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Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
David Horowitz, intellectual godfather of the Trump administration
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 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
American Military News
01-05-2025
- Politics
- American Military News
Video: Conservative icon dies at 86 from cancer
The David Horowitz Freedom Center announced that 86-year-old conservative commentator and activist David Horowitz died on Tuesday after losing his battle with cancer. The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative think tank founded by the conservative icon, shared a video Tuesday on social media reflecting on Horowitz's life. 'On behalf of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, we are very saddened to announce the passing of the Center's founder, David Horowitz,' the David Horowitz Freedom Center tweeted. 'After a lengthy battle with cancer, David passed yesterday at the age of 86.' In a follow-up post, the David Horowitz Freedom Center issued a correction, noting that Horowitz had passed away on April 29. According to The Daily Caller, Horowitz advocated for conservative causes for more than 40 years and established the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 1988. In Tuesday's video, the David Horowitz Freedom Center said Horowitz was born on January 10, 1939, in New York and was raised by parents who were committed to the 'progressive left' and 'its Marxist version of a liberated society.' The video explained that Horowitz followed his parents' left-wing political beliefs throughout his college education, where he became the editor of a left-wing magazine called 'Root & Branch.' READ MORE: Pic: Sports legend dies at 81 amid cancer battle Despite his commitment to the leftist movement, Horowitz had become 'disturbed at the direction' of the leftist movement by 1969. The David Horowitz Freedom Center said Horowitz 'realized, even at that time, you couldn't really remake the world as the left intended without totalitarian coercion.' The video noted that Horowitz's transition toward the conservative movement was ultimately prompted by the death of Betty Van Patter in 1975 after he had formed a connection with Black Panther leader Huey Newton. 'In a vignette that Horowitz wrote at the request of the New York Times Magazine, Horowitz recounted the stages of his metamorphosis,' the David Horowitz Freedom Center said. 'Being at the center of a heroic myth inspired passions that informed my youthful passage and guided me to the middle of my adult life, but then I was confronted by a reality so inescapable and harsh that it shattered the romance for good.' The David Horowitz Freedom Center's video explained that after voting for Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1984, the conservative icon went on to write multiple books exposing the political beliefs of the Democrat Party. Horowitz also launched 'FrontPage Magazine,' the David Horowitz Freedom Center's online publication. On behalf of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, we are very saddened to announce the passing of the Center's founder, David Horowitz. After a lengthy battle with cancer, David passed yesterday at the age of 86. David Horowitz, 1939-2025. Requiescat in pace. — David Horowitz (@horowitz39) April 29, 2025
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
David Horowitz, Leftist Turned Trump Defender, Is Dead at 86
David Horowitz, a radical leftist of the 1960s who did a political about-face to become an outspoken conservative author and activist, writing that Barack Obama had 'betrayed' America, and an ardent cheerleader for Donald J. Trump, died on Tuesday. He was 86. The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a think tank he founded in Southern California, said the cause was cancer. His wife, April Horowitz, said he died at his home in Colorado. Once a self-described Marxist, Mr. Horowitz executed a dizzying transit from the extreme left to the extreme right. He argued that the Black Lives Matter movement had fueled racial hatred; he opposed Palestinian rights; he denounced the news media and universities as tools of the left; and he falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election, which Mr. Horowitz called 'the greatest political crime' in American history. A prolific author since his early 20s, Mr. Horowitz published several pro-Trump books, including 'Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America' (2017) and 'The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America' (2021). The enemies he accused of totalitarian impulses were the mainstream Democrats Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, and Kamala Harris, then the vice president. Mr. Horowitz was a mentor to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump's top domestic policy adviser, whom he met when Mr. Miller was a California high school student fervidly critical of multiculturalism. At Duke University, Mr. Miller started a chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, a grass-roots advocacy group founded by Mr. Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz asked him to help coordinate an 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' on college campuses, according to Jean Guerrero, a biographer of Mr. Miller, writing in Politico in 2020. Mr. Horowitz helped Mr. Miller land a job as press secretary to Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who participated in a retreat sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The center describes itself on its website as opposing 'efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country.' Mr. Miller joined Mr. Trump's first presidential campaign in 2016, and Mr. Sessions served as attorney general under Mr. Trump from 2017 to 2018. Before his turn to the far right, Mr. Horowitz was a mainstream conservative who in 1984 cast his first Republican ballot, to re-elect President Ronald Reagan. He and a fellow convert, Peter Collier, writing in The Washington Post Magazine in 1985, described their transformation as a response in part to what they considered the left's naïve views of communist movements, and in part to Reagan's blunt assessment of the Soviet Union as an enemy of freedom. 'We agree with his vision of the world as a place increasingly inhospitable to democracy and increasingly dangerous for America,' they wrote. In a 1997 autobiography, 'Radical Son,' Mr. Horowitz identified a more wrenching moment when he broke from the left: the death of a friend, Betty Van Patter, whom he had recruited for a bookkeeping job at a foundation associated with the Black Panther Party. Mr. Horowitz believed that Ms. Van Patter was murdered by the Panthers, though the case was never officially solved. The New Left movement, he concluded, was too wrapped up in fantasies of revolution to see the Panthers as thugs. Reviewing 'Radical Son' in The New York Times Book Review and speaking of Mr. Horowitz, the historian Richard Gid Powers called it 'a courageous book, full of self-revelation and with a willingness to expose his own frailties.' However, he continued, Mr. Horowitz 'is nothing if not contentious, and some of his contentions will rub readers the wrong way.' Identified in the 1980s as a neoconservative, Mr. Horowitz began moving farther right with the emergence of culture wars. He co-founded Heterodoxy magazine in 1992 to critique political correctness on American campuses. In 1988, he and Mr. Collier founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which changed its name in 2006 to the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Mr. Horowitz pressed universities and state lawmakers to adopt an 'academic bill of rights,' which he argued would expose students to broader viewpoints. Critics said it was an effort to purge liberal professors and create quotas for hiring conservatives. In years of public speaking, often on college campuses at the invitation of Republican students, Mr. Horowitz was known for a pugilistic style. He advised conservatives to 'begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth.' 'If you're nuanced and you speak in what I would call an intellectual manner, you get eaten alive,' he told The Times in 2017. In speaking engagements that sometimes required security details and drew explosive responses from students, Mr. Horowitz often criticized Islamic radicals and the Palestinian cause, which he equated with a desire to wipe Israel from the map. 'There is a movement for a second Holocaust of the Jews that is being supported on this campus by the Muslim Student Association,' Mr. Horowitz said at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2008. The student group's faculty adviser rebuked him. In 2013, in an article in National Review titled 'How Obama Betrayed America,' Mr. Horowitz attacked President Barack Obama for 'minimizing' the threat of Islamic terrorism. The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2014 called Mr. Horowitz 'the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.' Two longtime former colleagues of Mr. Horowitz's, Ronald Radosh and Sol Stern — who also turned their backs on the New Left — wrote about their friend's more extreme political arc in The New Republic in 2021, lamenting that he had metamorphosed from 'a thoughtful conservative' into a 'Trump propagandist.' 'When the full history of the Trump intellectuals' betrayal of decent conservatism is written, David Horowitz will have special pride of place, a chapter all to himself,' they wrote. David Joel Horowitz was born on Jan. 10, 1939, in New York City, in Queens. His parents, Phil and Blanche Horowitz, were schoolteachers and members of the American Communist Party. They quit the party in 1956 when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin. David grew up 'a sheltered child in a Marxist bubble,' he later wrote, attending a May Day parade at age 9. He earned a 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. He helped found Root and Branch, a campus-based New Left magazine. While living in London in the mid-1960s, he wrote a leftist critique of the Cold War, 'The Free World Colossus,' which excoriated the United States as imperialist. Returning to California in 1968, Mr. Horowitz became co-editor of the influential New Left magazine Ramparts, which ultimately reached a paid circulation of nearly 250,000. In its pages, he celebrated the Black Panther Party, and he became friends with one of its leaders, Huey Newton. Beginning in 1976, after he fell out with the left but before he embraced the right, Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Collier wrote best-selling biographies of the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford families. Mr. Horowitz's marriages to Elissa Krauthamer, Sam Moorman and Shay Marlowe ended in divorce. In 1998, he married April Mullvain. Besides his wife, he is survived by a sister, Ruth Horowitz; three children from his first marriage, Anne, Jonathan and Ben Horowitz, who is a co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; a stepson, John Kibbie; and seven grandchildren. A daughter from his first marriage, Sarah, died in 2008; Mr. Horowitz wrote about that loss in his book 'A Cracking of the Heart' (2009). His other books include 'Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America' (2018) and 'I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America' (2021).
Time of India
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
David Horowitz, former marxist turned Donald Trump supporter, dies at 86; family recalls last phone call with president
David Horowitz, a well-known conservative activist, writer, and speaker, has died at the age of 86. His death was announced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the conservative think tank he founded. The center confirmed that Horowitz passed away after a long battle with cancer. Death confirmed by freedom center The announcement of his death was made on Tuesday on the social media platform X. The David Horowitz Freedom Center said, 'We are very saddened to announce the passing of the Center's founder, David Horowitz.' On behalf of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, we are very saddened to announce the passing of the Center's founder, David Horowitz. After a lengthy battle with cancer, David passed yesterday at the age of 86. David Horowitz, 1939-2025. Requiescat in pace. Son shares personal tribute As per the reports, his son, Benjamin Horowitz, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, shared an obituary online. In it, he reflected on his father's long career in activism and writing. The tribute also mentioned Horowitz's support for President Donald Trump. A memorable call with Trump Benjamin shared that when he met Trump last year, he spoke to the president about his father. Trump's response was immediate. 'President Trump's face immediately lit up and he insisted that Benjamin get David on the phone immediately,' the obituary read. Though David was in the hospital and not well, he was still happy to speak with the president. Rest in Peace to my father @horowitz39 . We love you Dad. David Joel Horowitz was born January 10, 1939 to Phil and Blanche Horowitz in Queens, New York. David was raised in Queens along with his sister Ruth. Phil and Blanche were high school teachers and members of the… A shift from Marxism to conservatism Horowitz's political journey was notable. He was once a Marxist, but later became a prominent voice in the conservative space. He was born in Queens, New York, and pursued his education at respected institutions. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University and later earned a Master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Remembering his family David Horowitz is survived by his wife, April Mullvain. She was his fourth wife. He also leaves behind his sons, Benjamin and Jonathan, and a daughter, Anne. Another daughter, Sarah Rose, died in 2008. Final words from the family The obituary shared by Benjamin described how much his father meant to those closest to him. 'In the end, David helped countless people and expended every fiber of his being pushing society towards freedom,' the family wrote. '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.'
Express Tribune
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
David Horowitz, conservative commentator famous for anti-Muslim views, dies at 86
Listen to article David Horowitz, a conservative commentator and founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center who spent decades promoting anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian rhetoric, died Tuesday at age 86 after a long battle with cancer. Though once a Marxist in his youth, Horowitz became better known in his later years for what critics widely condemned as Islamophobic activism, incendiary writings, and a central role in pushing far-right ideological narratives across college campuses and media platforms. Horowitz's Freedom Center, originally established to combat what he described as 'leftist indoctrination,' evolved into a hub for conspiracy-driven, anti-Muslim content. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the organization an 'anti-Muslim' hate group, citing its persistent campaigns against Muslim student organizations and its propagation of discredited claims about Islamic law infiltrating the U.S. legal system. One of Horowitz's most controversial initiatives was his 'Islamofascism Awareness Week,' which he promoted on college campuses, warning students of what he alleged was a jihadist threat from Muslim student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Civil rights organisations, Muslim advocacy groups, and university communities roundly rejected the campaign as fear-mongering and hate speech. He was also an outspoken opponent of Palestinian rights, frequently describing pro-Palestinian activists as apologists for terrorism and openly opposing any political recognition of Palestinian grievances. His center's publications often vilified Palestinian advocacy and dismissed critiques of Israeli state violence as anti-Semitic. Over the years, Horowitz was a polarising figure, receiving sharp criticism from academics, civil rights groups, and interfaith coalitions for contributing to what many viewed as a climate of rising Islamophobia in the US. His rhetoric was cited as part of a broader effort to mainstream anti-Muslim sentiment in conservative politics, particularly during the post-9/11 era. Despite this, Horowitz remained an influential figure in far-right circles, penning multiple books and endorsing Donald Trump, who he spoke with from his hospital bed, according to his son Benjamin Horowitz. Trump, the family said, was eager to speak with him during a hospital visit, a testament to Horowitz's ongoing influence among Republican elites. Horowitz's legacy is one marked by deep division. While supporters praised his commitment to opposing what he saw as leftist extremism, his critics argue he spent his later life fueling bigotry under the guise of free speech. He is survived by his wife April Mullvain, children Benjamin, Jonathan, and Anne. His daughter Sarah Rose died in 2008.
