David Horowitz, radical American leftist turned right-wing firebrand, dies at 86
A supporter of the Black Panthers in 1960s Berkeley, writer and activist later evolved into a conservative thought leader whose criticism of Islam drew accusations of bigotry
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor-in-chief of JTA
JTA — David Horowitz, a former 1960s radical turned right-wing firebrand who decried what he called the “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values,” died Tuesday after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 86.
His death was announced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the think tank he founded with Peter Collier in 1988.
A self-described agnostic Jew who wrote in 2016 that he had never been to Israel, Horowitz nonetheless became one of the fiercest critics of Democrats he claimed “empowered” Israel’s enemies, including Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas.
In campaigning against Islamism after 9/11, he became a savage critic of Islam itself, writing once that “to call Islam a peaceful religion is laughable” and, in another instance, that Islam is “a problematic religion and source of violence.” Many saw his criticism as bigoted and the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League both termed him “anti-Muslim.”
Having become an early supporter of Donald Trump’s bid for the US presidency, Horowitz lambasted fellow conservatives who didn’t support the then-developer and TV star’s candidacy. In a controversial 2016 essay in the hardline right-wing Breitbart News, he accused the conservative Jewish writer William Kristol and other “Never Trumpers” of trying “to weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her.”
In recent years he was a fierce defender of some of the first Trump administration’s most contentious stances, including its travel ban on a group of mostly Muslim countries, and its policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents at the border. Stephen Miller, the Jewish senior Trump adviser thought to be an architect of those policies, considers himself one of Horowitz’s proteges.
In 2017, in a harbinger of current Trump administration policies, Horowitz’s Freedom Center launched a campaign against “sanctuary campuses” for failing to report undocumented immigrants to authorities.
Horowitz honed his take-no-prisoners approach to activism as a leader of the New Left, a fiery political movement that emerged in the 1960s with the University of California, Berkeley as its epicenter.
He earned his master’s in English from Berkeley in 1961 and returned to the campus in 1968. He served as co-editor of the radical magazine Ramparts, which preached revolution “by any means necessary” in its opposition to the Vietnam War and support for far-left regimes.
Horowitz was also a supporter and associate of the Black Panthers, a radical Black Power group. By his own account, Horowitz’s political conversion was sparked by the disappearance and murder in 1974 of Betty Van Patten, a friend who he recommended for a job with the Panthers. Horowitz suspected the Panthers in the murder, which remains unsolved.
“My life as a leftist began with a May Day Parade in 1948, when I was nine years old, and lasted for more than twenty-five years until December 1974, when a murder committed by my political comrades brought my radical career to an end,” he wrote in 1986.
By the end of the 1970s, Horowitz began to further question his Marxist views, and like a number of Jewish “red diaper” babies raised in leftist homes (he was born in Queens to parents who were Communist Party members) he became disillusioned with a movement that he felt ignored the violent excesses of the far left.
In 1984, he voted for Ronald Reagan and co-authored a Washington Post op-ed attacking his old comrades for supporting Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as well as the Sandinistas, a revolutionary leftist movement in Nicaragua.
In 1988, he and Collier founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which became the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Its activities include a database of alleged left-wing activists, the Jihad Watch blog and a magazine dedicated to exposing the excesses of “political correctness” on college campuses.
After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the foundation increasingly focused on Islamist terrorism. Its targets included Students for Justice in Palestine and pro-Palestinian Berkeley professors it accused of fomenting antisemitism. In 2016, the Freedom Center launched a poster campaign targeting pro-Palestinian student activists as “Jew haters” and terrorists’ allies.
As the posters drew criticism, a pro-Israel campus group funded by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was compelled to issue a statement saying that while they had made a “modest” grant to the center, they had not funded the campaign.
Horowitz, deeply critical of Palestinians, claimed that their goal is to erase Jews from the Middle East. “No people have shown themselves as so morally sick as the Palestinians,” he said at Brooklyn College in 2011.
Horowitz was a polarizing figure, earning praise from those who said his views were prescient, and derision from others who described him as a hate-monger.
“David was an incredible resource to me and many other Jewish students facing terror sympathizers and haters on hostile college campuses, before it became national news,” Hannah Grossman, a reporter at the right-wing Manhattan Institute think tank, wrote on X.
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Freedom Center as a hate group, saying its projects “give anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.”
Horowitz was the author or co-author of dozens of books, whose titles reflect his political compulsions, including “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party” (2017); “BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win” (2020), and “Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America” (2018).
He was married four times. Survivors include three children by his first marriage; in 2008 a daughter, Sarah, died of heart complications at age 44. He wrote about her in his 2009 book, “A Cracking of the Heart.”
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