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In homeschool, my parents taught me a song I thought they wrote: “Who were the witches? / Where did they come from? / Maybe your great-great-grandmother was one / Witches were wise, wise women they say / and there’s a little witch in every woman today.”
Last week, I heard it elsewhere for the first time in my life while listening to a podcast by Zaid Ayers Dohrn, the son of domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. In the episode, he played a clip of himself and his classmates singing it at the “scruffy alternative preschool” his fugitive parents sent him to while underground and on the run from the FBI in New York.
It probably shouldn’t surprise me. My parents were never directly involved in left-wing violence, but they moved in overlapping circles with Weathermen and others of a similar mind. And they were radicals. I grew up idolizing the Black Panthers, writing ecstatic poetry about Cesar Chavez, and sincerely believing the U.S. government assassinated Malcolm X.
Today, I hold the values of principled conservatism very closely. I’ve come to see much of the left-wing project as rooted in utilitarian hedonism and fear-based social conformity, aimed at erecting theoretical scaffolding for moral anomie.
It wasn’t ideology that changed me, but an abiding commitment to truth wherever it led, regardless of the political implications. Much of that transformation is thanks to Buckley, Scruton, and the Manhattan Institute.
Which is why I’m thrilled that, beginning next week, I’ll be working at the Manhattan Institute full-time. I couldn’t imagine a better place to invest my energy.
*P.S. For those supposed “right-wing accounts” with poor reading comprehension who mobbed this the first time (in prototypical leftist fashion), this post is stating that I was raised in a progressive environment and came to conservatism of my own accord.
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