[David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, is released today, May 7th. Order it: HERE.]
Freedom Center founder and bestselling author David Horowitz calls his newest book, America Betrayed: How a Christian Monk Created America & Why the Left is Determined to Destroy Her, the most important book he has ever written. For the author of such essential conservative works as Radical Son, Destructive Generation, One-Party Classroom, The Unholy Alliance, the eight-volume The Black Book of the American Left, and dozens of others, this is a remarkable assertion.
But America Betrayed, from Final Battle Books, weighing in at a streamlined 150 pages, arguably is his most crucial work, not least because it distills so much of his life’s work into one densely packed warhead of a book. As Horowitz explains in the preface, “I wrote this book to provide a concise, easily digested and accurate history of race in America to serve as an antidote to the hateful lies progressives have promoted about their own country.”
Those lies stem from the left’s mission to “obliterate the foundations of the old social order” by smearing America as an irredeemably and systemically racist nation which must be deconstructed entirely to make way for a socially just, equitable paradise. A steady torrent of this subversive messaging over the decades has eroded the willingness and ability of impressionable younger generations to defend their own country and culture from the left’s relentless assaults.
The “Christian monk” of the book’s subtitle is Martin Luther, one of the central figures of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. Horowitz explains how in his own youth he hated the notoriously antisemitic Luther as “the foremost German precursor of the Nazis,” but eventually came to appreciate the man whom today he labels “one of freedom’s greatest heroes.” Luther’s accomplishments, Horowitz writes, made everyone who lived under “the canopy of his ideas” freer, safer, and more at home in the world – “including and especially the members of my persecuted tribe.”
Horowitz goes on to recount his youthful flirtation with Christianity as the son of devout Marxists whose revolutionary fervor he shared. That misguided fervor, he realized in hindsight after his political conversion, stemmed from the arrogant leftist assumption that humanity’s flaws are rooted not in human nature but in an “external reality called ‘society.’” Thus, fancying ourselves to be the gods of our own universe, we can grant ourselves redemption by undertaking to re-create society – i.e., to “build back better.” In retrospect, Horowitz marvels,
How could we have ever believed this? How could we believe that the same human beings whose greed, deceit, envy, bigotry, sadism, and hate were responsible for human misery could liberate the world if only they could acquire enough power to compel everyone else to obey them? Was there ever a more perverse and destructive idea? There never was.
To this obvious misery we added a new dimension of perversity. To seek the redemption of the world was a holy mission. Indeed, what mission could be nobler? Therefore, what lie would our social justice warriors not tell, what crime not commit or support, to achieve such a miraculous result? Our radical utopianism was a criminal creed.
Horowitz explains that “those of us who broke free from these utopian delusions came to understand that the corrupter of the world was not society, patriarchy, or race. It was us”:
These truths are encapsulated in the most humbling and liberating Lutheran doctrine of all: justification by faith… the idea that Martin Luther put front and center in his thoughts about the human condition… [I]f redemption is possible, if a harmonious world can be achieved, it will not be by the efforts of those who are the source of human misery but only by the grace of a God whom mortals cannot seduce or corrupt.
As it happens, this is also the foundational belief of a secular democracy, based on equality and individual freedom.
Horowitz credits Luther with laying the foundations of the free world in his liberating ideas of the sanctity of the individual and equality, and of “the priesthood of all believers” that marked his break with the Catholic Church and became the cornerstone of Protestantism. Luther’s translation of the New Testament into the vernacular, and the timely invention of the printing press, fueled the Reformation and “an unprecedented empowerment of individuals,” ultimately resulting in the creation of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“The Lutheran principles of a free society – religious or secular – can be summarized in three axioms,” Horowitz notes. “First, the equality of all before the law; second, the freedom of all in matters of conscience; and third, the unalienable nature of the rights protecting these two.” America’s Founding Fathers infused these principles into the Declaration and Constitution, extending them to the universal community of believers in our founding values.
As for slavery, “For 3000 years [it] was regarded as a normal institution in all societies. Yet, slavery has been absurdly called America’s ‘original sin.’” In fact, our young nation abolished that ugly institution in the northern states within twenty years of America’s founding and ended it throughout the country only a few decades after that, at the bloody cost of civil war.
Horowitz sums up the complex story of our struggle over slavery, then delivers a blistering condemnation of the left’s “grotesque caricature” of the truth: the historical revisionist New York Times narrative called The 1619 Project, which – though debunked by hundreds of actual historians – has nevertheless been disseminated as an indoctrination tool throughout thousands of American schools. He takes us also through a brief history of race relations in modern America, culminating in Martin Luther King Jr.’s epic “I Have a Dream” speech and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed the systemic racism that the left insists we still labor under.
From there, Horowitz details the rise of the “Tribal Counter-Revolution,” which featured the likes of Nation of Islam hate-monger Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama’s race-mongering mentor Jeremiah Wright. The successes of the original civil rights movement began to be dismantled as Americans were divided into racial categories, with whites cast as the oppressors of the left’s designated victim groups: “Over the next fifty years the Democrat party became the party of racial divisions, shaping its malicious campaigns to portray Republicans as heirs to Klan racism.”
Bringing the narrative of race in America up to date, he describes the rise of the neo-Marxist revolutionary organization Black Lives Matter and its champion in the White House, Joe Biden:
For all intents and purposes, the election of Joe Biden marked the potential end of the American experiment that had been launched by the founders and crowned by the sacrifices and heroisms of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King junior.
…
For the first time in American history, there was a government in Washington whose principles were fundamentally anti American, and whose policies were self-consciously racist.
Horowitz concludes the book with a short explanation of the religion of “wokeness” and its presumption that a “socially just” world “is only possible if human beings are purged of society-imposed corruptions and able to maintain a politically correct outlook. This can only take place if the ideas and values of the old order are suppressed.” The revolution, he declares chillingly, “is inevitably a tyranny with no limits and no exits.” Martin Luther’s vision, by contrast, acknowledged that “we are doomed to go on toiling in the imperfect and tragic circles that have defined our human passage from the beginning of time.” Tragic, yes, but preferable to, as Horowitz puts it, “a paradise with no air to breathe.”
Horowitz wraps up America Betrayed with an appendix detailing the life and work of one of the left’s most influential activists – Saul Alinsky, the amoral author of the Machiavellian Rules for Radicals, who mentored, either directly or indirectly, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among many others. But what he didn’t pass down to his acolytes was a plan for the future. “Revolutionaries like Lenin and Alinsky,” Horowitz observes,
who are prepared to burn down existing civilizations and put their opponents to the wall, never have a plan. What they offer is a destructive rage against the worlds they inhabit and what they provide is an emotional symbol of the future they propose – in Marx’s case the kingdom of freedom, in Alinsky’s, the open society. These seductive images are designed to sanction fraud, mayhem and murder, all justified as necessary to gain passage to the promised land. But revolutionaries never spent a moment thinking about how to make an actual society function… [What] missionaries like Lenin and Alinsky offer is not salvation but chaos – a chaos designed to produce a totalitarian state.
David Horowitz’s invaluable gift to the right has been his forcefully articulated exposure of the darkness and lust for power at the heart of the ideology he embraced in his misguided youth. For over 40 years he has devoted his indefatigable passion to warning Americans about the malignant nature of the enemy we face in this epic struggle for the heart and soul of our exceptional nation. America Betrayed is the apotheosis of that life’s work and an essential read for claiming victory before it’s too late.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.
