[Order a copy of David Horowitz’s Final Battle: HERE.]

Even now, nearly two years into the Biden administration, to peruse the “current events” or “American politics” titles at the typical bookstore virtually anywhere in the Western world is to encounter a solid wall of Trump-hatred – tome after cynical tome piling lie upon outrageous lie in support of a narrative so utterly devoid of fact as to qualify these texts for placement in the fiction section. Yes, there have always been journalists and historians who’ve put something of an ideological slant on the historical record. But during the Trump era the level of mendacity has been well-nigh unprecedented. To love books, to love the truth, and to love America is almost to grow physically ill at the sheer scale of the perfidy on offer. It’s also to feel even more grateful for the fact that David Horowitz, in a series of short but definitive books that have been published during the last few years, has provided powerful correctives to all the shameless deceit – highly concentrated doses of verity and wisdom that could not be more essential reading for Americans who for the last few years have been supplied by the legacy media and big New York publishers with a steady diet of sheer and utter bilge. The most recent of Horowitz’s books, Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be the Last, is now available.

First, a quick summing-up of its predecessors. In Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America (2017), which appeared early in the Trump presidency, Horowitz detailed Trump’s America First battle plan; three years later, in Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020), Horowitz tallied the manifold policy achievements of Trump’s administration as well as his detractors’ baseless libels; in The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America (2021), he provided a panorama of Trump’s “woke” enemies, from the progressive professoriate to Silicon Valley censors; and in I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America (2021), he destroyed the myths surrounding George Floyd and other criminals who, thanks to the propaganda of Black Lives Matter and the accommodating attitude of the mainstream media, have been posthumously transformed into martyrs.

Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be the Last is the natural – and necessary – follow-up to these volumes. Horowitz opens with a bang: taking us back to Election Day 2020, he recalls the mysteries of Election Night, ponders the impact on the official results of the Democrats’ election “reforms” (from promoting mail-in ballots to opposing voter ID), and reminds us that these “reforms,” in every particular, were totally at odds with proposals that had been formulated by the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform (created in 2004 and led by Jimmy Carter and James Baker) and that both the Democrats and Republicans had eagerly embraced just a few years earlier. The more closely one examines the Democrats’ about-face on this subject, the more obvious it is that the only purpose of their counter-reformation “reforms,” which were putatively motivated by a noble desire to eliminate purported impediments to minority voting (for example, it’s somehow harder for blacks than for whites to locate and copy their birth certificates, to figure out how to register to vote, and to find their way to the nearest polling station on Election Day), was to make it easier for the Democrats to cheat. Horowitz doesn’t miss the irony of the fact that after Democrats had questioned one recent Republican presidential victory after another on little or no evidence, Republicans who now spoke up about the many fishy goings-on around the country on Election Night this time around were now being denounced, in tones of high moral dudgeon, as “traitors” spouting “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, actions that have always been recognized as essential to democracy – such as being allowed to express an opinion contrary to that of the ruling party – were now being depicted as nothing less than assaults on democracy.

In these opening pages, Horowitz establishes the pattern that he will follow throughout the book. First, quite simply, he sets the record straight. Step by step, he tells us what happened – period. This is a more valuable service than it might seem. Even if you’re an assiduous follower of the news – and even if your preferred news sources are the handful of  alternative media that you can actually count upon to give you the facts – there will be plenty of developments that you happened to miss, or that you happen to have forgotten, and that form a key part of the big picture. But Horowitz does much more than set forth the facts. He provides a perceptive running commentary on it all, supplementing the facts with pointed reminders of the falsehoods – repeated endlessly by the Democratic Party, the Biden White House, and their media lackeys – that have taken the place of those facts in the minds of millions of Americans.

Horowitz’s account of the 2020 election itself is succeeded by several pages apiece on the major events of the weeks immediately following that debacle: the so-called “insurrection” of January 6, the second impeachment of Trump on January 13, the inauguration of Biden on January 20, and the flurry of executive orders that Biden signed on Inauguration Day. The lies about January 6, of course, are legion. They begin with the very notion – which to any sane observer was and is ridiculous on its face – that what happened in the Capitol building that day can even remotely be considered an “insurrection.” Similarly, no sane person who examines what Trump said to his followers on that day can find the slightest evidence for the absurd claim that he encouraged them to enter the Capitol, engage in violence, or overthrow the government. It is nothing short of remarkable that TV newsreaders, even now, can repeat these preposterous fabrications with a straight face. Horowitz treats all this foolishness exactly the way it deserves to be treated, and also debunks the asinine assertion that January 6 was somehow unprecedented: in a March 1, 1954, incident that has, over time, received a tiny fraction of the attention given to the January 6 “insurrection,” four armed Puerto Rican terrorists actually shot at members of Congress from the House gallery, wounding five of them. Yes, wounding five of them. Have you ever heard of this? Of course not. (Years later, by the way, President Carter commuted the perpetrators’ sentences.)  

Biden has referred to the Trump supporters who entered the Capitol on January 6 as “a riotous mob” and as “domestic terrorists.” On the contrary, not one of those people carried a gun, and only incidental damage was done to a structure that is, in fact, a public building to which, on a typical day, ordinary citizens have free access. (I myself have walked in and out of it a great many times without the least hassle.) To this day, the mainstream media declare, as if it were an amply corroborated fact, that a police officer was killed at the Capitol on that day. No; the only death was that of a young woman who was a Trump supporter, and the circumstances of her demise have yet to be firmly established. Horowitz’s gloss on all this is devastating: in contrast to the minimal harm done on January 6 to what Nancy Pelosi called “the temple of democracy,” there were, in the year 2020, “at least 746 violent riots nationwide,” almost all of them organized by BLM and Antifa, which dance to the beat of Pelosi’s drum. In those riots, “federal buildings were torched, stores looted and destroyed, and individuals savagely beaten by mobs.” And how did Biden, for one, characterize all that disorder? He “dismissed Antifa as merely ‘an idea.’” Similarly, Merrick Garland, his feckless Attorney General, responded to questions about this very contrast by attempting to minimize the significance of the BLM/Antifa rampages while singling out January 6 as an existential threat to American democracy.

As for Biden’s inaugural address, Horowitz recalls the president’s lofty vows to “brin[g] America together,” to “unit[e] our people,” and to be “a president for all Americans” – promises that Biden proceeded almost immediately to break. Just moments after delivering that speech, he signed a raft of executive orders that undid some of Trump’s most important and successful policies. You’ll probably recall that one of those orders put an end to the construction of the wall at the Mexican border. Yes, not all that long before, Biden and other Democrats in Congress had supported the building of a border wall; now, however, because Trump had made the wall his personal cause, Biden felt compelled to switch sides – and to attribute an enthusiasm for the wall, on anyone’s part, not to a concern about mass illegal immigration and its impact on American wages, child trafficking, and the importation into the U.S. of armies of criminals and massive amounts of deadly fentanyl, but to “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”

Do you remember, by the way, what Biden’s other January 20 executive orders were about? Horowitz does. One of them restored U.S. membership in the World Health Organization, which Trump had taken us out of because it’s controlled by China. Another Biden order restored America’s so-called “humanitarian aid” to Palestinians – which Trump had cancelled, as Horowitz points out, because that moneyfrom American taxpayers had been used “to fund terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians.” Yet another Biden order put an end to Trump’s 1776 Commission, a vitally important initiative that was intended to counter the poisonous impact on public-school students nationwide of the New York Times’s perfidious 1619 Project, which teaches that America was founded not on freedom but on racism. Forget about everything else Biden has done since that very first day of his presidency: those executive orders of January 20 alone, Horowitz reasonably contends, effected a not inconsiderable transformation in American society.

Of course, Horowitz proceeds to cover the rest of the Biden presidency – and to point out the highly illuminating consistencies in the actions taken by his administration. When the Biden White House came up with an aid package for small businesses that had suffered economically because of the pandemic lockdowns, it prioritized firms owned by blacks, Latinos, and other minorities – even though race had nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. When undocumented immigrants flowed across the border in record numbers, not only was nothing done to try to keep them out (in fact, they were flown clandestinely, under the cover of night, to destinations around the country, leading a former Trump aide to observe that Biden had “turned Border Patrol and ICE agencies into resettlement agencies”), those illegals were exempted from the requirement – imposed on every American citizen seeking to enter his own country from abroad – that they show proof of a negative COVID test.

There’s much more. And through it all, Horowitz’s major contribution is to connect the dots, to identify the underlying pattern. The “central theme” of the Biden agenda, writes Horowitz, has been “equity.” Which is code for putting your finger on the scale for purported victim groups – including imprisoned felons, non-whites (including foreigners who’ve never set foot in the U.S.), and self-declared stateside victims, who, however privileged in reality, belong to officially designated victim groups or profess to be “queer” or “non-binary” – as well as for people who happen to fall into traditionally pro-Democratic demographic categories. And consistently, those who are trampled upon by Biden’s agenda are, first and foremost, the hard-working, law-abiding middle-class Americans, especially those living in flyover America – the Americans, in short, whom Hillary Clinton called “deplorables.” In short, America last. Trump strove throughout his presidency to help make life better for precisely these people – and, to an extraordinary extent (at least before COVID came along), he succeeded magnificently, bringing unemployment down for a wide range of demographic groups. Biden, by contrast, is out to fleece working Americans and stuff taxpayer cash into the pockets of the undeserving – hence his outrageous, unconstitutional promise to “forgive” the college loans of rich Ivy League kids.

None of this is new, of course. It’s just more extreme – more and more and more extreme. America has been proceeding down this road for a long time, led every step of the way by progressives in the academy, in popular culture, in politics, in big business, in the media, and even in the mainstream religious and military establishments. And Horowitz knows all about it because he was there on the left all those decades ago, shoulder to shoulder with Black Panthers and other radical leftists, at the very moment when all this mischief started. At first he believed in it. But then he saw through it, and walked away, and has been warning about it – tirelessly, courageously, and with all his heart and soul – ever since. He knows that the people behind the Biden administration’s policies, whoever they may be, are Communists – and unlike many other conservative observers who also know this, he doesn’t flinch from saying so. He knows that the Democrats who are so quick to smear decent white Americans as racists are themselves the real racists. Then there’s this: while some conservatives, again, are – inexplicably – content to allow the histories of some of the more appalling leaders of today’s left to be dropped down the memory hole, Horowitz demands that we remember. Who, for example, is Chesa Boudin, the District Attorney for San Francisco who’s largely responsible for the decay of that once-golden city into a West Coast Calcutta? He is, Horowitz reminds us, the son of terrorist parents – namely, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, members of the notorious Weather Underground who were convicted of murder in the 1981 Brink’s truck robbery in Rockland County, New York. And Al Sharpton, the MSNBC star whose current image is perfectly mainstream? Horowitz remembers the vile way in which Sharpton, a small-time race hustler, transformed himself into a national figure. Democrats can invent calumnies about Trump all day long and get away with it, but all too many Republicans, perversely, seem to regard it as bad taste simply to bring up the reprehensible truth about some of the most powerful figures on the left.

Yes, Horowitz demands that we remember – and, moreover, that we know. Know about what? About, for example, the redefinition of the word “infrastructure” to include, well, nearly everything. About the Equality Act, which requires “gender affirmation” surgery on teenagers in the name of America’s founding principles. About the left-wing celebration of even the most logically unfounded, economically devastating, and psychologically ruinous aspects of the lockdown because it had “green” benefits. About the For the People Act. Do you remember the For the People Act? Do you remember, for that matter, how the reaction of General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to protests outside the White House compared to his reaction to the events of January 6? Do you remember Matthew Lohmeier? Have you heard of Bishop Garrison? Do you remember how Biden’s State Department, after our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan (which Horowitz rightly calls the worst humiliation in American history), gave the Taliban the names of the Afghans who’d collaborated with us? Do you remember A.G. Garland’s dreadful school-board letter?

These are not idle questions. Over the course of the two or three days during which I was reading this book, I happened to watch an episode of Bill Maher’s podcast on which his guest was Dave Rubin. As they spoke together, it emerged that Maher, who naturally considers himself very well informed (and is constantly dismissing most Americans as idiots), thinks that the rise in gas prices under Biden has nothing whatsoever to do with any action by Biden himself – and can’t be convinced otherwise. “Gas prices go up, they go down,” he said with a shrug. In other words, the direct link between Biden’s closing of the Keystone pipeline and the terrifying jump in prices at the pump is lost on him. During the same couple of days, I also caught part of an online chat with Ian Hislop, editor of the British humor magazine Private Eye, who seemed to be smart and funny – the kind of clubbable chap who could hurl snappy zingers at both sides of the political aisle. But after a few minutes he interrupted his own amusing patter to pronounce, with a sudden solemnity: “Trump is an assault on reality.” An assault on reality? Nothing could be more, well, at odds with reality. Trump lives in reality, is guided by it, became a billionaire by keeping his eye on it. Biden, or whoever his handlers are, is a creature of ideology, of alternate facts, of image over substance, of rhetoric over action. And of course, as with any hack politician (and the more you study Biden’s career, the more you realize just how much of a hack he is), his ideology, his alternate facts, and his rhetoric change readily over time depending on who’s greasing his bagman’s palm. Apropos of which, Horowitz reminds us of Biden’s January 23, 2021, statement to Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, that the public perception was that the war in that country was “not going well,” and that “there is a need, whether it is true or not…to project a different picture.”

Projecting a picture: that’s what it’s all about under Joe Biden. It’s about denying the reality on the ground of a country that, during the past couple of years, has been torn apart by Antifa and BLM riots, flooded with immigrants, filled with urban encampments of mentally ill homeless people, ravaged in a plethora of ways by irrational COVID restrictions, beset by unprecedented rates of looting and other violent crimes, and economically weakened by sky-high inflation. And it’s about  pretending that America’s real problems, its most critical challenges, are systemic racism, transphobia, a climate crisis, and other such abstract nonsense. And it’s about insisting, over and over again, that Donald Trump and his loyal supporters are so evil and dangerous – such a threat to “our democracy” – that the only way to save “our democracy” from these parlous, knuckle-dragging authoritarians may well be to eradicate democracy, or at least put it on hold until these deplorables can be removed from the scene. Remember Biden’s September 1 speech, delivered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where he was backlit in blood-red and both looked and sounded, for all the world, like a dictator of the first water? Has any American president ever spoken about his predecessor, and his predecessor’s voters, in the way that Biden did about Trump and “MAGA Republicans”? They are, he said, “a threat to this country.” They “do not respect the Constitution.” (In fact, MAGA is all about the Constitution.)  “They do not believe in the rule of law.” (MAGA Republicans are by definition law-abiding, as opposed to the arsonists, vandals, and assorted punks that make up Antifa and BLM, the armed wing of the Democratic Party.) MAGA Republicans, charged Biden, are out “to undermine democracy itself” and “to take this country backwards.” They oppose “rights,” “justice,” “the rule of law,” and “the very soul of this country,” and they exude “anger,” “chaos,” and “lies.” Needless to say, this isn’t ordinary political rhetoric. And it isn’t just confined to a single speech by Biden, either. Prominent Democrats, from one end of the country to the other, and up and down the hierarchies of power, have been talking about Trump and his supporters in such terms for years, and the rhetoric has only grown more and more intense. When Trump voters planned to gather in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, General Milley actually told his underlings: “These guys are Nazis….These are the same people we fought in World War II.”

Simple question: why, when you’re holding the reins of power, do you spread the mantra that your opponents are Nazis? For one reason, and one reason alone. So that you can justify doing anything to keep them from grabbing those reins from you. The language of Biden’s chilling Philadelphia tirade is precisely the kind of language that a tyrant uses to demonize his opponents and to justify any and all actions he might choose to take in the subsequent weeks and months to keep those opponents away from the levers of power. The thinking, on the part of these monstrous people, is as follows: in the interest of preserving our precious democracy, the Democrats, while they still hold the White House and at least one house of Congress, must find some way to prevent any more free and fair elections, lest Trump and his moronic MAGA Republicans be returned to power – for if they were returned to power, they would surely prevent any further free and fair elections. Yes, this is pure self-contradiction, reminiscent of the purported statement by a U.S. major in Vietnam that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it,” but it’s precisely this mentality that informs the current rhetoric of the Democratic Party and its boosters in the media: their party line truly is that, unless America becomes a one-party state – i.e., a Democratic state – it might well fall into the hands of Republicans who would – horrors! – turn it into a one-party state! This is why Horowitz warns, in his subtitle, that “The Next Election Could Be the Last.” And if you think that this statement is in any way an exaggeration, you simply haven’t been paying sufficient attention.