How a Rich Kid Politician Was Spun as a Working Class 'Oysterman'

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69. I Thought David Horowitz Was a Joke--but He Foreshadowed the Trump Coalition

As an undergrad, I mocked the radical leftist turned reactionary. But with his cruel, vindictive politics taking over the government, he had the last laugh.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/david-horowitz-radical-son/

https://archive.ph/0DzXr


David Horowitz, who died in April, spoke on the CU Boulder campus on February 14, 2005, about what’s wrong with various professors in US universities today.(Brian Brainerd / The Denver Post via Getty Images)

The first time I thought about David Horowitz was in 2006, when I was a 22-year-old senior at Horowitz’s alma mater, Columbia University. A friend—like me and Horowitz, a Jewish David—had commissioned me to review Horowitz’s latest book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, for the Columbia Political Review. As a snotty undergraduate, I agreed to do so on the condition that I wouldn’t have to read the book and that I would admit that I hadn’t upfront. Rather than an actual review, I wrote a generalized attack on Horowitz as a “once-radical hack,” accusing him of producing a McCarthyist screed and of libeling nine Columbia professors among his chosen 101—but I also reduced his life, or what I assumed without any research to be the broad outlines of his life, to a cliché:



It’s embarrassing to revisit some of my earliest writing, but still, I was pretty close. Horowitz was born in January 1939, eight months before World War II broke out in Europe (arguably, it had already begun in Asia). He grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, about five miles from Morningside Heights as the crow flies. He was indeed a second-generation American on both sides, and his parents really were Stalinists, though it was Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 rather than the earlier Doctors’ Plot that broke them. He did at some point socialize with Kristol and Podhoretz, he did protest the Vietnam War (not sure about ROTC), and the rest of that second paragraph is essentially accurate too.