David Horowitz, a radical left of the 1960s, had a political face to become an outspoken, conservative author and activist. He was 86 years old.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a think tank he founded in Southern California, said the cause was cancer. His wife, April Horowitz, said he had passed away at his Colorado home.
Once a self-proclaimed Marxist, Horowitz performed a dizzy transport from the far left to the far right. He argued that the Black Life Matter movement promoted racial hatred. He opposed Palestinian rights. He denounced the news media and the university as left-handed tools. And he falsely claimed that Trump won the 2020 election. Horowitz called it the “biggest political crime” in American history.
Horowitz, a prolific author since his early 20s, has published several pro-Trump books, including President Trump's Plan to Save America (2017) and The Enemy: How Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America (2021). The enemies he condemned for his totalitarian impulses were then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then Vice President Kamala Harris.
Horowitz, the leader of Trump's domestic policy advisor Stephen Miller, met when Miller was a high school student in California.
At Duke University, Miller began the Students' Chapter for Students, a grassroots advocacy group founded by Horowitz. According to Jean Guerrero, Miller's biographer who wrote for Politico in 2020, Horowitz asked to coordinate “Islamic Fascism Awareness Week” on his university campus.
Horowitz took up a position as spokesman for Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, and joined a hideout sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The Center explains on its website it opposes “the efforts of the radical left and the Islamist allies to destroy America's values and disarm the country.”
Miller joined Trump's first presidential campaign in 2016, and Session served as attorney general under Trump from 2017 to 2018.
Before heading to the far right, Horowitz was a mainstream conservative and cast his first Republican vote in 1984 to re-elect President Ronald Reagan.
He and fellow convert Peter Collier wrote for the Washington Post magazine in 1985, and considered their transformation in response to what they had considered the naive views of the communist movement, and in part to Reagan's dull assessment of the Soviet Union's enemy of freedom.
“We agree with his vision for the world, his vision as an increasingly inhabited democracy and an increasingly dangerous place for America,” they write.
In his 1997 autobiography, Radical Son, Horowitz identified a more tragic moment when he broke from the left. He is the death of Betivan Pattern, a friend who recruited for bookkeeping work on the basis related to the Black Panther Party.
Horowitz believed that Van Putter was murdered by the Panthers, but the case was never formally resolved. He concluded that the new left move he concluded was too shrouded in revolutionary fantasies to view the Panthers as a thug.
In a review of the New York Times book, Radical Son, and speaking of Horowitz, historian Richard Gid Powers called it “a courageous book, full of self-revelation and willing to expose one's own frailty.” But he continues, Horowitz said, “There's nothing, if not controversial. Some of his claims rub the reader the wrong way.”
Identified as a neoconservative in the 1980s, Horowitz began moving to the right with the emergence of the culture war. He co-founded Heterodoxy Magazine in 1992, criticising political correctness on American campuses. In 1988 he and Collier founded the Center for Popular Culture Studies, and in 2006 its name was changed to the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Horowitz pressed universities and state legislators to adopt an “Academic Bill of Rights.” Critics said it was an effort to purge liberal professors and create allocations to hire conservatives.
Horowitz was known for his filming style for many years of public speaking on university campuses at the invitation of Republican students. He advised conservatives to “start all conflicts by punching progressives in the mouth.”
“If you speak in nuances and what I call intelligent ways, you can eat alive,” he told The Times in 2017.
When talking about occasional security details and eliciting explosive responses from students, Horowitz often criticised Islamic extremists and Palestinian causes.
“There is a second Jewish Holocaust movement supported on this campus by the Muslim Student Association,” Horowitz said in 2008 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The student group's faculty advisor replied to him.
In 2013, in a national review article entitled “How Obama Betrayed America,” Horowitz attacked President Barack Obama and “minimized” the threat of Islamic terrorism.
The 2014 Southern Poverty Law Centre was called Mr. Horowitz.
Two former colleagues of Horowitz, Ronald Radsch and Sol Stern, wrote about the more extreme political arc of friends in the new Republic in 2021, lamenting the transformation from “thoughtful conservative” to “Trump propagandist.”
“When the complete history of the decent conservative betrayal of Trump intellectuals is written, David Horowitz will have a special pride of the place.
David Joel Horowitz was born in Queens on January 10, 1939 in New York City. His parents, Phil and Blanche Horowitz, were school teachers and members of the Communist Party of America. They left the party in 1956 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned Joseph Stalin's crimes.
David grew up with a “child protected by the Marxist bubble,” he wrote, and attended the May Day Parade at the age of nine.
He received his Bachelor's degree in English from Columbia University in 1959 and a Master's degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961.
While living in London in the mid-1960s, he wrote The Free World Colossus, a left-wing criticism of the Cold War.
Returning to California in 1968, Horowitz became co-editor of the influential new left magazine Runparts, eventually reaching nearly 250,000 paid distribution. On that page, he celebrated the Black Panther Party and became friends with one of his leaders, Huey Newton.
From 1976, he fell on the left, but before he accepted the right, Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Collier wrote best-selling biography of the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford families.
Mr. Horowitz's marriage to Elissa Krauser, Sam Mooreman and Shay Marlowe ended with divorce. In 1998 he married April Malvine.
In addition to his wife, he was survived by his sister Ruth Horowitz. Three children from his first marriage, Anne, Jonathan and Ben Horowitz, are co-founders of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. son-in-law, John Kibby; and seven grandchildren. Sarah, the daughter of his first marriage, passed away in 2008. Horowitz wrote about the loss in his book, A Cracking of the Heart (2009).
His other books include Dark Agenda: The War Destroying Christian America (2018) and I Can't Breathe: How Racial Hoaxes Are Killing America (2021).
