The Horowitz Recommendation

~ Clarissa

I had no idea it existed, so thank you most kindly for the recommendation.

Now is a strange time to be reading Horowitz’s autobiography because everything he describes about 1968-1975 is happening right now. Unhinged liberals obsessed with a foreign conflict they don’t understand or really care about, occupying campuses and dreaming of “liberated zones” around the country where they would be able to run free. Guilty Jews, lionizing black criminals to expiate their “white skin privilege.” Excusing atrocities overseas by advancing a claim that the US is guilty of worse atrocities.

This is disturbing because it means that the exact same ideas expressed in an almost identical way have dominated the intellectual space in this country for half a century. I didn’t really know how identical it all was. If people were bashing each other’s heads on campuses over “white privilege” 50 years ago and they are doing it now, this is evidence of a complete intellectual stalemate. This is not good news.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the book but I’m only at 37% at the moment. Sincere thanks to whoever recommended. I have the best readers.

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Published by Clarissa

8 thoughts on “The Horowitz Recommendation”

  1. I’m familiar with Horowitz from reading FrontPage Magazine, but something that bothered me was that he came from an ethnic immigrant background and was so radical and anti-American. My parents are Cuban immigrants and they are very patriotic Americans, they taught us to be proud of being American and love this country. They are very conservative and I never went through a socialist period or even a liberal period, I’ve always felt conservative and now I’m a registered Independent with a conservative streak.

    I’ve read his website and I wonder what kind of parents he had for him to be that sort of radical, fuck America hippie weirdo. Maybe his parents were Communists, but that is something that baffles me. I grew up hearing from my parents that Communists are devil spawn and I still think Communists are devil spawn, if I told my parents that I sympathize with Communism or the Palestine stuff, they would have literally beat the shit out of me and kicked me out of the house

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    1. His parents were not just Communists. They were Stalinists. And Horowitz himself engaged in pretty treasonous stuff during the Cold War. Meaning, actual treason. He confesses it honestly in the book. It’s a terrible burden to know one has been duped into betraying his own country.

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    2. As for why they are this way, these are Ashkenazi Jews. The highest achievement group in any society they join (except, curiously, Israel.) The highest IQ group on the planet. Which is precisely why I was saying the other day that exceptional intelligence isn’t necessarily great. These are very intranquil people who are into social experiments.

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      1. I had an idea he was Jewish, Horowitz sounds like an Ashkenazi name. Maybe one is just better off being a little smart than super smart, unless you have conservative parents like my siblings and I have. My older brother and I both could read by 3 and have IQs in the 120-130 range, yet he’s an instructor in the Navy and further to the right than me and I’m a substitute teacher. Having conservative parents made sure that we did something useful with our brains, instead of being useless and treasonous

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      2. Maybe it’s just a side-effect of being smarter than the people around you. There’s a built-in internal discomfort with not being able to have normal comfortable conversations with normal people, but most people want to externalize that discomfort: I’m uncomfortable, there must be an external cause, let’s find it and change it! But also: growing up in a subculture where everybody’s smarter than the gen pop would tend toward viewing the gen pop as a sort of undifferentiated mass of stupids that you can/should exploit/control/manipulate. 

        Have sat through so many cringe dinner monologues with my very-smart-numbers-guy aspie FIL detailing how many ways the world would be better if it was run the way *he* wanted it (i.e. smart people should run everything, screw the democratic process)… each time full of relief that he does not in fact have any political power or connections.

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          1. Oh, if only. Monarchy is so romantic and humane by comparison. He seems to think an IQ-based meritocracy (as opposed to competence-based) would fix everything. Mandarins and stuff. But with lots of borrowed opinions from The Economist and his favorite Keynesian social pseudoscientists. The important thing to know is that the guy has negative charisma and leadership ability. Put him in charge of anything, and it would immediately go straight to hell as he offended everyone, neglected boring bill-paying and housekeeping stuff, and got frustrated that nobody was sticking around just to hear his brilliant ideas.

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