Right-wing author David Horowitz appeared on Glenn Beck’s show on Tuesday to talk about his most recent book, “Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America.” Beck read from the book’s closing lines declaring that a nation divided over fundamental principles like individual freedom versus group identity “cannot long endure” and concluding, “The urgency that drew the Religious Right into politics 50 years ago is now an urgency of the nation itself.”
A clip highlighted by the Beck’s The Blaze focuses on Horowitz’s take on slavery. It’s a stunning rewrite of America’s racial history, and one that, like many right-wing attempts at historical revisionism, ignores the long and violent imposition of Jim Crow apartheid in the former Confederate states after the Civil War—not to mention official and unofficial policies that have continued to perpetuate glaring racial disparities in opportunity, income, wealth and well-being.
In the clip, Horowitz starts with a slam at Cory Booker, U.S. senator and presidential candidate, for saying, in Horowitz’s telling, “we have to get rid of the bigotries in the Constitution.” Here’s how Horowitz responded:
There are no bigotries in the Constitution. It doesn’t deal with race. It doesn’t use the words white or black because the founders actually believed that all human beings are created equal, and that even though given what those times were like it would take a bloody civil war, which they wanted to avoid, that was their goal. And we’ve achieved it.
There’s never been in the history of the world a more integrated, inclusive, tolerant nation than our nation, and yet they’re talking about slavery as the original sin of our country. No. What we did with slavery is our original virtue. Slavery existed for 3,000 years in all countries. No one ever said it was immoral until white Christian males led by Wilberforce in England and Jefferson in the United States said it was immoral and that all men are created equal—this is our own birth certificate—and have an inalienable right to liberty. That included black slaves, and that’s why we had a civil war, and that’s why we led the world in ending slavery. It’s so repulsive what Democrats are doing today in destroying our heritage and pretending we have to be ashamed of our country instead of proud of it.
