In the prologue of his 1997 memoir, Radical Son, David Horowitz shares an observation — a hard-earned lesson, really — that those on the Left continually run up against and yet can’t seem to accept.

“This is the perennial challenge,” he writes: “to teach our young the conditions of being human, of managing life’s tasks in a world that is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age.”

There it is. The Rosetta Stone of the radical Left, as deciphered by a man who attended his first Communist Party USA political rally in 1948 at age nine; who, as a Sixties radical, made common cause with murderous Black Panthers and helped found the New Left; and who then, as a Reagan conservative, helped the rest of us understand the pathology, the destructiveness, and the dishonesty of his former colleagues on the Left.

No wonder they hate his guts.

As Horowitz now writes, “The New Left was a socialist movement that began as an attempt to rescue the ‘Old’ Communist Left from the ‘mistakes’ it had made in serving masters who murdered more than 100 million people. In peace time. ‘Mistakes’ was our weasel term for the epic crimes our fellow Marxists committed against ordinary human beings who refused to go along with their utopian schemes. Our goal was to revive the quest they had begun and finally create a world of ‘social justice.’”

Horowitz says he had two awakenings during his days as a radical. The first was his realization of the impossibility of true equality “because people are not equal, and the attempt to make them so requires taking away the freedom of most for the benefit of what turns out to be a few.”

His second awakening “came with the success of the New Left’s ‘antiwar movement,’ which forced America out of Vietnam.” He says their “anti-war” claims were actually a pair of lies that doomed 2.5 million peasants in Cambodia and Vietnam. “There wasn’t a single demonstration against the slaughter,” he writes. “Not one. I realized then that it was never an ‘anti-war’ movement. It was an anti-American movement. The Left wanted the Communists to win and didn’t care how many innocent Asians were murdered in the process.”

And that’s when he left the Left.

These days, as Horowitz notes, “We live in an atmosphere of intimidation, where people can lose their livelihoods, their careers and even their lives if they get on the wrong side of leftist crusaders. That is a terrible thing to have to say in this once free country, but it is something that has become too obvious to deny.”

Nowhere is this intimidation, this personal destruction, more apparent than in the Left’s use of race as a weapon. Leftists use it, he says, because it works.

“For 30 years before he descended the famous escalator in Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for the White House,” Horowitz writes, “Donald Trump was a well-known public figure. Everybody in America knew who he was. In all those 30 years, no one ever referred to him as ‘Donald Trump, host of "The Apprentice” and white supremacist.’ Nobody ever said, ‘This is Donald Trump, New York builder and white nationalist.’ That only happened when he ran against the Democrats.“

Horowitz notes that George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney were all smeared with the same racist brush. Remember when, in 2012, Joe Biden warned a largely black audience that Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, were "gonna put y'all back in chains”? (Horowitz could’ve also included Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat whom the Left smears to this day for a speech he gave at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, just seven miles and 16 years removed from the notorious murders of three civil rights activists.)

Aside from its effectiveness, though, Horowitz says there’s another reason why the Democrats keep moonlighting as race pimps: for political cover. “Democrats control 100% of every major inner-city in America,” he writes, “and have for 50 to 100 years. … Every injustice in these inner cities — real or imagined — that policy can affect, Democrats are 100% responsible for. Every rotten school system, which year in and year out fails to provide mainly black and Hispanic kids with the basic tools they need to succeed, is 100% controlled by the Democrat Party and its teacher unions.”

Donald Trump saw an opportunity here, and his outreach to the black community bore fruit. “What do you have to lose?” he famously asked. And the Left, seeing its hold on the black vote become more tenuous, redoubled its attacks on Trump with a viciousness unlike any seen by an American president.

It didn’t work. According to election exit polling, support for Trump rose among blacks, Asians, and Latinos. And not just a little. His support among black men stood at 18%, and his support among black women doubled from 2016 to 2020. (The actual numbers are probably higher, given the social risk attached to admitting one’s support for such a vile racist of a candidate.) So there’s hope, and, thanks to President Trump, there’s a blueprint for pushing back against the Left’s reflexive racism canard.

“Forty years ago,” writes Horowitz, “I left the left when I saw that it was a destructive force that would never change. Leftists do not tolerate dissenters in their ranks. They suppress politically incorrect ideas and cast out their perpetrators, demonizing them in the process.”

“The good news,” he says, “is that a patriotic movement has risen, rededicated to the propositions that all men are created equal and endowed with God-given rights to life and liberty, and is prepared to defend them.”