I’m reading Destructive Generation by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. It is a collection of mini-biographies of the people who made up 1960’s radicalism. It was published in 1989 so it was around when he was going public with his apostasy and rejection of leftism.  His Wiki entry, surprisingly, does a good job summarizing his life as a public intellectual. I say it is surprising as Wiki is populated with liberal fanatics who often assault the pages of people they deem enemies of the faith. I think it says something about the boomer generation and their personal impact on the next generation of lunatics.

Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson have left no imprint on black Americans. Even old warhorses like Alcee Hastings and Eleanor Holmes don’t mention them. Similarly, the nation had to be reintroduced to dirtbags like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Even liberals had forgotten all about them when they suddenly re-emerged as the principle backers of Barak Obama. In conservative circles, David Horowitz is well out of the mainstream. The boys and girls at National Review have probably never heard of him.

Anyway, the first chapter is on Fay Stender. Her Wiki is here. As you can see, she was in no small part responsible for giving us prisoner rights, a madness that remains with us to this day. She also helped create the prison street gang, The Black Guerilla Family. I bet they have killed ten thousand by this point as their reason to exist is to sell drugs and control urban street gangs that sell drugs. Stender and her cult of radical lunatics set free dozens of psychopaths who went onto murder innocent people once they were released. They also caused lasting damage to the criminal justice system. Forty years on we still struggle to repair the damage.

What jumps out to me in the 60-page description of Stender’s life is just how much sex drove radical politics. Stender was mostly driven to the prison movement because she wanted to fuck badass black guys. The milquetoast Jewish boys at college could not light the fire the way a jailed Mandingo could, I guess. Women are wired to seek out high status males, but this is often interpreted as most physically dominating. In my day, everyone knew the easy mark was a feminist girl. They would let you do anything to them.

This sexual impulse made everyone shockingly stupid. Despite elite educations, they failed to understand the necessity of jails and law enforcement. This is basic stuff, yet they were so filled with fanatical zeal to strike a blow against their parent’s system, they could not see what was right in front of them. Guys like Newton and Jackson, for example, were cunning criminals who knew how to exploit these stupid brats. The fanatic, however, is myopic out of necessity and Stender’s crowd could never see what was obvious to the world around them. For them, it was all about the cause. Even when Stender was shot by one of the criminal negroes they had helped, it still did not sink in.

The other thing that jumps out is the self-absorption. Everything about these people tracks back to some way to profit. The hypocrisy in how they lived versus how they talked is shocking from this great distance. I’ve often noticed that leftists project their faults onto others, which is why the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is so useful. These people are full of self-loathing, but not so much that they would abandon their comfortable lives. The trope of the guilty liberal is overdone and misses the mark. Guilt and loathing are different things. One leads to contrition; the other leads to destruction. That’s what’s clear in the Stender tale. She and her coevals were on a suicide mission.

Finally, the conventional wisdom is the New Left radicals were boomers. The truth is they were not. Stender and her crowd were born in the 1930’s. In fact, all of the leading radicals of the 1960’s were born in the thirties and early forties. Generally, we think of the boomer as having been born between 1945 and 1964, with the real end point being much earlier for the “60’s generation.”  By the time of the Summer of Love, Fay Stender was a middle-aged woman.