Saturday, December 30, 2023

That very thing has indeed happened

From ‘We’ll Get You Through Your Children!’ The Night in 1958 That Launched the Culture War by Mark Judge.  

“We’ll get you through your children!”

That was the threat shouted by the poet Allen Ginsberg on a fateful night in 1958. Ginsberg was yelling at Norman Podhoretz, a conservative writer. The confrontation between Ginsberg and Podhoretz is described in Podhoretz’s 2001 book Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

The Podhoretz essay, called “My War With Allen Ginsberg,” has stayed with me for years. I occasionally re-read it for its tremendous foresight, wisdom and power. It is a first-hand account of a night in America in which the modern culture war began. With elegant and at times very funny observations, Podhoretz predicted everything that would happen for the next 60 years: How we got to be a country awash in drug abuse, transgenderism (and the medical malpractice that comes with it), mental health problems, anti-Americanism and atheism. It’s the genesis of our modern cultural and political nightmare.

Most chilling is the part where Ginsberg, a drug user, sex addict and member of NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, bellows at Podhoretz: “We’ll get you through your children!” That very thing has indeed happened. It’s why Podhoretz, still going at 93, has never forgiven Ginsberg, who died in 1997. The left did in fact get back at square America by corrupting her children.

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