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David Horowitz in his Simi Valley study, 2017. (Laurence Jarvik photo) |
I learned of the death of David Horowitz in Colorado at age 86 a few days after it happened on April 29th, 2025.
I visited David in 2017 at his home in Simi Valley in order to congratulate him on the election of Donald Trump as President, since he had worked hard to make it happen. When I arrived, David handed me a signed copy of Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America, his blueprint for the Trump administration. At the time, David was recovering from an operation and was walking with a limp. He seemed frail, but full of energy and determination.
David told me he was working on several projects simultaneously and handed me a copy of the latest volume of his 7-volume series, The Black Book of the American Left detailing the horrors of the communists in America. But that wasn't all.
He spoke at length about his wife April's charity work with injured horses, for which he was proud to have help establish a charity foundation. He then took me outside, on a tour of their corral to introduced me to their horses.
That was a side of David that I hadn't seen much during the years I worked for him--gentle, compassionate, and seemingly at peace. I had no idea that he was an animal lover. He also talked about his ex-wife and children, of who he was also extremely fond. Again, I hadn't seen the paterfamilias side of David before, only the crusader side. It was not long before David moved to Colorado.
We talked on the phone a couple of times after that, and exchanged a few emails, but I never saw David again.
I did think about him a lot over the years, and came to the conclusion that his conversion to anti-communism was sincere. He was a best-selling author whose establishment career ended when he announced his support for President Reagan. His departure from the Left cost him not only friends, but also career opportunities. David told me that he never got a good review in the New York Times after publication of "Lefties for Reagan" in the Washington Post in 1985. His political heresy cost him millions in royalties, I'm sure.
And I have no doubt that the murder of his friend Betty Van Patter by the Black Panthers, and David's guilt for playing a part in that tragedy, launched him on the political trajectory which changed his life. He was obviously surprised that his old comrades and liberal friends sided with the Panthers, and excused the murder of his bookkeeper for political reasons.
In microcosm, David had personally experienced the history of Liberals, Socialists and Communists making excuses for murderous Communism since the October Revolution in Russia. No crime has been too horrible to be excused by those who remain devoted to the shining future promised by scientific socialists. Of course, David had been one of those Leftists himself, a "New Leftist" raised by "Old Leftist" parents. Old wine in a new bottle. As he wrote in his autobiography, he thought nothing of his parents hiding an East German spy in their family home. How different was that from families who hid members of the Weather Underground in the 1960s? Not very.
Although murder had been well-established as a feature of communist regimes by the 1960s, it was only when such a murder struck close to home, to someone he knew, that David realized the nature of the forces he had been aiding as editor of Ramparts and fund-raiser for the Black Panthers.
Nevertheless, despite his political heterodoxy, David was loyal to his friends. His collaborator Peter Collier was like a brother, perhaps even a twin separated at birth. After Collier died, ending their writing partnership, David became more of an organization man, building up The David Horowitz Freedom Center into an institution which he planned to outlive him.
His relationship with liberal Democrat Ron Radosh was also quite tight, at least when I knew him. When I worked for David on the public broadcasting issue, he wouldn't allow a word of criticism of Radosh--even when I complained he was doing nothing to help us in our efforts to defund PBS and NPR. David said I couldn't expect anything because Radosh was a professor and I had to understand the constraints he was under. I didn't then, and don't now. But I did see that David was loyal to his childhood leftist friend from New York City. (Later, his loyalty to Radosh caused a breach between David and fellow anti-communist Diana West, after he published Radosh's negative review of her 2013 expose: American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. The review accused her of promoting John Birch Society-like conspiracy theories about communists in the US government.)
However, David's loyalty to Radosh was in the end betrayed, when in 2021 Radosh (with co-author Sol Stern) denounced David -- in the same way he had earlier denounced West -- in a 2021 New Republic article titled "Our Friend David Horowitz, The Trump Propagandist:"
In the arc of David Horowitz’s life as a writer and political activist, there is a recurring cycle: an attraction to the most extreme, pugilistic flank of an ideology, a period of reckoning and second thoughts, and then a relentless drive toward the violent fringes of another radical crusade. The stakes seem to increase with every fitful change of heart. With his Freedom Center battle tank, his Restoration Weekends, and his recent bestsellers, Horowitz has become one of the most effective propagandists for a destructive mass movement of millions of middle- and working-class Americans. Such a movement threatens our democracy far more than the campus-based radicalism Horowitz championed during his Berkeley and Ramparts period.
In that earlier era, he celebrated the burning of a bank by a student mob. Today he’s an intellectual pyromaniac who honors the MAGA mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Horowitz’s provocations are calculated to destabilize the electoral process. Perhaps most despicably, he has compared Democrats’ response to the Capitol insurrection with Hitler’s response to the 1933 Reichstag Fire, which the Führer used as an excuse to unleash his horrors on Germany: “The difference was that for Hitler,” Horowitz wrote, “the phantom enemy that justified his depredations was the Jews, while for the fascist Democrats it is ‘white supremacists,’ whose actual numbers are fewer even than the Jews.” But the only political tactic reminiscent of the rise of the Nazis is Horowitz’s (and Trump’s) big lie of a stolen election. It’s the historical equivalent of the Nazi’s claim that the Weimar liberals “stabbed Germany in the back” and lost World War I. Such rhetoric makes Horowitz an enemy of the open society and beyond the pale of rational political discourse.
Our old friend must be defeated on every political front on which he operates, a counteroffensive that should begin by investigating and exposing the Horowitz center’s fundraising scams and the potential abuse of its tax-exempt status. Horowitz will surely protest loudly that the leftist Democrats and traitorous Republicans are canceling his speech. (He already complains of that.) Of course, his free-speech rights should be protected, just as every other American’s are. But you don’t get to ignite warfare and take pride in “fighting fire with fire” and then cry foul when the other side fires back.
In other words, Radosh had declared his "old friend" David Horowitz an enemy to be eliminated.
Some friend.
Too late, David finally recognized Radosh for the enforcer he appeared to be:
The real agenda of Radosh and Stern is to mobilize the IRS to investigate me and deprive me of the resources to criticize and oppose the tyranny descending on us from Washington. Like a pair of commissar wannabes they issue a call to war: “Our old friend must be defeated on every political front on which he operates, a counter-offensive that should begin by investigating and exposing the Horowitz Center’s fundraising scams and the potential abuse of its tax-exempt status.”
In the view of Daniel Greenfield, author of the article in which the above quote appears, and David's successor as CEO of The David Horowitz Freedom Center, Radosh was a totalitarian who had despicably denounced David to government authorities for the purposes of prosecution. "New Left" and "Old Left" and "Liberal" were revealed to have been semantic distinctions without a difference.
Luckily for David's legacy, President Trump was re-elected in 2024. David had lived long enough to see vindication.
In conclusion, David Horowitz was a human being. Like any man, he had his flaws, and he made mistakes. Once he realized the errors of his youth, caused both by a communist upbringing and the trends of the 1960s, David fought the good fight. Not perfectly, but doggedly, with determination and persistence. With his last ounce of dying strength, he was writing until the end. And he lived long enough to see Donald Trump return to the Oval Office.
He finished the race. He kept the faith.