On radio this morning, David Horowitz, author of The Black Book of the American Left and founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, joined Glenn to discuss his remarkable journey from being one of the founding members of the New Left in the 1960s to a conservative Republican.

“Last night, we had David Horowitz [on the Glenn Beck Program]… and he's an amazing icon and hero,” Glenn said. “I collect rare books, important pieces of history. And David has put a new book out, The Black Book Of The American Left. It's the first in a series of nine that he's putting out to document what happened to us and who did it to us. I am hopeful that he will send me each one autographed because I want to put it in the library. I really, truly believe this is the documentation that is missing on what happened to us and who did it and how it all works.”

To start, Glenn asked David to explain his upbringing and the harrowing incident that led him to reevaluate his ideology.

David was raised by “card-carrying communists” who described themselves as “progressives.” And he followed in their ideological footsteps for many years.

In the early 1970s, David explained he was introduced to the leader of the Black Panther Party, and he ultimately helped raise the money needed to buy a white Baptist church in Oakland. He gave the land to the Panthers so they could build a school. He asked the woman who handled the bookkeeping of the left wing magazine he was editing at the time to keep an eye at the finances of the school because it has received tax-exempt status.

“I asked [my bookkeeper] to do the books of the school because I made it a tax-exempt foundation, and I was under the impression that I.R.S. would close down anything that was [to the] left,” David said. ”She disappeared in December 1974. By the time the police fished her body out of San Francisco Bay, weeks later, I knew [the Panthers] had killed her… That was my awakening. This was in early 1975. I was devastated by the death of this woman. Of course, I felt responsible. And I couldn't understand why I didn't see the dangers. It took me seven years really to come out of a depression and become a conservative.”

David’s new book explores how the progressive left has been able to rise to power in the United States, and, given his background, the book offers in-depth analysis into the inner workings of the American left.

“I put the book together is because I know conservatives are scratching their head and think: How in the heck did we get a guy like [Obama] in the White House,” David said. “And the answer is, over about 20 years, everybody was sort of a asleep as this was happening. The Black Book of the American Left largely is a record of my, at the time, lonely fight. I don't want to say I was the only one fighting these people, but I was one of the very few who understood who they were. They were calling them liberals. They are not.”

“Thank you for saying that,” Glenn said. “Oh it drives me out of my mind when I hear conservatives call people liberal. They are not. They are progressives… They are progressives and they are communists.”

Glenn has been quite vocal about the danger progressivism poses to the Republican Party, but David had a slightly different take on the situation.

“I look at it a little differently. I think that Republicans are fixers. You know, they go to Washington to try to fix problems. They believe the American system was set up to make competing special interests compromise with each other. So they have a huge longing to be reasonable and to make deals. You can't really make deals with the devil without selling your immortal soul. And that's the problem,” David said. “The Republican problem is just a little different. I agree, these deal makers – the Boehners, the McConnells – are interested in deal making. [But] they are not ideologically committed to the progressive agenda. They wouldn't believe in it. But they are committed to compromising with them.”

Find out who David thinks is the future of the Republican Party and more in the clip below: