The analogies between what Horowitz is describing and the current moment are striking.
Vietnam protests = pro-Hamas protests
Black Panthers = the BLM. Back then, it was just as fashionable to find some black gangster and worship him as a martyr for revolution
AIDS = COVID. A virus that was dangerous to a very specific group was presented as equally dangerous to everybody causing many unnecessary deaths.
Gay men being physically eliminated through a concerted campaign of ideological lies = transing away the gay.
The same slogans, the same bizarre ideas. The same Anthony Fauci, even. The only difference is that back then the state apparatus wasn’t as completely coopted (and the business world was very marginally coopted) by left-wing radicals as they are now.
Mind you, Horowitz wrote Radical Son a quarter of a century ago. He wasn’t trying to make analogies with 2020-24. Time made them.
Clarissa's Blog 
You’re stretching it with these two:
AIDS = COVID. A virus that was dangerous to a very specific group was presented as equally dangerous to everybody causing many unnecessary deaths.
=> The book was published in 1996. How were people overcautious about AIDS before then and how were these unnecessary deaths caused?
Gay men being physically eliminated through a concerted campaign of ideological lies = transing away the gay.
=> There are tons of young gay people growing up. There is no concerted campaign of ideological lies that it’s not OK to be gay.
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There was a politically motivated refusal to accept that a) AIDS was an STD and b) that it affected gay men enormously more than anybody else. The book details terrible facts about how facts were concealed, causing many unnecessary deaths. There was even a slogan, “Sex doesn’t cause AIDS. A virus does.” It’s very much like COVID where we were told for months that children were at the same kind of risk as the elderly. In some areas, if you remember, schools were closed for 1,5 years in service of this lie while elderly people had COVID patients brought into their retirement homes causing – guess what? – many unnecessary deaths.
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Probably too young to remember the AIDS panic, and the giant propaganda campaign trying to cast it as “everybody’s problem”. I remember PBS doing tearjerker documentaries featuring two people with AIDS: a straight black woman with a regular job, and a straight married hemophiliac Anglican priest who’d gotten it from a blood transfusion. No gay men in that doc. They were really pushing the idea that *anybody* could get it… by going out and finding the most edgy edge cases in the universe and giving them far more press than any of the normal cases. But all the people we knew who had it were gay men and addicts.
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Horowitz tells about several hemophiliacs who were infected during blood transfusion because progressive authorities in SF thought it was “like Jim Crow” to ask gays to stop donating blood for a while. The recipients of these transfusions were sacrificed to the urgent need not to mention that this illness was affecting mostly gays.
Another story Horowitz tells is that there was an epidemic of other STDs in the gay community in SF before AIDS. This weakened their immunity massively and made them more prone to be ravaged by AIDS. Then, as in 2020, it was not allowed to talk about the immune system and what weakens it.
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The history of AIDS in america is so sordid.
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Yeah, my dad had some blood transfusions back in the day, so there was a stretch where we worried about it a bit.
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I led a campaign for clean syringes back in my Soviet school where everybody was injected with the same syringe during the early vaccinations. As a result, I got my own, fresh, individually packed syringe while everybody else got injected with the same dirty one because they were too scared to protest.
Forty years later, nothing much changed in my life. 🙂
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I’m older than most of you, and I recall the eighties and nineties very well. In the beginning, the information given about AIDS was pretty accurate — that it was a disease transmitted almost exclusively by promiscuous gay sex and/or the sharing of infected needles. Problem was, you couldn’t get normal people worked up about AIDS as long as they believed that it was caused by specific behaviors that they didn’t engage in, and that are easily avoidable. That’s why TPTB started spreading the lie that everyone was at risk.
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Confirmed, with the added observation that if you didn’t have personal dealings in NYC or Miami in the early 1980s, you didn’t have much to worry about at first.
SF and LA were a bit later.
The first person I knew who died from it was a guy in the Miami art scene, back in the mid-1980s.
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Wish I’d have been able to keep my copies of The Village Voice so you could have been there in a sense …
But one of the things that was driving immunity down was nitrous oxide use.
Kaposi’s sarcoma started to show up in people doing “whippets”, and there was enough of an overlap that things got going.
But everyone I knew who had it early was not only gay and promiscuous but also was somehow linked to the “whippets” group.
Even science magazines were clueless — anyone remember the 1980s “Science” magazine?
I think it was only in 1983 when they started to put clues together, but nitrous use as an immune suppressant was conveniently left out by then.
South Florida has an interesting special blood group, BTW, so when this took off in some of the poor towns around Lake Okeechobee, this shouldn’t have been a huge surprise.
But it’s like people were paid not to look at the data …
Just like 2020 onward with The Rona, really.
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Fauci led medical shenanigans with AIDS. Good medications were dismissed in favor of more dangerous ones.
They also told people that everyone was at equal risk of getting, scaring the crap out of everyone.
Amanda
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Yeah, AZT was like laetrile for HIV treatment …
You wouldn’t believe how many family fortunes got blown on AZT for a family member.
You would easily recognise some of the family and corporate names, some of them were literally household words.
Some of these people strung out on AZT for Big Pharma profits I knew.
Fauci has plenty to answer for.
Honestly, I’m surprised one of those families didn’t hire an assassin.
Maybe they did but the protection detail was better?
I wonder.
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I don’t like the “trans=gay conversion therapy” framing at all. First of all because it’s not very effective (Democrats are the real homophobes!), second of all because I don’t think it’s a very accurate description of the problem. While there are certainly some people who transition because they struggle to accept their homosexuality, at this point there are probably more bisexuals and heterosexuals transitioning than gays and lesbians. Are heterosexuals being physically eliminated?
In the context of this particular conversation, I’ll say there’s no comparing how AIDS devastated gay men to the trans issue. Most children who are being transitioned are female (probably less than half of whom are lesbian, not that lesbians and gay men feel a particularly strong affinity with each other.) When it comes to grown adults who do this…maybe it should be legal, maybe it shouldn’t, but it’s not the same kind of tragedy as it being done to children and it’s not something that affects us much. When I see gay men complaining about transgenderism as gay men (rather than advocating on behalf of others as disinterested bystanders, which is honorable), it’s telling. They complain about having to occasionally see people they find sexually unattractive on dating apps as if it’s a real problem (I can tell you firsthand that 99% of people on Grindr are male and that there’s zero pressure within the gay community to fuck ftms if you’re not into it.) When gay men try to act like they’re the victims of the trans movement, they come across as petty and selfish, because they are.
HIV is a bigger problem for us now than the trans thing is. Did you know that 1 in 6 men who have sex with men are HIV positive? You don’t usually die now but both the virus itself and the drugs to treat it seriously impact your quality of life. This is underdiscussed because there’s now a big push to act like HIV is no big deal.
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“When gay men try to act like they’re the victims of the trans movement, they come across as petty and selfish, because they are.” Should clarify here that obviously detrans gay men are an important exception to this, and have every right to complain. But I have seen surprisingly few.
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Yeah, I don’t like the sneaky way in which these protests are being reframed on social media as “pro-Hamas” protests. These are anti-Israel protests and god knows that country has done enough to inspire protests everywhere. These protesters are also my ideological enemies, but let’s not give Israel a break here. At least I won’t. 🙂
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There was even a slogan, “Sex doesn’t cause AIDS. A virus does.”
Oh, I remember it well. It was so disingenuous. Another was “HIV does not discriminate.” I was a gay activist at that time, but sexually celibate: ALL of my gay friends – close friends, not acquaintances, about a dozen people – became HIV-positive, and guess what, they were either sexually highly promiscuous or in a relationship but still promiscuous. Like almost everybody else I drank the kool-aid of LGBT propaganda, but I realised I’d been duped when I was left the only HIV-negative person in my circle of friends.
The same gaslighting is going on now. Still, you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
These people are “waiting for the revolution”. They may call themselves Pro-Pal, or BLM or decolonising or anti-Vietnam war: they are always the same Marxist anarchist antifa thugs trying to undermine the West.
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Then, as now, it took gay people quite a while to notice what was being done to them under the guise of progressivism. At least, now they aren’t killing the gays. Just snipping off their body parts. That’s actual progress!
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AIDS advocacy never reckoned with these missteps and it shows. It’s still taboo to suggest people change their sexual behavior (I’m not talking about celibacy or even abstaining from casual sex, I mean literally any restraint at all.) Everyone still cries about it all being Reagan’s fault. Activists still look back fondly on the sexually free 70s which caused these problems in the first place.
The gay community has serious internal problems with extremely risky sexual practices, drugs, etc. but the “movement” is busy crying about “book bans.” There are some parallels with racial activism here, perhaps. Ignoring mountains in favor of molehills, because it’s easier to point the finger at others than take responsibility for your own problems.
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I forgot to mention: there’s now a big push among AIDS advocates to “destigmatize HIV” and to convince people who’ve recently acquired it that it’s not a huge deal. I think much of this comes from noble intentions: a panicky attitude can lead to people avoiding getting tested, or avoiding getting treatment (because then they’d have to think about their diagnosis.) But in the process they downplay the serious, unavoidable health consequences of an HIV infection. I also think that a less noble motivation at play is that people who work in this field (usually very left wing and “sex positive”) don’t want to question their beliefs around sexuality.
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Don’t even get me started on “book bans.” I’m from the USSR. I know from real book bans. People should be ashamed.
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Generations raised on the slogan “no dead white men” (1990s IIRC) are deracinated from the experience of their grand- and great-grandparents.
There’s no reason that being dead, or white, or male obviates either the historic record, or the narratives told, but it does. “The victors write the history” turns out to be less of an observation than a promised action.
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Anybody who loves art is offended by the “dead white men” slogan, which is why I always detested it.
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