Volume V – Culture Wars

Review of Volume V: Culture Wars by Jay Nordlinger

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One of my least favorite modern phrases is “gets it.” So-and-so “gets it,” and so-and-so “doesn’t get it.” But sometimes I find the phrase handy. And David Horowitz gets it. Gets what?

Well, many things, but he certainly gets the Left, from which he comes. As readers of this magazine don’t need to be told, Horowitz made one of the most famous, and consequential, journeys from left to right in recent history. He knows the Left from the inside out. He has their number, as we used to say. (“Gets it,” frankly, was sexual.)

Abigail Thernstrom is another intellectual who traveled from left to right. During the 1990s, she told me that she’d had an interesting conversation with an academic associated with the Clinton administration. He said that he would no longer engage in public debates with her. Why? “Because, Abby, you know what I’m going to say before I say it, and you know why I’m going to say it.”

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Review of Culture Wars: Volume V by Barbara Kay

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Way Stations on Marxism’s ‘long march through America’s institutions’ in the 20th century.
By Barbara Kay

Some months ago, joining an online discussion initiated by a gay Facebook friend on the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, I countered a bitter remark about Ronald Reagan’s “homophobia” and his primary role in causing so many deaths by (as tactfully as possible) observing that gay activists had to bear their share of the blame for the epidemic in having obstructed public health measures to curtail its spread.

The hostile blowback to this remark startled me in its denialist fury, but the salient point here is the sneering tone in which more than one critic on the thread accused me of merely reiterating talking points raised by conservative polemicist David Horowitz. I was taken aback by the rapidity of the redirect to Horowitz in particular, as though nobody else at that time had raised the question of gay-liberationist complicity in maintaining a cone of silence over the elevated HIV risks inherent in unprotected, promiscuous anal intercourse. (Others did, but nobody else with the persistence, straight-talking candor and politically incorrect judgmentalism of Horowitz).

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