America Betrayed by David Horowitz

Shannon discusses David Horowitz's last book, America Betrayed.  He starts with how it all began with a monk.  In this episode, we bring up the fact Shannon creates "Porcupine Books" am we promised to have an example!

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:09

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time it is you're tuning in. Welcome back to another edition of the Bookworm Mom. Today we are going to be talking about uh the book, the last book written by one of our great conservative minds, Mr. David Horowitz. The book is entitled America Betrayed: How a Christian Monk Created America and Why the Left Is Determined to Destroy Her.

SPEAKER_04 0:33

Ooh, that sounds really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 0:34

Yeah, now this book was uh is published in 2024. Mr. Horowitz died the next year uh in 25. So we we have lost him. Um it's it's a sad we we keep losing these great minds.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:49

And um so just gonna read a little bit right off the jacket, kind of uh give a history of him and um kind of what this book was was for in his mind. Um he said, America's now engulfed in a crisis that goes to the very foundations of its democracy. Now keep in mind this would have been written essentially during the Biden administration period leading up to the end, uh, even when Kamala has now switched over and she's the she's the person running. Um anyway, to destroy Americans' pride and under undermine their will to defend it, the attacks on America's heritage begin with malicious, uh malicious slanders that turn the American dream of equality and freedom into a white supremacist nightmare. Now we're you remember Biden was famous for the greatest threat to America is white supremacy. Um I don't think that was true then, nor certainly not now. We are told America from its inception has been a racist nation that treats minorities as less than human. We are told America deserves to be destroyed. This destructive lies now the official doctrine of the Biden White House, the woke Pentagon, the Democratic Senate, and the curricula of American schools. America Betrayed restores the true history of America's achievements and its role as the beacon of freedom. It's framed by an account of Martin Luther's history and ideas. Uh, America Betrayed demonstrates that racial progress in America originates not from leftist policies, but from its founding ideals. America Betrayed is a history and a manifesto focused on the current war to save our country and restore the dignity and freedom of the individual. David Horowitz is the noted conservative thinker, writer, and the founder and CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, California, whose mission was to defend free societies and to defend the principles of individual freedom, the rule of law, private property, limited government. I love that. And to re-establish academic freedom in American schools. That would be a brilliant thing to see. The Freedom Center publishes the online news magazine frontpagemag.com. Now, Horowitz himself grew up what he calls a red diaper baby in a communist community in Sunnyside, Queens, and was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. Forced to confront some difficult truths about the political left, Horowitz ultimately found a political and intellectual home as a conservative activist. Horowitz has written well over a dozen books, including some things such as Blitz, Trump will smash the left and win, Big Agenda, Trump's Real Plan to Save America, as well as Dark Agenda, The War to Destroy Christian America, Unholy Alliance, the Black Book of the American Left, and his celebrated memoirs, Mortality and Faith and Radical Sun. Now, David was, as he notes himself, a communist in his upbringing. His parents were both like Stalinist, you know, they Soviet Union style communist. And so he grew up with that as his training and his environment, much like some others that we know, like we talked about Thomas Sowell to begin with, who were in the beginning themselves Marxists, and then they came to this epiphany and was like, wait a minute, this doesn't add up. So what he he's done in this book is basically lay out all of the falsehoods that are being presented, even still today. We still have these groups out there, you still have Black Lives Matter, you still have these organizations that are hellbent on trying to prove that America was racist at its conception, and it's just it's hodgepodgage, it's not true at all. So he breaks it into three parts, um, and obviously chapters. The first part is really a historical recounting of Martin Luther and how he um more or less ha came up with the founding ideals in terms of everybody's equal, we're all created equal, um, and that no government instituted by man is going to be good. Um, and so therefore, all of our rights, our liberties, can't come from man or government. They have to come from God, a creator, because only a creator cannot be uh foiled or influenced or blackmailed, whatever you want to call it. And so that's why he said that's where our liberties come from, and famously obviously that's where our founding fathers came up with the unalienable rights, uh, nature's creator, because they understood that fact to be true as well. Now, we currently today have several senators and congressmen on the Democratic side of the aisle who are arguing that no, no, government gives you your rights.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:23

Um, and no, that's not true. Government does not give us our rights, and the only thing the Constitution does is protect our God-given rights, yeah, not grant them. But given the fact that we have a congresswoman, Ilhan Umar, who was reading something uh, I guess, to a press conference the other day. I don't know if I'm sure if you you saw this or not, and she got to the part where she was trying to say this has been going on since you know World War II. World War 11. World War 11. Um I was like, wow, that's that's just clear. And that to me harkens to what what I've been arguing and needs to be corrected in our constitution. We need an amendment to correct this. That if you're not born here and you're not raised here, let me emphasize that if you're not born and raised here, don't be a Chinese baby. You're born here and then take you back to China and they raise you, and then you come back and you're an American citizen. If you're not born and raised here, you should not be eligible to run for elected office.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:19

Some people are gonna, I'm sure they're gonna get all kafluffled with that I said that. Any office. Yeah, local, state, federal, none. Now your kids, if you come here and become a naturalized citizen and then you have children and they're born and raised here, absolutely they're eligible. But you are not because your loyalties are split and your knowledge of our systems is paper thin, especially given how little they require you to be tested to actually even gain citizenship now. So we that was a whole discussion from our very first podcast.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:50

If you haven't listened to that one, please go back and take a listen. But anyway, so back to the book. So he he really breaks down, Ms. Torres breaks down the the importance of of Horwitz and he he also, you know, as I said, these books always seem like they link back to other books and other great authors. Yeah, so one of the things he notes is he talks about uh a guy that I talk about often, and that is uh Alexander Solsenesen. And you know, he wrote the book uh The Gulag Archipelago, in which he lays out, you know, uh the critical problems with communism. And as I said before, he famously said, All you need to do to stop communism and totalitarianism is that one man stop lying, and you can bring down that tyranny, which is where the book comes out, Live Not by Lies, is based off of that quote from Alexander Solseneson. Because what you're doing with you're living in this Marxist communist uh democratic socialist worldview is that you're living with lies.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:48

And you know, we won't throw names out here, but I know you were just recently at an event where someone was imparting things that were not 100% wholly accurate, and so you thankfully stepped up and said, Let me let's clarify the record, make sure we set the record straight. That needs to happen all the time. Our government frequently says and does things that are just either partially true or completely and totally uh inaccurate.

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:10

Now he goes through and explains where the church, the Catholic Church, kind of breaks away in things like indulgences, because you know, Martin Luther was himself a Catholic in the beginning. He wasn't a strict Catholic monk. I mean, he believed it. And of course, you know, if you've done your history and you know these things, he saw the church the indulgences was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back, if you will. Yeah. And that is a point. Yeah, to make money for the church. And he said that's it. So he you know famously nails his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg and says, you know, this is what we're gonna do. Um, and so that's that's kind of the beginning. And so I think I think it's a fair um extension to say that a lot of his philosophies or ideas were wrapped up in the beliefs of our founders because let's be honest, our founders were themselves believers of some level, whether they were holy believers, or even he notes Jefferson was a deist, but he understood enough of the morality of the Christian faith to incorporate those morals into the founding documents. Um, an important thing that happened during his time, Martin Luther's time, obviously, probably one of the most important things was the uh creation of the printing press, which then led to something happening that revolutionized Christian Christianity worldwide. Uh up until that point in time, you could only get in the Bible written in Latin. Because you know that was God's, that was Jesus' language. He spoke. Oh no, wait, it wasn't Latin. But anyway, that's the Latin they chose. So um so they translated it into languages that the laymen could understand, and then they printed out multiple copies of this Bible so that everybody had an opportunity to read. So now the next thing that happened is lay people were typically not educated. So this is where the church steps up again and says, all right, we need to start educating people so that they can read the word of God. So the whole idea of public education stems from this belief that you need to understand the word of God and you need to be able to read it. So again, we can give that hat tip back to Martin Luther again and the idea that literacy is important. And without the Protestant churches, we would have never had public education, period. So we do owe them that. So then he goes into part two and really kind of lays out the beginning, the origins of the Democratic Nation. Um, he talks about the church and state a lot. Uh and he again he lays out why the church and the state cannot be united because we don't want the state to create, like the Church of England, a religion that everybody has to adhere to. He says, no, but by the time he takes over, I think there's probably only a handful of Protestant denominations um in the beginning, but now there's, I don't know, I think I think Mr. Horwitz says something like, I don't know, there's several thousand, like 13,000. It's a ridiculous amount of I didn't realize there were that many, yeah, but there are apparently. So he lays out that it's very important that you have that separation there, that the church uh not be controlled or created or dominated by the state. Um so that that was an important part. He then goes on to talk about the importance of uh America as a nation of free people and that everybody is is born with this freedom, which you know clashes with this this new adage of the 16 Project 1619, where they're saying that you know we've always been a slave-owning, racist, white supremacist nation when nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, um if you do your history, you'll find that the the slaves that they talk about that came in weren't actually slaves, they were indentured servants, and so they were supposed to work for five to eight years to repay the cost of the shipment to bring them there, you know, their travel. Um, it wasn't until later that slavery became sort of the the thing, the onus that happened. And you know, this can't be emphasized enough. We did not, we established our country in 1776, and within 20 years of establishing our country, I think it was 1807, we had abolition of slavery in the northern states. So we were this white supremac, you know, racist nation. A couple things should have happened. One, somewhere in the founding documents, there should have been a clear language that said white people get the following benefits, but not black people. That's not anywhere in our constitution. And then there should have never been any abolition of slavery. That should have never occurred in the northern states. Uh now it did happen later in the southern states, and for people that don't understand, we fought a civil war to grant freedom to the oppressed people. So, what kind of racist nation divides itself to the point of you know, bloody conflict, brothers against brother, if they're racist? That's just asinine on its face. Yeah. So, but that is what they want to try and claim. And so one of the things that I that I thought was interesting, um, I'm and I'm I we don't I don't want to take a lot of your time, I could, because you know, you can tell you I've I've put so many things in this book that I thought this is good, this is good.

SPEAKER_04 13:08

Another porcupine book.

SPEAKER_03 13:10

It is. Um let's see, let me jump up to jump up to here. Uh Abraham Lincoln. Before he was assassinated, Lincoln sponsored the so-called Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, which recognized the full equality of African slaves that he had just liberated and according them the same rights as free Americans. Unfortunately, when he was assassinated, a Southern politician and Democrat, uh, Mr. Andrew Johnson, comes in and he essentially nullified the rights without actually formally repealing them because he just didn't implement them. Um, so he was more of a segregationist, he wanted to segregate uh the blacks, and so that, you know, I have a heartburn about Andrew Johnson getting any accolades. The other guy that I think should get no accolades is Woodrow Wilson.

SPEAKER_02 13:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:51

He lied to us about keeping us out of the war. That sounds familiar. And then he famously previewed the movie Birth of a Nation, which was based on the Ku Klux Klan novel, The Klansman, uh, and it completely demonizes blacks, it celebrates the Klan, all of these things. And he played this in the White House. So this guy is not a good guy. Um, and so both of these individuals are to have big black spots beside their names saying, no good, no bueno. Um, something else I find interesting for those who want to say that again our nation was this you know historically racist nation. We only had between one and four million slaves at any given period of time. The height of the number of slaves is four million. And that was even after we had stopped the slave trade. It no longer happened. And that was just simply, you know, they had children and we the children be born into slavery, etc. And so at the time of their emancipation, there were over 500,000 free black men already in the country. And of those, 3,000 of them owned slaves themselves. So, you know, go figure there. But later um in the 1900s, early 1900s, we had something created called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. Now, if you were to talk to your average young person today and ask them, you know, who founded the NAACP and you know, where did it come from, they would probably maybe throw out Martin Luther King's name, and they might and they'd be wrong. He is founded by white people.

SPEAKER_02 15:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:17

The first president of the NAACP Moorefield story was White. Yeah. White served as a president from its inception in 1909 all the way for 20 years until he died in 1929. The next highest NAAC war award was called the Spring Narn Medal. It's named after a Jew, a white Jew who led the role in the organization and served as its president from 1930 to 1939. So the idea that somehow whites were not uh important because we're all racist supremacist, you know, right, is nonsense. But it does give birth to this black nationalism and black supremacy that starts to take root. But prior to that, you you have this great guy whose father had originally been named Michael King, and he goes over and he does some sort of a historical dive and he learns all about Martin Luther. And he's so impressed and inspired by him that he changes his name to Martin Luther King, and then he changes his son's name to Martin Luther King Jr. And so we all know the famous speech that MLK Jr. gives. Uh it's frequently referred to as I Have a Dream. Probably the only more significant speech, you know, Mr. Horwitz notes, would be the Gettingsburg Address. Yeah. So I'm just going to take a quick moment, just read a few of the lines from that. Uh I have a dream. I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. What? Wait a minute. If we're a nation born out of racism and white supremacy, then we wouldn't have had that. Or we'd have made it very clear that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all white men are created equal. But that's not what our founder said, is it? No. He goes on, I have a dream that one day out in the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. What I find most pressing at this moment in time is that there are so many within the black rights movement, the BLM movement, Black Lives Matter, which really should just be called Black Lives Marxists, but anyway, because they're Marxists. Oh yeah. They don't see it that way anymore. They don't want to be judged according to the content of their character. They want to be judged according to the color of their skin. They think that DEI is the way to go, that you should look at someone first and say, okay, well, this person is a minority based on the color of their skin or their gender or whatever they say their gender is uh or their sexual orientation.

SPEAKER_04 18:04

And then and we should by that ignore their character.

SPEAKER_03 18:09

Yes, exactly. Um and so that that's extraordinarily problematic, but anyway, I digress. So we we we go on and we find out that that we have this uh this guy, Lewis Farrakhan, who is from the Nation of Islam, and and he you know he's this radical guy, and he tries to do some things and they sort of overthrow the NAACP from MLK Jr.'s movement of you know nonviolent, so they want black power, and that's that's what they are focused on. And so one of the things he does is he creates or he initiates something called the million man march. And some of the members of the NAACP were not too happy about it because they didn't like the word man, million man, they just had the million person march, maybe they'd have been happier. But um, you know, by this time the NAACP has been taken over by the likes of, you know, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton. So they're not the best of the best. Um, but a guy who did kind of hold the line there was one of the civil rights icons, John Lewis. Uh, he didn't attend this march because, in his words, Farrakhan's message was to resegregate America. So there were still some members of the NAACP and the black community who said this idea of segregation is not the way to go. We already fought that battle. We won that battle. Let's don't regress back to it. Right. Um, then we we talk about um I want to read this real quick. I just think this is pivotal about Donald Trump because they referred to him as a white nationalist and a white supremacist. Um they leveled it against him, who a man who's literally been, according to Horowitz, a lifelong supporter of Democrats and their liberal causes. And in 1986, Donald Trump received an NAACP award alongside Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali, presented to them by Jesse Jackson. It was also despite the fact that during the campaign and his presidency, Trump had made special outreaches to black communities and added large federal contributions to black institutions like historically black colleges and universities. But somehow we're supposed to believe that he's this big, huge racist white supremacist. Uh-huh. Yeah. Folks, if you've ever met a racist, and I've met some, they ain't giving y'all nothing. No. If you're white, if you're Jewish, if you're Hispanic, if you're anything other than a Caucasian, you're getting nothing from them but hatred. They're not gonna give you any money. They're not gonna support you in any way.

SPEAKER_04 20:34

Unless you're part of the Southern Poverty Law Center, then you'll get plenty of money. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:39

Well, that that kind of plays into, we'll get to that later. The ends justify the means kind of thing. Um, so you know, again, they had this moment in 2014 with the death of Michael Brown, you know, hands up, don't shoot, all of that. And so that's where the Black Lives Matter sort of takes off and gets its its impetus, and then it it starts rolling down the road. The whole thing, in essence, in this book is that he breaks down how radicals uh trained by men like Solinsky kind of infiltrate the political scene, the political Democratic Party. And they start saying, Listen, you guys over here in the in the Marxist revolutionary corner, you just want to go out and everything's a nail and you're a hammer. That's not the way to do it. You need to infiltrate, look like you're you know, in it to get along, you know, and then slowly take over all of the institutions, and then you'll be the ones in charge, and you won't have to do all this hook smash stuff. Um, and so that's really what starts to occur, and and some of the most important people in the Black Lives Matter movement, or I shouldn't say in in Solinsky's corner, Barack Obama was a big Saw Lite, uh, and Hillary Rodden Clinton major. And she wrote her her thesis on Sololinsky. So these guys understood it, they understood what their role was supposed to be. Um and so they did it. Now Biden himself was a racist. He he actually was racist. It's funny though. If they had criticized him for being a racist, there's so many ways to prove that. In fact, Kamala Harris did point it out on the campaign stage back when she was in the race.

SPEAKER_04 22:13

That's true. She pointed it out, and then somehow she I think it was after uh the birds uh funeral and was eul eulogized by Biden.

SPEAKER_03 22:24

Who thought he was great and he was a huge racist. But anyway, um you know, I I just go back to the quotes in the paper where, you know, Biden refers to the schools as jungles and so on and so forth because black kids were there. I don't know how you get much more racist than that, but anyway. Uh it works because the ends justify the means, and that is a big push. Uh and then you have Obama again, he's the big, he's a big guy. Uh within the You don't vote for me, you ain't black. Yeah, yeah. That was uh that was Biden. If you don't vote for me, you ain't black, you ain't black enough. So um this this quote to me, uh his and his wife's quotes just make me kind of want to throw up a little bit. But Obama said the following, and I think you probably remember this quote we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. Yeah. Some people said, Oh, it's Obomination. I said it's an abomination.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:17

You know, uh, this guy. So anyway, again, major, major uh Solinsky Iight, um, and Obama got his start as a grassroots community organizer, which is exactly how Olinsky trained his people. This is what you're supposed to do. You start out in the communities and you you work your way into the social uh fabric of society and you get money from the federal government and have it funneled to where you actually want the money to go, which makes me think of Minnesota, California, where they've gotten all these federal dollars and they're supposed to be helping the less fortunate and they're not. They're helping the criminals in our society, you know, the corrupt.

SPEAKER_04 23:55

Uh even the World War 11 woman who can't understand how how much money she's worth. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:01

You know, it's just insane because she has and her wine she's Muslim when they don't drink alcohol, but her husband had a winery, so go figure.

SPEAKER_04 24:07

The winery's gone, but yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:09

Right, right. Um, this was an important quote, I thought, to deal with this. It said the issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. In other words, the cause of a political action, whether civil rights or women's rights, is never the real cause. Women, blacks, and other victims are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power. So again, it's it's power for power's sake. Um he talks about Obama and his relationship with Acorn. If anybody remembers Acorn, we found out they were doing some uh very sketchy things, duplicitous things with votes and voter registration, registering people that weren't really um alive or eligible to vote, if you will. So that that was a major ordeal. And uh Trump was obviously pretty important there. His major, he had three uh of his Chicago mentors were literally trained at the Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation. So, I mean, you this guy is as close to Linsky as he can get, even though he can argue, well, I never met the man. Okay, well, he got pretty close. So you embraced everything he believed, even if you didn't meet him. And you know, one of the things I'll say about Alinsky's book that everybody kind of knows, Rules of Radicals, that's the title that we all talk about. People go and look at his signature work and look at the beginning of that book, and it literally shows that he dedicated this book to the devil, to Satan. Because he said, Hey, this was the first radical, this is the first rebel, and we want to dedicate this to him. Because part of what Marxists believe is that you can't have a God, you can't have a faith. Because if you have that, again, it goes back to Martin Luther, we can't have a church uh or a state built on man because we're fallible. It has to be an infallible creator who cannot be blackmailed or influenced. And so the first thing that Marxists realize is, oh, we gotta get rid of that, we can't have that. So that's one of the reasons why you'll find that Marxism, communism, socialism, they don't align with faith. And they don't align with a belief in a God. They break away from that pretty quickly because they don't want you to have any reason not to just go blindly along with whatever they say. And they'll tell you that no matter what uh happens, it is essential that you keep your mind on the means, I mean on the ends, not the means. Um one of the things I thought was that Alinsky talks about Machiavelli's book, The Prince, and he basically says the following The prince was written by Machiavelli for the haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the have nots on how to take the power away. Yeah, that's good. That's why you see they want to tax everybody until they become that body. You know, you look at Bernie Sanders, you know, let's tax the rich, the millionaires should be taxed. Oh, the millionaires, oh we'll tax, and now he's a millionaire. So now he's gotten off of the millionaires because he is one. Now it's the billionaires, we need to tax the billionaires. I'm like, okay, Bernie, gotcha. And he has three homes. Explain that to me. That's not very Marxist in nature. Um, but he kind of he then goes into towards the end of the book, he talks a little bit about the ends justifying the means. These guys are willing to do anything and everything to bring about what it is they believe is the ultimate utopian society. And again, we go to this utopian society with communists and Marxists, they genuinely believe this or they perpetuate it as an excuse for their behaviors because they enjoy being in power in positions of power. And so if they can convince the useful idiots among them and below them that this is for your good, I'm living in three homes and I'm a millionaire because I'm sacrificing for you, the little guy. And people eat this up, and I I'm it's a head scratcher as to how that that is still a thing, but it is. So the book is not incredibly long, it's only a hundred and let's see, 140 pages. Yeah, roughly 140 pages. I I read it in probably two and a half hours. Um, you know, you take a little more time than that to read it. Um but it's it's really well done, and of all the books to to to end on, if you will, I think Mr. Howitz picked a great book to have his final say. Uh again, he he wrote this book, it was it was printed in 2024, and then he passed away in 25. He was 85 when he wrote the book, he was 86 when he passed away.

SPEAKER_04 28:24

So that's incredible.

SPEAKER_03 28:25

You can get this book anywhere, uh Amazon. I'm sure you can find it at most bookstores as well.

SPEAKER_04 28:29

Yeah, and you can check it out in our our link. And um I'm also gonna include a little picture in the link of what a porcupine book looks like from from Shannon when she comes in. And uh, if you want to hear more, check out all of her episodes on the Bookworm Mom. If you like other podcasts, check out our other podcasts at libertycrackmedia.com. And well, thank you everybody and tune in for us next week.

SPEAKER_03 28:57

Oh, hey, and don't forget, hopefully coming up in June, uh, looks like maybe around June 2nd, we're gonna get that great uh author, Scott Mann, that's gonna come in. That is and I'm super excited about that.

SPEAKER_01 29:07

Incredible.

SPEAKER_03 29:08

His book will hit the press, uh, will actually be released on May 12th. So very excited about that. So please be prepared for some really good conversation coming up.

SPEAKER_04 29:17

All right, everybody, tune in and uh join us next week. Thank you.