[Please consider making a generous, tax-deductible contribution to the David Horowitz Freedom Center to help continue David’s mission far into the future: HERE.]
“My first political demonstration was a May Day parade in 1948 when I was nine years old,” David Horowitz wrote at the beginning of his, as yet, unpublished final book, written in between bouts of hospitalization. The young David saw himself as a “soldier in an international class struggle that would one day liberate all humanity from poverty, oppression, racism and war.”
The May Day parade had been organized by the Communist Party.
When David Horowitz passed away earlier this year, Charlie Kirk came to speak at his memorial service and President Trump eulogized him by video. The boy attending a Communist parade went on to define the New Left as a young man, and then broke with it to define the New Right.
David Horowitz focused the conservative movement around two points, that the Left and Islam were the most urgent threats to America, and that they had to be fought without compromises. It took generations for that message to get through, but by the time of his death, it undeniably had.
He rallied country club conservatives to fight, took the battle to college campuses and hammered home that this was a culture war long before the idea hit home by confronting the same cultural establishment that had once boosted him. And he mentored the younger figures like Charlie Kirk and Stephen Miller who are leading the fight today.
Upon his death, every conservative is hailed as a transformative figure by his friends, but the testimonials for David that really mattered came not from his allies, but his enemies on the Left who were begrudgingly forced to testify to his impact and admit he had remade the country.
The Los Angeles Times described him as a “grandfather of Trumpism” and admitted “we live in Horowitz’s world now.” The Nation‘s writeup of his passing spitefully vented that “David Horowitz is a forerunner of the Trump coalition”, bemoaned that “unfortunately, he turns out to have been ahead of his time” and concluded mournfully that “he had the last laugh.”
When the Washington Post incited the six year IRS investigation of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which nearly destroyed our organization, it justified it by warning that “the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration.” And so David Horowitz and the Center had to be stopped.
But David Horowitz didn’t let the IRS investigation stop him, no more than he did when the Southern Poverty Law Center smeared him as the “Godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement” and launched a campaign to ‘debank’ the Center, leading major banks and credit card issuers to stop doing business with us, or when angry campus mobs tried to stop him from speaking at colleges.
To David, the attacks were not intimidating, they were validating. The angrier the Left became, the more he knew that he was hurting it, and the more relentless its campaign to silence him grew, the more he knew that he had made the right decision all along by leaving the Left.
In all the phases of his life, David Horowitz had been concerned with the rightness of his actions. As a Marxist, he had believed in the morality of what he was doing, and in the greater part of his life as a conservative warrior, he was convinced that he was fighting against evil.
And the greatest source of frustration for him was the difficulty in making others see it too.
To his former leftist comrades, David appeared to have completely changed, but those who truly knew him understood that his moral core was the same. What had changed was his realization, discussed at length in compelling political biographies like ‘Radical Son’ and ‘Destructive Generation’ (co-written with Peter Collier), of the destructive nature of leftist movements.
David Horowitz was far from the only former leftist to leave the Left. The exposure of Stalinism, the obvious decline of the Soviet Union and its Communist allies into corrupt totalitarian regimes, and the growing embrace of Third Worldism by the Left drove many liberals to drift towards neoconservatism and even some leftists decided Reagan might have been right.
But David Horowitz made a much longer journey from a radical movement leader to a conservative movement leader. Unlike many other former liberals and leftists (including some who joined the conservative movement, but later turned against him) he didn’t become a conservative merely because Republicans seemed saner and more reasonable than a radical Left that had become prone to setting off bombs and instinctively hating America.
Horowitz was not looking for an exit strategy or a safe landing. He already had that with his bestselling biographies of the Kennedy and Rockerfeller families (also co-written with Peter Collier.) Even there, David Horowitz could not avoid controversy. ‘The Kennedys: An American Drama’ was a nuclear bomb that blew up Camelot, exposing the corruption, the lies and the abuses, but Horowitz and Collier did it while maintaining a comfortable cultural position.
David Horowitz blew all that up, not because he needed to leave, but because he wanted to.
When he left, he did it to lead a new movement dedicated to fighting all the evils that Marxism had unleashed on America and the world. He gathered establishment veterans and young emerging talent and introduced them to each other, he defined the conflict in stark terms and laid it out as the ultimate global and national struggle for the survival of Western civilization.
That was why Charlie Kirk and President Trump both hailed David at his passing. There are intellectuals who come and go, but David was not just an intellectual (although there was never any doubt about the formidable powers of his mind), he had built the Freedom Center into what he called a ‘battle tank’ and rallied other conservative groups to fight every bit as hard as he did.
Ordinarily, we would be paying tribute to Charlie Kirk as the ‘Man of the Year’. But as Charlie himself said, “Without David Horowitz, I’m not sure Turning Point USA would exist.”
“David’s fingerprints are all over the populist revival of the last decade,” Charlie Kirk wrote after his death. “David Horowitz was a lion. A fighter. A father of modern conservatism.”
If he were still with us, David Horowitz wouldn’t want to be our ‘Man of the Year’. Each year the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekends handed out the ‘Annie Taylor Award for Courage’ to conservative warriors like Charlie Kirk, Andy Ngo and Pamela Geller, and towards the end, as his health was failing and he could no longer attend the weekends, we tried to convince him to let us honor him with the award. But each time the matter came up, David turned us down.
He didn’t want an award. He wanted to lead a fight. And to win.
And in truth, ‘Man of the Year’ is too limiting. The difference that David Horowitz made transcends any given year. David’s vision wasn’t to ‘go viral’ in any given year, but to make a long term difference across the decades and generations by building a movement.
We are all part of the movement he built. And we are continuing his fight in his ‘battle tank’.
