Today, we begin a three-part series on David Horowitz, “A Witness.” The first installment is here. Born the son of Communists, he grew up on the left, and stayed there until he was in his mid-30s. I’ve received a letter from a reader who was a very different young person. Thought you’d like it:
Jay,
I love David Horowitz. I was born in ’52. By the time I was 13, I had talked my parents into a subscription to the Wall Street Journal ($11 for six months!). Even though I was in the liberal la-la land of Hubert Humphrey, my young economic mind, reading the Journal’s editorials, decided they were absolutely right.
Hell, at that point I had a five-year history. I remember standing in a snowstorm in 1960 at age eight, waiting to enter my grade school at 8 a.m. the morning after Nixon lost, feeling dejected. Not even remotely suspecting that it had been stolen in Illinois and Texas. How could such a thing possibly be true?
Probably better that I was just a dumb kid. Being a total cynic at age eight would not have been good from a mental-health standpoint.
Some years later, I was an economics and finance major at the University of Minnesota, after the party of Humphrey, JFK, and even LBJ had been taken over by delusional McGovernites. I despised them and their constant anti-American B.S.
When Nixon did the Cambodia “incursion,” I cheered. Most of my cohort lustily booed. Cost me more than one hippie girlfriend. [My favorite line of the letter, by the way.] I watched idiotic campus demonstrations from my dorm room, complete with police in riot gear standing up to the lefty knuckleheads. I hoped that they would crack a few — not that it would have done any good.
Ayers and Dohrn and the SDS were constantly in the news, along with the Black Panthers. Not to mention Jack Baker, progenitor of the original “gay marriage” lawsuit (Baker v. Nelson). The student organ of the U of M, the Minnesota Daily, was all Left, all the time. The only article about Reagan I remember came when he was running for reelection, in 1970. The article referred to him as “Ronald Ray-guns.”
Who knew that the student editors were so smart, they knew about “Star Wars” thirteen years before the speech? Did they get a tip-off from Edward Teller?
Anyway, my humble thanks to you for writing about David Horowitz. You could write 10,000 words on his exploits and I’d read every one of them.
Well, there are many fewer words than that — but there could be 10,000 while still getting warmed up.