Final Battle: David Horowitz Defines the Fight for America

 (“Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be the Last” is now available.)

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776.

No American who loves our country can look at these past years without feeling that our souls have been tried. At conservative conferences and events there is an inescapable desire for a big picture sense of what we are up against and whether the fight can be won. And that is what David Horowitz offers in his latest book, “Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be the Last”.

Since “Destructive Generation”, Horowitz has spent over three decades chronicling our national crisis in his books and few deny that we are living in the world that he had spent so long warning conservatives would come to pass if the totalitarian ambitions of the Left went unchecked.

“Final Battle” is a fitting title for a culture warrior whose message to conservatives, over and over again, was that they needed to learn to fight. This is a book that describes the fight and its missed opportunities, of those who fought and those who didn’t, and what the next phase, and perhaps the final phase, of the struggle for the country that he loves so much looks like.

Here, David Horowitz pulls no punches, writing, “the greatest existential threat to American democracy is the drive by the Democrat Party to create a one-party socialist state—a fascist state.” His message is clear, leftists have set out to dismantle “the system of checks and balances, which has been the bulwark of American democracy for over 240 years” and they are terrifyingly close to their goal of seizing complete power over every last man, woman and child.

“All these tyrannical ambitions are within reach for a party” with even the narrowest of majorities “in a country deeply divided on the issues of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Such is the awesome and terrifying power of an ideological zeal justified by planetary crises and mostly imagined social inequities,” he warns.

“Final Battle” lays out in broad strokes how the shackles are being on Americans. This is a book that boldly takes on election fraud, open borders, pandemic lockdowns, race riots and the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan not just as singular events, but as part of a larger plan.

A plan that is on the verge of coming to fruition and whose planned end is America’s end.

As “Final Battle” warns, the Left is moving to dismantle the constitutional order of the Electoral College, an independent judiciary and federalism, but above all else, the conviction that whatever our political differences may be, we are one single nation and share a single destiny.

Instead, Americans have been divided and pitted against each other by radicals. The ultimate aim of their politics of hate, as Horowitz writes, is to “set the nation on the path to a one-party state.” Demographic replacement and manufactured conflicts over identity politics are the engines for dividing and conquering America by destroying the spirit of her people.

The template, as “Final Battle” devastatingly describes, is California.

“California is now a one-party state in which Democrats control virtually all state executive offices,” David Horowitz writes, and it also has “the highest poverty rate in the country”, “the largest number of chronically homeless people in America” and “now holds the distinction of being the least-educated state”.

This state of perpetual misery and power, the extremes of poverty and wealth, division and degradation is the Democrat vision for the entire country. And for every single one of us.

That is what is at stake in the ‘final battle’ we will face..

The message is a familiar one though we have not heard it recently. In “The American Crisis”, Paine wrote, “By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils- a ravaged country- a depopulated city- habitations without safety, and slavery without hope.”

We can see the ravaged country all around us, the depopulated cities, the erosion of public safety as a fundamental duty of government, and the prospect of slavery to the leftist state.

This is what David Horowitz has been warning us about for over a generation. And it’s here.

The Left has clearly and unambiguously laid out its plans for a totalitarian state that will eliminate free speech and criminalize political dissent, that will control every detail of our lives from food to transportation to education, that will destroy our past and our nation.

The Democrats, even men who were portrayed as “moderates” like Joe Biden, have fully signed on to the agenda of packing the Supreme Court and the Senate, eliminating the filibuster, and federalizing control of elections around the country in order to rig them with ballot harvesting and fraudulent mail votes. They have racialized our politics, poisoned our dialogue and claim the authority to urgently crack down on political dissent using government agencies aimed at policing “misinformation”. This is not the final outcome of their plans, only the very beginning.

Armed with this agenda, the Constitution is only a few votes away, one election, from becoming a dead letter.

That is why this is truly the ‘final battle.’

The Left has solidified its control over the Democrats. With Senator Kyrsten Sinema declaring herself an independent and Senator Joe Manchin likely on the way out, there are few remaining dissenting voices in the party. There is no longer any meaningful debate over even the farthest extremes of an agenda that Biden and most Democrats found too extreme not that long ago.

They have their movement, they have their agenda and they have their party. We know all too well what the outcome will look like if they defeat America and come fully into their power.

“The desire to make things better is an impulse essential to our humanity. But taken beyond the limits of what is humanly possible, the same hope is transformed into a destructive passion, until it becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of the beautiful idea,” Horowitz wrote in “Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion” a decade ago.

Russia. China. Cuba. Cambodia. And so many of the other genocides and historical tragedies that have become the bywords for evil began when the Left lost any political check on its power to transform the world and had to grapple with the limitations of reality and human nature.

When speech, property and the family have been abolished and utopia hasn’t arrived, what will the men and women screaming hate in the streets now do? How many of us will they annihilate for the beautifully unworkable utopian ideas that, like snowflakes, melt when they touch people?

Elections have ceased to be contests of policy. They have become a rear guard struggle for the last shreds of freedom still left in a country where in the space of a few years the Biden administration radicalized the military censored social media, abolished marriage and gender, racialized the economy, sexualized education, plotted to pack the judiciary and the legislatures, to federalize elections, and is just getting started on the grander agenda it intends to impose.

In politics they say that every election is the last, but we are running out of elections and out of the right to have them. Fraud, tainted rules and rigging have poisoned the legitimacy of elections. That is why “Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be the Last” is so crucial.

David Horowitz’s latest book is a compelling indictment of the abuses of these years that we have lived through and a call to action. “The present winter is worth an age, if rightly employed; but, if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the evil,” Paine wrote.

In this winter, our American winter, we face either rebirth or doom. This will be the season that “if rightly employed” begins the rise of the nation to reclaim its heritage and its purpose. “Final Battle“ lays out the choice for us much the way that Paine did in “American Crisis”. The evils that we have experienced are here, along with the worse evils yet to come, the stakes in the final battle, and the battle plan for winning that fight and reclaiming the future of our country.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.