In his youth, David Horowitz was as normal as any other American boy. He took part in all the typically American activities such as baseball and summer camp, hot dogs, apple pie,and escaping the New York City summer heat by running through water froma fire hydrant. Back in those days, same as now, New York City's families segregated themselves according race, religion, and social status. In young David Horowitz's case, there was nothing unusual about the fact that he and his parents were Jewish, nothing unusual in the fact that his family, though Jewish, were non-practicing, and nothing unusual at all that his family was struggling lower middle class. What was unusual was that Horowitz's parents were Communists, as were most of the parents in their immediate neighborhood.
He grew up in a family atmosphere of secrecy, clandestine meetings, and underground subversive activity. He grew up believing what his parents believed: The Marxist cause for Socialism was a just cause and worthy of the continued class struggle to bring forth the inevitable Communist utopia. But it wasn't just his family and neighborhood which influenced him. The schools he and his classmates attended were run by Communists, and even the summer camp they attended was a Communist function.
As a post-graduate student, Horowitz attended Columbia University, married, took a degree in English, and then moved himself and family to England where he rubbed elbows with various Marxists, Trotskyites, and other self-styled revolutionaries. He began his writing career as a dedicated Marxist ideologue bent on justifying and explaining the atrocities of Lenin and Stalin. Apparently, Moscow was delighted with his efforts as he was courted by the KGB, wined and dined a few times, and offered money in exchange for his further co-operation. He refused the offer and moved back to the United States, and to Berkeley, California.
Berkley welcomed him with open arms. In a short time he was offered a position at Ramparts magazine, the official west coast mouthpiece for the left-wing revolutionary cause. During Horowitz's tour at Ramparts he associated with the cream of the radical crop: Tom Hayden, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Bernadine Dorhn, etc.. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Black Panthers, Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA, responsible for the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst), etc.. Horowitz was there. He lived it. And he knew where the bodies were buried. Well, some of them. The rest were never found.
Eventually Horowitz took over as editor of the by then failing magazine. Faithful Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, and Maoists at Ramparts were good at drawing money from their influential and wealthy leftist colleagues and contacts who were sympathetic to the cause and who were willing to support the magazine. But, they were quick to squander the booty on lavish lifestyles or fiscally irresponsible business practices, and the business suffered for it. When Horowitz took over, the magazine was near bankruptcy. He managed to keep it alive for a couple more years before the end came, despite.
It took a close association with the radical Maoist revolutionary and cop-killer Huey Newton to shake Horowitz from his Communist utopian dream. Only when he became fully aware of Newton's and the Black Panther Party's involvement in political assassinations, murders, drug trafficking, and other organized crime activity, and only when he feared for his own life did he decide to alter his course. Both Horowitz and his long time friend and Ramparts associate Peter Collier found themselves questioning their allegiance to the leftist cause and began the dangerous maneuvers necessary to extricate themselves from its powerful and unforgiving grip.
What followed were books, magazine articles, and speaking engagements, all in opposition to the Leftist-Liberal agenda. The radicals wasted no time in denouncing the traitors. Leftist magazines and newspapers fired shot after angry shot at the two. Once warm and fuzzy universities and their faculties morphed into belligerent and unaccommodating bastions of rhetoric. Old friends waxed hostile and refused to speak to their former comrades. Isolation.
Horowitz and Collier survived and together collaborated on Destructive Generation which was hailed by some as the first to be published realistic account of the violent and destructive political agenda behind the radical Marxist inspired assault on this nation. In 1991, Horowitz received the Teach Freedom Award from President Ronald Reagan. Inspired by the Conservative acceptance of him and his efforts, he set to work on Radical Son.
The above short synopsis is hardly a substitute for reading the book. In fact, both Radical Son and Destructive Generation should be mandatory for those who would like to fully understand how our great nation has managed to slip into an immoral and socialist nightmare. The below quotations serve to educate and wet the appetite for more education. Enjoy the quotes, but don't fail to read the books also.
"...Hanoi responded with its own strategy, which was to launch an offensive in South Vietnam to alter the facts on the ground. The task reserved for [Tom] Hayden and other New Left radicals was to intensify the divisions in America, behind enemy lines."
"After the anti-draft movement disintegrated in 1970, Hayden and Fonda organized an 'Indo-China Peace Campaign' to cut off remaining American support for the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. For the next few years, the Campaign worked tirelessly to ensure the victory of the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge."
"Accompanied by a camera team, Hayden and Fonda traveled first to Hanoi and then to the 'liberated zones' in South Vietnam, to make a propaganda film. Called Introduction to the Enemy, it attempted to persuade viewers that the Communists were going to create a new society in the south. Equality and justice awaited its inhabitants if only America would cut off support for the Saigon regime."
"The Movement had self-destructed, and it would take a generation to put anything new together. In any case, I was not the activist-leader; it was more appropriate that he should tell me. He then revealed his plan. 'I'm forming a new Communist Party,' he [Tom Hayden] said."
"He [Tom Hayden] was writing articles in the Berkeley Barb advocating guerilla warfare and the creation of 'liberation zones' in American cities through armed force, and calling the Panthers 'America's Vietcong.' He had created a Berkeley Liberation School with his own 'Minister of Defense' who trained its students in the use of weapons, including explosives. At one point, Hayden and his activists even conducted a training session in an emergency clinic in Los Banos, posing as doctors and paramedics, practicing on unsuspecting patients. 'Fascism is coming,' he announced on a visit to the Ramparts offices. 'By the end of the year they're going to put us all in jail.' About this time, Michael Lerner [Hillary Clinton's friend] approached me with the idea that I should buy a gun. 'Michael,' I said in disbelief, 'this is no revolutionary situation. The people aren't with us. You couldn't even describe a scenario in which there was a shoot-out with the police that we could win.' Hardly pausing, he said, 'Then you have to buy a hand gun and give it to someone else for use in assassinations.'"
"Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, whose parents were also Communists, even described the [McCarthy] era as a 'reign of terror,' pairing it with events in revolutionary France and Stalinist Russia in which millions perished."
"Like a dutiful husband, I pressed her [Elissa,Horowitz's wife] to attend a 'consciousness-raising' women's group, when this became a radical fashion. The group included Berkeley's feminist elite.... Elissa came home from the first session in a state of agitation, vowing never to return. 'They hate me because I'm a mother,' was all she said. Years later I learned from other members of the group that they had berated her for allowing me to 'oppress' her by 'making' her assume the housewifely role."
"[Michael] Lerner [Hillary Clinton's friend who inspired "The politics of meaning"] was both Rabbi and groom at his own nuptials. The bride... who was nearly ten years his junior, was dressed in traditional white... she had sought Lerner out when he was the leader of an organization he had created, the Seattle Liberation Front... In the wedding ceremony... the couple exchanged rings made from the fuselage of a downed American aircraft."
"In an odd way, the Rockefellers thus had much in common with the Left, regarding themselves as social missionaries whose task was to uplift humanity. Theirs was a kind of inverted radicalism. They regarded themselves as an anointed vanguard, harassed by those who wanted them to give up the money rather than deploy it 'to promote the well-being of mankind,' which was the motto of their foundation."
"The victim had lived in Berkeley, but her body washed ashore in Foster City, across the Bay. Oakland where the Panthers operated, was not even involved in the case. This confusion hampered the investigative effort. The high level of scrutiny the police could expect from a liberal press, the press of legal suits from radical lawyers, and the charges of persecution that would accompany any serious probe, completed the constraints."
"After our talk, Bobby [Kennedy Jr.] invited me to come up to Cambridge... When I arrived... We chatted, and then one of Bobby's brothers entered the room. Without interrupting the conversation, Bobby laid out a line of cocaine and offered it to him. After his brother had snorted the line, Bobby said: 'Oh, by the way, this is David Horowitz. He's writing a book on our family... Sometime into my research, however, I uncovered a fact that was not publicly known: Bobby was a heroine addict as well"
"Just as Peter and I were coming to the end of the manuscript, Bobby [Kennedy Jr.] had a drug episode on an airplane flight, and was discovered by the crew clutching his heroin apparatus in one of the plane's lavatories. The story made front-page headlines across the country..."
"These facts added up to what I had come to think of as a group psychosis surrounding the Kennedys. At the center of the psychosis was the idea that had been so useful and at the same time so destructive to the family throughout its career: A Kennedy could get away with anything."
"Justice was administered by a crack dealer named Tyrone Robinson, whom Newton had burned. For the last six years of his life, the former Minister of Defense for the Black Panther Party had been addicted to base cocaine... But now, in death, he was being resurrected. A public funeral... was a front-page story in the Bay Area press. 'Huey Newton lived just long enough to have been the unknown idealist, a popular and heroic champion of the oppressed,' read the funeral program. "He was 'a world hero, our king in shining armor,' said one of the eulogists. He was a 'black Moses,' said another, in a phrase that made the headlines. The same sentiments were echoed by Congressman Ron Dellums, and other black dignitaries and politicians who had learned to keep their distance from Newton when he was alive but came to pay tribute to him as martyr when he could no longer threaten them."
"The Panther myth was propagated in the academy by tenured radicals who made them icons. Panther veterans had been hired to teach in African-American studies departments, and even Warren Kimbro, the convicted murderer of Alex Rackley, had been matriculated at Harvard as an affirmative-action student, and become a dean at a Connecticut college. The myth was also spread through campus speakers' programs, which were generally controlled by the Left and whose stars were often Panther enthusiasts.."
"And it [the Panther myth] was promoted under the auspices of public television, which produced five documentaries featuring the Panthers, including the widely distributed and award-winning 'Eyes on the Prize.' The PBS films glorified the Party, and perpetuated the image of its leaders as movement heroes who had been destroyed by the FBI because they were leaders of black liberation. The murders of Alex Rackley and Betty Van Patter, the assaults on the police, the bull-whippings and extortion and drugs, were never mentioned."
"The situation in the universities was appalling. The Marxists and socialists who had been refuted by historical events were now the tenured establishment of the academic world. Marxism had produced the bloodiest and most oppressive regimes in human history -but after the fall, as one wit commented, more Marxists could be found on the faculties of American colleges than in the entire former Communist bloc."
"The American Historical Association was run by Marxists, as was the professional literature association, whose field had been transformed into a kind of pseudosociology of race-gender-class oppression. When Peter [Collier] and I were undergraduates in the Fifties, the mission of the university had been described by its guardians as 'the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.' It was now officially recast in radical terms as that of 'social transformation.' "
"With no trace of embarrassment, Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent figures in academic philosophy, even boasted that 'the power base of the Left in America is in the universities,' by which he meant not the students (who were generally apathetic if not conservative), but the faculties, administrations, and departments, who tried to recruit students to their political agendas."
"Shortly after the [1992 Los Angeles] riot, I appeared on a radio talk show with Clark Kissinger, a former president of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]. Kissinger had created a new organization in South Central [LA], Refuse and Resist, to promote the idea that local Crip gangs were revolutionaries battling an oppressive state. On the air, Kissinger was adamant that the looters and burners were social rebels, and that anyone doubting this was a 'racist.'"
"As an undergraduate at Columbia in the McCarthy Fifties, I had written papers from a Marxist point of view, but had never been graded politically by my anti-communist professors. Nor had I ever felt that the lectures I attended were veiled indoctrinations... When I visited university campuses now, however, the contrast was striking. Courses were often baldly ideological. Many left-wing professors gave one-sided presentations of subjects, expecting their views to be parroted on papers and exams. Students were graded politically, and frequently intimidated from expressing their own perspectives. The atmosphere of political terror was far greater and more pervasive than anything I had experienced, as a Marxist, in the McCarthy era. Although there was no statistical evidence to prove it, I would estimate that many more academic careers had been aborted for political reasons during these post-Sixties decades than during the entire Communist 'witch-hunt' of the McCarthy period. The reason for the lack of statistics was the same as for the effectiveness of the purge: Unlike the McCarthyites, whose base was government, the left-wing witch-hunters were inside the academy, where they could operate in secrecy and to far greater effect."
"Inevitably, the academic curriculum was also affected. A new theme of the academy was 'multiculturalism,' the Left's latest assault on the American identity and a direct appeal to alienated minorities not to assimilate into the American culture. In the multicultural perspective, the constitutional framework became the scheme of 'dead white males' to shore up their privileged status. Conservative thinkers like Hayek, von Mises, Kirk, Sowell, and Oakeshott were notable for their absence from college reading lists and courses (or their marginality, if present). The same was true of historical figures who had opposed the totalitarian left. Undergraduates I interviewed had not even heard of Whittaker Chambers, although the same students could identify the traitor Alger Hiss as a 'victim of McCarthyism.'"
"When Peter [Collier] and I spoke at Carleton College, one of the leading liberal-arts schools in the country, we asked a seminar of fifty students if they had ever heard the names Hayek or von Mises, two seminal figures of Twentieth-Century thought who had predicted the socialist collapse. Only one student had. Yet thirty responded when we asked how many had read a book by Noam Chomsky, a leftist whose views were so extreme that his writings were no longer accepted even by liberal magazines like the Atlantic or the New York Review of Books. Conservatives who had been historically vindicated by the Twentieth Century's epic struggle against Marxist totalitarianism were generally consigned to obscurity, while radicals who had betrayed Western freedom -political hacks like Angela Davis, intellectual commissars like Antonio Gramsci, and embittered nihilists like Michael Foucalt- were given places of honor in the academic canon."
"The radicals had moved onto the faculty and into the administration [of UC Berkeley], and had changed the rules. Political propaganda and recruitment were now considered academic norms in an institution redefined as 'an agency of social change.' McCarthy and his allies had never been able to get inside the academy but the radicals had. To consolidate their political control and stifle critics of their agendas, the radicals had instituted 'speech codes' -the most stringent restrictions on intellectual discourse in the universities since their administration by religious sects. As a result of these changes, the liberal-arts faculties of American universities were now at their lowest intellectual level since the creation of the modern university more than a hundred years before."
"In November 1991, I attended a conference at the university of Michigan which called itself 'The PC Frame-UP.' This turned out to be a rally of leftists claiming that 'political correctness' was something invented by right-wing witch-hunters. It featured a cast of radical academics like Houston Baker and Todd Gitlin, and non-academic ideologues like columnist Julianne Malveaux. According to the organizers, funds for 'The PC Frame-Up' conference were supplied by fourteen of the university's departments and programs. Even the audience was provided by a huge lecture class in communications, whose professor had made attendance virtually compulsory, counting it as a third of the grade. I regarded the whole spectacle as a violation of the students' academic freedom -the right not to be politically indoctrinated by their professors. But it proved to be a standard form of educational abuse in the new academic environment. Such resources, of course, were not available to us, had we been willing to draw on them, or to anyone else on our side of the political and cultural argument. Our exclusion from the academy, and from the commanding heights of the culture generally, was as effective and complete as any blacklist."
"An irony missed by our left-wing critics was that the 'ruling-class' foundations. such as Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, were solidly behind the programs and ideas favored by [leftist Columbia professor and PLO spokesman] Edward Said and his allies -multiculturalism, affirmative action, radical feminism, black separatist studies and the political redefinition of the university mission. Tens of millions of dollars had been invested by America's biggest capitalist fortunes in these anti-democratic and anti-capitalist agendas"
"I visualized a pyramid whose apex was Marxism, which was my life's work and which provided the key to all other knowledge. Marxism was the theory that would change everyone's world. And put mine at the center. But in that very moment a previously unthinkable possibility also entered my head: The Marxist idea, to which I had devoted my entire intellectual life and work, was false."
"I had been reading Political Messianism, by J.L. Talmon, which described nationalism and socialism as secular religions that lacked a doctrine of original sin. After reading Talmon's account, I began to wish that I had inherited such a concept. The idea of original sin -that we are born flawed, that the capacity for evil is lodged within us (no matter how our consciousness may be raised) -would have instilled in me a necessary caution about individuals like Huey Newton, and movements like ours."