By Frank Browning and Steve Weissman
David Horowitz, the Trotskyist radical turned far-right entrepreneur, has just published an instant best-seller, Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America. Only the agenda is not Trump's. It's Horowitz's, and shamelessly so. Little David, as we distinguished him from Big David at Ramparts magazine in the 1960s, is pushing his Goliath to be even more ideologically partisan and to more readily provoke extremist violence in the United States and Europe.
"There can be no 'honeymoon' in the wake of this election -- the most divisive since America's Civil War," Horowitz writes. "Republicans must drop their attitude that these political conflicts are 'business as usual' and must begin to confront the fact that the progressive agenda is a dagger aimed at the heart of America's social contract and the security of the American people. Progressives are the mortal enemy," Horowitz warns, lumping together everyone from tough-minded Trots to wide-eyed Bernie bros to scheming Clintonistas. For Trump to save America, he says, Republicans need to eradicate this socialist threat. "The strategy is to go for the jugular."
Big Agenda highlights how much Horowitz has tailored his pitch to meet changing times. Promoting himself in the 1980s as his generation's foremost ideological defector, he eagerly joined the neo-cons in the Reagan administration to fight the Contras in Nicaragua. He moved on to earn good money from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, the Bradley Foundation, and others on the far right by loudly warning how his lumped-together left threatened to subvert America. Then with GWOT, the Global War on Terror, he earned far more by adding an all-out attack on Muslims, creating a double whammy he celebrates promoting his online place of business:
"The David Horowitz Freedom Center combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror."
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