David Horowitz R.I.P. | Frontpage Mag:
"...David’s legacy is vast and the number of people that he inspired, mentored, and impacted is incalculable. That we live in a world today where there is a fighting chance of defeating the Leftist utopians who would enslave us is due in no small measure to the rare courage and unflagging passion that exemplified David’s work these past 40 years.
Over the years, David became something of a Saul Alinsky for the conservative movement, shaking a complacent Right out of its sleep and reinventing it as a war machine, laying out the strategies and principles for defeating the Left in too many bestselling books, articles, and pamphlets to count.
David’s message to the conservative movement was that it needed to abandon its habit of embracing noble failure and instead fight to win. Indeed, Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was shaped and guided by David and his disciples like Stephen Miller. And while his passing is an incalculable loss, David lived long enough to see his ideas and tactics become the heart and soul of a new movement to take back America.
David Horowitz, 1939-2025. Requiescat in pace." .......
Lee Smith: David Horowitz, 1939-2025 - Tablet Magazine:
He saw the left primarily as a secularized religious movement rather than a political one. “It’s a faith that seeks redemption in this life with itself as the savior,” he said. “It’s such a beautiful dream, what lie would you not tell and what crime would you not commit to realize it?”
Apparently, none.
"As My Own Death Approaches, I Weigh the Life I Have Lived," David Horowitz | Frontpage Mag
David Horowitz Never Stopped Working | Frontpage Mag--Daniel Greenfield
David Horowitz Lived to See His Vision for America | Frontpage Mag:
The Trump administration is carrying out David's vision.
How We Beat Debanking | Frontpage Mag
Discover the Networks: An Online Database of the Left and its Agendas
David Horowitz, Conservative Stalwart, Dead At 86 | The Daily Caller
NY Post: Conservative commentator David Horowitz dead at 86
“...On behalf of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, we are very saddened to announce the passing of the Center’s founder, David Horowitz,” the center said.
His son, Benjamin Horowitz, a co-founder of the venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, shared an obituary on social media highlighting his career in media and activism, including several books he wrote and his endorsement of President Donald Trump.
When the younger Horowitz met Trump last year, he told the president about his father.
“President Trump’s face immediately lit up and he insisted that Benjamin get David on the phone immediately,” the obituary reads. “Hospitalized and weak, David was still delighted to speak with the President.”
Donald J. Trump
45th & 47th President of the United States
From red-diaper baby to New Leftist to champion and tutor of the Right.
"...Horowitz’s career as a New Left intellectual flourished. He wrote Empire & Revolution: A Radical Interpretation of Contemporary History, which offered a New Left perspective on imperialism, Communism, and the Cold War. Horowitz returned to the U.S. in 1968 to become an editor at Ramparts magazine, the New Left’s largest and most successful publication, with a circulation of a quarter-million readers.
He thought that he had found an answer to the political paralysis of the early 1970s when he became close to Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panther Party. Horowitz had avoided contacts with the Panthers in their overtly violent phase, but in 1970, Newton announced that it was “time to put away the gun” and turn to community activities. Seeing this as a constructive leftism, Horowitz found himself raising funds to purchase a Baptist church in Oakland’s inner city for the Panthers, which he turned into a “learning center” for 150 Panther children. In September 1974 he recruited the Ramparts bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, to maintain the accounts of the tax-exempt foundation he had created to manage the Panther school. In December, Van Patter’s bludgeoned body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. The police were convinced she had been murdered by members of the Panther Party, but local prosecutors were unable to bring an indictment, and the federal government, under siege from the Left, steered clear of this crime, as did the press, which had largely bought into the notion that the Panthers had been targeted for destruction by racist law enforcement.
Entering what would become a ten-year, slow-motion transformation from theorist of the Left to its worst enemy, Horowitz undertook his own inquiry into the murder. As he collided with denial and threats of retribution if he continued to search, he was forced to confront three stark facts: His New Left outlook was unable to explain the events that had overtaken him; his lifelong friends and associates on the Left were now a threat to his safety, since they would instinctively defend the Panther vanguard; and no one among them really cared about the murder of an innocent woman, because the murderers were their political friends.
Forced to look at his own commitments in a way he had never allowed himself to do before, Horowitz realized that it was the enemies of the Left who had been correct in their assessment of the Panthers, just as they had been correct in their assessment of the Soviet Union, while the Left had been disastrously wrong. The Panthers were not political militants and victims of police repression. They were ghetto thugs running a con on credulous white supporters and committing crimes against vulnerable black citizens. It was the Left and its “revolution” that had conferred on them the aura of a political vanguard, protecting them from being held accountable for their deeds.
In pursuing his investigation of Betty Van Patter’s death, Horowitz discovered that the Panthers had murdered more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution, and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. And yet, to his growing bewilderment, the Panthers continued to enjoy the support of the American Left, the Democratic party, Bay-area trade unions, and even the Oakland business establishment.
In his essay “Still No Regrets,” Horowitz wrote: “A library of memoirs by aging new leftists and ‘progressive’ academics recall the rebellions of the 1960s. But hardly a page in any of them has the basic honesty — or sheer decency — to say, ‘Yes, we supported these murderers and those spies, and the agents of that evil empire,’ or to say so without an alibi. I’d like to hear even one of these advocates of ‘social justice’ make this simple acknowledgement: ‘We greatly exaggerated the sins of America and underestimated its decencies and virtues, and we’re sorry.’”
The political journey from Left to Right, of course, had been made before. But Horowitz’s change of heart was of a somewhat different character from the conversions of the ex-Communists who had traveled to the Right before him. Unlike the contributors to The God That Failed, for instance, most of whom remained men of the Left, Horowitz made a comprehensive break with the radical worldview.
After Betty’s murder, Horowitz ceased his radical activism, and he put aside his political writing for most of the following decade. Silence about politics became his refuge, as he painstakingly reassessed his life and outlook. He was already involved in a writing project with Peter Collier, a multi-generation biography of the Rockefeller family, and this became his cocoon. In 1975, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty appeared, to widespread acclaim, including a front-page rave in the New York Times Book Review. It became a bestseller and a nominee for a National Book Award. The success of The Rockefellers led to other books — The Kennedys: An American Drama (1984) and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). These works earned Collier and Horowitz praise from the Los Angeles Times as “the premier chroniclers of American dynastic tragedy.”
After the Communist victory in Vietnam in 1975, the North Vietnamese began executing tens of thousands of South Vietnamese and setting up “re-education camps” where ideological offenders were held in “tiger cages.” The general repression prompted an exodus of 2 million refugees. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese boat people perished in the Gulf of Thailand and in the South China Sea in their attempt to escape the Communist new order, which the efforts of the New Left had helped to bring about.
In Cambodia, the victory of the Communists led to the slaughter of some 3 million peasants. More peasants were killed in Indochina in the first three years of Communist rule than had been killed on both sides during the 13 years of the anti-Communist war.
As the Indochinese tragedy unfolded, Horowitz was struck again by how the Left refused to hold itself accountable for the result it had fought so hard for — in this case, a Communist victory. It evidently could not have cared less about the new suffering of the people in whose name it had once purported to speak. He became increasingly convinced, as Peter Collier had tried to persuade him, that “the element of malice played a larger role in the motives of the left than I had been willing to accept.” If the Left really wanted a better world, why was it so indifferent to the terrible consequences of its own ideas and practices?
In November 1984, Horowitz turned another corner. He cast his first Republican ballot, for Ronald Reagan. Shortly thereafter he learned that Peter Collier had done the same. On March 17, 1985, he and Collier wrote a cover story for the Sunday magazine of the Washington Post, “Lefties for Reagan,” and explained their vote by describing what they had seen and done while fighting against “Amerikkka” as part of the Left. As they expected, the article inspired vitriolic responses from their former comrades and forced them to re-enter the political arena to wage what became a two-person war against the Sixties Left.
Dissecting the Left’s hypocrisy now became a Horowitz métier. As a former believer, he could attack the progressive myth with the familiarity of an insider. He and Collier delivered their first stunning blow in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the ’60s, a 1989 book in which they analyzed the legacy of the New Left and its corrosive effects on American culture. Destructive Generation represented the first dissent from the celebration of the 1960s that had been issuing forth in volume after volume from publishing companies headed by former New Leftists.
Before Collier and Horowitz turned on the Left, they had enjoyed front-page reviews in the New York Times Book Review and bestseller status for their multi-generational biographies. But Destructive Generation marked their eclipse in the literary culture. As Horowitz later recalled, “Our books, once prominently reviewed everywhere, were now equally ignored. With a few notable exceptions, we became pariahs and un-persons in mainstream intellectual circles.” The last review of a Horowitz book in The New York Review of Books was in 1985, the very spring that he and Collier announced they had voted for Reagan.
Horowitz’s next work, Radical Son, published in 1997, was powerful enough that even his enemies had to admit that it called up comparisons to Whittaker Chambers’s Witness and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. George Gilder called it “the first great American autobiography of his generation.” In this memoir Horowitz provided an account of his life, the details of which were already being distorted by his political enemies, and described the intellectual process of his political change of heart....
In The Art of Political War Horowitz observes that progressives have inverted Clausewitz’s famous dictum and treat politics as “war continued by other means.” By contrast, conservatives approach politics as a debate over policy.
Horowitz’s political strategy is to turn the tables on the Left, framing ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ as the actual oppressors of minorities and the poor.
Conservatives generally, and Republicans in particular, either fail to understand that there is a political war taking place, or disapprove of the fact that there is. Conservatives approach politics as a series of management issues, and hope to impose limits on what government may do. Their paradigm is based on individualism, compromise, and partial solutions. This puts conservatives at a distinct disadvantage in political combat with the Left, whose paradigm of oppression and liberation inspires missionary zeal and is perfectly suited to aggressive tactics and no-holds-barred combat. Horowitz’s political strategy is to turn the tables on the Left, framing “liberals” and “progressives” as the actual oppressors of minorities and the poor. ...
Horowitz’s next book, The Politics of Bad Faith (1998) was a collection of six essays that provided what he called “an intellectual companion piece” to Radical Son — analysis counterpointing the earlier book’s narrative. A central theme of The Politics of Bad Faith is the refusal of radicals to accept what the implications of the collapse of Communism are for the future of socialism. “For radicals, it is not socialism,” Horowitz writes, “but only the language of socialism that is finally dead. To be reborn, the left had only to rename itself in terms that did not carry the memories of insurmountable defeat, to appropriate a past that could still be victorious.” Thus leftists now called themselves “progressives,” and even “liberals.” ...
In pursuing his efforts to document the Left’s infiltration and eventual control of the Democratic party, Horowitz found his attention drawn to a recently formed network of funders and apparatchiks that the Washington Post had already described as a “shadow party,” taking a term from the British political lexicon to describe the government-in-waiting of the opposition party. In this case, however, the government-in-waiting was being formed inside the opposition party itself. With co-author Richard Poe, Horowitz published The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party (2006). ... [and later] The Black Book of the American Left. It can be said with reasonable certitude that this is the most complete first-hand portrait of the Left — as it has evolved from the inception of the Cold War through the era of Barack Obama and the Islamic jihad — that is likely to be written. ...
Academic and social critic Camille Paglia, herself an independent leftist, calls Horowitz “one of America’s most original and courageous political analysts,” reflecting that “as a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz’s spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.”
Anyone who has traced the arc of David Horowitz’s life cannot help thinking that, despite all the efforts to silence him, he will ultimately be vindicated by history and that the principles behind his work, to use William Faulkner’s famous words, will not only endure but prevail." .......
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| 6:02 PM · Apr 29, 2025 |
His family:
“In the end, David helped countless people and expended every fiber of his being pushing society towards freedom. He may not have saved the world, but he most certainly made it a better place – especially for us. He was our super hero and we will love him forever." .......
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David Horowitz, Rest in Peace |
Habakkuk 2
2-3 And then God answered: “Write this.
Write what you see.
Write it out in big block letters
so that it can be read on the run.
This vision-message is a witness
pointing to what’s coming.
It aches for the coming—it can hardly wait!
And it doesn’t lie.
If it seems slow in coming, wait.
It’s on its way. It will come right on time.
Amen!
