Radical Son by David Horowitz. Book Review

 

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz
There's Never Been a Better Time to Read It

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, David Horowitz's memoir, was published in 1996. It needs to be read right now. I want to buttonhole my friend Deborah and assign the book to her as homework. Deborah regularly shares social media posts detailing violent crimes committed by young black males in Oakland, California, often against elderly whites, Asians, and Jews. Mainstream media reflect Deborah's internet scuttlebutt – see here and here. Oakland is one of the most dangerous cities in the US, and elderly and otherwise vulnerable people are frequent targets of criminal fists, guns, and knives. A book published in 1996 about events even decades earlier will help Deborah to understand her city and her dilemma in 2023.

My friend Louis is a musician, artist, and writer. He comes from a multi-generational family of successful creators. He has been making a comfortable living in Hollywood for thirty years. This man who keeps limber with yoga is as inflexible as an iron rod when it comes to politics. Anyone to the right of Louis, he rigidly insists, is a Neanderthal, not just unintelligent, but also simply without good taste. I am going to drop hints to Louis that he read Radical Son. The sheer elegance of the prose, and the human complexity found therein, worthy of a classic novel, just might move the needle of Louis' judgmental intolerance.

It is never too late to read a masterpiece, and Radical Son earns that superlative. Recent books like James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose's Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody and Bruce Bawer's The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Birth of the Woke Ideology provide a history of ideas. These excellent books chart how Woke and identity politics came to dominate American culture. Radical Son provides similar insight, but via a very different delivery mechanism. Radical uses the nitty gritty of particular, temporary politics to invite the reader into the universal, timeless human soul.

Radical Son's plot could be summarized as "boy gets ideology / boy loses ideology / boy gets new ideology." The book details Horowitz's growing up in the New York City area as the child of two dedicated communist parents. As an adult, Horowitz was a leader of the New Left. Reality intervened, most obtrusively in the grisly death of an innocent woman at the hands of the Black Panthers. Horowitz knew both the killers and the victim. Slowly but surely, he changed course, and became a prominent conservative.

"Pageboy" by Elliot Page, the Former Actress Ellen Page

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Unstated Premises and the Fate of the Little Library in Costello Memorial Park

 

Unstated Premises and the Fate of the Little Library in Costello Memorial Park

Why More Money is Not the Answer

The rules do not apply to us. Those who tell us to follow the rules are slave drivers. Telling us to follow rules that everyone else follows is racist oppression. We are owed. All of those other people who aren't exactly like us, including Jews, including Asians, including whites who immigrated to this country long after the end of slavery, including Africans who immigrated to this country long after the end of slavery, as well as American-born blacks who have done well, all of them, they all, owe us. None of them know what suffering is. If they don't pay us, and they never pay us enough, we can take anything we want from them. We are justified. We would be suckers, fools, naive, not to take anything we can get away with taking. Pimps, looters, shoplifters, drug dealers and anyone running a scam is clever and resourceful. The ambition to achieve in mainstream society is betrayal. The American Dream is a scam for suckers. Our rite of passage is a young man's first epic defiance of mainstream society. Anything nice that is left alone without a guardian is asking to be stolen or destroyed. Nice is phony, hypocritical, weak. People who like nice are "acting white." Our lives are not nice so anything nice affronts us, challenges us. We must destroy it so that, in its destroyed state, it justifies our wallow in misery. We must "keep it real." Keeping it real means keeping it cynical, sneering, base.

No, none of my black neighbors in Paterson has stated these premises to me. Why, then, do I think that some of them think this way? Because of behavior I've observed, including the destruction of the Little Library in Costello Memorial Park. That destruction is but one example of a wider, decades-long pattern. It indicates why the leftist solution of pumping more taxpayer dollars into black underclass urban areas solves nothing.

When Compassion and Tolerance are Left Behind

 

Edward Hopper Room in New York 

When Tolerance and Compassion Are Left Behind

I used to be a leftist. Slowly, over the course of many years, I stopped being a leftist. One of the bigger turning points occurred almost twenty years ago. I knew the name "David Horowitz" like I knew the name "Beelzebub." Mention of Horowitz invoked sparks, the stench of sulfur, and the wailing of the damned. Horowitz used to be one of us – he was a Marxist! Then – horror of horrors! – he abandoned the shining ranks of the righteous and defected to the dark side.

Anticipating fire and brimstone, I attended a talk by David Horowitz on a college campus in New Jersey. I agreed with a surprising amount of what he said. I thought about other things he said for years afterward. That lecture, and other events, slowly but surely, shoved me out of the shining ranks of the Left.

The Little Mermaid 2023 Swaps Wisdom for Woke

 

The Little Mermaid 2023

Folklore, Hans Christian Andersen, and Corporate Race Commodification

 

A hundred years ago, in the foothills of the Tatra mountains, a peasant woman was warning her daughter.

 

"Pavlina, when you grow up, you are going to have babies, like I had you. After you give birth, don't leave home until it is time for you to be churched. You will hear someone outside, calling your name, oh so sweetly. Don't be fooled when you hear that sweet, seductive voice! Whatever you do, don't go outside till you are churched!"

 

Pavlina had no idea who would call her name, tempting her to go outside without being churched, but she vowed to resist.

 

"And beware," momma said, "of the one that lives in the river under the bridge!"

 

Pavlina always felt so tempted to dive into the Nitra's cool, glistening waters.

 

"You can go into the Nitra as long as the sun is out," momma said, "but if you are near the river under the moonlight, don't let him lure you in!"

 

"Who, momma?"

 

"The Hastrman! The Hastrman lives under the bridge and he'll drag you in if you go near the river at night! We'll never see you again!"

 

Pavlina believed when she was a little girl in Slovakia. "But I don't believe it any more," my mother said, after telling me these stories. "Do you?" she challenged me.