This review of Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America by David Horowitz was published yesterday on Amazon. [Added 04/04/2020: Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella addressed some of the issues I raise below.—A.F.]
Across Dark Agenda’s dozen chapters David Horowitz (Radical Son; Mortality and Faith; Black Book of the American Left [in nine volumes]) starkly surveys the outrages that the Left has committed against traditional American sensibilities for more than a hundred years. This short book isn’t a treatise on political philosophy, although evidence of his training in it enriches its pages. It delivers the clean, spare reflections of an American octogenarian who once promoted the leftist worldview he’s been exposing for over thirty years.
According to Horowitz, the Left hates Christianity, Western civilization’s dominant religion, and therefore hates America, arguably that civilization’s finest political creation. These mutually reinforcing hatreds take many forms. Leftist denials of anti-patriotic animus are worthless, for evidence of it abounds and is of long record.
For example, there’s the “discovery” of a mother’s alleged right to procure the death of her unborn child. This offends against the first right named in the Declaration of Independence. Then there’s the ban on public school prayer: Leftists seem only to have heard of the First Amendment’s non-establishment clause, not its free-expression twin.
Democratic-led (i.e., Leftist) state and local governments virtually nullify the right to bear arms articulated in the Second Amendment, a bulwark against a potentially tyrannical government. In a health emergency, for example, the government shutters as “non-essential” gun stores along with theaters and restaurants.
Neither able nor willing to build consensus and win arguments in town halls and voting booths—the American way—Leftists, in addition to their slander, rioting, spying and other crimes, have achieved their aims by seeking and winning diktats from unelected jurists.
A moral theologian once aphorized that social engineering begins with verbal engineering, and Horowitz abundantly illustrates that truth. Americans live under a linguistic tyranny against which no charitable appeal to nuance or good will is a defense. (He notes that “‘people of color’ is a term created by people who are at war with this culture” [167].) Dissenters from the politically correct orthodoxy are diagnosed as suffering from one “phobia” or another.
Racism “explains” nearly everything the anti-Christian elites don’t like about America, past and present. Quack psychiatry replaces arguments. “Democratic” American Leftists are not slow to suggest that their political adversaries—mainly, but not exclusively, conservative Christians, and especially those of European descent—are lunatics for whom an asylum is medically indicated. This was, of course, business-as-usual in the old Soviet Union.