Culture Wars: Volume V of the Black Book of the American Left
David Horowitz's new book unveils the forty years of lost wars that have brought America to its present low.
November 30, 2015
Jay Nordlinger
To order “The Black Book of the American Left, Volume V: Culture Wars," Click Here. We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com – which features David Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-5 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.
One of my least favorite modern phrases is “gets it.” So-and-so “gets it,” and so-and-so “doesn’t get it.” But sometimes I find the phrase handy. And David Horowitz gets it. Gets what?
Well, many things, but he certainly gets the Left, from which he comes. As readers of this magazine don’t need to be told, Horowitz made one of the most famous, and consequential, journeys from left to right in recent history. He knows the Left from the inside out. He has their number, as we used to say. (“Gets it,” frankly, was sexual.)
Abigail Thernstrom is another intellectual who traveled from left to right. During the 1990s, she told me that she’d had an interesting conversation with an academic associated with the Clinton administration. He said that he would no longer engage in public debates with her. Why? “Because, Abby, you know what I’m going to say before I say it, and you know
why I’m going to say it.”
Any leftist who debates David Horowitz is taking his life into his hands. Maybe that’s why so few agree to do it.
Horowitz is embarked on a tremendous publishing project:
The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz. I remember how glad I was in 1997 when
The Black Book of Communism came out. It documented the crimes of that gang, worldwide. In his collection, Horowitz is now up to
Volume V, headed “Culture Wars.”
The volume is organized in five parts: “The Progressive Party Line”; “Media Culture”; “Sexual Politics”; “Feminist Assaults”; and “The Government’s Left-wing Network” (i.e., public broadcasting). It all begins with an introduction by Horowitz, which is worth the price of admission alone.
...
For some 35 years, he has been screaming at us, “These people really hate you!” (“These people” being the Left.) “They are intent on
destroying you. Don’t you realize that?” I realize that, yes, and one of the people who helped me to, many years ago, when I was learning about the world, was Horowitz.
Reading Volume V of his magnificent collection made me sad, for two reasons. First, I thought, “Those who need to read this, won’t. Those who need to know this, won’t. David is preaching to the choir. I wish he could preach to the nation at large.”
But then I remembered that
I found him -- as I found Norman Podhoretz, Bill Buckley, and many others. No teacher or professor assigned them to me. But I found them. And maybe other people will find David, and these volumes?
The second thing that made me sad was this:
Après lui, qui? After David, who? Who gets the Left like this, who has its number, who remembers everything that happened, who remembers where they bodies are buried (literally, in the case of the Panthers’ victims), who will scream at us, when we need screaming?
Who? But at least we have
The Black Book of the American Left, a repository of vital information and thought, indeed of truth.
Culture Wars: Volume V of the Black Book of the American Left
