Warren Buffett’s father should have changed Radical Son David Horowitz’s red diapers.

At first glance, Horowitz’s vehement rejection of his card-carrying Communist Party upbringing to become an equally unwavering Grand Old Party loyalist, from voting for Ronald Reagan’s re-election right up until his passing on April 29, would seem the mirror opposite of the path to Buffett’s retirement a week later.  Six decades after inheriting the Berkshire Hathaway he would nurture into a trillion-dollar conglomerate from a Republican congressman deemed “arch‐conservative” in his New York Times obituary, Howard Homan Buffett’s son had become the sort of capitalist who could not only be commended by Times guest essayist Roger Lowenstein for having “long stood out on Wall Street because he eschewed its frequent chicanery, self-dealing and greed” (“Taking the Measure of Warren Buffett,” May 5), but gladly cited as a role model by It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism author Bernie Sanders.

Yet the Times acknowledged that the “arch-conservative” had urged “curbs … on the United States military leadership,” anticipating Dwight Eisenhower’s better-remembered caution to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex.”  E. J. Dionne, Jr. observed in Why Americans Hate Politics that “New Left scholars … took a much more favorable view of the old isolationists such as Robert A. Taft” and Buffett “than liberal scholarship ever had” — and that Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby had quoted Buffett on how “we cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.”

Dionne’s caveat that “the New Left’s attack on large corporations was not a cause to which conservatives repaired” is hard to maintain when a devoted Ayn Rand fan like Roy A. Childs, Jr. could note in the May 1972 issue of Libertarian Forum not only the validity of “students’ reactions to Dow Chemical’s presence on campuses across the U.S., at the time when Dow’s own napalm was being used to zap Vietnamese peasants” but that law-and-order dismissals ignored how “so-called ‘private’ universities … seize land from its rightful owners by aligning with the State’s power of eminent domain.”

One of those “New Left scholars” was none other than David Horowitz.  The back cover of Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism includes a blurb from the Horowitz who would later coedit The Anti-Chomsky Reader lauding its “understanding of the imperial dynamics of America’s postwar course” underneath Noam Chomsky lamenting “how much has been lost by narrowing the spectrum of debate” when such a “critique of … the centralization of state power was perceptive at the time, and has much to offer to us today.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “They Could Have Overruled the Empire as Father and Son” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 9, 2025
2. “Opinion: They could have overruled the empire as father and son” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, May 13, 2025

Donald Trump’s attempts at “fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past” have a chance to succeed — by spurring the very sort of “revisionist movement” he denounces in his March 27 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Not that Trump’s “solemn and uplifting public monuments” will engender much high-mindedness among the American public, even though they will surely avoid quoting from Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School. And Trump’s trumpeting of America’s “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing” is at odds with his 2017 inaugural address describing a country in which heretofore “there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land,” since “for too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

But the administration’s very heavy-handedness might make Americans think twice about what they think they know about their history.  On April 2, New York Times contributor David W. Blight insisted that what Trump dubs a “revisionist” approach is necessary to “maintain relevance,” and that “many Americans … actually prefer complexity to patriotic straitjackets.”

The newspaper wasn’t always so charitable to the revisionists.  In 2007, Howard Zinn responded to Walter Kirn calling his A Young People’s History of the United States less devoted to “telling the truth” than “editing and motivating” in The New York Times Book Review with a letter to the editor insisting that “there is no such thing as a single ‘objective’ truth” independent of “the viewpoint of the historian.”  This year, a contribution by Jeet Heer discerned “a proto-Trumpian politics” in Murray Rothbard viewing America’s rules as “a sham that ripped off ordinary citizens” (“Why We Got Kash Patel and a ‘Gangster Government’,” January 30).

Yet the Rothbard who Heer sees as yearning for rule by real-life equivalents of “the mobster antiheroes of the ‘Godfather’ movies” had no use for the not-so-little “Caesar in the White House” who imposed wage and price controls in his 1971 Times op-ed “The President’s Economic Betrayal,” or Nixonian Republicans who “have forgotten their free enterprise rhetoric and are willing to join in the patriotic hoopla.”

In contrast, the February 1976 issue of Rothbard’s The Libertarian Forum lauded “the Revisionist, even if he is not a libertarian personally” since “to penetrate the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals” is “a vitally important libertarian service.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Trump Makes History Again? Great…” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, April 4, 2025

“What noted conservative advocates jailing people to prevent the spread of their ideas?” If David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom was written nowadays, he could challenge readers to think of one who doesn’t.

Friedman observed that National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s then-recent 1965 call for “quarantining all [narcotics] addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague” was “inconsistent with [Buckley’s] belief in a free society.”  The pugnaciously partisan pundit of conservatism wouldn’t take the implications of his own analogy far enough to “favor jailing Galbraith, Bundy, and several Rockefellers as carriers of liberalism.”

By 1996, Thomas Szasz could be confident that “Buckley has since moderated his views” on the issue (even if he hadn’t “abandoned defining the ‘drug problem’ as a medical matter”).

Yet in February 2025, former Reagan staffer Glenn Loury still considered applying a Just Say No approach to other vices, deeming “online gambling and pornography … detrimental … to marriage,” enough so to possibly justify efforts to “prosecute producers of … the most obscene videos.” Friedman had quipped that the decisions made by what Buckley called the “psychologically weak or misinformed” might include “getting married or subscribing to National Review.”

Loury’s “obscene videos” may not include Academy Award champion Anora, but on May 3, Lauren Smith vouched that its filmmakers’ acceptance speeches would “legitimise the act of sexually exploiting women for money” (“The ‘vibe shift’ hasn’t reached the Oscars,” spiked). That same day, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called anti-Semitism “comparable to history’s most deadly plagues” not just in its harmful effects but its catchiness, with top universities serving as “greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence” — while decrying in the same breath “censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.” JFK’s nephew ignores such ills among his new bedfellows in the Trump administration as intently as the new PBS American Masters documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse covers them as if they are only found there.

Friedman pointed out that “a university may proclaim its neutrality, but neutrality, as the left quite properly argues, is also a position” — one particularly hard to maintain “if one believes that the election of Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy would be a national tragedy.” Long after their time, the solution remains not “a university run from the outside, by a state government” but developing “noncoercive cooperation.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Freedom: Not Another Word for Things Left to Lose” by Joel Schlosberg, The Newton Kansan, March 10, 2025