David Horowitz, combative right-wing activist and author, dies at 86

Boston Globe

01-05-2025

A Queens-bred son of communist teachers, Mr. Horowitz grew from a red diaper baby into a committed Marxist, attending his first march at age 9 and becoming a top editor at Ramparts magazine, a voice of the 1960s and '70s New Left.
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He gradually became disillusioned by the movement and, in a break from politics, partnered with his friend Peter Collier to write books about powerful American families, including well-received portraits of the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, and the Ford auto-making family. Their first collaboration, 'The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty' (1976), was a finalist for the National Book Awards.
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Beginning in 1985, when the duo co-wrote a Washington Post Magazine article titled 'Lefties for Reagan,' they also drew attention for their turn toward conservatism. The Los Angeles Times likened them to 'lumberjacks on a two-man saw, enthusiastically cutting through a forest of former beliefs.'
Mr. Horowitz and Collier explained they had decided to vote for President Ronald Reagan out of frustration with the left's 'anti-Americanism' and 'casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism,' among other issues.
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'Looking back on the left's revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years, we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: that we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse - much worse,' they wrote. 'This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime's experience, it seems about right.'
Although he continued to write biographies with Collier, Mr. Horowitz shifted his focus back to politics, reinventing himself as a conservative commentator and provocateur.
He spoke at college campuses, wrote dozens of books (including the 2017 bestseller 'Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America') and appeared frequently on television, particularly on Fox News, where he denounced President Obama as 'an evil man' who was 'destroying our borders.'
Long before the Trump administration began seeking more federal control of universities, he helped lay the groundwork for the White House's efforts, arguing in books such as 'Indoctrination U' (2007) that America's universities had become incubators for left-wing politics and had abandoned the principle of academic freedom.
Mr. Horowitz influenced conservative activists and political advisers such as Charlie Kirk, who called him 'a titan in the battle of ideas and a warrior for Western civilization,' and Stephen Miller, the Trump White House deputy chief of staff for policy, who credited him with inspiring 'generations of bold conservative leaders.'
Miller first sought out Mr. Horowitz for advice as a teenager in Santa Monica, while trying to persuade high school administrators to direct daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. Mr. Horowitz later helped him get a job in the office of Senator Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who served as attorney general during Donald Trump's first term.
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Outside of right-wing circles, Mr. Horowitz was harshly criticized, including for describing Black Lives Matter as 'a violent racist organization' and equating Palestinians to 'Nazis.' The Southern Poverty Law Center called him 'a driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black movements,' citing his direction of the Freedom Center, which began in 1988 as the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
The center has denounced climate science, illegal immigration, and the spread of Islam, organizing a 2007 event called 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' that was billed as a campaign to call out 'the oppression of women in Islam.' Its gatherings drew future Trump officials and advisers including Sessions and Stephen K. Bannon.
Discussing the group in a 2017 interview with the Post, Mr. Horowitz cast the center as a key defender of 'traditional American values' and as a counterweight to rival groups spending money on behalf of the left.
'People would refer to my Freedom Center as a 'think tank,'' he wrote in a 2017 article for Breitbart News, 'and I would correct them, 'No, it's a battle tank,' because that is what I felt was missing most in the conservative cause - troops ready and willing to fight fire with fire.'
One of two children, David Joel Horowitz was born in Queens on Jan. 10, 1939. He studied English at Columbia University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1959, and married Elissa Krauthammer that same year.
Mr. Horowitz earned a master's degree in English from the University of California Berkeley in 1961, and the next year he published his first book, 'Student,' a report on the political activism taking place on campus.
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His political advocacy took him to London, where he worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and befriended the Polish Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher, whose biography he published in 1971, a few years after returning to Berkeley and joining the staff of Ramparts.
'The system cannot be revitalized; it must be overthrown,' the magazine declared in a 1970 editorial. 'As humanely as possible, but by any means necessary.' (Mr. Horowitz later told The New York Times that he was the one who pushed for the 'humanely' part.)
At Ramparts, Mr. Horowitz worked closely with Collier, a fellow editor who had also been a graduate student at Berkeley. He also got to know Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, which was heavily featured in the publication. Mr. Horowitz helped the Panthers raise money to finance a school for poor children in Oakland.
Mr. Horowitz (right) of Ramparts magazine answered questions at a news conference in Berkeley, Calif., in 1972. He appeared along with editor Peter Collier (third from right) and Perry Fellwock (second from right) of San Diego. Fellwock, an antiwar activist, was credited by the magazine as the source for an article on National Security Agency intelligence-gathering.
Sal Veder/Associated Press
But he grew disillusioned with the organization, and with left-wing politics more broadly, after the death of his friend Betty Van Patter, a white woman whom he had introduced to the Panthers. While working for the group as a bookkeeper, she disappeared in late 1974. Weeks later, her body was found in San Francisco Bay, badly beaten.
Although no one was charged with her killing, Mr. Horowitz was convinced the Panthers were responsible. 'Everything I had believed in and worked for, every effort to ally myself with what was virtuous and right, had ultimately led to my involvement with the Panthers, and the invitation to Betty to take the job that killed her,' he wrote in a 1997 memoir, 'Radical Son.'
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By his own acknowledgment, her death sent him into a tailspin. He bought a Datsun sports car; was nearly killed when it was struck by a train, according to The New York Times; and divorced his wife after nearly two decades of marriage.
Writing, especially in partnership with Collier, seemed to bring stability. Together they produced books including 'The Kennedys: An American Drama' (1984), a four-generation history that charted the rise of patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and the successes and disappointments of his descendants.
'Collier and Horowitz have blended historical research and journalism brilliantly,' Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward wrote in a review. 'The information they have gathered will always be an important part of the record, although their particular vision of the Kennedys as doomed family will likely die with other Kennedy myths. They see the Kennedy history as a story of alliances and dreams - in their view, the wrong alliances and the wrong dreams. Where the individual family members succeeded, the authors see money, manipulation and insincerity. Where the family failed, Collier and Horowitz see payment for the successes.'
Mr. Horowitz's marriages to Sam Moorman and Shay Marlowe ended in divorce. In 1998, he married April Mullvain.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Horowitz had a stepson, John, and four children from his first marriage: Jonathan Daniel, Ben, Anne and Sarah Horowitz, who was born with Turner syndrome, a chromosomal condition, and died in 2008 at the age of 44. He wrote about her legacy in a 2009 book, 'A Cracking of the Heart.'
Describing his political views, Mr. Horowitz said he was more moderate than his critics made him out to be, writing in a 2002 essay for Salon that he was 'a defender of gays and 'alternative lifestyles,' a moderate on abortion, and a civil rights activist.'
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But he was unabashed about his combative style and, to the dismay of some conservatives, his defense of Trump, whom he falsely claimed had won the 2020 election.
'If you're nuanced and you speak in what I would call an intellectual manner, you get eaten alive,' Mr. Horowitz told the Times in 2017. 'It's a great handicap to be talking like accountants while the opposition are making moral indictments.'