Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After a huge sigh post election sigh of relief , I asked myself why is the leftist / bias media doubling down with their their attacks on Trump? How long will they keep this up? Are we in for an extended conflict between left and right? I dusted off my 2006 copy of David Horowitz "The Shadow Party" and got my answer. If you are looking for answers/explanation that outlines how George Soros and the radicals from the 1960's seized control of the Democrat Party and created this conflict, this book is for you. The book is still relevant today, truly enlightening and answers fundamental questions like, what motivates a guy like George Soros and why does he so religiously advocate an open society? The following is an excerpt from another online source, but gives you an snippet of what Horowitz discusses in depth. "George Soros was born to Tividar and Erzebat Schwartz, non-practicing Jews, in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. Tivadar was an attorney by profession, but the consuming passion of his life was the promotion of Esperanto—an artificial, "universal" language created during the 1880s in hopes that people worldwide might be persuaded to drop their native tongues and speak Esperanto instead—thereby, in theory at least, minimizing their nationalist impulses while advancing intercultural harmony. In 1936, Tivadar changed his family surname to Soros—a future-tense Esperanto verb meaning "will soar." When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, Tivadar decided to split up his family so as to minimize the chance that all its members would be killed together. For each of them—his wife and two sons—he purchased forged papers identifying them as Christians; paid government officials to conceal his family's Jewish heritage from the German and Hungarian fascists; and bribed Gentile families to take them into their homes. As for George in particular, the father paid a Hungarian government official named Baumbach to claim George as his Christian godson, "Sandor Kiss," and to let the boy live with him in Budapest. One of Baumbach's duties was to deliver deportation notices to Hungary's Jews, confiscating their property and turning it over to Germany. Young George Soros sometimes accompanied the official on his rounds. Many years later, in December 1998, a CBS interviewer would ask Soros whether he had ever felt any guilt about his association with Baumbach during that period. Soros replied: "… I was only a spectator ... I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt." Soros today recalls the German occupation of Hungary as "probably the happiest year of my life." "For me," he elaborates, "it was a very positive experience. It's a strange thing because you see incredible suffering around you and the fact you are in considerable danger yourself. But you're fourteen years old, and you don't believe that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have a belief in your father. It's a very happy-making, exhilarating experience." In 1947, the Soros family relocated from Hungary to England, where George attended the London School of Economics (LSE). There, he was exposed to the works of the Viennese-born philosopher Karl Popper, who taught at LSE and whom Soros would later call his "spiritual mentor." (George Soros, Underwriting Democracy (1991), p. 170) Though Soros never studied directly under Popper, he read the latter's works and submitted some essays to him for review and comment. Most notably, Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies introduced Soros to the concept of an "open society," a theme that would play a central role in Soros's thought and activities for the rest of his life. The term "open society" was originally coined in 1932 by the French philosopher Henri Louis Bergson, to describe societies whose moral codes were founded upon "universal" principles seeking to enhance the welfare of all mankind—as opposed to "closed" societies that placed self-interest above any concern for other nations and cultures. (David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party (2006), p. 67) Popper readily embraced this concept and expanded upon it. In his view, the open society was a place that permitted its citizens the right to criticize and change its institutions as they saw fit; he rejected the imposed intellectual conformity, central planning, and historical determinism of Marxist doctrine. (Nicola Chalton, ed., Philosophers: Extraordinary People Who Altered The Course Of History (2008), p. 159) By Popper's reckoning, a society was "closed"—and thus undesirable—if it assumed that it was in any way superior to other societies. Likewise, any belief system or individual claiming to be in possession of "ultimate truth" was an "enemy" of the open society as well. Popper viewed all knowledge as conjectural rather than certain, as evolving rather than fixed. Thus, by logical extension, Popper did not share the American founders' confident assertion that certain truths were "self-evident," and that certain rights—such as the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as referenced in the Declaration of Independence—were "unalienable" and thus not subject to doubt, because they had been granted to mankind by the ultimate authority, the "Creator." We shall see that George Soros, as he grew to maturity, would likewise reject the founders' premise. Indeed Soros would harbor great disdain for modern-day American political figures who displayed unshakeable confidence in their own culture's nobility, and who embraced the tenets of the Declaration and the U.S. Constitution as timeless, immutable truths. To Soros, "Popper's greatest contribution to philosophy" was his teaching that "the ultimate truth remains permanently beyond our reach." (George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy (2004), p. 193)