David Joel Horowitz (January 10, 1939 – April 29, 2025) was an American conservative writer and activist. He co-founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), was editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine, and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
Horowitz wrote several books with author Peter Collier, including four on prominent 20th-century American families. He and Collier collaborated on books about cultural criticism. Horowitz worked as a columnist for Salon.
From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.
Early life and education Born on January 10, 1939 in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City, Horowitz was the son of Jewish high school teachers Phil and Blanche Horowitz. His father taught English and his mother taught stenography. His mother's family emigrated from Imperial Russia in the mid-19th century, and his father's family left Russia in 1905 during a time of anti-Jewish pogroms. Horowitz's paternal grandfather lived in Mozir, a city in modern Belarus, prior to leaving for the U.S. In 1940, the family moved to the Long Island City section of Queens.
During years of labor organizing and the Great Depression, Phil and Blanche Horowitz were long-standing members of the Communist Party of the United States of America and strong supporters of Joseph Stalin. They left the party after Nikita Khrushchev published his report in 1956 about Stalin's crimes and his terrorism against the Soviet population.
Horowitz received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in 1959, majoring in English, and a master's degree in English literature at University of California, Berkeley in 1961.
Career New Left After completing his graduate degree, Horowitz lived in London during the mid-1960s and worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. originally published in Counterpunch October 27, 2007 He identified as a Marxist intellectual.
In 1966, Ralph Schoenman persuaded Bertrand Russell to convene his war crimes tribunal to judge United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Horowitz would write three decades later that he had political reservations about the tribunal and did not take part. He described the tribunal's judges as formidable, world-famous and radical. They included Isaac Deutscher, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stokely Carmichael, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer and James Baldwin. In January 1966, Horowitz, along with members of the Trotskyist International Marxist Group, formed the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign organized a series of protests in London against British support for the Vietnam War.
While in London, Horowitz became a close friend of Deutscher, and wrote a biography of him.Isaac Deutscher: The Man and His Work. London: Macdonald, 1971. Horowitz wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War. In January 1968, Horowitz returned to the United States, where he became co-editor of the New Left magazine Ramparts, settling in northern California.
During the early 1970s, Horowitz developed a close friendship with Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party. Horowitz later portrayed Newton as equal parts gangster, terrorist, intellectual and media celebrity. As part of their work together, Horowitz helped raise money for, and assisted the Panthers with, the running of a school for poor children in Oakland. He recommended that Newton hire Betty Van Patter as bookkeeper; she was then working for Ramparts. In December 1974, Van Patter's battered, decomposed body was found on a beach in San Francisco Bay; she had been murdered. It is widely believed that the Panthers were responsible for her murder, a belief also held by Horowitz.Pearson, Hugh (1994). The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America. Da Capo Press. p. 328. ISBN 0-201-48341-6."Left-leaving, left-leaning" Archived 2016-06-30 at the Wayback Machine, Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2003.Kelley, Ken. September 15, 1989. "Huey Newton: I'll Never Forget". East Bay Express, Volume 11, No. 49. https://archive.org/details/Huey-Never-Forget-1989
In 1976, Horowitz was a "founding sponsor" of James Weinstein's magazine In These Times.
Rightward evolution
Following this period, Horowitz rejected Marx and socialism, but kept quiet about his changing politics for nearly a decade.
In early 1985, Horowitz and Collier, who also became a political conservative, wrote an article for The Washington Post Magazine titled "Lefties for Reagan", later retitled as "Goodbye to All That". The article explained their change of views and recent decision to vote for a second term for Republican President Ronald Reagan. In 1986, Horowitz published "Why I Am No Longer a Leftist" in The Village Voice.
In 1987, Horowitz co-hosted a "Second Thoughts Conference" in Washington, D.C., described by Sidney Blumenthal in The Washington Post as his "coming out" as a conservative.
In May 1989, Horowitz, Ronald Radosh, and Collier attended a conference in Kraków calling for the end of Communism. After marching with Polish dissidents in an anti-regime protest, Horowitz spoke about his changing thoughts and why he believed that socialism could not create their future. He said his dream was for the people of Poland to be free.
In 1992, Horowitz and Collier founded Heterodoxy, a monthly magazine focused on exposing what it described as excessive political correctness on United States college and university campuses. It was "meant to have the feel of a samizdat publication inside the gulag of the PC [politically correct] university". The tabloid was directed at university students, whom Horowitz viewed as indoctrinated by the entrenched Left.David Horowitz profile, splcenter.org; accessed August 10, 2016. In Radical Son, he wrote that universities were no longer effective in presenting both sides of political arguments. He stated that left-wing professors had created an atmosphere of political "terror" on campuses.
In 2005, Horowitz launched Discover the Networks.
Horowitz appeared in Occupy Unmasked, a 2012 documentary portraying the Occupy Wall Street movement as a sinister organization formed to violently destroy the American government.
Academic Bill of Rights In the early 21st century, Horowitz concentrated on issues of academic freedom, attempting to protect conservative viewpoints. He, Eli Lehrer and Andrew Jones published a pamphlet, "Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges and Universities" (2004), in which they find the ratio of Democrats to Republicans at 32 schools to be more than 10 to 1. Horowitz's book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006), criticized individual professors for, as he alleges, engaging in indoctrination rather than a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.
Horowitz published an Academic Bill of Rights (ABR), which he proposes to eliminate political bias in university hiring and grading. He says conservatives, and particularly Republican Party members, are systematically excluded from faculties, citing statistical studies on faculty party affiliation. In 2004 the Georgia General Assembly passed a resolution on a 41–5 vote to adopt a version of the ABR for state educational institutions. In Pennsylvania, the House of Representatives created a special legislative committee to investigate issues of academic freedom, including whether students who hold unpopular views need more protection.
David Horowitz Freedom Center In 1998 Horowitz and Peter Collier founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Politico states that Horowitz's activities and DHFC are funded in part by Aubrey and Joyce Chernick and The Bradley Foundation. Politico stated that during 2008–2010, "the lion's share of the $920,000 it [DHFC] provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from [Joyce] Chernick".Smith, Ben (September 4, 2010). "Mosques and Money" (blog post). Politico.com. Retrieved September 10, 2018. Between July 2000 and February 2006 the freedom center provided a total of $43,000 in funding for 25 trips taken by Republican senators and representatives including Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Bob Barr, Fred Thompson and others. In 2015, Horowitz made $583,000 (~$ in ) from the organization.
Horowitz was the editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine. It has been described by scholars and writers as right-wing, far-right, Islamophobic, and anti-Islam.
Political positions Horowitz was a former Marxist, but was later described as being conservative. He has described himself as "a defender of gays and 'alternative lifestyles', a moderate on abortion, and a civil rights activist".
Horowitz wrote against United States intervention in the Kosovo War, arguing that it was unnecessary and harmful to United States interests,22/Feb/1999 Clinton Kosovo Intervention Appears Imminent , senate.gov; accessed August 10, 2016. but supported the interventionist foreign policy associated with the Bush Doctrine, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also wrote critically of libertarian anti-war views.
Horowitz opposed Barack Obama, illegal immigration, gun control, and Islam. He endorsed Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump.
Economics In his book Empire and Revolution (1969), Horowitz centered and adapted Bolshevik concepts in his historical analysis up to that point. Critical of Joseph Stalin, Kenneth Boulding termed him a Marxist revisionist, who was comparable to Paul Sweezy and "curiously nationalistic". U.S. policymakers, he claimed, failed to apply Keynesian economics to internal needs and rather sought expansion of the market economy, resulting in U.S. foreign intervention. His dialectical materialist view considered nations that underwent bourgeois revolution before the 19th-century, like the U.S., as needing to undergo a stage of capitalism. Contrasting the development of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China to the Alliance for Progress, he affirmed the need for socialist revolution.
In 1979, he asserted in The Nation article "A Disenchanted Radical" that state socialism was liable to all that he had attributed to capitalism, including "exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery, economic waste, national hatred and national oppression." "…inefficiency, lack of economic incentives, and, above all, the unrestricted role of the omnipotent bureaucracy…", he clarified, were unique drawbacks of socialism. Following his political transition, he avidly opposed economic redistribution, claiming it a threat to individual freedom. By 2013, he rhetorically categorized anyone in favor as having a "communist mentality".
Race During his time in the New Left, Horowitz supported the civil rights movement. In the 1970s, he came to believe that the Black Panthers were involved in the death of his friend Betty Van Patter, souring the relationship between Horowitz and the Black Panthers.