David Horowitz, a radical leftist of the Sixties who did a political about-face to change into an outspoken conservative writer 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 Middle, a assume tank he based in Southern California, stated the trigger was most cancers. His spouse, April Horowitz, stated he died at his house in Colorado.
As soon as a self-described Marxist, Mr. Horowitz executed a dizzying transit from the intense left to the intense proper. He argued that the Black Lives Matter motion had fueled racial hatred; he opposed Palestinian rights; he denounced the information media and universities as instruments of the left; and he falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had received the 2020 election, which Mr. Horowitz referred to as “the best political crime” in American historical past.
A prolific writer since his early 20s, Mr. Horowitz printed a number of pro-Trump books, together with “Large Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America” (2017) and “The Enemy Inside: How a Totalitarian Motion Is Destroying America” (2021). The enemies he accused of totalitarian impulses had been the mainstream Democrats Nancy Pelosi, then the Home speaker, and Kamala Harris, then the vp.
Mr. Horowitz was a mentor to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s high home coverage adviser, whom he met when Mr. Miller was a California high school student fervidly important of multiculturalism.
At Duke College, Mr. Miller began a chapter of College students for Tutorial Freedom, a grass-roots advocacy group based by Mr. Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz requested him to assist coordinate an “Islamo-Fascism Consciousness Week” on faculty campuses, in keeping with 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 Periods, Republican of Alabama, who participated in a retreat sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Middle. The middle describes itself on its website as opposing “efforts of the unconventional left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this nation.”
Mr. Miller joined Mr. Trump’s first presidential marketing campaign in 2016, and Mr. Periods served as lawyer normal underneath Mr. Trump from 2017 to 2018.
Earlier than his flip to the far proper, Mr. Horowitz was a mainstream conservative who in 1984 forged his first Republican poll, to re-elect President Ronald Reagan.
He and a fellow convert, Peter Collier, writing in The Washington Publish Journal in 1985, described their transformation as a response partly to what they thought of the left’s naïve views of communist actions, and partly to Reagan’s blunt evaluation of the Soviet Union as an enemy of freedom.
“We agree together with his imaginative and prescient of the world as a spot more and more inhospitable to democracy and more and more harmful for America,” they wrote.
In a 1997 autobiography, “Radical Son,” Mr. Horowitz recognized a extra wrenching second when he broke from the left: the loss of life of a buddy, Betty Van Patter, whom he had recruited for a bookkeeping job at a basis related to the Black Panther Get together.
Mr. Horowitz believed that Ms. Van Patter was murdered by the Panthers, although the case was by no means formally solved. The New Left motion, he concluded, was too wrapped up in fantasies of revolution to see the Panthers as thugs.
Reviewing “Radical Son” in The New York Occasions E-book Evaluate and talking of Mr. Horowitz, the historian Richard Gid Powers called it “a brave ebook, stuffed with self-revelation and with a willingness to show his personal frailties.” Nevertheless, he continued, Mr. Horowitz “is nothing if not contentious, and a few of his contentions will rub readers the unsuitable means.”
Recognized within the Eighties as a neoconservative, Mr. Horowitz started shifting farther proper with the emergence of tradition wars. He co-founded Heterodoxy journal in 1992 to critique political correctness on American campuses. In 1988, he and Mr. Collier based the Middle for the Examine of Common Tradition, which modified its identify in 2006 to the David Horowitz Freedom Middle.
Mr. Horowitz pressed universities and state lawmakers to undertake an “tutorial invoice of rights,” which he argued would expose college students to broader viewpoints. Critics stated it was an effort to purge liberal professors and create quotas for hiring conservatives.
In years of public talking, usually on faculty campuses on the invitation of Republican college students, Mr. Horowitz was identified for a pugilistic type. He suggested conservatives to “start each confrontation by punching progressives within the mouth.”
“If you happen to’re nuanced and also you communicate in what I’d name an mental method, you get eaten alive,” he told The Times in 2017.
In talking engagements that generally required safety particulars and drew explosive responses from college students, Mr. Horowitz usually criticized Islamic radicals and the Palestinian trigger, which he equated with a want to wipe Israel from the map.
“There’s a motion for a second Holocaust of the Jews that’s being supported on this campus by the Muslim Scholar Affiliation,” Mr. Horowitz stated on the College of California, Santa Barbara, in 2008. The scholar group’s college adviser rebuked him.
In 2013, in an article in Nationwide Evaluate titled “How Obama Betrayed America,” Mr. Horowitz attacked President Barack Obama for “minimizing” the specter of Islamic terrorism.
The Southern Poverty Regulation Middle in 2014 called Mr. Horowitz “the godfather of the fashionable anti-Muslim motion.”
Two longtime former colleagues of Mr. Horowitz’s, Ronald Radosh and Sol Stern — who additionally turned their backs on the New Left — wrote about their buddy’s extra excessive political arc in The New Republic in 2021, lamenting that he had metamorphosed from “a considerate conservative” right into a “Trump propagandist.”
“When the complete historical past of the Trump intellectuals’ betrayal of respectable conservatism is written, David Horowitz could have particular satisfaction of place, a chapter all to himself,” they wrote.
David Joel Horowitz was born on Jan. 10, 1939, in New York Metropolis, in Queens. His dad and mom, Phil and Blanche Horowitz, had been schoolteachers and members of the American Communist Get together. They give up the social gathering in 1956 when the Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin.
David grew up “a sheltered baby in a Marxist bubble,” he later wrote, attending a Could Day parade at age 9.
He earned a bachelor’s diploma in English from Columbia College in 1959 and a grasp’s diploma in English from the College of California, Berkeley, in 1961. He helped discovered Root and Department, a campus-based New Left journal.
Whereas dwelling in London within the mid-Sixties, he wrote a leftist critique of the Chilly Warfare, “The Free World Colossus,” which excoriated the US as imperialist.
Returning to California in 1968, Mr. Horowitz turned co-editor of the influential New Left journal Ramparts, which finally reached a paid circulation of practically 250,000. In its pages, he celebrated the Black Panther Get together, and he turned pals with one in every of its leaders, Huey Newton.
Starting in 1976, after he fell out with the left however earlier than he embraced the correct, Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Collier wrote best-selling biographies of the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford households.
Mr. Horowitz’s marriages to Elissa Krauthamer, Sam Moorman and Shay Marlowe led to divorce. In 1998, he married April Mullvain.
Moreover his spouse, he’s survived by a sister, Ruth Horowitz; three kids from his first marriage, Anne, Jonathan and Ben Horowitz, who’s a co-founder of the Silicon Valley enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz; a stepson, John Kibbie; and 7 grandchildren. A daughter from his first marriage, Sarah, died in 2008; Mr. Horowitz wrote about that loss in his ebook “A Cracking of the Coronary heart” (2009).
His different books embody “Darkish Agenda: The Warfare to Destroy Christian America” (2018) and “I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America” (2021).
