David Horowitz, intellectual godfather of the Trump administration

Yahoo

02-05-2025

David Horowitz, who has died aged 86, was a former radical Leftist turned conservative firebrand who became widely seen as the intellectual godfather of the Trump administration.
In 1988 he co-founded the California-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which changed its name in 2006 to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a 'school for political warfare' set up to defend conservative values from 'attack by Leftist and Islamist enemies'.
In decades of public speaking, Horowitz developed a pugilistic style which he claimed to have picked up from his former comrades on the Left. 'If you're nuanced and you speak in what I would call an intellectual manner, you get eaten alive,' he told an interviewer. 'It's a great handicap to be talking like accountants while the opposition are making moral indictments.' He advised conservatives to 'begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth.'
As a Right-wing polemicist, he spent much of his energy attacking universities, which he considered hotbeds of Leftist thought. He founded the group Students for Academic Freedom and named names in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, published to huge controversy in 2006.
In 2016, at a time when the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was widely seen as a shoo-in for the presidency, Horowitz was commissioned to write a book about how the Right could mobilise to defeat the new president, to be published a few days before her inauguration. When Donald Trump surprised the world by winning, the book was quickly rejigged into Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America, although much of it still focused on attacking Hillary Clinton. 'The strategy,' Horowitz wrote, 'is to go for the jugular.' The book was on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for 11 weeks.
Horowitz was seen as a mentor by leading members of Trump's administration, most notably Stephen Miller, a senior adviser for policy during Trump's first administration, now homeland security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
Horowitz first met Miller when he was a California high school student and stayed in touch with him when, as a student at Duke University, Miller started a chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, and helped Horowitz to coordinate an 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' on college campuses. In a 2012 strategy paper he emailed to Miller, then communications director for Senator Jeff Sessions, another Horowitz ally, he argued that while Democrats 'are secular missionaries who want to 'change society,'' the Republican Party should remake itself in that radical image, using the same 'moral language,' but focused on fear instead of hope. 'Fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion,' he wrote.
In 2018, during the row that erupted after revelations that the government had established 'tender age' shelters in south Texas for babies and young children forcibly separated from their migrant parents at the southern border, a strategy seen as the brainchild of Miller and Sessions, whom Trump had appointed attorney general, Horowitz leapt to his protégé's defence, telling The Guardian in an expletive-laden phone interview: 'It's not a policy of family separation. It's the government's hands are tied by Obama and the Democrats, so if a kid gets in, everybody gets in. It's disgusting. It's an abusive exploitation of these kids. There's a f-----g lynching going on here, and there's a wolfpack that your newspaper is part of. It's gross.'
In fact the policy of family separation had been announced explicitly by Sessions and although, following national and international criticism, Trump signed an executive order ending the policy, the practice continued for at least 18 months.
Meanwhile, across the Pond, Horowitz attracted media attention for the support he gave to British Right-wing figures. On presidential election week in November 2016, Nigel Farage spoke at an event organised by Horowitz, and in 2018 when the far-Right activist Tommy Robinson was jailed for nine months after being found guilty of interfering with the trial of a sexual grooming gang, Horowitz told The Guardian that Robinson was 'a courageous Englishman who has risked his life to expose the rape epidemic of young girls conducted by Muslim gangs and covered up by your shameful government.' Somehow he ignored the fact that by interfering in the trial, Robinson made convictions less, rather than more likely.
In 2020 Horowitz, to no one's great surprise, embraced Trump's claim that the presidential election of that year had been 'stolen' by the Democrats, labelling the debacle 'the greatest political crime' in American history.
The intersecting paths connecting Trump acolytes to Horowitz might not, perhaps, have been as significant for Trump's policies as the president's own unpredictable leadership. But Horowitz's blistering rhetoric on immigration and other issues, which won him censure for extremist speech by the Southern Poverty Law Center, certainly influenced the public utterances of Trump proxies in the White House and elsewhere.
One of two children, David Joel Horowitz was born on January 10 1939 in the Queens district of New York, to Phil and Blanche Horowitz, schoolteachers and members of the American Communist Party. Young David went on his first march in 1948, aged nine.
After taking a bachelor's degree in English at Columbia University, followed by a master's degree in English at University of California, Berkeley, he spent several years in the 1960s in London where he worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, reportedly studied under the Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband (father of Ed and David) and befriended the Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher, whose biography he would publish in 1971.
Returning to California in 1968, he became co-editor of the New Left magazine Ramparts, in which he sang the praises of the Black Panther Party, a Marxist-Leninist and black power organisation founded in 1966. Ramparts's international editor was Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who fled to Cuba in 1968 after leading an ambush of police officers in Oakland, California, and it was thanks in large part to the magazine that the Panthers came to embody the notion of revolution for white radicals.
Horowitz helped raise money for the party and when the Panthers needed someone to manage their finances, he recommended a white friend named Betty Van Patter as a bookkeeper. In late 1974, however, Betty disappeared. Weeks later, her badly beaten body was found in San Francisco Bay. No one was ever charged with the killing, but Horowitz became convinced that the Panthers were responsible.
The event precipitated a crisis in Horowitz's life that was both personal and political. He bought a sports car, had an affair, divorced his first wife Elissa after nearly two decades of marriage and barely escaped with his life when a train smashed up the car.
And he started his pilgrimage to the political right.
In partnership with his friend Peter Collier, he wrote several books about powerful American families, including well-reviewed portraits of the Kennedys, the Roosevelts and the Ford vehicle-making family. Their The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976) was a finalist for the National Book Awards.
By the early 1980s Horowitz was a mainstream conservative and in 1984 cast his first vote for the Republicans in the presidential election which returned Ronald Reagan to the White House. In 1985 he and Collier co-authored a Washington Post magazine article entitled 'Lefties for Reagan', in which they castigated the Left's 'anti-Americanism' and 'casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism'. In 1986 Horowitz published a memoir of his political conversion, Radical Son.
Horowitz's other books included The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America (2021), the enemies in question including Democrats Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, and the then vice-president Kamala Harris.
Horowitz's marriages to Elissa Krauthamer, Sam Moorman and Shay Marlowe ended in divorce. In 1998, he married April Mullvain who survives him with a daughter and two sons from his first marriage. A daughter from his first marriage died in 2008.
David Horowitz, born January 10 1939, died April 29 2025
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