Radical Son is a book by David Horowitz that I read many years ago. There is now a new edition with an updated preface by David Horowitz. Yesterday John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted an article about the updated preface. Please follow the link to read the entire article. It provides a lot of insight into the thinking of the radical political left.
The article contains the entire preface. I am simply posting the last part here in the hopes that you will read it in its entirety at Power Line Blog:
In his narrative, Forbes makes clear that he regards the inconveniences he suffered as a result of his crimes as an injustice to him. He exhibits no remorse for his victims and no appreciation for the short jail time he spent for plotting the assassination of Crystal Gray or killing his friend, or for the cold-blooded, botched execution attempt which ruined the life of the ambulance driver, Nelson Malloy, who tried to help him. The fantasy of the “revolution” he served by committing violent crimes, mainly against vulnerable black people who were not political, remains for Forbes a source of inordinate pride. Equally revealing is his continuing adoration for the criminal who recruited him to the Panthers when he was sixteen, made him a gangster, murdered an eighteen-year-old black woman, and ordered him to assassinate another.
Flores Forbes’s story is emblematic of what America’s political culture has become. His title today is Associate Vice President of Strategic Planning and Program Implementation at Columbia University, where he is a pillar of the academic community. Meanwhile, those of us who worked to bring the criminal reality of the “revolutionary” charade to light are persona non-grata among administrators and faculty at Columbia, which happens to be my own alma mater.
And this travesty is not confined to one Ivy League school. There are academic tributes and shrines to Panther gangsters at UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, the Smithsonian, and numerous similar institutions across the country. This is a pretty fair measure of the Left’s institutional ascendance in America in the wake of the mayhem its radical activists have created and the atrocities they have committed.
Radical Son was written as a witness to the dark undercurrents of American politics and to their enduring power in the nation’s life. It has definitely had an impact. Whether the revelations contained in its narrative can seriously affect the course of this history is unlikely. But as long as the book has open-minded readers, the possibility exists that new generations will be able to put together these lessons with others, and perhaps affect the outcome. Or maybe just one individual will have been affected by this book in such a way as to avoid experiences as painful as I had to endure. That would be sufficient reward for the ordeals of writing it.
In case you are unaware, David Horowitz grew up in New York as a ‘red diaper baby.’ That was the name given to the children of members of the Communist party in America. His parents were school teachers. Let that sink in. His indoctrination into radical political beliefs at home was probably not a lot different than the indoctrination his parents’ students received. I strongly recommend reading Radical Son to understand how the radical left thinks and what their goals are. It is eye-opening.