UPDATE: Glenn also took time to talk to David Horowitz on GBTV Monday night:
Original Story:
On radio this morning, Glenn interviewed former Communist David Horowitz, a man who has now dedicated himself to exposing progressives, radicals, and extremists. And while Horowitz's latest book, The New Leviathan, contains some chilling information about how organized and funded the left has become, he said that he now sees that American conservatives are starting to wake up to the realities in front of them.
Transcript below:
GLENN: I will tell you that there are few heroes and lots of villains. There are few heroes in today's society. There are a few people that have stood and stood and stood for a very long time and tried to warn the American people, tried to warn the ruling class, if you will, that there's trouble coming, and knows it inside and out. And one of those heroes, in fact, a guy who I think has given us more time than maybe anybody else besides the Navy SEALs has been David Horowitz. David Horowitz has been standing guard for a long time. He was a Communist. He was raised by communists, he was part of the 1960s radical movement. When he started to see the slaughter after the Vietnam War, he woke up and said, what ‑‑ guys, we were wrong. They didn't care. And he realized it wasn't about the principles, it wasn't really about doing good. It was really about power and control. And he started to talk about that. And he was rejected by the left and the right and then the right would listen to him, if I'm not mistaken, David ‑‑ stop me at any time ‑‑ the right would listen to him when it was advantageous to him but still they really didn't get it. David Horowitz is a guy who, when I first started looking into the Tides Foundation and everything else, I found Discover the Networks, which is one of the best tools out there if you really want to know who's connected, how it's connected. It's really complex, very difficult to understand, but he's made more sense of it than anybody else. David Horowitz has a new book out called The New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. It is one of the most frightening books you will read because it's all true and all about how far behind anybody who loves freedom really is. David, welcome to the program. How are you, sir?
HOROWITZ: Thank you, Glenn. Actually I'm not as pessimistic as my book would lead people because ‑‑
GLENN: It's breathtaking.
HOROWITZ: I see a dramatic change in American political life and that is the awakening of the people. The awakening of conservatives. When I first, when I left the left 25 years ago, actually conservatives were quite kind to me, but they didn't really want to take in if the message. They were in a kind of denial because ‑‑ first of all because it was too horrible to contemplate that there were so many people that want to destroy this country. So many Americans, American citizens, Americans born, Americans privileged especially, privileged Americans who have a hatred in their heart for America.
And the second thing is that conservatives don't like politics. If you're a conservative, you're probably in the private sector, you're a creator. Politics is real ‑‑ is a lot about destruction. You're a creator. If you're running a business, you want every customer possible. So you don't want to get involved in divisive battles. And then kind of the attitudes change a little and I got support because they ‑‑ I mean, here was a guy who was willing to mix it up and get into the street fight and I ‑‑ you know, I don't take any credit for that. That's really all I know how to do. And that's the way I was brought up.
GLENN: But we haven't ‑‑ I mean, all of us, first of all, after communism fell, we all thought, oh, Communist, it's a joke, that's proven wrong, it's not working." So any hiding communists or anything like that, "Oh, please, it's ridiculous. Nobody really believes that." And we're all in that moment of, you know, after September 11th, all ‑‑ even the progressives standing there on the steps of the capitol holding hands and singing Kumbayah and everybody thought, we're all Americans. No, we're not.
HOROWITZ: No.
GLENN: No, we're not. And your book outlines the staggering, again, just the appendix just breathtaking. It is the number of groups and how much money they have on the left. Let me just start here. There are 14 liberal groups that have a billion dollars in assets.
HOROWITZ: More than.
GLENN: Yeah, more than a billion dollars in assets. 14. The conservatives have zero. There's nobody on the side of conservatives that have the juice and the power of these foundations.
HOROWITZ: Let's dramatize it. I mean, the Koch Brothers have a foundation. It's worth $239 million. Sounds like a lot of money. The Ford Foundation has $10 billion. It's 30, whatever that is, five times, 35 times the size of the Koch Brothers. And, of course, the Gates Foundation is three times the size of Ford. The leftwing foundations ‑‑ and they are the ones that they fund Occupy Wall Street, they fund the radical organizations that gave Obama his start, that trained him, that brought him up through the ranks. They have $104 billion in assets whereas the conservative foundations have only $10 billion total, 75 conservative foundations. But that's just the, I don't know, it's just the base of the iceberg because they then fund other tax‑exempt foundations, 501(c)(3)s.
For example, the Ford Foundation created the Environmental Resources Defense Council many years ago. And actually it created them to fight DDT just to do this very briefly. DDT, the Rockefeller foundation in the old days when it was the conservative foundation funded a global malaria eradication program using DDT. Along came the Ford Foundation and the Environmental Resources Defense Council which now, by the way, has $139 million in assets. It's grown to gigantic size. It started with this malaria campaign. They conducted a campaign against DDT using Rachel Carson's famous, or should be infamous book The Silent Spring which claimed that DDT would kill all the birds. Completely false, no scientific basis, but it's a classic of the environmental movement.
They persuaded even the Nixon administration to ban DDT and so malaria returned. And malaria kills three million people a year. It's killed since the ban on DDT100 million people probably. 95% of them are black children under the age of 5 in Africa. All this blood is on the heads and the hands of the ‑‑ without the Ford Foundation, this never would have happened.
GLENN: Ford Foundation, I was talking to a friend who actually knew Henry Ford and he said ‑‑ they were having lunch together one time and he said, "The worst thing I ever did was let go control of the foundation"
HOROWITZ: Yeah.
GLENN: Because it went off the rails. They always do that.
HOROWITZ: We print, in our book The New Leviathan, we print Henry Ford's resignation letter from the board which says in so many words that you are attacking the very system, the Ford Foundation is dedicated now the very system that created this wealth. And, you know, in his behalf, he had to save the Ford Motor Company which was in the hands of a gangster after his grandfather died in 1947 and that's why he let the president of Studebaker, who turned out to be a progressive, be president. And that's true of a lot of, well, most of the venerable American foundations.
GLENN: So how we ‑‑
HOROWITZ: Rockefeller is now a leftwing foundation. Carnegie, Hewlett, Packard, Kellogg, Casey, Joyce, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are funding the left. These are government‑backed institutions.
GLENN: When you have Soros join this ‑‑
HOROWITZ: And Soros.
GLENN: I mean, how do you possibly win, David?
HOROWITZ: Well ‑‑
GLENN: Because you ‑‑ wait. We haven't even talked about the universities. The universities are the think tanks now.
HOROWITZ: Of the left, right. Look. I had this experience. I was on a panel in Paris in 1986 organized by the committee for the free world and we had the Vietnamese there. It was an anniversary of the America's defeat in Vietnam. The French. And I was on a panel. And the topic of the panel was, is communism reversible. This is 1986. And nobody thought it was. I certainly didn't. And three years later it was gone. The fact of the matter is that America is ‑‑ first of all, it's not like European countries. We are an individualist country. We were founded by individualists. We had a frontier. So ‑‑ which created an incredible spirit of independence. If you didn't like the way things were here, you went west a little ways and you founded your own, and you did it on these principles. And these, the founders, it's not just the original founders but all along the way the founders of America were incredible people. You know I'm thinking ‑‑ you know the Mormons who went across the country and then came to Salt Lake and they said, "Hey, you know, let's ‑‑ let's build it here in the middle of nowhere."
GLENN: That's crazy, yeah. Yeah.
GLENN: You know. Or as I was saying to Glenn earlier, Dallas is a little, a little shack in the middle, log cabin actually in the middle of Dallas where some guy walked across the plains and you have to be to Texas to see how vast it is and said, "I'm going to stop here and this is where I'm going to raise ‑‑ you know, do whatever I did," and he was the founder of Dallas. That spirit is so antithetic to everything these collectivists want to do that I still think we have a fighting chance.
GLENN: Okay. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I want to talk to you a little bit about ‑‑ because the book lays out the path to presidency for Obama and how everything was just a network of these radical progressives. We'll get into that here in a second. The name of the book is The New Leviathan by David Horowitz and it's all ‑‑ it's the dirt on what ‑‑ on how this, how this machine that they've built really works. We'll come back to David here in just a second.
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(OUT 11:19)
GLENN: Chapter 12 in my new book cowards is young socialists, why kids think they hate capitalism. David has helped us with several of our ‑‑ several of our books and he is ‑‑ being a reformed Communist, he knows about radicals and revolutionaries and how they work. He has a new book out called the New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. And if you really want to know what you're up against, if you really want to see how all of this works, you want to see how screwed we are on the EPA, how much ‑‑ how much money the leftwing organizations have.
VOICE: The leftwing 501(c)(3) ‑‑ by the way, this book is really about the Shadow Party on steroids. George Soros is an important player here but when you see how many of them there are, you'll appreciate what we're up against. The environmental leftists, we divided environmental groups into pro free market and anti‑free market. The anti‑free market wants huge government controls. They think that corporations are the cause of everything from the mythic global warming to every other environmental problem we have. So they have built into them this anti‑capitalist, anti‑freedom agenda. The progressive environmental organizations have $9 1/2 billion in assets. That's bigger than the EPA budget which is 8.7 billion. And also dwarves the pro ‑‑ there are pro free market environmental organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. There are 32 of those and they have $38 million. So that's the left ‑‑
GLENN: To give you some idea of how ‑‑
HOROWITZ: 249 times, times as big.
GLENN: We're not coming to ‑‑
HOROWITZ: But that's ‑‑ that's not the end of it because the left through the Democratic Party and through brainless Republicans gets itself funded by the government. What's the disparity there? They get annually $570 million to fund these anticapitalist, anticorporation environmental organizations, and the pro free market environmental organizations get 728,000. 570 million versus 728,000. You can do the math on that.
GLENN: We're bringing a ‑‑ we're not bringing a knife to a gunfight. We're bringing a toothpick.
HOROWITZ: A toothpick, exactly right.
GLENN: To a ‑‑ to a gunfight.
HOROWITZ: But I'm going to have to say this over and over. Look at Wisconsin. They had all their forces out in Wisconsin and they lost. And why did they lose? Because the people are waking up.
GLENN: They ‑‑
HOROWITZ: Glenn, I mean, you're the Clarion voice here in waking them up.
GLENN: I think people are just, I think people have sensed for a long time that something's not right. I think they started waking up in George W. Bush. I mean, Pat, you and I both have an awakening about the same time, don't you think?
PAT: Mmm‑hmmm. Mmm‑hmmm.
GLENN: It was just a couple of years after September 11th and we're like, something's not right. By 2004 we were pretty awake and I think we're ‑‑ I think we're still somewhat asleep, but we're waking up. And people are just, people are waking up all over the country.
HOROWITZ: I think you can date it from 9/11. 9/11 started the turn and then Obama has really, you know, it's like that when they go to hyperspeed. That Obama really said, people suddenly realized we could lose this country.
GLENN: How much is Obama really in charge of things? How much of this is Obama and how much is he the face?
HOROWITZ: I think if it were only Obama, it wouldn't be such a big problem. I think that Obama is pretty incompetent. I think that's pretty evident. He let Pelosi and Harry Reid run his ‑‑ and the unions. I think the ‑‑ one of the values in this book The New Leviathan is to give you a picture of how it works and how big it really is. And again with the unions. Look, all that Scott Walker had to do was to take away the, you know, the government collecting dues for the unions and give people the freedom to leave and half their members left. So this couldn't ‑‑ you know, this can turn pretty quickly if we have people who have the stomach and the spine to do the right thing.
GLENN: Did you see how Obama is now asking for donations?
HOROWITZ: From weddings? They're shameless.
GLENN: All of the money that they have.
HOROWITZ: Not enough.
GLENN: What are they doing? I guess it is, it's not enough.
HOROWITZ: Never enough.
GLENN: It's never enough. The name it book is The New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. You want to see what it really looks like, you want to see why I've had so many sleepless nights in the last couple of years. David lines it out unlike anything I've ever seen before. New Leviathan available in bookstores everywhere. Back in just a second.
