https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/11/david-horowitz-journey-left-right/

The Life and Work of David Horowitz
By JAMIE GLAZOV
November 10, 2015 5:00 PM

In 1956, when Horowitz was 17, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a secret speech in the Kremlin about the crimes of Stalin, causing a crisis among the faithful. Party members who had previously dismissed as “slander” claims by their opponents that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions now had no choice but to admit that the charges were true. They left the party in a mass exodus that killed the CPUSA as a force in American political life, although for many it was impossible to give up the socialist faith.
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In September 1974 he recruited the Ramparts bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, to maintain the accounts of the tax-exempt foundation he had created to manage the Panther school. In December, Van Patter’s bludgeoned body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. The police were convinced she had been murdered by members of the Panther Party, but local prosecutors were unable to bring an indictment, and the federal government, under siege from the Left, steered clear of this crime, as did the press, which had largely bought into the notion that the Panthers had been targeted for destruction by racist law enforcement.

Entering what would become a ten-year, slow-motion transformation from theorist of the Left to its worst enemy, Horowitz undertook his own inquiry into the murder. As he collided with denial and threats of retribution if he continued to search, he was forced to confront three stark facts: His New Left outlook was unable to explain the events that had overtaken him; his lifelong friends and associates on the Left were now a threat to his safety, since they would instinctively defend the Panther vanguard; and no one among them really cared about the murder of an innocent woman, because the murderers were their political friends.

Forced to look at his own commitments in a way he had never allowed himself to do before, Horowitz realized that it was the enemies of the Left who had been correct in their assessment of the Panthers, just as they had been correct in their assessment of the Soviet Union, while the Left had been disastrously wrong. The Panthers were not political militants and victims of police repression. They were ghetto thugs running a con on credulous white supporters and committing crimes against vulnerable black citizens. It was the Left and its “revolution” that had conferred on them the aura of a political vanguard, protecting them from being held accountable for their deeds.

In pursuing his investigation of Betty Van Patter’s death, Horowitz discovered that the Panthers had murdered more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution, and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. And yet, to his growing bewilderment, the Panthers continued to enjoy the support of the American Left, the Democratic party, Bay-area trade unions, and even the Oakland business establishment.

In his essay “Still No Regrets,” Horowitz wrote: “A library of memoirs by aging new leftists and ‘progressive’ academics recall the rebellions of the 1960s. But hardly a page in any of them has the basic honesty — or sheer decency — to say, ‘Yes, we supported these murderers and those spies, and the agents of that evil empire,’ or to say so without an alibi. I’d like to hear even one of these advocates of ‘social justice’ make this simple acknowledgement: ‘We greatly exaggerated the sins of America and underestimated its decencies and virtues, and we’re sorry.’”
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More peasants were killed in Indochina in the ?rst three years of Communist rule than had been killed on both sides during the 13 years of the anti-Communist war.
As the Indochinese tragedy unfolded, Horowitz was struck again by how the Left refused to hold itself accountable for the result it had fought so hard for — in this case, a Communist victory. It evidently could not have cared less about the new suffering of the people in whose name it had once purported to speak. He became increasingly convinced, as Peter Collier had tried to persuade him, that “the element of malice played a larger role in the motives of the left than I had been willing to accept.” If the Left really wanted a better world, why was it so indifferent to the terrible consequences of its own ideas and practices?

Ends really are inextricable from means.

The rest of his story tells you all you need to know about the Left’s subversion of American institutions. NOTE: DH was more than just a “former believer” – he was a major figure intellectually and a media super-star for the Left, whose change in beliefs was research & reality based, deeply thoughtful, and devastatingly challenging.

In November 1984, Horowitz turned another corner. He cast his ?rst Republican ballot, for Ronald Reagan. Shortly thereafter he learned that Peter Collier had done the same. On March 17, 1985, he and Collier wrote a cover story for the Sunday magazine of the Washington Post, “Lefties for Reagan,” and explained their vote by describing what they had seen and done while fighting against “Amerikkka” as part of the Left. As they expected, the article inspired vitriolic responses from their former comrades and forced them to re-enter the political arena to wage what became a two-person war against the Sixties Left.
Dissecting the Left’s hypocrisy now became a Horowitz métier. As a former believer, he could attack the progressive myth with the familiarity of an insider. He and Collier delivered their ?rst stunning blow in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the ’60s, a 1989 book in which they analyzed the legacy of the New Left and its corrosive effects on American culture. Destructive Generation represented the ?rst dissent from the celebration of the 1960s that had been issuing forth in volume after volume from publishing companies headed by former New Leftists.
Before Collier and Horowitz turned on the Left, they had enjoyed front-page reviews in the New York Times Book Review and bestseller status for their multi-generational biographies. But Destructive Generation marked their eclipse in the literary culture. As Horowitz later recalled, “Our books, once prominently reviewed everywhere, were now equally ignored. With a few notable exceptions, we became pariahs and un-persons in mainstream intellectual circles.” The last review of a Horowitz book in The New York Review of Books was in 1985, the very spring that he and Collier announced they had voted for Reagan.

Horowitz’s next work, Radical Son, published in 1997, was powerful enough that even his enemies had to admit that it called up comparisons to Whittaker Chambers’s Witness and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.
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A central theme of The Politics of Bad Faith [1998 book of essays] is the refusal of radicals to accept what the implications of the collapse of Communism are for the future of socialism. “For radicals, it is not socialism,” Horowitz writes, “but only the language of socialism that is ?nally dead. To be reborn, the left had only to rename itself in terms that did not carry the memories of insurmountable defeat, to appropriate a past that could still be victorious.” Thus leftists now called themselves “progressives,” and even “liberals.”

Horowitz’s next book, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, published in 1999, quickly became the most controversial work the author had written.It addressed the new cultural dimensions of the radical cause, specifically the determination to make race function the way class had in the traditional Marxist paradigm. White males were demonized as an ersatz ruling class responsible for every social disparity between racial groups and genders. Behind the idea that all blacks are victims all the time, according to Horowitz, lies the desire to perpetuate the failed Marxist vision and the social war it justifies.
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Conservatives generally, and Republicans in particular, either fail to understand that there is a political war taking place, or disapprove of the fact that there is. Conservatives approach politics as a series of management issues, and hope to impose limits on what government may do. Their paradigm is based on individualism, compromise, and partial solutions. This puts conservatives at a distinct disadvantage in political combat with the Left, whose paradigm of oppression and liberation inspires missionary zeal and is perfectly suited to aggressive tactics and no-holds-barred combat. Horowitz’s political strategy is to turn the tables on the Left, framing “liberals” and “progressives” as the actual oppressors of minorities and the poor.

In How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas (2000), Horowitz returned to these themes.
In the spring of 2001, Horowitz put his own advice to the test by launching an effort to oppose the Left’s campaign to secure reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact as “bad for blacks and racist too.” Horowitz conducted his opposition by taking out ads in college newspapers across the country — or attempting to. Forty college papers refused to print the ad, generating a furor over free speech.Donald Downs, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, summed up the reaction: “The Horowitz controversy has laid bare the cultural and intellectual splits that rivet the contemporary university.” When Horowitz was scheduled to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, university officials assigned 30 armed guards to protect him. Subsequently, and for the rest of his career, Horowitz was unable to speak on campuses without a security presence. In the fall of 2001, he published an account of these events, which he called Uncivil Wars.

The reparations campaign exposed the hostility of American campuses to ideas that challenged the orthodoxies of the Left. One consequence of this was the absence of any interest on campus in Horowitz’s own work. To provide a guide to the growing corpus of his writings, he decided to publish a representative selection of his articles and excerpts from his books along with a bibliography of his writings. The book, titled Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, was published in 2003.
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in the spring of 2003 he drafted an “Academic Bill of Rights” based on the classic 1915 statement on academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors. Over the next seven years Horowitz attempted to persuade universities to adopt a code to ensure that students would have access to views on more than one side of controversial issues and that faculty would conduct themselves professionally in the classroom, and refrain from using their authority to indoctrinate students in partisan agendas.
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Having himself once been part of a progressive movement that identified with America’s enemies, Horowitz was struck by the Democrats’ reluctance to stop Saddam Hussein’s aggression during the first Gulf War: Only ten Democratic senators supported the coalition that George H. W. Bush had assembled to reverse Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait. This was a sign of the commanding role the Left had assumed in the Democratic party. Since Saddam Hussein was one of the true monsters of the 20th century and did not justify his atrocities by appeals to “social justice,” it also revealed the disturbing lengths to which the Left would go to act on its hostility to America.
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In 2014, Horowitz resumed his strategic lessons for Republicans and conservatives in Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left, which is a summary statement of his 20 years of thinking about political warfare. According to Horowitz, conservatives fail to employ a political language that speaks to voters’ emotions, and fail to highlight the moral imperative of opposing policies that are destructive to the poor and the vulnerable, and ultimately to all Americans. Progressives view themselves as social redeemers, as missionaries seeking to transform the world, which inspires their will to win. Conservatives are pragmatists whose goals are specific, practical, and modest by comparison. But it is only by embracing an inspiring mission as defenders of freedom and champions of the victims of progressive policies that conservatives can confront the fire of the Left with a fire of their own.
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In You’re Going to Be Dead One Day, we see how far Horowitz has escaped from his father’s shadow and from the destructive discontent that lies at the heart of the radical creed. While looking unflinchingly at human limitations and the death that awaits us all, his story is nonetheless one of tenuous hope, even joy.
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Some sectors of intellectual conservatism have kept a distance from Horowitz, re?ecting a discomfort with his aggressive political and literary style. Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, observes: “There’s his polemical style, which still resembles the one invented by the left. Even though it has made the left its target, there are conservatives, I think, who feel uncomfortable with it.”
The historian Richard Pipes agrees: “It may have to do with style and decorum. Conservatives do not like aggressive argumentation — they prefer to stand above the fray. For the same reason they ignore Rush Limbaugh, for all his enormous success and in?uence. It is a weakness of the conservative movement, this fear of giving battle.”

Yet while some conservatives have kept him at arm’s length, it cannot be denied that Horowitz has enjoyed signi?cant support in the conservative movement generally and even from the conservative media.

Contains what looks like a full bibliography & ample biographical details.

Anyway. I read Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” then and thought nothing of it. I still have a copy. I’ve read or browsed books which horrified me — “Mein Kampf” and the Koran for two — but RFR was not one of them.

I just don’t recognize the Alinsky I once read as the Evil Guy Behind It All conservatives are agog about. In the chapter “Of Means and Ends,” which seems to be the basis of the Alinksy lie accusations, Alinsky cites and quotes historical monsters like Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Gandhi for the distance between what they said at one time and something different they said later.

Alinsky chides his readers for expecting something better and advises them that producing political results usually entails things you don’t see in Disney family entertainment. (Though the Disney bit is me.)

I grew up there. There was never a time in my memory when the slums weren’t there and passably populated. Shabby, but there.

For those dealing with fear of the Leftist alliance:

1. It is surely obvious that if you can be attacked you are not invulnerable. You see attack as a real threat. That is because you believe that you can really attack. And what would have effects through you must also have effects on you. It is this law that will ultimately save you, but you are misusing it now. You must therefore learn how it can be used for your own best interests, rather than against them.

2. Because your attack thoughts will be projected, you will fear attack. And if you fear attack, you must believe that you are not invulnerable. Attack thoughts therefore make you vulnerable in your own mind, which is where the attack thoughts are. Attack thoughts and invulnerability cannot be accepted together. They contradict each other.

3. The idea for today introduces the thought that you always at­tack yourself first. If attack thoughts must entail the belief that you are vulnerable, their effect is to weaken you in your own eyes. Thus they have attacked your perception of yourself. And because you believe in them, you can no longer believe in yourself. A false image of yourself has come to take the place of what you are.

4. Practice with today’s idea will help you to understand that vulnerability or invulnerability is the result of your own thoughts. Nothing except your thoughts can attack you. Noth­ing except your thoughts can make you think you are vulner­able. And nothing except your thoughts can prove to you this is not so.

5. Six practice periods are required in applying today’s idea. A full two minutes should be attempted for each of them, although the time may be reduced to a minute if the discomfort is too great. Do not reduce it further.

6. The practice period should begin with repeating the idea for today, then closing your eyes and reviewing the unresolved ques­tions whose outcomes are causing you concern. The concern may take the form of depression, worry, anger, a sense of imposition, fear, foreboding or preoccupation. Any problem as yet unsettled that tends to recur in your thoughts during the day is a suitable subject. You will not be able to use very many for any one practice period, because a longer time than usual should be spent with each one. Today’s idea should be applied as follows:

7. First, name the situation:

I am concerned about _________.

Then go over every possible outcome that has occurred to you in that connection and which has caused you concern, referring to each one quite specifically, saying:

I am afraid _________ will happen.

8. If you are doing the exercises properly, you should have some five or six distressing possibilities available for each situation you use, and quite possibly more. It is much more helpful to cover a few situations thoroughly than to touch on a larger number. As the list of anticipated outcomes for each situation continues, you will probably find some of them, especially those that occur to you toward the end, less acceptable to you. Try, however, to treat them all alike to whatever extent you can.

9. After you have named each outcome of which you are afraid, tell yourself:

That thought is an attack upon myself.

It’s not a good trend for the war of good and evil, light and dark.

What is the Path of Satan?
it is the Left hand path explained here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-hand_path_and_right-hand_path

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6oiaCDuHpU&t=1043s

And that was not a lie of Bush’s. A lie is when you know it’s a lie. That was a promise that he made that he should not have made because he couldn’t keep it (and didn’t keep it) when pressure was applied.

Here’s the way it went down:

Although he did oppose the creation of new taxes as president, the Democratic-controlled Congress proposed increases of existing taxes as a way to reduce the national budget deficit. Bush negotiated with Congress for a budget that met his pledge, but was unable to make a deal with a Senate and House that was controlled by the opposing Democrats. Bush agreed to a compromise, which increased several existing taxes as part of a 1990 budget agreement.

In the 1992 presidential election campaign, Pat Buchanan repeatedly cited the pledge as an example of a broken promise in his unsuccessful challenge to Bush in the Republican primaries. In the general election, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, running as a moderate, also cited the quotation and questioned Bush’s trustworthiness. Bush lost his bid for re-election to Clinton, prompting many to suggest his failure to keep the pledge as a reason for his defeat…

The passage was written by leading speechwriter Peggy Noonan, with Jack Kemp having suggested the basic idea. Including the line caused some controversy, as some Bush advisers felt the language was too strong. The most prominent critic was economic adviser Richard Darman, who crossed the phrase out on an initial draft calling it “stupid and dangerous.” Darman was one of the architects of Reagan’s 1982 tax increase, and expected to have a major policy role in the Bush White House. He felt that such an absolute pledge would handcuff the administration.

Upon the advice of others however, especially Roger Ailes, the line remained in the speech. It was felt the pledge was needed to keep conservative support in a campaign that was trying to position itself as centrist. It was also hoped it would add an element of toughness to a candidate who was suffering from a perception of being weak and vacillating. At the time Bush was significantly behind Michael Dukakis in the polls, and Darman later argued that the campaign was far more concerned with winning than governing. The strategy appeared successful…

When in office, Bush found it challenging to keep his promise. The Bush campaign’s figures had been based on the assumption that the high growth of the late 1980s would continue throughout his time in office. Instead, a recession began. By 1990, rising budget deficits, fueled by a growth in mandatory spending and a declining economy, began to greatly increase the federal deficit. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act mandated that the deficit be reduced, or else mandatory cuts unpalatable to both Republicans and Democrats would be made. Reducing this deficit was a difficult task. New cuts of any substance would have to come either from entitlement programs, such as Medicare or Social Security, or from defense.

The budget for the next fiscal year proved far more difficult. Bush initially presented Congress a proposed budget containing steep spending cuts and no new taxes, but congressional Democrats dismissed this out of hand. Negotiations began, but it was clear little progress could be made without a compromise on taxes. Richard Darman, who had been appointed head of the Office of Management and Budget, and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu both felt such a compromise was necessary. Other prominent Republicans had also come out in favor of a tax increase, including Gerald Ford, Paul O’Neill, and Lamar Alexander.

At the end of June, Bush released a statement stating that “it is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following: entitlement and mandatory program reform, tax revenue increases, growth incentives, discretionary spending reductions, orderly reductions in defense expenditures, and budget process reform.” The key element was the reference to “tax revenue increases” now being up for negotiation. An immediate furor followed the release. The headline of the New York Post the next day read “Read my Lips: I Lied.” Initially some argued that “tax revenue increases” did not necessarily mean tax increases. For example, he could mean that the government could work to increase taxable income. However, Bush soon confirmed that tax increases were on the table.

Some of the most enraged over the change in policy were other Republicans, including House Whip Newt Gingrich, the Senate leadership, and Vice President Dan Quayle. They felt Bush had destroyed the Republicans’ most potent election plank for years to come. That the Republican leadership was not consulted before Bush made the deal also angered them. This perceived betrayal quickly led to a bitter feud within the Republican Party.

A stupid pledge to begin with, then an attempt to compromise with a Democratic Congress, and then the GOP circular firing squad.

I really don’t think it’s a good example of a lie, though.

I consider it a HUGE difference. It was also something I noticed quite early on about Obama.

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html

Barack Obama and Alinsky’s Rules for Psychopaths
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/09/barack_obama_and_alinskys_rule.html

The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Saul Alinsky, and Their Influence on Obama
http://www.floppingaces.net/2011/07/30/the-cloward-piven-strategy-saul-alinsky-and-their-influence-on-obama-reader-post/

And just because it fits in with the topic of “Obama” and “Great articles by American Thinker”:

Stop It Already — He’s Not So Smart
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/06/stop_it_already_–_hes_not_so_smart.html

Plus Hillary and Alinsky:

Reading Hillary Rodham’s hidden thesis
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17388372/ns/politics-decision_08/t/reading-hillary-rodhams-hidden-thesis/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfSU-VGixjM