David Horowitz In Memoriam

 

David Horowitz
In Memoriam

 

In the late 1980s and early 90s, I lived in the People's Republic of Berkeley. Berkeley was one of the forces that made me the person I am today. UC grad school was permission I had been hungering for my entire life, without realizing it. Yes, it is okay to spend an entire day reading, writing, asking questions, and saying things that you weren't sure anyone had ever said. I loved being around intellectually alive people 24/7. I met Annapurna summiteer Arlene Blum (I felt small), Salman Rushdie (super charming), Czeslaw Milosz (rude), Gloria Steinem (kind), Shelby Steele (aloof), Peter O'Toole (indulgent but world-weary smile), and Frank Langella (sooo hot). Berkeley, in those days, was all about healing, and I had alotta wounds to heal. Berkeley's Twelve Step meetings were among the most important religious experiences I've ever had.

 

The San Francisco Mime Troupe's free outdoor plays inspired me. One performance managed to turn Liberty Leading the People, from the Delcroix painting, into a character. I get chills just thinking about it. I felt, "Wow, I have found my tribe. We are going to usher in a better world!" In the cavernous, 1,466-seat UC Theater, I watched all five hours of the Samurai Trilogy in a packed house of whooping and cheering fans. Though I'm from Jersey, where excellent pizza is as the air we breathe, I must salute Zachary's deep dish spinach and mushroom pie. I danced off the calories at Ashkenaz, a warm and welcoming nightclub constructed to resemble an eastern European synagogue.  

 

The only way to live in high-rent Berkeley was to share. You searched newspaper ads. You saw one for a room in a house, and shared bathroom and kitchen. To gain admittance, you were vetted by the current tenants.

 

At one interview, I had just come from watching The Princess Bride. I gushed about the film. They told me to leave. To this day I don't understand why my loving that film ended my candidacy. At another house I was asked if I would feel "compelled to fry meat. Vegetarians can be made ill by the smell alone." That wasn't so much a question as a psychodrama. Innocent, righteous vegetarians, the question implied, were being tormented by sadistic carnivores who used range tops and hamburger meat as their chosen implements of torture. I snorted and left. At another potential home, the first question was, "How do you feel about masks?" I had no reverential response for that, either. At another, I was told I would have to submit my breasts for a papier-mâché wall collage of all previous tenants' breasts. No go. 

 

The bottom line is the bottom line. Eventually my working class eyes penetrated past Berkeley's beautiful costume of communal ideals into its economic skeleton. Café talk of the evils of capitalism notwithstanding, Berkeley was the most stratified place I'd ever lived – millionaires and Nobel laureates in the hills; in the flatlands, every first of the month, we panicked about rent.

 

I was a certified teacher with international experience. I applied for a job teaching new Hispanic immigrants. A lovely woman praised me highly and said she could not hire me because I am a "Gringa." "My board wouldn't have it." I applied for a job on campus. I never heard back. Later, at a party, I met the employer. "You're Danusha Goska! I took one look at the name at the top of your resume and threw it away! I thought you'd be some Polak who'd speak English with a Boris Badenov accent!" I applied for a job writing copy for the AIDS Quilt. They called me in and said mine was the best writing sample, but they couldn't hire me because I am straight. I applied for a job at a San Francisco museum. I was sitting on the edge of a bed in a temporary sublet apartment when I got the call. I promise you, their first words were, "What color are you? 'Danusha' sounded like it might be a black name. Are you black? If so, we can hire you." Alan Dundes, my campus mentor, said he couldn't find me funding because I was "the wrong minority." I ended up working as a domestic, a landscaper, a carpenter, always for the wealthy. "Save the world" Berkeley had no "Save the world" job for this ethnically incorrect candidate. Communal ideals; serf economy.

 

I knew comfortable people in Berkeley. They always had money made by someone else, somewhere else, doing work their heir disdained. The most hippie woman I knew never worked. She inherited gallons of cash from an ancestor she held in contempt. He was a financial wizard and one of the Four Hundred, the Gilded Age aristocracy back in Manhattan, her birthplace. One of my richest friends' money came from nukes and cigarettes. Left-wing ideals never created, in Berkeley, a sustainable left-wing economy.

 

These rich whites created an aristocracy among those applying for entry-level jobs, rewarding non-whites and punishing poor whites. The Civil Rights movement might have meant an end to hate and discrimination. Instead, the left just turned the fire hose of hate and the mechanics of discrimination against whites – that is elite leftist whites protected themselves and demonized poor whites, those with the least power to fight back. Blacks became religious totems proving the white leftist's sanctity. One of my Berkeley friends praised her friend, a therapist, for getting on her knees – literally – to a black patient to apologize. A local activist told any new acquaintances that she was "in solidarity" with oppressed Muslims and no one could criticize Islam in her presence, or she'd retaliate. How? At one point she released skunk spray at a public meeting. Berkeley's leftist caste system, that rewarded some identities but punished others, worked in my favor only once. I was chosen to share one rental house because, "We've never met a working class person before!"

 

There was a constant background thrum of violence and insanity. I lived, for a few months, on Telegraph Avenue, center of much counterculture activity. One morning around three a.m. I could hear a couple of street dwellers beneath my window. "I'm Jesus," one insisted. "No, I'm Jesus," the other said. This competition went on for a while.

 

At Sather Gate, Rick Starr performed Sinatra hits into a dead microphone. On Telegraph Avenue, Julia Vinograd wore Renaissance Faire clothing and blew bubbles at passersby. The Naked Guy insisted that his nakedness was a Civil Rights issue. Fourteen years later, he died by suicide in jail. There was blood on the sidewalk where my best friend was mugged by a young black male, probably from Oakland.

 

A nineteen-year-old who called herself Rosebud Abigail Denovo – which spells "RAD" – lost her life in a protest over a beach volleyball court. Denovo, armed with a machete, was trying to murder the university chancellor – again, as I said, over a beach volleyball court. Police shot her to death. She had been living in a property that had formerly housed Ted Kaczynski.  

 

During the Oakland firestorm of 1991, the sun was blackened and the air turned orange. Twenty-five people died. I was on Shattuck Avenue. A petite, middle-aged white woman with braids past her shoulders was standing next to her bicycle. She said, "Good to watch those rich bastards up in the hills burn."

 

A friend of a friend of a friend invited me to a party in Marin, one of the wealthiest counties in the US. I walked in the front door and onto a footbridge – inside the house – over a koi pond. A slender, elderly white woman snoozed on a couch. She was the home-owner. Next to her was the friend-of-a who had invited me to this party. He looked a bit like Egyptian film star and heartthrob Omar Sharif. He self-identified as a "Palestinian terrorist." He was the kept man of the elderly, half-awake, white woman. His boytoy status did not prevent him from unsuccessfully attempting to seduce me, both sexually and into his terrorist activity, even as his benefactress snored and drooled next to both of us.

 

Elegant people were gathered around a large screen watching a film that somehow involved Israel, but it wasn't a documentary you'd see on mainstream TV. The camera had somehow found only unattractive Jews behaving badly. I was disoriented. What's going on? Partygoers – attractive, successful-looking people – were shouting antisemitic slogans at the screen. I can still hear the voice of a slender, beautiful young woman. Her sheath dress revealed sexy protrusions – only the requisite fat on breasts, and hip bones highlighting her slenderness. She had the kind of voice you'd expect to hear teaching her class or comforting her patient or hosting her program on NPR. And she was giving voice to the kind of gutter sneering you'd expect at a Klan rally.

 

I queried her. She was a graduate student and also teaching classes. "God's chosen. They act like they are the only ones to whom anything bad has ever  happened."

 

I struggled to reconcile irreconcilable opposites of what I felt was reality. In my heavily Catholic, immigrant, blue collar hometown, if you said the things this girl was saying, it would be understood as the kind of antisemitism that had gotten us into a war. You would be understood to be a s--t of a person. How was it that here, in the most enlightened spot on the planet, an avatar of human evolution and superiority, a UC Berkeley professor, was saying these things? I dropped silently to a spot on the carpet.

 

A chunky blonde plopped next to me. She carefully explained that Palestine must be free and that Israel must cease to exist as a nation state.

 

"I've traveled a lot," I said. "I am aware of how my American passport protected me in tough spots. Do you have a passport? Do you rely on the protection of a nation state?"

 

She missed my point. "I'm a dual national," she said. "I have a German passport." I promise you that she said the following word-for-word and that her words have been seared into my memory from that day to this. "My father was a guard at the Warsaw Ghetto. He used to bring the Jews garbage so that they would have something to eat."

 

That ended that conversation. I spied the type of guy I was very familiar with from my days as a fellow traveler with the Communist Party back in New York City. This man was middle-aged, short, dark-haired, with a hang-dog expression, and a copy of the New York Times, as rumpled as he was, under his arm. I had to ask.

 

"Why are you here? How can you stand it?"

 

"I have no relationship to my ancestors' religion," he said. "Religion means nothing to me."

 

"Look in the mirror," I said. "Do you really think that the people here don't think of you as Jewish?"

 

"What's happening here tonight is an inevitable phase of the revolutionary process. Palestinians, like blacks, are an anti-imperialist vanguard. Through this process, we will arrive at the historical moment when religion, and religious strife, are a thing of the past. As a revolutionary, I am part of this advance toward a new tomorrow."

 

I could see that he was breathing, but there was something profoundly dead about this man. He had cut off the part of himself – the vital eyes, ears, vibrant mind, beating heart – that can recognize and respond honestly to facts on the ground. He had replaced that vital part of himself with lifeless Marxist dogma.

 

The background thrum of violence and insanity: we weren't supposed to tell the truth about either. I once pointed out to a housemate that our beloved Berkeley street characters were mentally ill. She reprimanded me. When stating such basic truths is condemned as "intolerance" and "judgmental," you can't move on to getting that person help. Both RAD and the Naked Guy had documented histories of mental illness; they both died young and in the criminal justice system.

 

Berkeley condemned "intolerance." But I met people who insisted that if you ate cooked food, you were evil. A righteous raw food enthusiast told me that she prepared pasta by soaking it in water in full sunlight. If you didn't unquestioningly embrace Islam, or the Black Panthers, or the beach volleyball rioters, you were evil. If you fried hamburgers … You had to tiptoe. You never knew when you were violating some self-anointed prophet's unique religion.

 

My friend who left his blood on the sidewalk was one of many UC Berkeley personnel who was attacked by black criminals from Oakland. You weren't allowed to notice; even so, you lived your life accordingly. You were wary on Alcatraz Avenue, the border between Oakland and Berkeley, or you simply never went anywhere near the border. You recognized that young black male approaching you as a threat and you crossed the street. You warned newcomers, somehow without ever using the words "black" or "Oakland."

 

But none of that was why I knew I had to leave. This was why. Berkeley emptied out on Thanksgiving and Christmas. One year I finally realized: When they are here, they are not at home. They are, in a sense, on a stage, acting. Acting, not investing. In spite of all the vetting, to make sure you were a good leftist, being a leftist was merely a performance for many. The environment? Everyone drove cars and used plastic, just like beyond the borders of the People's Republic. Men were every bit as misogynist as anywhere else. One of my friends lived with a man; they were "life partners" rather than husband and wife – how progressive. She was very slim. He caught her eating Pepperidge Farm cookies. He told her he'd leave her for a slimmer, younger woman if he ever caught her eating them again. And I lived, for a very short while, with a  younger male "housemate" who audibly beat his older "landlady" and also his lover. But it wasn't abstract nouns – "misogyny / hypocrisy / crime" that pushed me out. It was the sense that when I talked to folks back in Jersey, I was connecting with something solid. When I talked to Berkeley folk, I was interacting with an ephemeral performance.

 

The best of Berkeley was a Utopia I have missed everyday since I left. I didn't leave Utopia for another Utopia. I left Utopia for gritty, disappointing, intermittently rewarding and pleasant, solidity.

 

Someone else arrived in Berkeley back in 1959, and, like me, earned an MA at UC Berkeley, and, like me, also eventually left the left. That person, unlike me, was an historically significant figure who helped to shape the leftist Berkeley that so attracted me. That person was David Horowitz, who passed away on April 29, 2025.

 

An event in David's departure from the left must be mentioned in any discussion of his legacy. David was part of the Black Panther movement. He recommended his friend, bookkeeper Betty Van Patter, as a help to the Panthers. Van Patter reported to Panther leader Elaine Brown discrepancies in the Panther's handling of money. On January 20, 1975, Van Patter's body was found in San Francisco Bay. Some accounts allege that she was raped and tortured before her murder. Her body showed signs of violent assault. This changed David.

 

He and I had little things in common, things he remarked upon. We were in Krakow, Poland, at the same time. In May, 1989, David participated in an anti-Communist rally there. I was in Krakow for a year and I'm guessing we had to have been at the same rally – I never missed one. We both had parents we had to work to recover from. We struggled with cancer simultaneously, and we both struggled with religious faith.

 

I liked David. I am touched by his death. I want to say something, but the web is awash in final thoughts by those who knew him much better than I. I didn't know David Horowitz well, which is part of why I provided so much detail here about why I loved Berkeley, and why I left. Berkeley was one of those things that David and I had in common. Did he feel about his time there the way I did? Did he continue to miss it, even after he left? The definitive answers to these questions must wait till the next time he and I converse. Meanwhile, what I can say here is the product of peripheral vision.

 

It's something I've wanted to say for a while. Almost ten years ago, a reporter from the Washington Post kept sending me emails and calling me. He refused to say why. I knew he didn't want to talk to me about me; I am – quite happily – a nobody. David Horowitz was the noteworthy news item with which I had any contact; that's why this reporter was pestering me, though he refused to say as much. The reporter finally admitted that. He wanted my perspective on why someone like me admired David Horowitz. I told him to stop bothering me. I assumed that he'd never understand, and would ultimately distort, anything I said. That the truth gets extruded to fit dogma is one of the lessons you learn when you trade ephemeral ideals for the implacably solid.

 

Back in Berkeley, we shared dogma. There were dragons. One of those dragons was David Horowitz. Those sharing the lore indoctrinated me. "He used to be one of us. He lived here in Berkeley. But then he turned. He is the dark side."

 

This condemnation continues. A week after David died, one of my Berkeley buddies posted on social media, "I hope that, if there is some form of afterlife with eternal torment, David gets to share it." I pointed out that, as this friend knew, I knew David and was personally saddened by his death. My friend responded with no sympathy, but rather, with a Goebbels comparison.

 

On May 25, 2025, The Nation released a podcast calling David Horowitz a "monster." Journalist David Klion owned up to reviewing a David Horowitz book without reading it. Klion also fabricated a biography for David, in order to denounce David. A line from Klion's fake biography: David "hated Arabs and Black people." In The Nation podcast, journalist Jeet Heer and Klion hand-wave away the Panthers' corruption and violence. They attribute that violence to COINTELPRO. In fact COINTELPRO ceased in 1971; Van Patter was murdered years later. But leftists hold blacks above criticism, and, therefore, any standard of decency. Everything bad that happens must be attributed to white, heterosexual, American men, even when chronologies don't synchronize.

 

A few years after I left Berkeley, I stumbled across the 1999 book Hating Whitey. Expecting the pages to burst into flames, I finally read my first David Horowitz book. "Huh, he's right," I realized. This man was not only correct, he was also courageous. The left has elevated blacks to a sainted class above criticism. This sanctified status hurts not helps blacks. You can't fix what you can't name. Social and mainstream media in May, 2025, five years after George Floyd's death, is awash in images of Floyd with wings sprouting from his back and a halo of sunlight crowning his head; see here. David exercised the courage to resist dogma that powerful.

 

In 2004, I think, Beelzebub himself came to Bergen Community College. I had to attend. I wanted to walk on the wild side. Instead, I had the same reaction that I had had reading Hating Whitey. He's right, he's brave, and he's saying things that need to be said.

 

One of the key turning points in my leaving the left was commuting, on foot, to work through Paterson, New Jersey. Before this commute, I had lived internationally, in remote villages in two of the poorest countries on earth, one in Africa, one in Asia. I had also lived under Soviet Communism in Poland. Paterson, NJ, offered a picture of human degradation worse than I'd seen. Day after day, I witnessed healthy young black men standing on street corners, amidst garbage, smoking marijuana. I saw older black men sleeping in their own human waste, bottles still gripped in their hands. I saw prostitutes and junkies shooting up and succumbing to opioids. I saw girls not at all equipped to take care of themselves saddled with babies they could not adequately love.

 

It was obvious that culture, not prejudice or even poverty itself, was the feature that most urgently needed to be addressed. Muslims in Paterson, who themselves are often dark-skinned and face prejudice, open small businesses and demand that their children do well in school. In a city where few can afford cars, and pedestrians walk the streets day and night, I saw intact families among recent Hispanic immigrants. Father, mother, and children all walked together. In, now, over twenty years of living in Paterson, I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen an intact black family, a black mother, father, and children walking together in the street.  

 

White leftists insist that they star in black people's narratives; that white leftists, not blacks, are the essential players. One day the left will accumulate enough money and power to rescue the black underclass. That day hasn't come yet, and, because of white supremacy, blacks are powerless to do anything to help themselves. Leftists demonize anyone who mentions culture. Seeking solutions in culture is racist; it is victim blaming. The left especially hates black conservatives, including Orlando Patterson, Shelby Steele, Jason Riley, John McWhorter, Walter E. Williams, and Glenn Loury, all of whom seek solutions in culture.

 

In his 2004 Bergen Community College lecture, David Horowitz was throwing out a lifeline to the black underclass. Make yourself the hero of your own story, he was saying. For this, he risked being called a racist by white leftists who want to hoard the role of hero for themselves.

 

My next exposure to David Horowitz occurred in 2010. In May of that year, at a UC San Diego lecture, a girl introduced herself as the gratuitously multi-named Jumanah Imad Mussah Ahmed Albahri. Albahri was a baby-faced plumpster swaddled in a hijab made up of what looks like the uncomfortable layers of two enveloping scarves,  a stiff coat, and whatever is under that coat. A smirking Albahri announced that her Muslim Student Association group was hosting a Hitler Youth Week.

 

David refused to play. "Will you condemn Hamas here and now?" he, poker-faced, asked Albahri. "As a genocidal terrorist organization?"

 

Albahri refused. She also acknowledged that she supported Jews gathering in Israel because that gathering would make Jews easier to wipe off the face of the earth.

 

In a May 18, 2010 L.A. Times op ed, journalist Jonah Goldberg graphed the forces at play. "The real enemy of clear thinking is the script. We think the world is supposed to go by a familiar plot. And when the facts conflict with the script, we edit the facts … Liberals crave a comfortable plot in which bigoted 'homegrown' white men are the villains while Muslims are scapegoats … David Horowitz is a stock villain on U.S. campuses … But that doesn't mean he's wrong." Goldberg contacted UC San Diego and asked if Albahri would face any consequences for supporting a genocide of the world's Jews. No, he was told, in flowery language. "If a UCSD student publicly called for the extermination of gays and blacks," would that student also face no consequences, he asked. The university sent him a smokescreen reply. Goldberg mentioned UC Sand Diego's response to an off-campus event called the "Compton Cookout" in which "several" students dressed in "ghetto" clothing. UC San Diego responded extensively to that event.

 

There's one thing left unsaid about that Horowitz / Albahri encounter. She's inside, in southern California, in May. She's dressed to venture out of the cabin to check the sled dogs in the Arctic. She's significantly overweight, never a good sign in a person so young. She's snotty and un-self-aware. It's not Jews who are responsible for her evident misery. It's gender apartheid. Remove Islam, and she could be surfing, smooching with a hot guy, or prepping for a lucrative career. Not fecklessly fantasizing about killing off an ancient people who have survived mass murderers far more formidable than she. But, see, if she did reject Islam, her family would be obligated to terminate her for her apostasy. And that would not be the end of her suffering. In Hell, Allah would punish her, as described in Quran verse 4:56: "Those who disbelieve in Our verses We will drive them into a Fire. Every time their skins are roasted through We will replace them with other skins so they may taste the punishment."

 

Horowitz's truth-telling extended an invitation to the liberation of sad cases like Albahri. Leftists like David Klion reject Horowitz's liberatory truth-telling as "hating Arabs." Muslim and ex-Muslim reformers have repeatedly pointed out that it's not truth-tellers like Horowitz who "hate" Muslims. Rather, it's Western leftists who hold Islam above criticism. See, for example, Yasmine Mohammed's book Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims.

 

I don't remember when I first made one-on-one contact with David Horowitz. I think it was after I published an essay about finally leaving the left. I do remember that he liked the essay, and invited me to submit more pieces.

 

I felt shy and overwhelmed. I am not used to exchanging emails with a famous, historically significant person. I also suffer from phone phobia. So of course David phoned me. I was, at the time, dog sitting in a large, lovely house. All I remember from that phone call was pacing this big house, my pup following behind, and feeling inadequate and becoming more agitated by my inadequacy and of course becoming more agitated which of course made me more inadequate. I told him I was dog sitting; he, like me, was a dog lover, a passionate one. Another little thing we had in common. He talked about dogs as only the most dedicated dog lover can. He was kind enough to compliment my book Save Send Delete. I don't receive compliments well and of course the compliment pushed me to the edge of passing out. I kept putting out feelers, wondering how to connect. There was something else there that intimidated me even more than his intelligence, fame, and sang froid. I didn't know what that something else was, or how to address it.

 

One day there was a big package in my Paterson mail box. Oh, my, gosh, he has sent me his books. Given that compliments overwhelm me,  you can imagine how I feel when I receive actual presents. I need to dial a hotline. I opened Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey. In the book's opening passages, I discovered that something else about David that I had previously sensed but couldn't name. The writing was both beautiful and intimate. It was a naked exploration of his relationship to his father. I felt as if I were handling the gooey inside of a pumpkin. This was raw, and human, and not at all what I expected from that knight in full armor fearlessly battling against destructive BS. This was a beating heart, a reflective mind – dare I say it – this was a Berkeley free spirit seeker of truth ready to say anything, no matter how risky, no matter how much it hurt to probe the wound, no matter in how complex a light he depicted his own nearest and dearest and even himself. It was years before I could sit down and write a response. Years.

 

And then, thanks to David, this impoverished adjunct professor living in Paterson, NJ, got to visit Florida for the first time in her life. Of course my only thought was of birds. During my stay I slung my binos around my neck and treated Palm Beach as if it were a wildlife refuge. I was stopped by uniformed security. "Why are you wearing binoculars?" they asked.

 

"Do you not see the feral green-cheeked Amazon parrots right above your head?" I explained.

 

David's team invited me to his hotel room. It was spacious and a window looked out over the Atlantic Ocean. Brown pelicans flew past. April was there. She was beautiful and gracious. She seemed to feel about horses the way I feel about dogs. David ordered me a slice of key lime pie, something I'd heard about but never tasted. I loved it. I haven't had key lime pie since that first time, and if I ever have it again, I will think of David.

 

Given that a couple of my books focus on faith and doubt, we talked about transcendent moments. David mentioned an anomalous event in a food court that just might have been a sign from his daughter Sarah who had died young. It's always a challenge when someone who is not a believer confronts me about my belief. I always feel as if non-believers want me to produce irrefutable proof.

 

The other day, I listened to an interview with Jonathan Rauch, a self-identified atheist Jew. He described his own experience of the numinous in a beautiful metaphor. It's as if, he said, he has fallen asleep on a train. He wakes, looks out the window, and sees something wonderful. But the train is moving, and the beautiful vision is forever out of reach. Other than such fleeting glimpses, Rauch said, he cannot connect with any concept of the divine.

 

I can't give non-believers like Rauch what they don't have. It's not just that I can't; I don't feel compelled to do so. When they ask me for proof, I want to say to non-believers, "It's okay if you don't believe in God. God believes in you. 'Act as if,' as we say in Twelve Step, to those who have trouble with the concept of a Higher Power. Act as if God created you in an act of love and wants the best for you. Act as if that relationship with a loving creator God endows your life with rich meaning you can't begin to, yet, grasp. Act as if God hears your prayers. Someday you will discover that what had felt, at the time, like a monologue, was in fact a dialogue, one whose other side you heard only in moments you can't otherwise comprehend, like that anomalous event in the food court, or that vision from the window of a train."

 

Here's my final David Horowitz anecdote. Several years ago, I heard David on a talk show. I disagreed with him about something. It was something important, something big. I initiated contact, something I would normally be too shy to do. I told him that I disagreed with him and I spelled out why. He disagreed with me, and he spelled out why, and he never told me that I had to stop writing for his publication. Compare this, please, to those Berkeleyites who insisted that my cooking food, or criticizing Islam, or liking Princess Bride, rendered me a non-person.

 

What I'm hoping is that this essay explains why I refused to cooperate with the Washington Post reporter. I knew he would take what I said about David and put it through a meat grinder and extrude a product homogenized to conform to his dogma. And what you have in this essay is not anything that meets anybody's dogma.

 

I didn't leave Berkeley, Utopia, to enter another Utopia, this one a right-wing Utopia. In Jonathan Goldberg's metaphor, I didn't discard one script, one set of left-wing dogma, to conform to right-wing dogma. Any extreme swing of the pendulum in any direction can be destructive. I left Berkeley to enter a world that isn't interested in pleasing me or playing up to my dreams or conforming itself to the best laid plans of mice and men. Rather, the world is complicated. People contain dimensions we can only guess at. I didn't know David Horowitz well; I only knew him well enough to know that I didn't know him thoroughly. I know that he encouraged me. I know that he helped me. I know that he was generous to me. I know that even though I became gut-churningly nervous when he called, I liked the sound of his voice. I know that with every word I ever wrote for his publication, I worked to polish my product as highly as possible, because perhaps the author of Radical Son might read my work. I know that when we had a big political disagreement, he didn't banish me. I know that he told truths that needed to be told. I know that he resisted all-too-powerful and all-too-destructive leftist lies. I know that if more people gave respectful consideration to his best work, rather than denouncing it without even reading it, we would all be better off.

 

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery