch possesses the rare ability to articulate the urgency of the fight to save America from the Left’s depredations, while giving voice, just as eloquently, to the warm and tender emotions that have made his life here so very joyful. “Gaze at a Thomas Cole painting,” he writes, “listen to a Samuel Barber composition, walk along the wide Missouri River, get lost in the poems of Walt Whitman, study the life of George Washington, stand in the fields at Antietam, recite Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural, and don’t dare apologize for any of it. Not a thing. Not a darn minute of our history needs to be sullied like the haters of our great nation are doing today.”
A Time to Stand is a book that will warm the hearts of all who love America, and rouse the patriotic spirits of those who wish to help defend it.
Originally published at World Net Daily.