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May 23, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:05
David Horowitz | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 115
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Time Text
The left is very intimidating.
They've got 61% of Democrats believing that all Republicans are racists.
And as I say, Republicans are firing back by calling them liberals or saying they're playing with politics.
They're not playing people.
At the height of the Cold War, David Horowitz was raised in a New York communist household.
At Berkeley, he led activism for socialist revolution in the country, and then advanced as a prolific author for the radical left in the 1960s and 70s.
He was editor of Rampart, the leading magazine for the new left.
He befriended Huey Newton and raised money for the Black Panther Party.
His second book became a widespread handbook for the growing anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s.
And then, after 10 years away from political discourse, David announced he was supporting Ronald Reagan for president, and he was leaving the left.
We'll get into what he witnessed that drove him away from politics for a decade, and how he re-emerged on the other side of the aisle.
David's career, originally celebrated by intellectuals, disappeared from the cultural establishment almost overnight.
Prior to conversion, he had books praised by major mainstream media publications, The New York Times, LA Times, the National Book Awards, and then was widely ignored.
But David continued to be a prolific writer.
He used the anti-American beliefs and experiences from his early life to expose the damage to American society from the left.
In this episode, David tells us about his avocation to fight fire with fire when it comes to leftists.
If the left makes politics about rising to higher purpose with social-political activism, the right will never win unless we fight that same way.
And we discuss his latest book, The Enemy Within, how a totalitarian movement is destroying America, where David lays out how the Democrat Party's actions have pushed us to the brink of a one party state.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
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David Horowitz, thanks so much for joining the show.
Thanks for having me, Ben.
It's actually an honor to be on with such a warrior for our country, which is under attack from within.
I really appreciate that.
So we're going to get to what is happening in terms of your new book and modern politics in just a second.
But for folks who really don't know your early work, I think it's important that folks know your background.
You started off as a full-fledged communist, essentially.
So maybe you can explain your transformation.
You started off in an actual communist family.
Yeah, this book I've written, The Enemy Within, How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, is a book written from my own sort of biography.
I was brought up by communists.
I was one of the founders of the New Left.
I edited its largest magazine.
And I left the Left when I realized that it wasn't about social justice, it wasn't about peace.
It was about hating and destroying America.
And this was brought home to me when the left got its greatest victory, which was to drive America out of Vietnam.
When the communists came in, they proceeded to slaughter two and a half million Indo-Chinese peasants.
And there was not one single demonstration by the so-called anti-war movement And I knew then that my leftist friends didn't give a damn about the Vietnamese.
It's just the way they don't care about black people or any minorities.
What they care about is their hatred for America and destroying it from the foundations up.
So as you've talked about, growing up in a communist family, you see a lot of people now, young people, who are resonating to the messages of Karl Marx and of socialism and communism.
What is the appeal?
I don't think it's predominantly an economic appeal as much as it is sort of an almost spiritual appeal.
It's a religious, it's a crypto religion.
They believe that the world is a corrupt place.
It used to be because of corporations.
Now it's corporations and white people.
And they believe that they're the redeemers.
So they're gonna act like gods.
That's why they, look, I mean, why would you open the southern border in the midst of a global pandemic and let in 100,000?
Coronavirus carriers.
Why would you abuse children on the scale that Biden and Harris are abusing them on the southern border if you cared about people?
Why would you be Conflating black criminals with civil rights workers, which is what the Black Lives Matter movement is about.
And why would you burn cities?
You do it because you hate America.
And they put in a curriculum in our schools that's backed by the Biden government, the 1619 Project.
It's a pack of lies.
The idea is to make America's founding be slavery and racism.
The 20 Africans who were shipped to the Virginia Colony in 1619 were not slaves, and slavery was outlawed in the Virginia Colony.
And the Virginia Colony was not America, it was an English colony.
That doesn't phase them from teaching this to K-12 students and the whole purpose.
David, one of the things that's really interesting sort of about your life and career is that you seem to have moved in precisely the opposite direction that the country has moved.
So you started off as a communist when you were very young and you moved through the new left, you edited Ramparts Magazine, and now you're a member of the right.
The country as a whole started off As a conservative country in the time that you were growing up, it was a country that very much opposed this sort of fringe, communist, radical movement.
And now, as you mentioned, this has become the mainstream in the United States.
The counterculture is now the culture, and the culture is now the counterculture.
How is it that the arguments that you were making when you were young and that you grew out of and realized were wrong, how have they gained such unbelievable cultural purchase?
First of all, let me say, you know, if you're being attacked by Marxists, they always say you're selling out if you move to the right.
In fact, you know, I would be the subject of a Hollywood movie if I had stayed on the left and written my autobiography.
It's seductive.
It's not only seductive.
Their message is very seductive.
We're going to help poor people, the vulnerable, the least among us, all act baloney since their policies are It's hurting.
If you defund the police, who are the people who are going to suffer the most?
Poor minorities in the inner city.
That's their sole protection.
If you let violent criminals run across the border and enter the country, who are they going to prey on?
They're going to prey on poor Hispanic people.
They're not going to go into gated communities in Beverly Hills.
So, it's very seductive.
But also, we have a generation now, or several generations, of complete ignoramuses.
The big problem we have is that conservatives tend to be complacent.
So, it's live and let live.
That's a conservative idea.
So, you know, I wrote five books about the communist takeover of the universities.
And, you know, some of them got attention.
But the Republican Party did nothing.
I got no support from the conservative movement, you know, to protect academic freedom in the schools and stop the indoctrination that was going on.
It's only now that people are beginning to wake up.
So you have a whole generation that have no idea what America is about.
You know, to them, you know, they've been all brought up on the communist Howard Zins, people's history of the United States.
They think, you know, the way they look at the founding is it's a bunch of slave owners and racists.
Well, the opposite is true.
I mean, every black person in America owes a debt of gratitude to this country for declaring for the first time in 3,000 years, in 1776, that all men are created equal and have a God-given right to liberty.
And then within a little over a generation, sacrificing 350,000, mainly white lives, to free the slaves when they were all enslaved by black Africans and sold at auctions in Africa.
So, you know, the reality is that black people enslaved each other and white people liberated them. But to say that in today's climate, what makes me a racist?
So David, I think it's important here to point out that your bona fides with regard to race, particularly of the left, were pretty sterling up until you made the move to the right.
So you started off in solidarity with, for example, the Black Panther Party.
What was it in your story, for folks who don't know, that drove you away from that?
Well, the Black Panthers murdered a friend of mine.
I had raised a lot of money and bought a Baptist church in East Oakland and turned it into a learning center for the Panther children.
And I believed our own propaganda, so I thought the state is racist, and if they don't keep If they don't keep their books properly, I created a tax-exempt foundation to fund this school.
If they don't keep proper books, they'll be closed down.
I was completely wrong.
I mean, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have violated the tax laws for half a century and nobody's going to touch them because they're black and leftist.
So, I recruited my bookkeeper.
I was editing Ramparts, the largest magazine of the left.
And I recruited her to do the bookkeeping for the school.
And in December 1974, she disappeared.
She was in a local bar and two blacks came in and she left with them.
So, she obviously knew them.
She was working for the Panther Party.
And five or six weeks later her body was fished out of San Francisco Bay.
And the police interviewed me and they explained a lot.
I've written about this in a book called RADICAL SON.
I knew the Panthers had killed her.
That happened about simultaneously when the left was permitting, was not protesting the slaughter of two and a half million Indochinese peasants by the communists.
I knew that the left was evil and I dedicated the rest of my life to fighting it.
David, let's talk for a second about the shift that we've seen over the past half century or more from the sort of class-based argument that used to be made by Marxists to a pretty openly race-based argument that is now made by Marxists.
It's a sort of fascinating shift because obviously Marxism is a class-based conflict.
The idea is class solidarity regardless of color.
And now that's been transmuted into the sort of intersectional Racial conflagration that we've seen where instead of being a class-based conflict It's supposed to be a race-based conflict that poor white Appalachians are not in fact poor and white They are privileged and rich black people are not in fact privileged They are black and everything can be divided by race as opposed to by class and yet somehow this fits within the Marxist box How did that happen?
What does it mean?
If you're looking for logic, don't look at a leftist.
Look, Marx was a crackpot.
Everything that he said of any importance has been proven false over the last 150 years.
We knew that the proletariat was not going to be a revolutionary force because if you remember, well you're too young to remember, but the hardhats in the 60s, the construction workers were beating up new leftists when they did their marches.
So, the working class was not going to make a revolution, and so it was natural to move to cultural Marxism.
An Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci came up with this theory that the attack on the class system was misplaced, we should be attacking, leftists should be attacking the culture.
And as it happened, the Vietnam War came along, and the left didn't want to fight the communists in Vietnam, so they stayed in the universities and became professors, and they made this the curriculum.
Cultural Marxism is the menace that we face today.
It's pure racism.
Identity politics, it's also called.
It's pure racism.
Black people good, white people bad, but of course it's not all black people that are good.
If they're conservatives, then they're race traitors.
But, you know, today's generations don't have the basic knowledge.
For example, when I came out of the left, We have been attacking America.
And when I saw how evil the left was, I took a second look at America.
And it was an ingenious political system they created of checks and balances.
And what I describe in my new book, The Enemy Within, is how the Democrat Party, you look at the Democrat Party over the last decade, they are systematically destroying The American political system.
The system of checks and balances.
If you pack the Supreme Court, you eliminate the independent judiciary and legislators not only appoint the Supreme Court justices, but they get to make any law they want, unconstitutional or not.
They've attacked the voter ID.
This is racist.
The Democrats claim that poor black people are too stupid to get a photo ID.
You can't get food stamps without a photo ID.
You can't get welfare.
You can't get prescription drugs.
You can't get into the Democrat convention.
And if it were actually the case, which it's not since blacks are voting in record numbers, That voter ID was a problem.
The solution is really simple.
You set up a government agency to provide photo IDs to any American who asks for one and deserves one.
That is, they're citizens.
They're not dead.
They haven't moved to another state.
The Democrats never propose this.
They just want to eliminate voter ID because they are determined to create a one-party state, which is the last sentence of my book.
It's not about Trump.
It's not about winning one election.
It's about establishing a one-party state.
And the term for these people is fascists or communists.
It's the same thing.
That's the appropriate term for Nancy Pelosi and the Biden White House.
They do what fascists do.
They attack, they demonize their opponents.
If you're a Republican, according to Nancy Pelosi, you're an enemy of the state.
How much clearer do you need to hear it from them that they're fascists?
What happened on January 6th reminds me of the Reichstag fire.
If you read Trump's speech that he gave on January—first of all, Trump asked in advance—he offered to provide 10,000 troops to guard the Capitol on January 6th because he knew it was a volatile situation.
He was turned down deliberately by Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, so there were no troops there.
The speech he gave said, This was a rigged election, which it obviously was.
This is a rigged election.
We need to challenge it.
And we have these weak Republicans who won't have the cojones to challenge it.
So you've got to go there and stiffen their spines.
And do it peacefully, he said, and patriotically.
And if you fail, What do you have to do?
You must go home.
This is what he said.
You must go home and work to primary the weak Republicans in the next election.
You couldn't have a clearer Democratic voice with a small D.
Then Pelosi not only said that Republicans are enemies of the state, but they called this an armed insurrection.
They arrested something like 300 people, no arms, not one arm was found.
It was what the Democrats have been calling a peaceful protest.
Rowdy, but basically peaceful.
They didn't destroy a lot.
The legal charges against them are trespassing.
And they're still in jail.
Five months later, they're still in jail.
Parole or whatever you call it, without bail, because the Democrats have this myth of an armed insurrection that they want to use to create a one-party state to so demonize the opposition they call for the expulsion of Senators Wally and Cruz For questioning the election.
The Democrats have questioned every Republican victory in the national election since 1980, including they have never accepted as legitimate the Trump presidency.
So they're hypocrites, they're liars, but the most important thing is that they're fascists.
Why do I say the rice stag fire?
The Weimar Republic was a democracy.
Hitler was elected chancellor.
The first thing the Nazis did was burn their own capital, which was the Reichstag.
Then they blamed it on a Dutch communist.
Then they passed the Reichstag Fire Act.
Which criminalized their opponents and set the foundations for the Third Reich.
And I know this sounds inflammatory, but it's dead-on accurate to what's happening in our country.
If you look now, the Jews are under attack from Palestinian Nazis, who openly call for the genocide of the Jews, the destruction of Israel, and making it Jufri, Judenrein, which is what the Nazis called it.
And you have in Chicago yesterday demonstrations from these Nazi leftists.
We have to start calling things by their right names.
The Democrats call Republicans enemies of the state, armed insurrectionists, traitors, white supremacists, racists.
And the McCarthy Republicans are calling them liberals.
You can't win that battle.
As long as we don't use the proper language, we're not going to be winning this battle.
And our country is at stake.
It's fast going.
It's eroding as we speak.
So David, I want to get into a little bit of the detail of what you talked about there on January 6th and some of the details that you mentioned about the election.
So you suggested that the election is rigged. I just wanted to dig a little deeper there as to what you mean by that.
So I don't see the evidence that fraud and irregularity are responsible for the vote outcome.
I've said that the election was rigged by the media, that the media have obscured every single fact in that election cycle.
That the media blacked out all coverage of Hunter Biden for the last month of the election.
They lied openly about what was going on with COVID.
They suggested that Andrew Cuomo knew what he was doing, but Trump was somehow at fault for the vast wave of COVID.
They suggested that Trump was a vicious racist who was about to establish a tyrannical government despite No evidence that tyranny was on the way.
They suggested that he was a Russian cat's paw.
That basically, if you're talking about the sort of informal rigging of an election, the media are the political communications arm of the Democratic Party at this point, and that's enough to twist an election.
Now, when you say rig the election, what exactly do you mean?
Well, in my book, The Enemy Within, I describe what happened in July of 2020, about, what is that, six or seven months out from the election.
The Democrats sent 600 lawyers and 10,000 volunteers into the 50 states to change the election laws so that it would benefit themselves.
And what they did was unconstitutional.
For example, in Pennsylvania, well, first of all, the Constitution says the election laws are set up by each individual state.
It's a brilliant idea.
It decentralizes the power.
So the 50 state legislatures are supposed to set the rules.
In Pennsylvania, for example, they changed the law so that the Supreme Court, which was run by the Democrats of Pennsylvania, they made the election laws.
And they did it In a way that biased that.
There's about a million 4.4 votes that were illegally cast because they were cast in contravention of the existing rules, but with the new rules set up by the Democrat Supreme Court.
Here's the thing.
Nobody actually knows.
I don't claim that the election was decided by fraud.
I claim that there was massive fraud committed during the election.
We cannot say for certain, and certainly the Democrats when they accuse anybody who questions the election of treason are talking through their hats, because there has been no audit, none of the election result.
And that's because of the war the Democrats have conducted against every effort to actually recount the votes and look at what actually happened.
Trump got 10 million more votes than he got the first time, despite all the slander of the media.
Biden Couldn't hold a campaign from his basement.
He's an advanced case of Alzheimer's.
Everybody knows it.
He's being manipulated as president by somebody who has to ask permission to answer reporters' questions.
Come on.
This guy, who couldn't assemble a crowd of larger than 100 people, Well, Trump was assembling crowds of 50,000 in little towns like Butler, Pennsylvania, population 1240.
And we're asked to believe that Joe Biden got 16 million more votes than Obama did at his peak.
So, any reasonable person, and there's so many other facts that have come out about this, and I've listed a lot of them in my book, The Enemy Within.
You have to be smoking something to think that that election is not problematic.
And basically, that's what Republicans are saying.
You know, Trump, as he should, as a leader, as the person who was probably deprived, let's put it that way, of the presidency, but certainly the subject of massive irregularities, he has every right to claim that it was fraudulent.
But it's a claim.
The Democrats have no right to claim that there was no fraud, because that's just demonstrably a lie.
David, when you talked about January 6th, obviously the response by the Democrats to January 6th, from my view, regardless of what you think of January 6th, and I thought that it was a horrible sight to see people invading the Capitol, I thought that, you know, Language of insurrection was a bizarre use of the term, considering that there was no institutional support for anything that was done there.
In fact, the election was certified later that day by the same Republicans who are supposedly aiding in the insurrection.
Cruz and Hawley voted to certify the election that same day.
Putting aside January 6th for a second, The authoritarian left's move against freedom of speech in the aftermath of that is the thing that alarms me significantly more than 200, 300 misguided people invading the Capitol in defiance of what Trump actually said.
The fact is that they knocked Parler offline.
They decided that they were going to start in the media openly militating for Fox News to be removed from the air.
They started suggesting that advertisers needed to pull from every single conservative oriented show.
And then they started pushing forward with things like HR1, which is a, that actually is an attempt to rig elections by federalizing all election procedures up to and including ballot harvesting.
They want to legislate what they actually did in this last election.
To federalize it is a tremendous blow at the structure of our country, which is a federalist country.
We have 50 states making election laws.
So if you have one or two or three corrupt states, you still have an election that's Got integrity, mainly.
But if you put it all in Washington and you put it in the hands of the Democrats, forget it.
But they've been waging a war against the First Amendment, you know, since Trump's nomination, actually, before that, but certainly since Trump's nomination.
You know, look, to go back to where it really started, they called Bush Hitler.
You can't, in a democracy, if you demonize your opponents, if you call them Hitlerites, it's the end.
You can't have a dialogue.
They boycotted the Trump presidency.
They called him a white supremacist.
Trump was known to every American, practically, for 30 years, before he ran against a Democrat.
Nobody ever introduced him as, here's Donald Trump, host of The Apprentice, and a white supremacist.
That is to demonize and silence.
All the opposition.
That's not democratic.
And it's, like I said, it's systematic.
The electoral college is the same thing.
The voter ID, the packing of the Supreme Court, they want to abolish the Senate.
Dingell, I forget his first name, but he was the longest serving John Dingell, right, longest serving congressman ever.
His last act was to write an article calling for the abolition of the Senate.
And if you listen to those media liars like O'Donnell, if you listen to them, they say that of course the Senate is undemocratic.
Wyoming with 500,000 people has two senators and so does California with whatever it is, 40 million.
That was the idea of the founding.
We are a republic.
We're not a one-person, one-vote democracy.
And there was a reason for that.
The founders were absolutely brilliant.
They put sovereignty in the hands of the people because they understand that individuals can be corrupt.
And therefore a monarch can be a very dangerous leader, a ruler.
So they put sovereignty in the hands of the people.
But because, actually as readers of the Judeo-Christian Bible, they knew that the problem, the source of all social problems is not race, it's not gender.
It's us.
It's individuals.
People are corrupt.
Therefore, you have to put a check on it.
You know, Hitler was elected, people!
The founders understood the danger of pure democracy, so they put in a system of checks and balances, which kids are not being taught anymore.
They're just being taught about imaginary white racism in school and gender fluidity.
That's the curriculum now in our schools.
But the founders understood the basic problem is individuals.
And, you know, it's mind-boggling to me because now we have all these television programs, you know, about murders on almost every channel.
You see how horrible people are.
That's the problem.
How do you control that?
And the Democrats are dismantling and dedicated to dismantling the system that has worked, you know, for 240 years or whatever, however long we've been here.
So let's talk about the Democratic Party.
So it used to be that the Democratic Party was the party of Harry Truman, or the party of Scoop Jackson, or more recently the party of Joe Lieberman to a certain extent.
And now they seem to have completely lost their moorings.
Nancy Pelosi, who was a fringe left-wing figure, is now the Speaker of the House.
Chuck Schumer, who was a fringe left-wing figure, is now the Senate Majority Leader.
And Joe Biden, who is basically just an empty suit at this point.
I mean, they're just wheeling him around.
is supposedly running the show, but it's fairly obvious that the Democratic Party has become extraordinarily radical.
The radicals from the 1960s entered all the halls of power.
So what happened to the Democratic Party?
Yeah, Kamala Harris grew up in a family of Marxists.
Bernie Sanders is a lifelong supporter of communist atrocities.
He's the head of the Budget Committee.
We could go on and on.
I've written this in several books.
But where it started to go bad was at the Democrat convention in 1968, when Tom Hayden organized a riot to destroy the electoral chances of Hubert Humphrey, who had been Lyndon Johnson's vice president and was the Democrat nominee for president.
They hated Humphrey with a 95% ADA liberal.
He was down the line liberal leftist.
But he was an anti-communist, and that was their sin.
The left wanted the communists to win the Cold War.
What can I say?
That's where the left is.
They hate America, and they are either stupid or blind.
They're blinded by their hatred of America, just the way they're blinded by their hatred of Trump, to see the reality of the threats that face us.
After that riot, Humphrey lost the election to Nixon.
And then Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda led the left, which had been trying to burn down the country.
There were many, many bombings in the late 60s and early 70s.
They led these leftists who were trying to destroy the country into the Democrat Party during the McGovern campaign, because McGovern had started with a, you know, the pro-communist Henry Wallace.
That's where he started his political career.
And the theme of his campaign was America, come home, like we were the problem instead of the solution.
And they created these leftist caucuses, the Black Caucus, which is a Farrakhanite racist caucus now.
Clyburn, who James Clyburn, who made single-handedly almost Biden the nominee, is a Farrakhan lover.
The most notorious racist, anti-Semite, anti-gay bigot in the country, Louis Farrakhan, who from Tehran has chanted death to America.
Clyburn is an admirer of his.
So, over the next 50 years, the left infiltrated the Democrat Party, and they were helped by their control of the universities, which has been now 30 years, turning it into a Marxist training camp.
Our premier universities, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, whatever.
They infiltrated the Democrat Party and changed it.
And their success came with the election of Barack Obama, who has the same background I do.
He was raised by communists.
He was actually mentored by a Soviet agent.
And the difference between us is that I saw that it was an evil movement and wanted to warn people of the dangers from it.
Barack Obama never left the communist left.
They made his career.
I've written about this as well.
Paul Kengor has written about it.
Stanley Kurtz.
The communist left made Barack Obama's career.
And he didn't come out with the baloney, you know, that he's neither left nor right and we're all Americans and all that.
Baloney until he became a national figure.
And that's when he distanced himself to save his skin from Jeremiah Wright, a raving anti-American communist.
So there's really no mystery about what's happened to the Democrat Party.
And the left is very intimidating.
They've got 61 percent of Democrats believing that all Republicans are racists.
That's, and as I say, Republicans are firing back by calling them liberals or saying they're playing with politics.
They're not playing people.
So David, one of the things that has been pursued obviously by the left is that they do think in institutional terms.
The right has a real problem thinking In institutional terms, probably because for conservatives, politics is really about treating individuals as individuals.
All of our political views are rooted in the idea that you're supposed to treat individuals individually, as human beings endowed with particular rights.
The left, however, is very focused on taking over institutions and then shaping human beings from the top down.
And treating everybody as a collectivity, just the way communists and Nazis do.
Your group identity is more important than who you actually are as an individual.
This is the most destructive ideology you can imagine.
And that's what they're about.
You know, Joe Biden, one of the first things he said, and this is the theme of his administration, he said that Systemic racism touches every aspect of American life.
That is a monstrous lie worthy of Xi Jinping or of the Iranian mullahs or of Putin himself.
There is no—the only systemic racism in America is affirmative action.
And to get that through, they had to get a pass from the Supreme Court as a special case, because systemic racism was outlawed in 1964 by the Civil Rights Act.
It's illegal.
If there were actually systemic racism in police departments across the country, There would be a tsunami of lawsuits, wouldn't there?
First they'd have to fire all those black police chiefs to have a semblance of reality.
But there would be these lawsuits that would be open and shut if there was systemic racism.
There are no such lawsuits because there is no systemic racism throughout the rest of America.
It's an invention of a fascist party to destroy its opposition and establish a one-party state.
That's what the Democrats are about.
That's the theme of my book, The Enemy Within, how a totalitarian movement is destroying America.
How do you think that the right fights back against this?
Because again, it's not just from government.
It's in academia.
It's in the corporations.
I mean, I think that the right thought for decades that the corporate world was going to be free market oriented.
And it turns out that now the corporate world is indoctrinating its own employees in the same sort of critical race theory that the universities were indoctrinating their students with in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
Yeah, because people respond to demonization and pressure.
They head for the tall grass.
CEOs of corporations don't want to lose customers.
They're not brave people.
It's an extortion racket.
Right.
Forty years ago.
The first thing I said was, looked around and said was, where's the ground army?
My ex-comrades on the left have hundreds if not thousands of organizations whose business is threatening politicians and corporations.
Intimidating them.
You know, Jackson and Sharpton made careers out of racial extortion.
You go to a beer company and say, give us $10 million or we're going to call you racist and boycott you.
And that was told to me by a witness of that happening, Bob Beckel.
Not that he will say it publicly.
Where are the conservative organizations, grassroots?
Well, Donald Trump has given the conservative movement and the country a great gift because he has created the first mass conservative movement in our history.
It's clearly numbered in the millions, but just if you just think of the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out for his campaign rallies, that's That's the basic army that can save our country.
Again, conservatives need to get in the face of these teachers.
Look what the teacher unions have done.
They've damaged the lives of millions of K-12 kids because they don't want to teach, they just want to collect their paychecks.
You've got to go in the face of the teachers, of the principals, of the school boards.
Why isn't there a sit-in?
At Twitter headquarters or Facebook, making their lives miserable and exposing to them, the press will flock to it.
And you can tell the whole country what censors they are and what fascists they are, basically, and what hypocrites, since we know they let Iranian mullahs preached the death of America on their sites while banning the president of the United States.
I mean, what greater act of censorship is there than to de-platform the president of the United States, which they've done?
So what conservatives have to do is they have to start being more aggressive, calling things by their right names.
Use words like fascist when it's fascistic.
It's fascist.
It's racist.
To demonize your opponents with no evidence whatsoever, to call Republicans what happened on January 6th, an armed insurrection, is the way fascists deploy politics, not You know, Americans, not small-D Democrats.
They don't do that.
They're polite.
That's what the collegiality is about, used to be in the Congress.
Bipartisanship.
How can you be bipartisan with a party that you're calling enemies of the state?
You can't.
And it's true that the media is a bunch of liars.
What happened to the media is that in the old days, reporters actually never went to college.
They went out on the streets and they reported what they saw.
But these journalism schools have been corrupt for 30 years.
You know, I had lunch with the chairman of the journalism department, a decent left-of-center person, and I asked him, I said, Do you have any conservatives on your journalism faculty?
He said, I can't think of one.
I said, do you think that's a good idea for training journalists or for education in the first place?
Not to have purged all conservatives?
He said, no, I don't.
I said, what can you do about it?
He said, nothing.
Because the professors hire themselves.
And that's been going on for 30 years.
I can tell you the Columbia School of Journalism is the same way.
NYU, it's the same way.
All these elite institutions are one-party states.
You know this better than anyone, Ben, what one-party states the universities are.
If a conservative appears on campus, he gets boycotted by professors, and the left comes into his event and turns it into a circus, and the administrators think it's funny.
So David, let's talk a little bit about how you got to be David Horwitz.
Obviously now you're sort of one of the grandfathers of the modern conservative movement.
But again, you started off in sort of a communist family.
What was it like growing up a communist?
Well, I've had a pretty successful life, so I can't complain.
My parents were very decent people.
I mean, I don't think my mother ever got a traffic ticket.
But of course, they hid an East German communist in the basement, whom the country was trying to deport.
So they were part of a conspiratorial movement and everything everyone we knew and trusted was a communist as well.
You know, it gave me a passion for social justice.
And then I had a rude awakening when I was editing Ramparts magazine, the largest magazine of the New Left, and the Panthers murdered, they not only murdered this mother of three children, And threatened me.
But all my friends said, you know, I would say to my close friends, the Panthers murdered Betty.
And they would say, no, the white power structure did it, which is the way leftists think.
They think in terms of anything that takes away individual responsibility, structures, races, classes.
And I got an appreciation.
It occurred to me, I went into a serious personal crisis.
I was, I think, clinically depressed for seven years after that.
But in that crisis, I tried to rethink everything, including my attitude towards America.
What I saw was, for example, that in America, you had a figure, say, like J. Edgar Hoover.
Who was an American hero.
I mean, you know, he was an icon.
And then there were revelations about him, his corruptions and so forth.
And now nobody thinks of J. Edgar Hoover as an icon anymore.
So I saw that, you know, you can't prevent all injustice.
The world is an unjust place.
But you can remedy some of the injustices within the American system.
The left still thinks that the Rosenberg spies We're innocent.
They never re-evaluate.
The left never looks back and takes responsibility, or the two and a half million peasants they cause to be slaughtered in no China.
You'll have leaders of the Democratic Party boast about being on the periphery of the so-called anti-war movement to this day.
So the left never gets to look at what it does.
What's happened in a way is the time frame has collapsed.
So the left now, the Democrats, they don't see what they did yesterday, like accusing the Republicans of treason for questioning election, when in the previous election, Raskin, who led the impeachment of Trump, He was in the well of the house protesting the certification of the electors in the Trump election.
They don't seem to remember what happened yesterday, let alone 20 years ago.
David, how did your parents become communists?
Because your story really isn't just you moving from communist to non-communist.
It's almost a generational story of sort.
Yes.
I've written it.
I wrote a book called Radical Son, which tells this whole story.
But my father was a very weak And being a communist gave him strength.
And you can see that with a lot of airheads on the left these days.
Without the ideology, Ocasio-Cortez, what would she be?
She'd be a bartender.
She's an airhead.
And they're all so shallow.
In the radical caucus in the Democratic House.
So joining this, and it's an international movement, all over the world there are totalitarians posing as communists or fascists or Islamic Nazis.
And they get a lot of power by doing it.
They think they're changing.
You hear them say all the time they're on the right side of history.
History doesn't have a side.
You know, the 20th century is probably one of the worst centuries on record.
In terms of human atrocities.
It's not like there's a progression.
They love this phrase that the arc of the universe is bent towards justice.
No, it's not.
It's not bent in any way that human beings can relate to.
It just, it is.
So they get pumped up.
I call it, they get intoxicated.
You know, and it's all in Genesis.
We think Adam and Eve, We're given paradise.
It was better than the Green New Deal.
You didn't die.
You didn't have pain in childbirth.
You didn't have to work.
The fruit fell from the trees.
But there was one condition of staying there and that was you did not do evil.
But eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is exactly what Adam and Eve did.
And who seduced them?
The devil.
And what did the devil say?
If you eat of that tree, you shall be as gods.
And that's the way the left is intoxicated.
It's intoxicated on its own sense of recreating the world.
How arrogant and stupid is that?
The world has been the same.
Human beings have acted the same way for 5,000 years.
You couldn't read the Iliad or the Bible, for that matter, and recognize the people in it if we had changed.
You know, I mean, in Genesis, the next story is about the first crime, brother killing brother.
It's all there.
It hasn't changed.
And the effort to change the world is what has caused over a hundred million people to be killed by progressives in the last hundred years or so.
And what did they produce for all those deaths?
Nothing.
Totalitarian regimes.
Massive gulags where dissenters were incarcerated.
And if you don't think these Democrats are ready to put conservatives in re-education camps, you've got another thing coming.
You haven't been listening to what they've been saying.
So, David, you were there for a lot of the sort of seminal moments of the 1960s, particularly from the perspective of the left.
You were at Berkeley.
You were working at Rampart.
What was it like from the inside?
Because everything has now been given the sort of sepia tone.
I mean, just in the last year, the Oscars nominated two separate films, trying to recast the 1960s as a time of wonder and joy.
There was a full movie about the Chicago 7, lauding the Chicago 7.
There was another movie about the Black Panther Party, lauding the Black Panther Party.
What was it actually like on the inside there?
There were two 60s movements.
One was the hippie movement, which was relatively benign except for all the people who ended or ruined their lives on drugs.
But the attitude was great, flower power and all that.
Then there was the political movement, and there was a movement to rescue Communism from the taint it had received when Khrushchev revealed that Stalin had killed so many communists.
He left out the other victims.
But socialism was in bad odor then.
And so the new left set out to redeem the socialist fantasy.
But you can't redeem it.
If human beings set out to recreate the world, if they think they can change the world, look, if you believe that you could end racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, war, what lie would you not tell?
What crime would you not commit or support to achieve that?
That's why they are so immoral and evil, because they have a justification for any crime you can imagine.
And they, you know, they give even, you know, just to bring it down to a lurid level, how do you think that Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein function in liberal circles?
It's because they don't give a damn about human beings.
They think they do.
It's all in their heads.
Why would you defund the police, who are the only protection that inner-city minorities have?
Why would you open the southern border and let in all the coronavirus carriers and the criminals and the drug traffickers and the sex traffickers and the child abusers?
Why would you do that?
Because you have this fantasy that the reason we have borders is because we're racists and we can create a new world if we end our racism.
You know, it's stupefying even to try to repeat what they think.
So David, in just one second, I want to ask what sort of blowback you received when you made the transition to the right?
Two things.
One is I lost every friend that I had in life from the time I was a kid.
Every last one turned against me because they don't have These human connections.
I just lost a friend of 70 years, Ron Raynosh, who wants to sick the IRS on me.
Why?
Because I questioned the election result.
70-year friendship thrown out.
over a political idea.
That's what totalitarians do, that's what they are.
The ideas are more important than the human relationships.
The second thing is, Peter Collier and I, we had run ramparts together and we transitioned out of the left together, and we wrote a cover story For the Washington Post, which at the time, which they titled, it was their Sunday magazine, Lefties for Reagan.
Our title was Better Rotten Than Red.
When that happened, Peter, who was a realist, I was much more of a romantic, Peter said to me, our literary careers are over.
We had been the toast of the town, number one bestseller for seven weeks on the New York Times list, wined and dined.
And attended by the media.
You know, when we were attacked by the Kennedys, it was a book about the Kennedys, by the Kennedys, the Post considered us important enough to assign Woodward to examine the story and give us a clean bill of health.
But Peter turned to me when our article, Lefties for Reagan, appeared and said, our literary careers are over.
And I thought he was nuts, you know, but there was a lot of truth in that.
I don't get reviewed in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
I used to be front page of the book sections.
Don't get reviewed.
I'm an un-person.
I get slandered and I can't correct the slanders.
It just, it all changed.
I think things are getting better for conservatives, although the censorship team is out there in a big way.
But conservatives have now created their own institutions.
When I came into the right, there were not that many, certainly no combat institutions.
No, you know, aggressive conservative media institutions.
That's all changed.
Conservatives are now in the culture and fighting in the culture, and that's great.
So, David, I was going to ask you a little bit earlier about, you know, whether there is any hope coming from sort of center and people who are who are actual liberals, you know, people who may disagree with you or with me on tax rates or may disagree on the role of government and health care, but still are fundamentally committed to certain basic individual liberty principles.
It seems like an open question to me.
So I wanted to get your take on it.
They're collected on substack.com.
But like Glenn Greenwald used to, you know, tear into me and call me all kinds of names.
And I recently emailed him and said, I have to say, even though you said harsh things about me, I admire your courage and determination to, you know, fight for our individual liberties.
He's been a warrior on that front.
Matt Taibbi, He wrote a whole book ridiculing Trump.
He wrote an article called The Permanent Coup about what the Democrats were doing to Trump, even though he doesn't think much of Trump.
So those are two.
You know, Jonathan Turley has been pretty good on legal issues, and Alan Dershowitz You know, both of them Democrats.
But they're small voices, or few voices, because Dershowitz has a big voice and so does Turley.
There aren't a lot.
I mean, it's very disappointing.
I think that, you know, if you're thinking of elected officials, most of them are intimidated.
Pelosi is ruthless and will destroy their careers.
But I can't believe that if Democrats are confronted, you know, if there are two sides to a question, that they won't be shaken.
There have got to be some good Democrats out there.
I'm not talking about the voters who are not aware of most of these issues.
I'm talking about the leaders.
But it's very disappointing not to have a Democrat stand up and condemn the impeachments of Trump.
Black Lives Matter called January 6th a white supremacist coup.
You know, if you listen even to these people, Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, is a sociopath.
Just read her biography.
She's a sociopath and a racist and, you know, a defender of criminals.
They lie about it.
You know, you don't have to actually do a lot of research.
You just look what happened in Ohio when that cop saved the life of a black teen who was in the process of being stabbed to death by another black who said, I'm going to effing stab you to death.
That's on video.
And they called the cop a murderer because he's white and the murderer he killed is black.
These are disgusting people, Black Lives Matter.
You know, Jason Whitlock has said it's the Ku Klux Klan.
Jason Whitlock is a black, brilliant sports commentator.
But that's what it is.
So David, in a second, I want to ask you a few final questions.
I want to talk with you particularly about sort of your spiritual journey, because you've moved in sort of an interesting direction spiritually over the course of your career.
If you'd like to hear David Horowitz's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
Head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
Everybody make sure to go out and get a copy of David's brand new book, The Enemy Within, How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America.
David, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Ben.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens, and our assistant director is Pavel Wydowski.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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