Dr. James Dobson: You're listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I am that James Dobson and I'm so pleased that you've joined us today.
Roger Marsh: Well, welcome everyone to Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh with your host, psychologist and best-selling author, Dr. James Dobson. Today we're going to listen to part two of a classic conversation featuring Dr. Dobson and David Horowitz. Now David is a New York Times best-selling author and a prominent conservative speaker and activist.
Now, in part one of this dynamic and thought-provoking interview, David and Dr. Dobson discuss the importance of teaching our kids and the public about America's Christian foundation and heritage. David also shared why he walked away from a progressive communist mindset and embraced a conservative one instead.
Today, these two men will be discussing the origins of animosity toward religion and what has influenced politics and policies even to this day. Now let's join Dr. James Dobson and author David Horowitz for this special edition of Family Talk.
Dr. James Dobson: Let me go back many years before this to what you write about this foundation of the hatred against religion. And I'm going to read from your book. This is page four of Dark Agenda. "Karl Marx famously described religion as, 'The opium of the people and the sigh of the oppressed.' Inspired by his hatred ever since, revolutionaries have regarded religion as the enemy of progress and the mask of oppression.
In Russia, Marx's disciples removed religious teaching from the schools, outlawed criticism of atheists and agnostics and burned a hundred thousand churches. When priests demanded freedom of religion, they were sentenced to death. Between 1917 and 1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested, 95% of whom were executed by firing squad.
Radicals in America today don't have the political power to execute religious people and destroy their houses of worship, yet they openly declare their desire to obliterate religion." That really is one of the foundational concepts that goes all the way back to Karl Marx.
David Horowitz: Yeah. Part of what I've tried to put into this book is my lifetime experience with an understanding of the political left. Leftists habitually lie, and they lie because if they told you what their true agendas are, what their end game is, they probably would be strung up from the nearest lamppost. So they pretend to be progressives.
My parents never referred to themselves as communists, even though they were. It was always progressives. And they'd call themselves liberals. They're vindictive bigots, they're not liberal at all. Conservatives are liberals. Christians are liberal. We believe in two sides to a conversation. We believe in showing respect to other people.
Dr. James Dobson: And let me read one more portion of that section that I was reading from. "Religion must die in order for mankind to live," proclaimed left-wing commentator and comedian Bill Maher.
David Horowitz: Yeah, two of my favorite chapters in this book are about the new atheists like Bill Maher. According to Maher and also Richard Dawkins, "The scientists who said that there's nothing so dumb as religion and irrational." Dumb and Dumber. Of course, every great scientist that created the scientific revolution, whether it's Galileo, Newton, even Darwin, were believers, all of them.
And it was being believers that caused them to have these scientific insights because they believed the universe was designed, that there was a design to it, and they set out to discover the design. That's why I have very little respect for professional atheists.
Christopher Hitchens. Wrote a book whose subtitle was How Religion Poisons Everything. Actually, he had it exactly upside down. People poison religion, not the reverse. That's why we have to be on guard against our fellows, always. You have to look at people and judge them with a degree of skepticism until they prove themselves worthy of your trust.
Dr. James Dobson: Let's pick up there with the war on Christianity and bring it up more to contemporary times.
David Horowitz: Well, they spun out these Supreme Court decisions. When you think of the Supreme Court, think of what it actually is. It's nine lawyers, appointed for life, by politicians. Now how could that go wrong? And the left-
Dr. James Dobson: How could that go right?
David Horowitz: Exactly. And the left took advantage of that. The left that hates Christianity and it hates America, and they saw they could use the Supreme Court to override all the legislatures in the country to circumvent our democracy. And they came up in the... It started in the sixties with the idea that there was a right to privacy in the Constitution.
There is no such right? You can read the Constitution until you're blue in the face and you will not find a right to privacy. But they invented this right to get rid of a Connecticut law, but the left wanted it to be a fundamental right built into the Constitution, a constitutional right.
And in 1973 they committed an atrocity on this country called Roe v. Wade. The person who was called Roe was Norma McCorvey, how they used her and abused her. She was a very disturbed person. She already... I can't remember if she had two or three children she had before she was 20. She was uncertain of her gender; she was a druggie and she got pregnant and wanted an abortion.
And she knew that these leftists at the University of Texas, they were actually SDS members, that the lead lawyer had had an abortion, and she just wanted help getting an abortion. And they, even though their principal was to make abortion legal, they knew that to make their case, she had to have the child.
She had to wait, she couldn't abort the child. Because if she aborted the child there was no case. So they really wrecked the life of this woman to do it. Even... Somebody like John Hart Ely, who's a very, very famous liberal law professor at Yale. And it was a pro-abortion.
He said, "There's no connection to the Constitution in the Roe v. Wade decision." But these arrogant justices did it anyway. And I can't remember, maybe it was Justice White, who in dissent said, "What's private about an abortion? It involves a doctor. It involves a mother, and of course the unmentionable, it involves an unborn child."
And that, overnight, changed the fundamental law of the country without consulting anybody, without getting legislation passed, without trying to persuade people. Drove it through the whole Bible belt and split the country. And we've never recovered, that's why we're two nations now. That's why we don't have a shared conversation really.
Dr. James Dobson: I lived through that era and I was instantly incensed by that decision. And the leftists at that time needed to dehumanize the personhood of those babies, and so they called it meaningless protoplasm.
David Horowitz: Yeah. It's like pulling a tooth.
Dr. James Dobson: But only until this day have we admitted not only is it a child, but it's a child that can be murdered after birth. They've gone all the way from that sham.
David Horowitz: Well, that shows their true agendas, that shows their true mentality, which is inhuman. All these people who appear to be nice are willing to murder born children. That's what the meaning of the New York law is and the law in Virginia. If the billion dollars, I think is what Planned Parenthood...
Of course they make a fortune. They make $300, $400, $500 million a year on abortions, that's why this is not an issue that will go away for them. Suppose all those resources at Planned Parenthood were devoted to finding homes for these children, that would make the world of difference. It's not a pro-choice movement.
Dr. James Dobson: That's not what Margaret Sanger wanted though.
David Horowitz: No, Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. She believed that people should be bred like animals and that we should root out the defective ones and the inferior ones. And her mind was focused pretty much on black people to do that to. And that's why Planned Parenthood's main centers are all in black communities.
And while black women are 6% of the population, they account for 40% of the abortions. It's taken so long, but finally you have people like Candace Owens pointing this out. This is a genocide committed against black Americans by people who are pretending to be their champions.
Dr. James Dobson: I've shared this before, but Shirley and I had the privilege of being at the inauguration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the first Bush. And we were sitting by Jesse Jackson. And I'd never met him, and we had a very interesting conversation and it was fairly civil back and forth.
And then I said to him, "Jesse, I have to ask you a really tough question. I'd appreciate your answering it. You know that abortion is aimed at your people. You know that they're killing black babies more than white. You know that this is a form of genocide and yet you have not condemned it. Tell me why. Why have you been silent on this issue or you've come down on the wrong side of it?"
And he said, "I will talk to you about any subject of any nature that you want to discuss. But that one, I will not answer that question."
David Horowitz: No. Because he's a hypocrite. Because he actually was anti-abortion until it became a signature of the Democratic Party. Within the Democratic Party, you can't hold the descending opinion. There was an SDS newsletter in the sixties which said, "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution."
So Jesse Jackson put the revolution, the army he was part of, above the principle of life. That's how dangerous these people are. These are truly dangerous people. People who have never been in an ideological movement do not understand its power. The left has been rebuilding itself for 50 years now. I mean, I followed it from the outset and it always used to drive me crazy when conservatives would refer to these vindictive bigots as liberals.
The only liberals in this country are conservatives who are decent, respectful and want to hear two sides to a controversial issue. But I watched this left, they infiltrated the Democratic Party in 1968. Tom Hayden, whom I knew in the sixties, organized a riot at the Democratic Party Presidential Convention because the left wanted to destroy Hubert Humphrey.
Because even though Humphrey, he was a socialist, he was an arched liberal, he supported the war against communism in Vietnam. And so they wanted to destroy his electoral chances, which they did. And then they marched into the Democratic Party and they formed these radical caucuses; the Black caucus, the Chicano caucus, the Progressive Caucus, and used those caucuses in the Congress as a platform to take over the whole party.
Which they did with the election of Barack Obama, who was a lifetime member of the Communist left. I say this-
Dr. James Dobson: You know that for a fact?
David Horowitz: For a fact. Yeah, absolutely. He was brought up by... in a communist family. Actually his closest advisor, Valerie Jarrett, comes from a family of Iranian communists. The guy who ran his campaigns, David Axelrod, comes from a family of communists. And I can tell you as somebody who was part of that movement, that when you understand that that movement is evil and it wants to destroy America.
When you understand that, the first thing you want to do is warn other Americans that these people are dangerous. You never saw that coming from Barack Obama. He was supported by these extreme leftists through his whole career. When he was on the brink of being elected he said, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
Every leftist understood that the revolution was at hand here. And Donald Trump then appears to undo all this. And the first signals he gave were his lack of political correctness. Political correctness is another term for the party line. If you have to call black people people of color, that's the party line. And there's a reason for that.
The only people in the world who are not people of color are white people, the enemy. It's not even English, that's the way French speak, "Peuple du couleur." We don't say, "I have a television of color," do we? Completely ideological and it's designed to demonize white people and to lump all black people, all people of color... I hate those phrases, in one basket.
But if you look at what happened in Rwanda, the Hutus who are black, massacred a million Tutsis who are black. They don't have any common interest. If you think of people coming from Mexico, some of them are descended from the conquistadors, the oppressors. Others are descended from the Native Indians, whom also in their way were oppressors but you could look at as victims.
But when they crossed the border into America they're all people of color, therefore victims. That's the way the left operates, that's the way it thinks. And here comes Trump, and one of the first things he does in his debates with Hillary is he looks her in the eye and he says, "You are a liar and a crook." Which he is both, but no Republican would say that before Trump because she's a woman.
So she has it both ways. She can accuse 63 million people or how many members of Trump's supporters of being racist, sexist, homophobes, Islamaphobes, xenophobes...
Dr. James Dobson: Deplorables.
David Horowitz: ... deplorables, irredeemable. She can do that, and nobody can touch her because she's a female. So Trump just blew that apart. I mean, the left understands what protects them. And he took it on right from the outset, and I think they saw that this guy was going to undo everything they thought they were doing.
Dr. James Dobson: Mm. Well, where is this movement headed? Are we going to ultimately lose to the revolutionaries who want to fundamentally change this? After Barack Obama said that he wanted to fundamentally change America, I wrote one of my monthly letters. It went to thousands of people that said, "Fundamentally change it? How? What is there about the way it has been that we want to move fundamentally away from?"
David Horowitz: They're communists, they're socialists. You can see it in the Green New Deal. They want to take away everybody's automobile. 268...
Dr. James Dobson: How irrational is that?
David Horowitz: ... million. You can't do that without instituting a police state and they're very ready to do it. You ask me, "How can we defeat them? Who does it depend on?" It depends on the people listening to this show and people like them. God gave human beings paradise. It was better than socialism, better than the new degree and New Deal.
There was no pain in childbirth, you didn't die, fruit fell from the trees. But there was one condition of remaining in paradise, or being in paradise. And that is you don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which means you don't do evil. Our fore parents were ornery like all of us are.
Dr. James Dobson: It's really interesting, you being an agnostic Jew quote from the Bible that way and show an understanding of it. I told you when we talked on the phone the first time you'd make a great Christian. You do recognize the truths of scripture, don't you?
David Horowitz: Yeah. I mean, look, you couldn't have a book like the Bible that's a best-seller for thousands of years if it wasn't a very wise book, could you? Why would people read it?
Dr. James Dobson: Mm-hmm. Well, we were talking on that occasion about how flawed human beings are.
David Horowitz: But there's another lesson from Genesis.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah.
David Horowitz: What does the serpent say to Adam and Eve to tempt them?
Dr. James Dobson: "You will be as Gods."
David Horowitz: "You shall be as Gods if you eat from that tree." And that's the arrogance of the left, they think that they're God. It's a crypto religion and they're the saviors, in their own minds. I call them the social redeemers. That's how they can tear up a whole country.
Dr. James Dobson: If that is the way they see it, it's a holy war.
David Horowitz: It is.
Dr. James Dobson: It's a war of fundamental beliefs.
David Horowitz: It is. It's an irreconcilable conflict right now and a lot depends on how our side fights the war. If it will educate people, it has to educate people about America's true relation to slavery. Something we can be proud of as a nation, we ended it. The fact of the matter is there's so much evidence of the wisdom of the pro-American case.
Dr. James Dobson: David, we are out of time. And I said it before that I regret... Sometimes the clock is an enemy. Let me end with this or ask you to end with it. What we're really engaged in is a civil war of values. There are two primary views of looking at politics, mankind and everything in between.
In my view as a Christian, it's a spiritual warfare. It is really good against evil. I mean, there's... Not that people on the conservative side don't have their evil and wickedness too, because we're all flawed and there are no perfect people. We wouldn't need a savior if that was the case. But given the nature of that conflict, is unity ever possible again? Do you understand my question?
David Horowitz: It is an irreconcilable battle. When asked to be careful, the principles which the left progressives have adopted, are evil principles. They involve demonizing all opponents. Everybody who disagrees with them is a racist. If you believe America should have borders like every other country, you're a racist. Those are evil doctrines and they have to be fought that way.
But not everybody on the left is an evil person. I hold the leadership, the national figures, who did not defend American principles, who do not insist on respect, who go along with the persecution of the Colorado baker, who is not a bigoted person himself at all, who was willing to make cakes for the gays, just didn't want to make a cake with a slogan that violated his religious conscience.
When I see people on the left defend his right to hold his Christian views, that's a basis for unity. We cannot have a nation that believes in pluralism, tolerance, compromise, together with a nation that believes that we live in an oppressive system where white people are bad, males are bad, straight people are bad. That is an un-American view, and I think there could be bloodshed.
These groups on the left, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, these are violent... the Revolutionary Communist Party, these are violent groups and they will commit violence. But there can't be a civil war again because the federal government is too powerful and too big. What there will be is a political civil war for control of the executive, and that's where our energy has to go.
Dr. James Dobson: Man, you give us so much to think about. This has been a fascinating discussion, David, and I appreciate you coming and laying out these thoughts before us. These are substantive ideas and issues that must be confronted and talked about.
That's why I said in the beginning that every American should read your book. And I hope they will. The title of it is Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America by David Horowitz. Will you come back and be our guest again?
David Horowitz: Oh, absolutely. I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed our time together today, both on the air and off, with a lot of food for thought here.
Dr. James Dobson: Well, let's do it again.
David Horowitz: Okay.
Roger Marsh: Well, we hope you've enjoyed this two-day broadcast featuring Dr. James Dobson and his conversation with Mr. David Horowitz. Visit today's broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org for more information about David's book called The Dark Agenda.
When you visit our website, you'll also find links for David's organization and the first part of his conversation with Dr. Dobson as well. I'm Roger Marsh, thanks so much for joining us today. Have a blessed day everyone.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
Dr. James Dobson: If you've ever felt like you're just running in circles, it may be because you are. An experiment was once carried out by the great French naturalist, John Henry Fabre. He took a number of processionary caterpillars, so-called because they always march in unison, and he lined them around the inner edge of a flower pot forming a complete circle.
For three days, he monitored them as they marched around the edge of the pot. At the end of the third day, he placed some pine needles in the center of the pot. Now pine needles are what caterpillars eat. So for four more days they walked, Never once breaking the circle to look for food. Finally, one at a time, they rolled over dead from starvation.
Does that sound a little familiar to you? How many of us have found ourselves wandering aimlessly around the elusive circle of success, trudging day in and day out behind all the other career-oriented caterpillars? All the while what we truly need to sustain life sits just inches away.
If you've found yourself breathlessly chasing the guy in front of you, let me suggest that you break free. Take time out to remove your blinders and look for the food your body and soul need. Spend some time with your family. Have some good friends over for dinner. Read a good book just for pleasure. Take a walk with someone you love. Hold a three-year-old on your lap and tell him or her a story.
Life is simply too short to be spent plotting around in endless circles.
Roger Marsh: To hear more, visit our Broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org.