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I don’t buy it. David Horowitz is not who he pretends to be.

I recently finished his book, The Shadow Party, and found it interesting, but not in your traditional “oh that’s a good book from a trustworthy man” sort of way.

The book is really two in one. There’s a book for the public, wherein he explains that George Soros is a Moriarty type super villain, who through his own brilliance and cunning and malevolence got himself billions of dollars, that he is using to single handedly finance and orchestrate the destruction of America.

That’s kind of a fun story.

But then there’s the second story which comes about when you put the Horowitz-Soros tale into context adding in the history that Horowitz omits; it becomes apparent that the effect of his apparent revelations isn’t so much to show as it is to conceal.

A quick example. He writes about the tactic of exploitation of black-white racial tension and emphatically explains that it was a relatively recent invention of Democrats. But, that is factually wrong. Communists and the Kremlin had started this campaign decades earlier. Woops! There goes major explanatory history! Poof gone!

That is just one example which will be elaborated on alongside others below.

It reminds me of poker. I used to be one of the best in the world at heads-up no limit hold-em. The key to that game was figuring out what your opponent wants you to think. Then you can deduce what his holdings are. It’s a skill that comes in quite handy when parsing these political types.

Personally, I used to have a favorable impression of Horowitz. But then I read his book and had a rather strong feeling that something-isn’t-quite-right. I followed that up by digging into his biography and my suspicions were confirmed. The factums of the Horowitz story simply don’t add up. Something is off.

This entry should be fruitful to anyone interested in the truth about Horowitz, Soros, the history of subversion of the United States, disinformation, or even as a study in methodology on how to spot disinformation.

Horowitz is like Whittaker Chambers?

Recently Horowitz lashed out, once again, at the excellent Diana West, and called her an “unhinged conspiracy theorist.”

What was her transgression? Observing that Horowitz’s dad was a Communist Party member. Also, that Horowitz’s dad was a teacher at the same school from whence came the infamous Russian Rosenberg spy ring.

The problem, though, is that what West wrote is factually correct. Horowitz’s attempts to dismiss facts as a conspiracy theory is logically absurd. It’s bullying. The important thing is the effect he is going for: letting others know that certain topics are off limits.

But these topics, the history of subversion and his family’s nefarious history, are what Horowitz brands himself on! Shouldn’t he, of all people, be happy to dig farther in?

Not only is what West wrote true but it’s also interesting and relevant. Today we are in a mortal struggle against the Swamp. Her work is on its history. She covers the critical background information necessary to understand what we are up against. This is the knowledge, the wisdom, that is needed in order to stop it.

Then there is the specific question of whether Horowitz’s dad was personally involved in recruiting the Rosenberg traitors. The idea has merit both grounded in circumstantial facts surrounding the case and ideology. Consider Horowitz’s own autobiography where he wrote, “each of us knew that our commitment to socialism implied the obligation to commit treason.” That’s pretty strong stuff. The obligation to commit treason.

On the one hand, Horowitz wrote that his family was obligated to commit treason, but on the other hand, if you ask him if his family did commit treason, he will say you are unhinged. Make sense of that.

Horowitz spreads the idea that he is a modern day Whittaker Chambers. It’s right in his autobiography, placed prominently, at the very start. He writes, “I was like Whittaker Chambers,” then he goes on to preface numerous other sentences about himself with, “like Chambers,” and others with, “like him.”

Then, when he gets the chance to actually be like Chambers, and to explore the darkest moments of the history of our subversion, he lashes out trying to silence others. If Horowitz wants to clam up and try to force others into silence regarding his family’s nefarious activities that is understandable. But, and here is a big but, he cannot then also write an alleged tell-all autobiography and brand himself as a former Communist who is going to expose the left. It’s one. Or, it’s the other.

Horowitz’s behavior is in fact so un-Chamber like that it appears to have prompted Chamber’s own family into explicitly repudiating the notion.

What did Horowitz Really Do In Sweden?

Further back in time, before David “don’t be too radical” Horowitz was working to sponsor Black Panther terror, well before he transformed into a right wing writer, he lived abroad in Europe, training under Marxists.

His Amazon biography states that his European life started with a trip to to Sweden in 1962. But it doesn’t say what caused an American—during the Cold War, indeed, what some may consider the height of the Cold War—to go to Sweden of all places.

His autobiography, Radical Son, does elaborate somewhat on it. He explained that he was “impacted” by films done by Ingmar Bergman and it “triggered a desire” for him to go to Europe to find “real culture.” He further explained that he had an “innocent enthusiasm” for the country which was regarded as a “backwater at the edge of the significant world.” How touching.

Let’s tease out here the real meaning, the hidden meaning, behind this passage. Ask yourself what effect is Horowitz trying to achieve with his words.

The Bergman stuff is an explanation for why he moved to Sweden. It avoids revealing anything of significance but yet heads off any unpleasant questions. Questions like, why did you move to Sweden? Was it related to your work for Communism? Did the KGB invite you? Was the Sweden trip related to your parents’ connections to the KGB?

Oh yeah. That’s a fun little fact that Horowitz seems to have left out of his autobiography. Horowitz family was linked up with Kremlin intelligence.

Horowitz wrote, many years after writing his autobiography, that he had been working for the Daily Worker recruiting writers, and he got this position because, “(My parents were friends with Joe North, one of the papers editor’s)”. The parenthesis in that quotation are his own.

Who is Joe North? Again, as far as I can see, Horowitz leaves out the important context. He doesn’t say. What a shame because it makes the story even more interesting. North worked as a recruiter for Kremlin intelligence!

North worked with Kremlin intelligence. He was an editor at the Daily Worker. And he brought little Horowitz in to work at the Daily Worker. One could perhaps say Horowitz was personally and directly connected to the KGB. However, Horowitz wrote otherwise, this nice little clause here, “Even if we never encountered a Soviet agent…”

A little more on his Sweden text.

The term “innocent” that he threw in there is so you know that he was not doing anything shady. The last phrase “backwater” is maybe the most significant. Its purpose is so you know that his move to Sweden couldn’t possibly have been to related to geopolitics, his Communist duties, or anything North related, because after all, he was at the “edge of the significant world.”

And what did Horowitz do while in Sweden?

Oh you know. Just your idyllic farming life. He claimed that in “rural life… the rigors of the farm routine were severe” and he “had hardly any contact with anyone in Sweden.”

Just off to Sweden on a lark, in between stints with the Black Panthers and the KGB recruiter, right as the Cuban Missile Crisis is erupting. Um. Sure.

Horowitz’s Changing Story on Horowitz

Horowitz was recently explaining, yet again, how he is a credible person worth listening to because he used to be a Communist and then transformed into a conservative. In this particular interview, he explained that a sudden and traumatic event in 1974 changed everything: “I left the left when the Black Panthers murdered my friend.”

But then why did he write an article a full 11 years later in 1985 for the Washington Post Magazine, now available as a CIA declassified document, titled, Lefties for Reagan. Didn’t he leave the left in 1974?

The fact is that if Horowitz was a far lefty scumbag, and then some life event affected him and he changed his outlook, that would be good. He could be a wise man worth listening to. If he came clean about his scumbag past, letting light in on the nefarious deeds he had done, whatever Communist rings and subversion his family had been involved in, great!

But a man who speaks truth about his past doesn’t then undermine his own story with constant contradictions on the most basic facts. Nor does he keep changing the story.

In 1987 Horowitz said that by 1973 he was “in a state of shell shock and sitting on the sidelines.”

In his 1997 autobiography he again explained his conversion from Communist to, well, whatever he is today. But rather than the sharp dramatic change that he had previously written about which had allegedly “restored [his] sight,” it was in fact a more gradual change. Look at the review from Commentary Magazine on Amazon, it seeks to explain Horowitz’s “transformation” and gives three possible answers! And has no idea which, if any, is correct!

There is no end to Horowitz’s explanations about the famous Horowitz transformation. It happened in 1973. No, actually it was 1974. No, wait, actually it was a gradual process, so gradual in fact he was writing pieces self-identifying as a leftist in 1985.

And by the way, did Horowitz really not realize that the Black Panthers were violent before 1974?

The Shadow Party – Horowitz’s Book

Here’s a fun exercise. Compare Horowitz’s thesis to that of West’s, keeping in mind that he has repeatedly attacked West, calling her an out of control conspiracy theorist.

West argues that the Kremlin and Communists were able to infiltrate the American government and influence America’s foreign policy.

Horowitz argues that George Soros has constructed his own “Shadow Party” which is taking over the United States and deciding policy.

Which idea is more far fetched? That one man is single handedly destroying the United States? Or that the Kremlin, an entire nation-state, or rather an empire, with the largest intelligence service that humanity has ever seen, was able to infiltrate and influence America’s government?

In some ways, Horowitz’s theory is actually quite similar to that of West. Both argue that the United States has been infiltrated, hijacked, and subverted. West connects it to an ideological movement dating back at least a century with adherents around the globe and to the Kremlin. Horowitz says it’s done by Soros.

From my point of view, if we must use the term in a derogatory sense, it is actually Horowitz himself who is the conspiracy theorist.

Here is a brief sampling of Horowitz on Soros: “Soros makes his own rules,” “Soros has constructed a party, a Shadow Party, unlike any in American history,” “a third force had entered the political arena. That force was George Soros.”

See, we aren’t up against Communism, the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party. We’re up against Soros. That’s it.

Horowitz lists on his web page that the number one goal is to “Identify the enemy and understand his nature.” What is the corollary to that? If you can confuse a people about who the enemy is then you prevent them from defending themselves?

This is why West’s work is such brilliant and necessary reading. She provides a framework for understanding our enemy, who they are both foreign and domestic, and traces their roots back a hundred years. This gives us a deep understanding of who we are up against, their goals, their tactics, who they are today, and what they will do next.

Horowitz work has the opposite effect. There is no deep history. The problem isn’t expanded and explained. It’s limited, bounded, directed and misdirected onto a single man.

The Soros Dossier

A fun part of the Soros bio is that not only is he leading the effort to take down the United States, but he’s also single handedly financing the effort, all with money he earned, and all by himself!

Horowitz wrote that Soros invested in oil drilling stock even though “everyone thought he was mad” but then right away, wow, the Arab oil embargo hit, sending prices high. He followed that up by buying stocks in specialized military equipment, the type of stuff that civilians hadn’t heard of back then, which apparently netted him big gains.

Horowitz describes Soros’ trades as “eerily prescient investments.” Well, how was he able to do it? The explanation we get is “Soros’ career blossomed in New York, due partly to his drive and intellect and partly to the help and guidance of top-level global investors.”

Really? Guidance of top-level global investors? How would a refugee have such high level connections and what type of “guidance” was he given?

Looking back on Soros’ career retroactively one might ask whether he was given inside information or if that “guidance” had even come from an intelligence community. Would that explain anything? Is that a question worth taking a look at?

Horowitz doesn’t think so. He ends chapter one by writing, “[Soros] has unprecedented political and financial power for a private citizen.” Guess not. Off limits! Soros made his money doing nothing shady, just super duper smart trades, just like Soros said!

So far as I can see, Horowitz book is an exercise in regurgitating the basic facts on Soros’ life that Soros himself has made public. Horowitz merely adds in the editorial “Soros is a bad bad man.”

Consider, the premise of the book is that Soros is a dangerous Machiavellian liar. But also, it’s based on parroting what Soros says about himself with no critical examination, no analysis, of whether it makes sense and if it might be a cover for something else. It seems to me that there is a serious contradiction here which must be reconciled.

Soros Collaborates with the Soviet Union

Here is a fun quirk. Tell me if this is a coincidence.

West writes about how the Kremlin gained influence in the American government. Horowitz says she is “unhinged.” Horowitz, for his part, writes about a man who is gaining influence in the American government… and guess where he came from? Russia. Actually, speaking of Russia, Horowitz’s own family came from Russia as well.

Soros came out of Hungary in 1947, which at that time, was under Stalin’s control. That is problematic in itself but making the situation even more perturbing is that Soros had been a Nazi collaborator. Stalin sent Nazi collaborators to the Gulag. Stalin’s paranoia and draconian measures are well known; he sent anyone who merely could have been a Nazi collaborator to the Gulag. So how did Soros make it out of Russia-controlled Hungary? How did he rise from being a refugee to a college student in England and from thence to the status of rich financier so quickly?

Horowitz quotes Soros as saying, in 1946, “I’d like to go to Moscow to find out about Communism. I mean that’s where the power is.”

Well, did he go? And how could he want to go to Moscow, having been a Nazi collaborator, unless his safety from the KGB was somehow assured?

Now let’s skip ahead in the Soros story to when he opened up the Open Societies Foundation which Horowitz says is what Soros has largely used to hurt America.

Based on the Horowitz reading that Soros left his Eurasian life behind, came to America as a “private citizen” and “for one reason only—to make money” it would stand to reason he’d open up a center in the United States. But actually, he opened up the first one in Hungary. Moreover, in Hungary in 1984!

This is a red flag for anyone paying attention and giving the Soros Dossier an actual analysis. No foreign “businessman” could open up a venture, certainly not a political entity, without the Kremlin permitting it, wanting it, and “knowing” that “financier.”

Even interviews inside the book Soros on Soros recognize this issue. Soros is asked, “In 1984, when this was happening, the government in power in Hungary was still strictly communist. In Hungary of all places, you are now frequently accused of having collaborated with that regime in the interest of your foundation. Is that true?”

And yet no hint of this dilemma in Horowitz’s book. Horowitz is actually more slavish to the basic facts of the Soros line than a book by Soros himself.

In 1987, Soros opened up an office in Moscow and later remarked, “My spending rose from $3 million in 1987 to more than $300 million a year by 1992.”

The way Horowitz tells this part of the story, Soros got “angry” at Gorbachev and then “undermined” Gorbachev with public attacks that “damaged Gorbachev’s reputation.”

We are supposed to accept at face value this story that the totalitarian Communists in the Kremlin welcomed a subversive capitalist into their empire who first funded dissidents in Hungary and then, after that, the Kremlin welcomed him into Russia itself where he then attacked the Kremlin itself.

Yeah. Sure.

Consider the implications of this story that the Soros-Horowitz tag team pushes. Inside their framework, it isn’t foreign subversion of America that’s the problem, but Soros who is based out of the US, who is attacking and subverting the rest of the world, including Russia and Putin, a “man of order,” who are the hapless victims of treacherous attacks from America.

Horowitz says that Russians have been victimized by Clinton, Talbot and Gore. Funny he should bring these people up because I also bring them up in my short book Russian Agents: The Clintons Attack Against America. What a surprise, once again Horowitz omits critical historical information and context.

This crew of “anti-Russian” Americans—who Horowitz uses to advance his argument that meanie-pants America is harming those hapless Russians—were actually sponsored by the Kremlin. They all had an extensive history of collaborating with the Kremlin.

Talbot was recruited by the KGB to write a pro-Khrushchev biography while Al Gore Sr. was sponsored by, Russian agent and personal friend to Lenin, Armand Hammer. The Clintons most of all have a deep and extensive history of trips to Russia, pushing the Kremlin line, and massive financial sponsorship. Read my book for further details.

Everyone Horowitz alleges of being a vicious American spreading turmoil abroad actually had deep and unseemly ties to the Kremlin. And, of course, have actually been spreading turmoil in America.

This is the Horowitz inversion. He twists it so an attack on America is actually America attacking the rest of the world. Blaming America for problems that others cause, hm, who else uses this tactic?

Horowitz Acts Naive

If there is one person in the world who shouldn’t be naive it is Horowitz. This is a guy who worked with terrorists, had Marxist training in Europe, had Communist parents pledging to overthrow the government, was hooked in with Kremlin intelligence, and had a dad working at the same spot that the Russian Rosenberg spy went to school!

If anyone has seen shit go down it is this guy right here. If someone were going to expand our minds about the possibilities of what we are up against he is well positioned to do so. And yet…

Consider for instance this statement from his book where he talks about the Democrat tactic of leveraging racial divide for political gain: “In the Sixties, Cloward and Piven had practically invented the strategy of exploiting black rage to advance the cause of ‘social justice.’”

This is just simply not true. The idea of “exploiting black rage” wasn’t invented in the sixties by them. It was started decades earlier. PhD Kengor has written about this in his book The Communist which I will quote at length here because it so thoroughly demolishes Horowitz’s claim:

Kengor explained:

“From 1928 to 1930, the Comintern had ordered CPUSA to support black causes for freedom and self-determination in the Jim Crow South, in what the Comintern called the ‘Black Belt.’ This push to entice black America is one of the most salient features defining the declassified Comintern Archives on CPUSA.

Only later, under congressional testimony from sources who bolted the Party, did the U.S. government learn about Soviet schemes for black America. In 1922, the Comintern had approved a three-hundred-thousand-dollar subsidy to the American Communist Party for purposes of propaganda among black Americans.”

So Horowitz’s assertion is false, misses the roots of how this tactic came about, indeed, blocks and seals it off so it is not accessible to us.

Innocent mistake from a naive Horowitz? Maybe not.

Kengor was writing about the Scottsboro Boys. Well, Horowitz has also written specifically about them, “the Scottsboro Boys, who had been falsely convicted of raping two white women, and whose case the Party had taken up.” Italics my own. He went on, “In the pages of the Daily Worker there were always reports of injustices to Negroes.”

So Horowitz knew that what he was writing in Shadow Party was wrong.

Again, the key to understanding the Horowitz game here is to ask, what effect is he striving to achieve? Why would he say that Cloward and Piven recently “invented” this tactic when so clearly they did not?

His book on history has the effect of actually blocking history off.

A trivial academic matter? Well consider this. The Kengor book explores the fact that Obama’s mentor was Frank Marshall Davis who was a Communist. Davis was pro-Kremlin and had been influenced ideologically by Kremlin disinformation on racial matters.

The Communist-Davis-Obama nexus was so bad that if it had gotten more exposure and understanding it could conceivably have hurt Obama’s chances at election. And yet, this dynamic is impossible to understand, or even consider, in a world where it is believed that this type of racial subversion started in the 1960s, as Horowitz claims in Shadow Party.

No Foreign Subversion of America. Nothing to See Here Folks!

Horowitz goes on at length about a number of Soros associates who worked to undermine the United States in the Vietnam War. For instance, he brings up Soros colleague Aryeh Neier and explains “Neier personally created the radical group Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1959. During the Vietnam War, SDS was the student group most responsible for fanning the flames of unrest on US campuses.”

But, and this may not come as a surprise by now, Horowitz again leaves out the context.

The movement to smear the United States as it regards the Vietnam War was hugely sponsored from abroad. I don’t think any person familiar with the subject would dispute that Moscow funded the movement to the amount of, at the very least, over a hundred million dollars, and it was likely an order of magnitude more. Even assuming a lower estimate, it is a sum of money that is higher than many of the figures dropped in this book about the so-called “shadow party.”

Consider the words of high level defector Pacepa:

“The KGB campaign to assault the U.S. and Europe by means of disinformation was more than just a few Cold War dirty tricks. The whole foreign policy of the Soviet-bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world Communism… As far as I’m concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America.”

Hm. Sounds important. Almost like if you are talking about the roots of subversion, and particularly the roots of subversion regarding the Vietnam War, you’d want to talk about this. Maybe someone can disagree on the extent to which the KGB was responsible and effective but surely it’s worth bringing up?

But Horowitz doesn’t. Instead, he writes about it as if it were an entirely homegrown American movement. In fact, maybe I missed it, but in this entire book about the subversion of America, I don’t recall seeing a single instance where it was argued that the subversion was sponsored from abroad.

Now compare The Shadow Party where he argues that subversion of America is basically a homegrown affair to Horowitz’s autobiography where he admits his family’s loyalty was to a foreign power, “In their hearts they were indeed loyal to the Soviet state… Their loyalty to Moscow was as inseparable from their faith as was a Catholic’s belief in the authority of Rome.”

Do you see the disconnect here? On the one hand, he knows from personal experience the deep connection between subversion of American and foreign sponsorship, but yet in his book The Shadow Party, he acts like this angle doesn’t even exist.

Horowitz Versus McCarthy

We’ll go over one more example of a statement from The Shadow Partythat isn’t entirely accurate. This one isn’t even to prove a point about Horowitz. I believe the above 4,500 words were sufficient to let people understand Horowitz in new ways. This point is simply interesting and important history for its own sake.

Horowitz writes:

“In 1950, America was engaged in a Cold War with Communist totalitarianism. President Truman was, at that very moment, aggressively purging Communist sympathizers from government positions… ‘All of this was conducted with secret evidence, secret and often paid informers, and neither judge nor jury.’”

He then goes on to bring Joseph McCarthy into it, just as he has regularly done on Twitter here, and here, and here, and many other times, because he really likes to let Republicans know that they should not like McCarthy, and whatever it was that McCarthy was doing.

Horowitz is here spreading the left wing view of history, one which the left has gone to great lengths to propagate. McCarthy is arguably the single most demonized American in history. Perhaps taking second place to Trump now.

M. Stanton Evans wrote the definitive must read book on this topic, Blacklisted By History. Read what Evans wrote on this Horowitz-claim that Truman was a hardliner who took care of the Communist problem: “Sad to say, this portrayal of Truman’s policy on the home front is almost entirely fiction… Not only was the security problem not cleaned up by 1950, some of the most flagrant suspects imaginable were flourishing in the federal workforce.”

So much for that “aggressive purge” eh Horowitz?

In fact, the very premise of Horowitz’s argument is confounding. First he uses the term, “Communist sympathizers,” which apparently is used as a euphemism for “Kremlin agent,” because our government had literal Kremlin agents inside of it. Again, Horowitz downplays and minimizes the issue.

He writes that they were “purged” with “secret evidence” and “neither judge nor jury.” Well, yeah. To fire someone from a job you don’t need a court. And, if any “secret evidence” had been made public then the Communist loyalists would have gone beserk saying that they were tarnishing a good man’s reputation and smearing him in public and persecuting him.

Horowitz sets out the terms of the debate such that any attempt to actually root out infiltration in our government is impossible. Any efforts, nefarious.

There is much more to say about McCarthy, but you can take a hint from Horowitz’s insistence to demonize the man, as to McCarthy’s importance. McCarthy is a key needed to unlock our history and the world we live in today. Refer to Blacklisted by History and Diana West’s excellent work for more.

So here we are with Horowitz. A career Communist, who wants to expose Communists, but then attacks people who actually do so. A man here to inform us of subversion but then walls the issue off. A person who gives a history lesson by concealing the history. A guy who tells us to know the enemy and then reduces a vast global conspiracy reaching back in time and across the world down to one man. What is the ultimate effect here is he helping?