Reformed Radical on Militant Movement

This is a rush transcript from "Glenn Beck," September 4, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

GLENN BECK, HOST: President Obama has said we need a civilian force that is as highly-trained and well-funded as our U.S. military for domestic purposes. Why is that?

I sat down and talked to David Horowitz. He's a reformed 1960s radical and former communist.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID HOROWITZ, FRONTPAGEMAG.COM: Barack Obama is an ideologue. He comes out of the left that has been trying to get power in this country for half a century, and this is their best chance to do it, and the army he is speaking of is only one of many armies. When he appoints an avowed communist, a guy who was arrested in a race riot.

BECK: Hang on just a second, because I want to — I want to make sure...

HOROWITZ: Yes.

BECK: Not throwing around the word "communist," your parents were communists, right?

HOROWITZ: This guy says he's a communist.

BECK: Yes. I know that. I know that. Just so you — so people who don't know, your parents were communists?

HOROWITZ: Yes, my parents were card-carrying communists.

BECK: Card-carrying communists: You were a 1960s radical.

HOROWITZ: That's right.

BECK: You were part of — you were cut from this cloth.

HOROWITZ: I was cut from the movement, the 1960s movement of radicals, which is now running the show. It was done by children of communist or children of communists to revive the communist movement.

BECK: All right. So, as a former communist and a guy raised by communists, not only has he said it, but what gives you the — what are the earmarks of not just a communist, a radical communist like Van Jones?

HOROWITZ: You can't call yourself a communist three years after the Berlin Wall fell and not understand what went on in communism and not support it. That is, to the left, the left sees — everything that the left does is a crime. They say the capitalists did it, the devil made me do it. This is like with Fidel Castro. He has bankrupted his country; he's a lunatic. But what they do is they blame it on the United States.

So when I see a guy who calls himself a communist, who has organized a revolutionary movement that's called STORM, to organize a revolutionary movement, and whites books in which white people, and corporations are pure evil. This was paradise America before, white people came and ruined it — I know in my gut, because I was there, what's going on. These people want to destroy the system that we live under and create their fantasy.

BECK: Yes. I've never seen anything like it. We have an actual communist. We have people who want to put sterilants in drinking water. We have a socialist whose name now has been removed. We have czars with gathering power. We have the AFL-CIO now as the head of the chair — the head of the Fed in New York. We have SEIU using their muscles.

We have activists like ACORN actually having an audience with the president, yet no tea party people could meet with the president, and yet, people in America still want to give people the benefit of the doubt and say it's.

(CROSSTALK)

HOROWITZ: It's the great thing about this country. Everybody gets a second and a third chance, but it's becoming increasingly dangerous with these people. You have to take them at their word. What we're seeing here is what I have called — I wrote a book about it called "The Shadow Party," which has been put together by George Soros. So, you get billionaires, you get unions — radical unions, the head of the SEIU is an old SDS radical with a Leninist perspective, and you get street radicals — and Soros put them together in a coalition.

And you see it embodied in a Van Jones, a street radical who graduated from Yale Law School, and who's a protege of the Center for American Progress, which is run by Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta. That alliance was put together about five years ago, and what you are seeing unfold now are the plans that Soros laid for the 2004 election. He was defeated then when Bush unexpectedly won.

BECK: Tell me — tell me, David, when you hear — it sounds crazy and it's almost like these things are ghosts, you know? It's like you are chasing ghosts. Well, OK, he was in STORM. Big deal, that's over. Now, he's in the Apollo Alliance. There is credible people there, credible businesses.

HOROWITZ: Yes.

BECK: The Center of American Progress — I mean, it's John Podesta, he's worked in the White House.

HOROWITZ: Yes. The Apollo Alliance is a broad coalition to advance very radical agendas. And it includes very respectable businessmen, powers in the Democratic Party, but its muscle is unions and radicals. And it was created out of Rob Borosage's the Center for the American Future. Borosage is an old SDS radical.

When you become disillusioned with the left and you see its destructive agendas and you see the way it supports America's enemies abroad and you see the way it doesn't really advance the interests of poor people or black people in America, when you become disillusioned, you turn, and you — because you are very political person, you want to tell other people.

And that's been my career and other people like me, but it's not Van Jones' career. And it's not Rob Borosage's. They buy the agenda still. They are still seeking to overthrow the system and to create a socialist future.

BECK: Do you think the president of the United Sates, Barack Obama has that agenda?

HOROWITZ: Absolutely. I have no doubt about it. You have to see where he came from. First of all, he was an operative for ACORN. He's out of the Alinsky school. He worked for the Gamaliel Foundation.

BECK: He'd say that's politics of the past.

HOROWITZ: That's nonsense. People don't change overnight. I mean, who changes overnight?

BECK: He said, well...

HOROWITZ: Besides Arianna Huffington.

(LAUGHTER)

HOROWITZ: I mean, this is not what people do. You know, people are committed. This is a moral thing for people.

When you are a radical, you believe that you are in the army of the saints, a righteous person, and it's immoral. And if you — you know, I just read actually Van Jones' book, "The Green Economy," and you can see he defends himself against people who say he's selling out.

That's the big thing you can't do. If you sell out, then you become vilified. I mean, I've been — you know, I'm just totally vilified on the left. So, there's — everybody in the left understands, you know, I don't want to be a sellout. And it's actually something I said to myself when I was young.

So, you can always tell when a radical has changed, because they tell you they're changed, and they understand what's wrong with the left, and what's wrong with the left is its agendas, what it actually does — not what it says, but what it does.

BECK: Do you think Barack Obama is the architect or the anointed one?

HOROWITZ: I think Barack Obama is the anointed one. I think that his agendas are being driven by people like Soros and Rahm Emanuel. I think that Obama, this is what he wants.

I mean, I made the mistake with Obama. I thought he was going to be smart like Clinton, and I thought he was going to understand that America is a country that you have to govern from the center, and he would be to the left of center. But I didn't think he was going to empower Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to drive that steamroller over the country and bankrupt it.

BECK: I said I was at the "Time" 100 and I'm sitting there, Van Jones was there sitting at this big table, and, you know, I'm the only one there with my philosophy. And I said, "Let me ask you this — agree or disagree with the president, forget about the policy. Has anybody stopped to think what America looks like at the end of four years with just the changes that have been proposed and put into place right now? Has anybody done that?" The silence was deafening.

HOROWITZ: It's all instrumental — that is, when you are a radical, what you are thinking of is power. It's about power. You adopt this position. You take up that issue, but it's all to advance the power. They never think about what it's going to look like or how to put it together.

I can tell you, a radical never spends five seconds on thinking what makes a society work. That's not the way they work. They want to know, you know, what they can get away with to advance this big agenda, which is you get power and you change everything.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America!

(CHEERING)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOROWITZ: That's the way they think.

BECK: You said that it's becoming increasingly dangerous to ignore this. Why?

HOROWITZ: Well, I have watched the growth of the left, you know, for 40 or 50 years, and this presence of movement to the left started in 1972 with McGovern. There used to be a communist party, and that communist party imploded.

Most of the people who created this new left, this — we'll call it the Alinsky left era, after its guru Saul Alinsky, supported the communists. They supported the communists. They still think that America should have pulled out of Vietnam and let 2.5 million people be slaughtered, but I have never seen it so powerful and it has never controlled a major party.

BECK: They are in control.

HOROWITZ: They are in control. The Democratic Party is no longer the party — certainly not the party of John F. Kennedy who had the same politics as Ronald Reagan.

BECK: Yes.

HOROWITZ: Hard on defense.

BECK: My grandfather was a Democrat. My whole family was a Democrat. My grandfather — I know who my grandfather was. He would not have been in the same room with many of these people. He would not.

HOROWITZ: Watch Joe Lieberman.

BECK: Yes.

HOROWITZ: He is a liberal Democrat and a liberal Democrat in a post- McGovern era and he is very concerned — concerned on national security, concerned on health care.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BECK: Is America finally waking up to what's happening in our country? The answers — next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BECK: You know, it's about a year ago that I was saying that people in America were not paying attention. I couldn't wake them up. I couldn't get them to pay attention.

Their government was doing something to the country. And we have spent a long time together, you and me, trying to figure things out. Well, the other day, I was laying in bed with my wife and she turned to me and she said, "Are you OK? I said, "Yes."

Finally, people are starting to wake up. Millions all around the country are starting to wake up. But there is a sense of frustration that we are losing our country and people just don't know what to do. How do you — how do you dismantle what the government is putting into place?

Here again, David Horowitz:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HOROWITZ: First, let me say that I have been waiting for just conservatives to wake up for 20 years.

We refer to these people as liberals. There is nothing liberal about these people except their attitudes towards drugs — hard drugs and sex. That's what they're liberal about.

Everything else — they want to control your life. They're intolerant, bigoted and they will try to destroy you, as you are finding out, if you disagree with them.

(LAUGHTER)

HOROWITZ: Now, I think that there's — I have a strategic idea that also is just an encouragement. The country's mentality is not radical. It is not radical. It may not be conservative the way conservatives like to think, socially conservative and so forth, but it's not radical. And they understand that.

They're very good — that's why they always — they always talk about the private sector like they care about the private sector. They care to just get its money. As Lenin said, the capitalists will say you're the rope to hang them.

In my view, we should take a page out of Alinsky's book, "Rules for Radicals." And he says, what you do is you go outside the experience of your opponent and you disorient them, and you make them react the way that reveals who they are. The big secret of the left is that it claims to — and it's, of course, the Democratic Party — to be the champion of poor people, minorities, women, children, when, in fact, it is the oppressor of minorities, women and children.

BECK: I noticed this — I noticed this with ACORN. They'll take this people who are on the lowest rung of the ladder, push them into, I don't care, Mickey Mouse or whatever, forge them, you, just, we'll give you 20 bucks for every one you get. Keep bringing them in.

HOROWITZ: They use them.

BECK: And then they throw them to the wolves when they're caught and say, it was just rogue people, then they use those people as their being tried, and say, "Look, the man is keeping them down." They were the ones who put him in that situation.

HOROWITZ: Look what they did to the Vietnamese. They claimed to be the champions of the Vietnamese people against the American oppressor when the Vietnamese and the Cambodians were being slaughtered by the communists. They didn't utter a single word. They didn't care about them.

BECK: Where do we start?

HOROWITZ: I think you start with the inner cities of America. Every major inner city in America — Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Harlem, South Central, the city council in every one of those inner cities, the school board, the school district is 100 percent controlled by the Democratic Party, and Washington, D.C., of course, controlled — 100 percent controlled by the Democratic Party and the social justice crowd, and has been for 100 years.

Everything that's wrong in the inner cities that policy can affect, Democrats and progressives are responsible for. They have their boot heels on the necks of poor, black and Hispanic children everywhere in America, and the Republican Party lets them get away with it, never says a word about this.

If conservatives will start — will show these people — now, they're attacking old people. They want old people to die sooner. They don't want to give them the care that will keep them alive.

BECK: It's what Sarah Palin did.

HOROWITZ: That's what she did. That's why they hate her. She's very effective. You know, that is great.

And it shows you, they react, they yell, they squeal — and suddenly, the issue was in front of everybody. That's what you want to do.

The tea parties are great. They've taken American revolutionary symbol. And you remember the '60s kind of started with Jerry Rubin appearing in a revolutionary, you know, American revolutionary outfit. Yes, we're revolutionaries.

Now, see, if you get on the side of the underdog, and that's why they hate you and they hate O'Reilly because — no, I'm being serious. The romance of the underdog is the American romance, and it's because we were a little set of colonies. We went up against a big empire.

So, everybody thinks of themselves as an underdog. I mean, Martha Stewart, you know, Bill Gates, everybody is being picked on.

The Democrats are brilliant at pretending to be on your side. They never put a — look at the health care. How do they sell it? Forty-seven million people who can't get healthcare. We know that's a big lie, but that's what you do. You put in front — it's the human shield thing, the little black kid, little Hispanic kid, a woman, whatever, an old folk.

Republicans have to stop talking like businessmen and accountants, and stop talking and thinking of politics as a management problem. There's waste — yes, there's waste and inefficiency, but it's what they're doing to real people. That's their Achilles' heel.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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