Tag Archives: Radical Son

A Powerful Conservative Voice

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On April 30, Front Page Magazine reported that David Horowitz, the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, has passed away from cancer at age 86.

The article reports:

The Freedom Center’s founder and guiding force was a relentless conservative warrior who survived a previous brush with death (chronicled in his book Mortality and Faith), confrontations with the Black Panthers, campus radicals, government investigations, death threats, and hate campaigns, some led by his former friends and allies, without ever considering giving up or letting up. Nothing short of the end that comes for us all could silence his voice. He continued writing, working, and steering the Center to the very last; his final article, “The Biggest Lie of All,” appeared earlier this month.

Although he was a giant in the conservative liberty movement for over 40 years, David was raised a Marxist and was one of the leading intellectuals of the New Left movement at Berkeley in the 1960’s. But David, along with his writing partner and Freedom Center co-founder Peter Collier, eventually had a political epiphany and joined the side of freedom in the early 1980‘s. They committed the second half of their lives and work warning Americans of the dangers of the Progressives whose intellectual roots and totalitarian aims they understood better than many Leftists themselves.

David’s legacy is vast and the number of people that he inspired, mentored, and impacted is incalculable. That we live in a world today where there is a fighting chance of defeating the Leftist utopians who would enslave us is due in no small measure to the rare courage and unflagging passion that exemplified David’s work these past 40 years.

Over the years, David became something of a Saul Alinsky for the conservative movement, shaking a complacent Right out of its sleep and reinventing it as a war machine, laying out the strategies and principles for defeating the Left in too many bestselling books, articles, and pamphlets to count.

David Horowitz’s book Radical Son was published in 1997. I remember reading it and being amazed at the thought transformation it represented. David Horowitz was a living example of the fact that people can radically change their views as they observe new things and process them. He will be missed by the American conservative movement.

Insight Into The Radical Left

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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.