President Trump's Agenda Includes Hitting Back — Hard

From David Horowitz's new book, Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America.

Excerpt from Big Agenda in today's Philadelphia Inquirer: https://t.co/ROAQl98P0V

— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) February 19, 2017

Ironically, it was a billionaire businessman who broke the mold in the 2016 presidential campaign and brought a new voice into Republican politics. Donald Trump took up the cause of the forgotten working class, promising to restore America's industrial prowess and bring back the jobs that a corrupt elite with a globalist outlook had negotiated away in reckless trade deals that sent Americans to the back of the bus and squandered the prosperity they had created over generations.

Equally groundbreaking was Trump's bluntness in confronting the corruption of both parties for participating in a rigged system that left their constituencies out in the cold. The failure to secure the borders was a national disgrace in which both parties were complicit. In focusing on the criminal aliens who had not been blocked at the borders and were not deported, he broke the silence imposed by the politically correct party line. In calling Clinton a "crook," a "liar," and the enabler of a sexual predator, he took her off the pedestal on which her gender and the Democrats' fantasy of a Republican "war on women" had placed her. By speaking out against the Democrats' rape of the inner cities and their treatment of their black constituents as second-class citizens, Trump burst a bubble that had protected Democrats from the consequences of their actions and opened the ranks of the Republican Party to "people of color."

Trump's readiness to go for the Democrats' jugular rallied Republican voters frustrated by their leaders' long-running deference to Democratic outrages and their willingness to keep their party on the defensive. It was this rallying of the Republican troops, who turned out in record crowds during the campaign, that led Trump to call what he had created a "movement." It is a movement, first of all, anchored in its opposition to the Democrats' collectivism and in defense of individual liberty. Perhaps Trump's most significant innovation as a Republican candidate was the moral language he used to indict his Democratic opponent. Previously, Republicans would have been too polite to call their opponents liars and crooks - even when the evidence clearly showed that they were. If their opponent was a woman, they would never have dreamed of using such language, so deferential were they to the stringent rules of political correctness. Trump broke free of this constraint. But Republicans need to take this a step further and create a unifying theme that has a moral resonance with which they can characterize their opponents and level the political playing field.

That theme is individual freedom. The economic redistribution that progressives demand is not "fairness," as they maintain. Socialism is theft and a war on individual freedom. Compulsory public schools are not a service to minorities and the poor but are infringements on their freedom to choose an education that will allow them to pursue the American dream. Obamacare is objectionable not only because its mandates drive up the costs and diminish the quality of health care, as Republicans have argued. Far more important is that government-controlled health care takes away the freedom of individuals to manage their own health and secure their life chances. Onerous taxes and massive government debt are not accounting problems; they are a war on the ability of individuals to work for themselves instead of the government and are therefore an attack on individual freedom. This is the moral language Republicans need to use if they are going to defeat the progressive agenda...

Most excellent.

RTWT.

David Horowitz's New Book Offers Battle Plan

Horowitz's new book is in bookstores now.

And at Amazon, Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America.

Also, at FrongPage Magazine, "BIG AGENDA MATTERS: Horowitz’s new book delivers a battle plan for Trump - and a gut check for Republicans":

“Conservatives were justifiably worried that America’s decline was reaching a point of no return,” writes David Horowitz. After the recent election, many breathed a sign of relief, but as the author of Big Agenda sees it, “one battle is over, but there are many more to come.” To prevail, the combatants must want to win, but as the author notes that has not always been the case with Republicans.

In 2012, for example, Mitt Romney possessed strategic intelligence on his opponent yet failed to deploy it and duly lost the election. In 2016, Romney blasted fellow Republican Donald Trump as “a phony, a fraud,” a charge the openly fraudulent Clinton gleefully used in her attack ads. Veterans of the Bush White House announced that they would vote for Clinton, and somebody named Evan McMullin launched a presidential run in Utah, as Big Agenda notes, “in the hopes of blocking a Trump majority in the Electoral College.”

In the six years they controlled both houses of Congress, the Republicans failed to conduct an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. They threatened to defund the Obama agenda then wound up funding it. Likewise, they failed to investigate Huma Abedin, a Muslim Brotherhood acolyte joined at the hip to Hillary Clinton.

These and other examples of the Republicans’ ineptitude, “failure of nerve” and “cowardice” prompt Horowitz to wonder what they failed to understand about the perils of the nation, and “the destructive agendas of the left that threaten its future.” Here the author draws on his vast experience.

The progressive movement operates on “almost religious convictions,” which is why members move in lockstep, and demonize anyone outside their ranks. The movement divides society into “oppressor” groups such as whites, males, Christians and heterosexuals and victim or “oppressed” groups such as “people of color” and the LGBT squads. For Horowitz this is “the old Marxist wine in new bottles,” with similar results of division and dissention.

“Progressives dream of a world of political correctness and politically enforced equality, where everybody is taken care of by taxing the rich until there are no more rich,

universities and schools admit no ideas that are hurtful or offending, environments have no pollution, countries have no borders, and nations have no armies. Progressives are so enthralled by their dreams of a heaven on earth that they see those who oppose their dreams as evil, which is why they hate them.” But as the author shows, progressives amount to more than utopianism and demonology.

With Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as their bible, they have built a vast power base in government bureaucracies, government employee unions, and educational institutions in particular. Horowitz cites Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor and Department of Homeland Security boss under Obama. As president of the University of California Napolitano deems unacceptable “microagressions” statements such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”  At the same time, as the author observes, UC Berkeley hosts a Center for Race and Gender that includes “Islamophobia Studies,” all funded by California taxpayers.

This movement commands almost total control over the Democratic Party and is too powerful for leaders to deviate from the path. For their part, Republicans are afraid of being called “obstructionists” and stigmatized as heartless, racist, or xenophobic. That fear leaves them ill-equipped for conflict with the interlocking directorate of progressive power. But as the author shows, it is possible to take it on and win.

Horowitz charts government union threats and thuggery against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Yet Walker “demonstrated the will to stand up to them” and prevailed.

In similar style, Hillary Clinton charged that supporters of Donald Trump were “irredeemable,” a veritable “basket of deplorables.” Trump supporters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic— you name it.”

Trump fired back that “Hillary has tremendous hatred in her heart,” and as Horowitz notes, “never had any Republican dared to characterize a Democratic opponent in such damning moral terms to a national audience.” Trump continued to defy political correctness in brawling style, and he won. It will take that kind of defiance to “save America,” as the Big Agenda subtitle says.

“The strategy is to expose their hypocrisy and turn their firepower against them,” Horowitz explains, “to focus on the races, genders, ethnicities, and classes who suffer because of their policies and under their rule. The strategy is to go for the jugular.”

To turn around the battles conservatives have been losing for so long, “they must begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth.” The attack must take away progressives’ “moral superiority and smugness.” Let this reviewer volunteer an example of how that could be done.

In the Sessions hearings, Senator Richard Blumenthal, (D-CT) charged that David Horowitz, who wasn’t there, made “apparently racist” statements, which he did not. When dealing with Blumenthal, conservatives should always point out that he is a liar who said he served in Vietnam but did not. But it’s not just about rhetoric...

Keep reading.

David Horowitz on Hannity's (VIDEO)

Here's his book, David Horowitz, Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America.

And click through at FrontPage Magazine, "HOROWITZ ON 'HANNITY': DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS 'PARTY OF HATE'."

David Horowitz, Big Agenda

*BUMPED*

Horowitz's new book is in bookstores now.

And at Amazon, Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America.

See also Truth Revolt, "Newsmax: Horowitz's 'Big Agenda' Reveals Trump's Coming D.C. 'Earthquake' - 'This book is a guide to fighting the opponents of the conservative restoration'."

Anti-Bannon Hysteria More Evidence Left Has Lost Touch with American People

I was ignoring this issue, precisely because of the absurd hysterics.

But here's David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine:

The losers of the left have worked themselves into such a bizarre hysteria over the fact that they lost the White House that they have lost all connection to reality and are now hyping their most ludicrously paranoid fantasies.

The function of this lunacy is to put off the inevitable moment when they are going to come back to Earth and reckon with the fact that they were horribly wrong and the American people have rejected them. For them, Stephen K. Bannon is the straw man of the hour.

I can’t think of anything stupider than the charge coming from all quarters of the left–including a headline in the pathetically wretched Huffington Post–that Bannon is an anti-Semite. The source? A one sentence claim from an angry ex-wife in divorce court no less, that Bannon didn’t want their kids to go to school with Jews. I find that particularly amusing since Bannon wanted to make a film to celebrate this Jew’s life.

Not to be outdone, CNN, which has been particularly vicious, did a nasty attack on Bannon using another of the thinnest reeds available: This was a headline at Breitbart.com calling Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew.” In fact, neither Breitbart nor Bannon is responsible for that statement. A Jew is. I wrote the article, which was neither requested nor commissioned by Breitbart. And I wrote the headline: “Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.”

I wrote the article when Kristol set out to lead the “Never Trump” movement, after Trump had secured the Republican nomination. I would write it again in a heartbeat. I would write it the same way and with the same headline. Bill Kristol and his friends betrayed the Republican Party, betrayed the American people, and betrayed the Jews when he set out to undermine Trump and elect the criminal Hillary Clinton. Obama and Hillary are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that launched the Arab drive to destroy Israel and push its Jews into the sea (that was their slogan).

If Obama and Hillary had their way, Egypt’s leader al-Sisi would be overthrown, the Brotherhood would be back in power, and Israel would be facing a threat from the biggest military power in the Middle East and almost  certainly at war with Islamic terrorists who openly call for the extermination of the Jews.

I have known Steve Bannon for many years. This is a good man. He does not have an Anti-Semitic bone in his body. In his new position as Chief Strategist in the Trump White House, Bannon is the strongest assurance that people who love this country can have in America’s future, the strongest assurance that America is in the hands of people who will give this country a chance to restore itself and defend itself against its enemies at home and abroad.

Deal of the Day: Save On the Hoover Linx Cordless Stick Vacuum

At Amazon, Hoover Linx BH50010 Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner.

Also, Cyber Power Mini Towers.

BONUS: David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left Volume 7: The Left in Power - Clinton to Obama.

Here's David Horowitz on Tom Hayden

At FrontPage Magazine, "Tom Hayden, LA, and Me":

Tom Hayden and I were once comrades-in-arms in a movement to overthrow America's democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image and help America's enemies defeat her sons on the field of battle. Now he is running for mayor of Los Angeles and many people are asking me, "Does this past matter?" I think it does.

Hayden and I were deadly serious about our revolutionary agendas. During the Vietnam War, Tom traveled many times to North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia and Paris to meet communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders. He came back from Hanoi proclaiming he had seen "rice roots democracy at work." According to people who were present at the time, including Sol Stern, later an aide to Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein, Hayden offered tips on conducting psychological warfare against the U.S. He arranged trips to Hanoi for Americans perceived as friendly to the Communists and blocked entry to those seen as unfriendly, like the sociologist Christopher Jencks. He attacked as "propaganda" stories of torture and labeled American POWs returning home with such stories as "liars." Even after America withdrew its troops from Indochina, Hayden lobbied Congress to end all aid to the anti-Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. When the cutoff came, the regimes fell and the Communists conquered South Vietnam and Cambodia and slaughtered 2.5 million people. When anti-war activist Joan Baez protested the human rights violations of the North Vietnamese victors, Hayden called her a tool of the CIA.

On the domestic front, Hayden advocated urban rebellions and called for the creation of "guerrilla focos" to resist police and other law enforcement agencies. For a while he led a Berkeley commune called the "Red Family," whose "Minister of Defense" trained commune members at firing ranges and instructed high school students in the use of explosives. He was also an outspoken supporter of the violence-prone Black Panther Party.

Why do these facts still seem important? It is not that I think a man cannot learn from his mistakes, or change his mind. Far from it. I myself have recently published a memoir recounting my own activities in the radical Left, a past that I now regret. I find this history relevant not just because Hayden is now proposing himself as the chief executive of one of America's most important cities, but because he has never been fully candid about this past. He has not owned up to the extent of his dealings with America's former enemies or to the true agenda of the Red Family commune, which was little more than a left-wing militia. He has remained silent about the criminal activities which included murder of the Black Panther Party, whose cause he promoted at the time.

To be fair, Hayden has admitted to some second thoughts. In an abstract way, he now understands that the democratic process is better than the totalitarian one. He now claims to embrace more modest ambitions about what can be accomplished in the political arena. Yet, in all these years, he has not found the courage to be candid about what he actually did.

His silence on these matters has been coupled of late with an ongoing attack on the FBI, the CIA and other authorities responsible for the public's security and safety. In his 450-page memoir, published only a few years ago, Hayden included many pages of his FBI dossier, along with his sarcastic comments suggesting that the agents who kept an eye on him were no different from the agents of a police state trying to suppress unpopular ideas. Just last week Hayden, along with American communist Angela Davis and other '60s leftovers, led a march on Los Angeles City Hall organized by something calling itself the "Crack the CIA Coalition." Among its demands were "Dismantle the CIA" and "Stop the media cover-up of CIA drug involvement," a reference to a San Jose Mercury News story discredited by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post that claimed the CIA had flooded Los Angeles' inner-city communities with crack cocaine.

This sowing of suspicion of legal authority is troubling in a man who proposes himself as the leader of a city like Los Angeles, which has many political, racial and economic fault lines, and in which there are visible tensions between its diverse communities. At worst, it fuels the racial paranoia of elements in the inner-city community who are convinced that there is a government plot to eliminate their leaders, not to mention their community itself...

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Tom Hayden, The Long Sixties."

David Horowitz on Trump, the Left's Transformation, Campus Anti-Semitism, and More (VIDEO)

Here's David Horowitz speaking at the Beverly Hills Hotel last Wednesday, October 5, at FrontPage Magazine.

And out yesterday, at Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left, Volume 7: The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama.

David Horowitz, Black Book of the American Left, Volume 7: The Left in Power — Clinton to Obama [BUMPED]

Out October 10th, at Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left, Volume 7: The Left in Power — Clinton to Obama.

David Horowitz, The End of Time

Did you read my post from the other day, "The Nature of the War Against Us"?

That was an excerpt from David Horowitz autobiographical, The End of Time.

The Nature of the War Against Us

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine, "Understanding our enemies both secular and religious":

Love death. This is the improbable instruction that the founder of an Egyptian sect called the Muslim Brotherhood imparted to his followers in the 1920s. A disciple named Mohammed Atta copied this instruction into his journal just before leading the attack on the World Trade Center three days before my biopsy. Was it a coincidence that this dark creed took root in a country of monuments to the human quest for life beyond the grave? The sentence Mohammed Atta actually jotted down was this: “Prepare for holy war and be lovers of death.”

How can one love death? This is a question that is incomprehensible to us unless we are overwhelmed by personal defeats. But it is the enigma at the heart of human history, which is a narrative moved by war between men. For how can men go to war unless they love death, or a cause that is worth more than life itself?

*****

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, but the summons to holy war was planted in Arab hearts more than a thousand years before. The prophet Mohammed created the Muslim faith and claimed he was fulfilling the gospel of Christ. But Mohammed was a warrior and Jesus a man of peace who instructed his followers to shun the path of history and separate the sacred from the profane. His kingdom was not of this world: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s. Mohammed summoned his followers to make the world a place for God, which meant conquering Caesar himself.

Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who was executed for treason in 1966, is recognized as the intellectual father of the Islamic jihad. His brother Mohammed was a teacher of its leader Osama Bin Laden and his texts are read by would-be martyrs in madrassas across the Muslim world. The hope that consumed Sayyid Qutb’s life was to establish the rule of Islam throughout the heathen nations and the Islamic umma, to make the world a holy place.

Sayyid Qutb regarded Christianity as a threat to this Islamic redemption. He condemned Christians for their separation of the sacred from the profane, God’s world from Ceasar’s. He called this division a “hideous schizophrenia,” which reflected the very corruption he set out to correct. Christians had created liberal societies, Qutb said, in which “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended.” Islam’s task was “to unite the world and the faith.” It was what Jewish mystics called “tikkun olam,” a mission to repair the world by bringing about the rule of God’s law on earth.

Qutb wrote this prescription in one of his most famous texts, which he called Social Justice In Islam. The mission of Islam, he explained, was “to unite heaven and earth in a single system.” To make the world one.

This is the totalitarian idea. When the wave of redemption is complete, nothing will remain untransformed, nothing unholy or unjust. Total transformation is the goal of all radical jihads, including the flight that burned the towers of evil in Manhattan. It is the cause that Mohammed Atta served. Like all revolutionary passions, the totalitarian hope of radical Islam is to redeem the world. It is the desire to put order into our lives and to heal the wound in creation.

But there is no earthly doctor who can cure us. The practical consequence of all radical dreams, therefore, is a permanent holy war.

Inevitably and invariably, the effort to make the world whole begins with its division into two opposing camps. In order to conduct the work of salvation, redeemers must separate the light from the darkness, the just from the unjust, the believers from the damned. For radical Muslims this division is the line separating the House of Islam from the House of War, the realm of the faithful from the world of heretics and infidels, who are impure of heart and who must be converted or destroyed.

*****

A thousand years before Mohammed Atta left on his fatal mission, a Shi’ite named Hassan al-Sabbah began a holy war to overthrow the Muslim state. In Hassan’s eyes, the Sunni caliphate that the Prophet Mohammed had established to govern Islam had already fallen into a state of corruption. It was no longer holy; it was no longer God’s. To cleanse Islam and restore the faith, Hassan created a martyr vanguard, whom others referred to as the “Assassins,” and whose deeds have bequeathed to us the word itself. The mission of the Assassins was to kill the apostate rulers of the false Islamic state, and purify the realm.

Because their mission was a service to God, it was considered a dishonor to return alive, and none did. The Koran assured the Assassins that the reward for the life they gave was paradise itself.  “So let them fight in the way of God who sell the present life for the world to come. Whosoever fights in the way of God and is slain, conquers. We shall bring him a mighty wage.” When the Assassins’ first victim, the vizier in Quhistan was slain, Hassan al-Sabbah said, “The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss.” Revolutionaries love death because it is the gate of heaven and the beginning of bliss.

*****

Four years before 9/11, Mohammed Atta traveled to Afghanistan to join the International Islamic Front for the Holy War against Jews and Crusaders, whose leader was Osama bin Laden. Atta was a small, wiry man, the humorless son of a demanding father. After his team of modern Assassins turned the towers in Manhattan into a smoking ruin, his father told reporters, “My son is a very sensitive man.  He is soft and was extremely attached to his mother.”

Before the hour of his jihad, on the very page where he had copied the summons to love death, Mohammed Atta acknowledged that it was a call to perform acts unnatural to men. “Everybody hates death, fears death,” he wrote, but then explained why men should love it nonetheless. “Only the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, will be the ones seeking death.” Mohammed Atta had found a cause that was greater than life itself.

But was Mohammed Atta right? Did his martyrs sign up for death to gain a greater return? This presumes that the only reason people would seek to end their lives in this world is the hope of reward in another. Do they not also run towards what they fear? When we have guilty secrets to hide do we not find ways to end the awful wait before judgment by leaving the clues that betray us? Especially if we are withholding secrets from those we fear and love. Are we not all guilty in the eyes of God, and did not Mohammed Atta fear and love Him?

What if martyrs hate life more than they love death? If we look at the scanty record of Mohammed Atta’s time on this earth, it suggests that escape was always on his mind. “Purify your heart and clean it of all earthly matters,” he wrote in his instructions to his martyr team. “The time of fun and waste has gone. The time of judgment has arrived.”

In his short life, Mohammed Atta does not seem to have had much room for pleasure. His father was a successful lawyer, who was ambitious and austere. The family had two residences but lived frugally and apart from others. “They didn’t visit and weren’t visited,” said a neighbor later. The father agreed, “We are people who keep to ourselves.” An adolescent friend of Mohammed’s described the Atta household: “It was a house of study. No playing, no entertainment. Just study.” Even as an adolescent, to avoid the contamination of the flesh Mohammed would leave the room when Egyptian television featured belly-dancing programs, as it frequently did.

According to those who knew him as a young adult, Mohammed Atta was insular, religiously strict and psychologically intense. The death of an insect made him emotional; the modern world repelled him. A fellow urban planning student remembered how the usually reserved Mohammed became enraged by a hotel construction near the ancient market of Aleppo, which he viewed as the desecration of Islam’s heritage. “Disney World,” he sneered, the Crusaders’ revenge. Mohammed continued to avoid sensual images whether from television screens or wall posters. He hated and feared the female gender, averting his eyes from women who so much as neglected to cover their arms.

Others testified that he could not take pleasure in so basic and social a human act as eating. A roommate recalled that he sustained himself by spooning lumps from a heap of cold potatoes he would mash and leave on a plate in the communal refrigerator for a week at a time. A German convert who hung out with members of the terrorist cell that Mohammed headed, thought it was his morbid seriousness that allowed him to lead others but dismissed him derisively as a “harmless, intelligent, nut.” The people he lived with longed for him to leave. A girlfriend of one of them said, “A good day was when Mohammed was not home.”

Five years before his appointment with death, Mohammed Atta drew up a will in which he admonished his mourners to die as good Muslims. “I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say good-bye to me because I don’t approve it,” he stressed. “The people who will clean my body should be good Muslims… The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won’t touch my genitals…. I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.”

 In life, Mohammed Atta despised women, but on his way to death, he promised his martyrs many, citing the Koranic verse: “Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, ‘Come hither, friend of God.’ They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing.”

Mohammed also wrote down these instructions for the mission ahead: “When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, ‘Allahu Akbar [God is great],’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers.” Whoever neglected his will or did not follow Islam, Mohammed warned, “that person will be held responsible in the end.”

Like Mohammed Atta we long for the judgment that will make right what is not. We want to see virtue rewarded and the wicked rebuked. We yearn for release from the frustrations and disappointments of an imperfect life. Consequently every God of love is also a God of justice, and therefore a God of punishment and death. If this were not so, if God did not care to sort out good from evil, what would His love be worth?

The emotions of fear and hope spring from the love of self, and therefore make our motives suspect. Are those who claim to be God’s warriors pure of heart and above doubt? Can men serve God if they are really serving themselves? Do martyrdoms like Mohammed Atta’s represent noble aspirations, or are they merely desperate remedies for personal defeats?

Mohammed Atta was a withdrawn and ineffectual man who died without achieving his worldly ambitions. He never realized his goal of becoming an architect or urban planner, never married or had a family. Apart from his jihad, Mohammed Atta never made a mark in life. But in death he was a god, bringing judgment to 3,000 innocent souls.

If Allah is the maker of life, as Mohammed Atta believed, could He desire the destruction of what he had created? What is suicide but rage at the living, and contempt for the life left behind? Mohammed Atta offered his deed of destruction as a gift to God. In his eyes, his martyrdom was unselfish and the strangers he killed were not innocent. His mission was to purge the world of wasteful pleasures, to vanquish the guilty and to implement God’s grace.

But if God wanted to cleanse His creation, why would He need Mohammed Atta to accomplish His will?

*****

These are the questions of an agnostic, who has no business saying what God desires or does not. Nonetheless, an agnostic can appreciate believers like Pascal, whose humility is transparent and who is attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible through faith. Why are we born? Why are we here? Why do we die? An agnostic can respect the faith of a skeptic who confronts our misery and refuses to concede defeat. He can admire a faith that provides consolation for the inconsolable, and in a heartless world finds reason to live a moral life.

But murder is not moral and the desire to redeem the world requires it. Because redemption requires the damnation of those who do not want to be saved.      

*****

My father was an atheist, and a progressive who embraced the secular belief of the social redeemers. Along with all who think they have practical answers to the absurd cruelties of our human lot, my father felt superior to those who do not, especially those who take solace in a religious faith. In this prejudice, my father had impressive company. The psychologist Sigmund Freud regarded religion as an illusion without a future. But, like all revolutionaries Freud could not live without his own reservoir of belief, which was science. Progress was his human faith.

Whether they are secularists like my father and Freud, or religious zealots like Mohammed Atta, those who believe we can become masters of our fates think they know more than Pascal. But in their search for truth where do they imagine they have gone that he did not go before them? What do they think they know that Pascal did not? Their bravado is only a mask for the inevitable defeat that is our common lot, an inverse mirror of their human need...

Keep reading.

VIDEO: David Horowitz on 'Progressive Racism'

This is the full clip from Horowitz's recent talk at the Wednesday Morning Club in Beverly Hills.

Watch, "Freedom Center president discusses his new book exposing the racial hatred at the heart of the American Left."

And score your copy, at Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume VI: Progressive Racism.

The 'Never Trump' Murder-Suicide Pact

From David Horowitz, at Breitbart (via FrontPage Magazine):

My Breibart piece today:https://t.co/u27aJSDAJa

— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) June 17, 2016

Barack Obama delivers nuclear weapons and $150 billion to America’s mortal enemy in the Middle East – and every Democrat to a man and woman defends his betrayal; Hillary Clinton violates the Espionage Act and delivers classified secrets, including information on an impending drone attack, to America’s enemies – and every Democrat to a man and woman defends her. Obama and Clinton lie about matters of war and peace – and every progressive publicly swears they are telling the truth.

But when Donald Trump insinuates the president is a man of uncertain loyalties, Republican leaders back away from him. When Trump proposes fighting “radical Islam,” securing America’s borders, stopping unvetted immigration from Muslim terrorist states, surveilling mosques, and scrutinizing the families of terrorist actors, Republicans join Democrats in denouncing him, or take an uncomfortable distance or maintain a silence that leaves him to fend for himself.

The left is blaming Christians, Republicans, and guns for the Orlando slaughter. The president and Hillary are claiming that ISIS is on the run – a lie flatly contradicted by the CIA director himself. They want to disarm Americans. If Hillary is elected, borders will stay open, and protecting Muslims will take priority over fighting Islam’s holy war against us.

In other words, Democrat betrayers of America are on the attack, while Republican leaders who claim to be patriots are on the run. Where, to take one example, is Ted Cruz? He claims to be a patriot and care about the Constitution, but he is AWOL — sulking like Achilles in his tent over personal slights he can’t get past to fight for his country’s survival. The Republican leader of the Senate and his second-in-command have both announced they will not participate in the presidential election, while the leader of the House makes clear his extreme embarrassment over Trump’s proposals to establish immigration policies appropriate to a nation under siege. This is the sad state of the Republican forces in retreat in an election campaign that will decide the fate of our country.

There are actually two wars we are engaged in– one with the Islamic caliphate and the other with an American left that refuses to recognize the enemy we face or the magnitude and nature of the threat. In this internal war, too many on the right have taken a course whose only practical effect can be seen as a betrayal of their cause. Erick Erickson has summed up the view of the Republican renegades in this succinct phrase: “We are in the midst of a murder-suicide pact that will be our ruination.”

This is, in fact, a precise description of what the #NeverTrump right is up to. But in Erickson’s inversion of reality, it is “the Republican Party [that] intends to murder the nation and commit suicide along the way.” What Erickson and his fellow saboteurs, led by Mitt Romney and Bill Kristol, want is for the Republican Party to block Trump and repudiate the record number of Republican primary voters who nominated him. This would actually be a Republican suicide in November – one that would indeed “murder the nation.”

Although the defection of the Republican leadership from the field of battle is still ongoing, there has been a break in the ranks of the #NeverTrump spoilers. Two of their leading intellectual figures, Hugh Hewitt and Andy McCarthy, have finally come to realize not just the futility of their efforts but their destructiveness as well. For the sake of the nation, let’s hope that there are a lot more such reversals on the way.

Meanwhile, the really big problem remains that of the Republican leadership, which thinks that “We’re stuck with Trump but we won’t dump him!” is an appropriate battle cry. As we all know, the Democrats are vicious, unprincipled attack dogs with a kept and unprincipled media in their camp. Passivity in the face of this blitzkrieg is, in practice, no different than a white-flag surrender. Paul Ryan summed up Republican fatuity in his answers to media questions in the wake of Orlando about whether he’s still supporting Trump. Ryan’s answer: he would be defending Republican principles in this election. Well, Paul, principles aren’t running in this election. Candidates are. And unless Republicans rally around Trump, and Trump beats Hillary, Republican principles are going down with him.

PREVIOUSLY: "Hugh Hewitt: We Can't Dump #DonaldTrump."

Bill Kristol Doubles Down on Betrayal of America

Previous iterations of the debate are here, "Renegade Jew Backlash."

And here comes David Horowitz for another round, at FrontPage Magazine, "Kristol's Betrayal Gets Serious" (and Big Government, via Memeorandum):

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country… https://t.co/RzgH5toXhF https://t.co/ZtADspVdJv

— memeorandum (@memeorandum) May 30, 2016

Open borders, Sanctuary Cities, importing unvetted Muslim refugees from the Middle East are but the tip of the iceberg in assessing the threat that the Democratic Party and its candidate (whoever it is) pose to America’s national security. For twenty-three years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Democratic Party has been the party of appeasement and retreat in the holy war that fanatical Muslims have declared on us. The first bombing of the World Trade Center misfired but still killed 6 people and wounded 1,000 others. Clinton never visited the site while his administration insisted on treating it as a criminal act by individuals who needed to be tried in criminal courts, an attitude that would culminate in Barack Obama’s refusal to recognize that we were in a war at all, and certainly not one with fanatical Muslims. To a man and woman the Democratic Party’s elected officials continue to participate in and support this denial.

Following the first World Trade Center bombing, there were three more devastating attacks on American assets by al-Qaeda’s barbarians during the Clinton administration, with no response and no change of mind towards the nature of the threat. There were also massive security breaches, including the theft by Communist China of America’s nuclear arsenal and the publishing of all our hitherto classified data from America’s nuclear weapons tests. Clinton’s leftist Secretary of Energy published the reports for the world to see, as she put it, “to end the bomb-building culture.

Following the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration focused on Afghanistan, which had provided al-Qaeda with a base to attack us, and Iraq, which had violated 16 Security Council resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce, which Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had repeatedly violated and prevent him from reviving the massive chemical and nuclear weapons programs we had destroyed. In 1998 Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, a further violation of the Gulf War truce and a clear sign of his determination to revive his weapons programs. Embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton fired 451 cruise missiles into Iraq, a pointless response that was correctly seen by critics at the time as an attempt to deflect attention from his appearance before the grand jury looking into his personal disorders.

The Bush administration put 200,000 troops on Iraq’s borders, which prompted Saddam Hussein to re-admit the inspectors, but then to throw obstacles in their path. Bush went before the UN and secured a 17th Security Council resolution, unanimously passed, in the form of an ultimatum to Saddam to destroy any weapons of mass destruction he possessed and provide proof that he had done so. Bush also went to Congress and got an authorization for the use of force from Senate but not House Democrats. The ultimatum date came and went, and to prevent the word of the United States and the commitment of 200,000 troops from meaning nothing, Bush proceeded to invade Iraq. But before he did so he gave Saddam the option to quit the country in which case the invasion would be called off. A simpler measure would have been to assassinate Saddam, since he was the Iraq problem. But thanks to a law passed by the post-Watergate Democrats the CIA is prevented from assassinating foreign leaders, which made the invasion necessary.

Within three months of the invasion, with American troops still in harms’ way. The Democrats who had authorized the use of force and spoken in favor of the removal of Saddam turned against the war and began a five-year campaign to sabotage it. The Democrats reversal – and betrayal of our men and women in arms - was triggered by a presidential primary in which a leftwing candidate, Howard Dean, was running away with the Democratic nomination. This betrayal prevented us from pursuing Saddam’s generals and chemical weapons into Syria, and bringing Assad to heel. Bush managed to rescue the war effort and defeat al-Qaeda on the battlefield through the “surge” that Democrats opposed. But then Obama took charge and implemented, the Democrats’ America-is- guilty platform of appeasement and retreat, creating a power vacuum in Iraq and Syria that ISIS quickly filled. At the same time, the Democrats have systematically taken down our military which is now at its lowest levels since World War II.

This is the issue that defines the coming election. A party in denial about the Muslim holy war against America and its allies, whose basic instinct is to weaken America’s defenses and enable her enemies, is opposed by a party that wants to rebuild America’s strength, secure our borders and put the safety of our people first.

The Kristol attack on the Republican Party and its candidate Donald Trump, is an attack on all Americans, and needs to be seen in that light.

RTWT at the link.

Progressive Racism: A History of Racial Truth, Dare, and Deception

From Colin Flaherty, at FrontPage Magazine, "David Horowitz’s new book sets the record straight on the Left's politics of destruction."

And buy the book, at Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume VI: Progressive Racism.

David Horowitz Is Right

More on the "renegade Jew" backlash. From Pamela Geller, at Big Government, "On Trump and the Jews, David Horowitz Is Right."

Geller: On Trump and the Jews, David Horowitz Is Right - Breitbart https://t.co/qgZwKehYRt via @BreitbartNews

— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) May 17, 2016

Renegade Jew Backlash

Following-up from earlier, "Bill Kristol, Renegade Jew," and "'Little Ben' Shapiro Attacks David Horowitz for Breitbart 'Renegade Jew' Piece."

David Horowitz responds, at FrontPage Magazine, "A low-grade counter-attack":

I have been accused of being a provocateur all my life – when I was a leftist in the 60s proclaiming (God help me) that Vietnam was the fulfillment of the American dream; when I left the left declaring that, “the beginning of political morality is anti-Communism;” when I said that identity politics “owed more to Mussolini than to Marx;” when I opposed reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact because it was “bad for blacks and racist too;” and when I organized “Islamo-fascism Awareness Weeks on a hundred college campuses across the country. Now I have provoked a firestorm on the Internet through a Breitbart article that called Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew.”

According to the Internet Webster synonyms for renegade are “defector” and “deserter.” I applied the term to Kristol because of his efforts to launch a third party campaign to block the nominee of his party, split the conservative vote, and ensure the election of a Democrat whose party had provided a path to nuclear weapons to the Jews’ mortal enemy (and America’s as well). I picked the emotional term “renegade” because I wanted to shock Kristol and his co-conspirators into realizing the gravity of their actions.

However, I had no idea that this would provoke the reaction it did. A veritable tsunami of attacks were directed at Breitbart and myself from Kristol’s supporters on the “neo-conservative” right and from die-hard enemies of the Republican nominee in all political quarters. Even the Anti-Defamation League, which had once attacked me over my anti-reparations campaign) chimed in, calling the title of my piece “inappropriate and offensive.” This was actually pretty mild considering others were denouncing it as “disgraceful” and “an anti-Semitic slur.”

How by the way is the characterization “anti-Semitic slur” even possible? Are Jews immune to defecting from causes? When I publicly repudiated the radical cause, thirty years ago, the first attack on me appeared in the Village Voice under the title, “The Intellectual Life and the Renegade Horowitz.” It was written by Paul Berman, who years later became a somewhat chastened radical himself. Berman’s attack stung me – as I hoped my charge would sting Kristol and cause him to reconsider his course. But the epithet didn’t bother anybody but me. My current critics would stigmatize me not only as a defector from the conservative cause but as a double agent who never really left the left. After my Breitbart article appeared, Commentary editor (and Kristol relative) John Podhoretz sent me a one-line email: “Once a Stalinist always a Stalinist,” while Commentary writer Jonathan Tobin in a piece titled “Breitbart ‘Renegade Jew’ Disgrace,” suggest: “You can take the boy out of the Bolsheviks but you can’t take the Bolshevik out of the boy.”

Like many of the attacks on Trump, these squalid responses with their flimsy intellectual content call to mind a famous remark of Lionel Trilling’s, made more than 60 years ago. Conservatives, he wrote, did not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas.” It is not that Kristol or his defender Tobin haven’t had worthy and defensible ideas. They have. But this makes it even sadder to see the flimsy arguments they trot out to discredit Trump and to defend Kristol’s indefensible campaign. Criticisms of Trump’s personal attacks on his Republican rivals are reasonable. But not when they fail to take into account the 60,000 political ads that were aired by those same rivals whose purpose was to destroy him. (The ads were not, should anybody have missed them, about policies and issues.)

I have no quarrel with people who have doubts about what Trump would do if elected. It is the task of the candidate to allay those doubts. For reasonable critics Trump’s announcement of his prospective Supreme Court nominees should be important steps along the way. My quarrel is not with Trump skeptics, but with the effort to nullify the vote of the Republican electorate – a politically active and informed, and conservative segment of that electorate. Kristol’s third party effort exudes an elitist contempt for the will of the people, which is particularly unbecoming in a crowd that prides itself on being “constitutional conservatives.”

Finally, I am disturbed by the failure of the nullifiers to consider the perils of the choices our country now faces. For the life of me I cannot understand how my friends in the conservative movement cannot have qualms about derailing the candidacy of the Republican Party’s pro-Israel, pro-military, pro-American nominee, and electing the candidate of a party that has built its foreign policy around making Islamist Iran the number one power in the Middle East, providing its jihadists with a path to nuclear weapons, putting $150 billion into their terrorist war chest and turning a blind eye to their circumvention of international restrictions so that they can build ballistic missiles capable of destroying the Jewish state and causing incalculable damage to the United States.

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BONUS: Peter Collier and, David Horowitz, eds., The Anti Chomsky Reader.

'Little Ben' Shapiro Attacks David Horowitz for Breitbart 'Renegade Jew' Piece

Following-up from yesterday, "Bill Kristol, Renegade Jew."

"Little Ben's" gone off the rails. He's been practically hysterical since Ted Cruz dropped out of the race, and he's torching all his old relationships, even to David Horowitz.

Bizarre.

Breitbart, ‘Renegade Jews,’ And The Anti-Semitic Wing Of The Trump Movement | Daily Wire https://t.co/ihWEz8jF8t pic.twitter.com/KWtVvJsl2y

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 16, 2016

The 'Never Trump' Pouters

From David Horowitz, at Big Government, "The conservatives who have declared war on the primary victor are displaying a myopia that could be deadly in November when Donald Trump will lead Republicans against a party that has divided the country, destroyed its borders, empowered its enemies, and put 93 million Americans into dependency on the state":

The ‘Never Trump’ Pouters
Reckless disregard
Insanity instead of putting #AmericaFirst 🔽🔽https://t.co/BxND2fbe4G pic.twitter.com/WgLQqt1OQ9

— Kristin Billitere (@SpecialKMB1969) May 9, 2016

This reckless disregard for consequences is matched only by a blindness to what has made Trump the presumptive nominee. When he entered the Republican primaries a year ago, Trump was given no chance of surviving even the first contest, let alone becoming the Republican nominee. That was the view of all the experts, and especially those experts with the best records of prediction.

Trump — who had never held political office and had no experience in any political job — faced a field of sixteen tested political leaders, including nine governors and five senators from major states. Most of his political opponents were conservatives. During the primaries, several hundred million dollars were spent in negative campaign ads — nastier and more personal than in any Republican primary in memory. At least 60,000 of those ads were aimed at Trump, attacking him as a fraud, a corporate predator, a not-so-closet liberal, an ally of Hillary Clinton, indistinguishable from Barack Obama, an ignoramus, and too crass to be president (Bill Clinton, anyone?).

These negative ads were directed at Republican primary voters, a constituency well to the right of the party. These primary voters are a constituency that may be said to represent the heart of the conservative movement in America and are generally more politically engaged and informed than most Republican voters. Trump won their support. He won by millions of votes — more votes from this conservative heartland than any Republican in primary history. To describe Trump as ignorant — as so many Beltway intellectuals have — is merely to privilege book knowledge over real-world knowledge, not an especially wise way to judge political leaders.

A chorus of detractors has attempted to dismiss Trump’s political victory as representing a mere plurality of primary voters, but how many candidates have won outright majorities among a field of seventeen, or five, or even three? When the Republican primary contest was actually reduced to three, Trump beat the “true conservative,” Ted Cruz, with more than fifty percent of the votes. He did this in blue states and red states, in virtually all precincts and among all Republican demographics. He clinched the nomination by beating Cruz with an outright majority in conservative Indiana.

In opposing the clear choice of the Republican primary electorate, the “Never Trump” crowd is simply displaying their contempt for the most politically active Republican voters. This contempt was dramatically displayed during a CNN segment with Trump’s spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, and Bill Kristol, the self-appointed guru of a Third Party movement whose only result can be to split the Republican ticket and provide Hillary with her best shot at the presidency.

Pierson urged Kristol to help unify the Party behind its presumptive nominee. Kristol grinned and answered her: “You want leaders to become followers.” Could there be a more arrogant response? By what authority does Bill Kristol regard himself as a leader? Trump has the confidence of millions of highly committed and generally conservative Republican voters. That makes him a leader. Who does Bill Kristol lead except a coterie of inside-the-Beltway foreign policy interventionists, who supported the fiasco in Libya that opened the door to al-Qaeda and ISIS?

I say this as someone who has written three books supporting the intervention in Iraq and who thinks Trump is dead wrong on this issue. However, I also understand that the Bush administration did not defend the war the Democrats sabotaged, allowing its critics to turn it into a bad war in the eyes of the American people. Consequently, Trump’s attack on the intervention is a smart political move that will allow him to win over many Democrat, Independent, and even conservative voters who think Iraq was a mistake and do not appreciate the necessity of that war or the tragedy of the Democrats’ opposition to it. You can’t reverse historical judgments in election year sound bites. Understanding this, instinctively or otherwise, makes Trump politically smarter than his Washington detractors.

Conservatives like Kristol claim to oppose Trump on principles but then turn to Mitt Romney for a Third Party run. This is the same Mitt Romney who, as governor of Massachusetts, was the father of Obamacare but ran against Obamacare in 2012. So much for principles...

Keep reading.

I love David Horowitz.

I'm personally flabbergasted at how puerile and nasty these "Never Trump" pouters have become. They're off-putting, to say the very least.