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Horowitz and Rubin: Passing of the Baton
Update: This interview is an hour and half long and I know many of you won’t be able to listen to it so I transcribed a little of the interview below just for people to get an idea what you will hear.
Dave Rubin (age 41) is getting up to speed very quickly and it’s amazing to watch and listen to his questions and commentary with David Horowitz (age 79). This is a great background for understanding the war (you know the one we’re in right now against the left? The one that Dennis Prager talks about?). I start the video late to skip the opening monologue about other things.
I’ve read Radical Son by David Horowitz and a few other books of his. I have read a lot about him over the years but this filled in a few more blanks in my understanding of him and his journey from red-diaper baby to a professed enemy of the left.
Rubin is in a space right now where he wants to learn from the people who have been fighting the war so far and have spent time in the trenches. Nobody knows the ground game better than David Horowitz.
I rank Radical Son up there with Whitaker Chambers’ Witness as absolutely essential reading. This is an important book and, if we can get through this present attack from the nihilist postmodern leftists of the world, these two books will be recognized as the counter-revolutionary tracts that laid the foundations of our salvation. I worry that only America can be saved because there are so few in Europe fighting this fight.
Samples from the interview:
Dave Rubin: I don’t know if I’ve read anyone’s bio and found it more interesting than your bio. … There’s so much richness there, your evolution politically, it has a lot to do with some of the things that you write about, about going from the left to the right. I want to start with your history first. Your parents were communists.
David Horowitz: Card carrying.
DH: These were people who were part of a vast international conspiracy orchestrated by Moscow. My parents — I don’t think my mother ever got a traffic ticket — but they were very middle class, did not break the law but they did hide an east German communist that the government wanted to deport. Dieter was his name, his brother was the mayor of East Berlin. They were very conspiratorial. They never referred to themselves as communists, only as progressives.
DH: We need to have a stigma on people who hate this country and we’ve lost that completely.
DH: I was one of the creators of the New Left. I was at Berkeley, we published a magazine that was called “Root and Branch” but by the end of that decade it was clear that the left was a totalitarian force…
DH: I was in the same place my parents were (being embarrassed by the Kruschkev report), something that I swore would never happen to me.
DH: When our (DH and Peter Collier) article came out that we voted for Reagan, Peter said to me, “Our literary careers are over.”
DH: When people start referring to the left as fascists and not liberals then I’ll say OK we’re winning now.
DH: Trump understands instinctively that when you get attacked you attack back.
I watched this interview a while ago.
One has to admire Dave Rubin. He actually listens and is interested in what his guests have to say. He wasn’t afraid to explore what the other side had to say, and when he started listening he learned – “Oh, these guys who call themselves conservative aren’t the bigots and authoritarians I thought they were. They actually care about free speech and ideas like I do.”
Rubin will never consider himself a conservative, but if the conservatives are smart we will form a coalition with people like Rubin to marginalize the identity politics of both the far left (SJW) and far right (Identitarians).
I’d pay him to interview David Stockman next. Nothing else would move the ball more, now.
Unlike actual journalists, he’s intellectually curious and plays it straight. We can all be very grateful that he has a huge following.
This is what Trump is doing.
Read both books back in the day. That David is quite a character. From the interview it seems he’s mellowed quite a bit. I should read them again just to get updated and also see if the culture has deteriorated even more these days. Silly me, of course it has…
I wrote a few articles for his and Peter Collier’s news magazine, Heterodoxy *. One of the articles was a review of Christina Hoff Sommers’ book Who Stole Feminism. (So you know how long ago that was!) There were a few other book reviews and an article or two.
Rubin’s interview with him was excellent. Thanks, Larry, for posting it – and for bringing David to the attention of the R community – even though many already know him. It’s the new members and the young’uns amongst us that need to hear him and of him – and read him.
*For fun, I looked up Heterodoxy on Wikipedia and it said that “Its focus was said to be on exposing the excesses of ‘political correctness’ on college and university campuses across the United States.” Well yes, but it covered many, many more issues than just PC.
Very interesting, Barbara. Did you know David Horowitz or Peter pretty well?
Horowitz is someone I’d like to meet and talk with sometime. I have one piece of correspondence with him. About 15 years ago my wife’s niece was at UC Santa Cruz and we stopped to have dinner with her. I knew that she was a lefty (her grandfather was a French commie) but had no idea that this sweet innocent (seeming) girl had such hate-filled beliefs. She was in the History of Consciousness program there — this is the most leftwing place in the country almost. She met and loved Angela Davis (that really turned my stomach — this atheist girl telling us that she almost wanted to “bow at her feet”). It’s disgusting what’s going on in this country. We are nurturing vipers to our breasts.
I wrote to David and asked him about what can work with this toxic disease, wondering if interventions would work and asking for any other advice. He wrote back saying that there is little that family members can do with these cult members. He sent me a signed book of his as commiseration.
Thanks to this video, I’m binging Rubin’s show. The Prager interview was fascinating and I may have had a slight perception shift that was kinda cool.
Reality
Thanks, RRJ — excellent. People need to see this.
Everything comes down to Keynesianism and Critical Theory or the Frankfurt School. The media are all statists.
It isn’t all that bad that they are statists if they would only admit it — it’s that they are lying scumbags. We’re not having an intellectual discussion with these people.
The media lies, and the Frankfurt School is real. Brietbart’s book is 100% right. All Democrats use Critical Theory tactics and Alinsky tactics reflexively. Cultural Marxism is real. “Everything about statism works and is good”. That is what is going on.
YES.
Thanks for posting this, Larry. I watched it all, just not all at once.
You’re welcome. It’s stuff we all need to know.
I’ve been watching Rubin all night and all day. What have you done to me???
Have you watched the Candace Owens one? I’m going to post on that next. She has evidence of a serious breach of trust by the media in cahoots with the Dems and the left. Blatant stuff. Watch it — it’s at the beginning and it deals with the realization she had that there was a cabal of people behind a lot of the fake tweets and stuff. It started when she tried to do a Kickstarter for a piece of technology (software, I assume) that can run down trolls on the Internet and how that threatened the people behind this stuff.
Really creepy stuff.
Red pill black? Yes and I loved it. It was especially interesting as what happened to her was in the midst of GamerGate when Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu were claiming they were getting death threats. It was Quinn who threatened her, right?
So Candace’s experience was actually pretty central to putting a stop to the sjw take down of the games industry and subculture.
Right. Isn’t their world upside down? Or they are evil. Which is it?