Red Diaper Baby (w/ Ari Brostoff)

Matt and Sam are joined by Ari Brostoff, author of Missing Time: Essays, to explore David Horowitz's 1996 memoir, Radical Son. Like a number of prominent conservatives, Horowitz is a convert from the left. But he's younger than most of the first neocons, and his journey to the right went through Berkeley and the New Left more than the alcoves of City College. Radical Son is his account of that journey—an evocative, angry, revealing text that takes the reader from his red-diaper baby childhood in Queens's Sunnyside neighborhood to his involvement with Huey Newton and the Black Panthers in Oakland to his break with the left and turn to the right. What does Horowitz's trajectory reveal about the rightwing politics today?

Sources:

Ari Brostoff, Missing Time: Essays (n+1, 2022)

Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977, reprint Verso 2020)

David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (Simon & Schuster, 1996)

Fran Lebowitz, "Speaking of New York," Commonweal, February 7, 2019

Ronald Radosh and Sol Stern, "Our Friend, the Trump Propagandist," New Republic, May 5, 2021

Cole Stangler, "David Horowitz: 'Conservatives are So F**king Well-Mannered," In These Times, December 12, 2013

Reinhold Niebuhr, "Augustine's Political Realism," from The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr (Yale University Press, 1987)

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