In the weeks before David Horowitz’s passing, he wrote an article and finished another book. In and out of the hospital, he would call me on the phone to relay another idea for a series or another article about the Left. When we worked together on an article about the leftist fifth column, he was exhausted and I told him we could work on it next week. There would be time. He sighed skeptically, knowing perhaps what we only know now, but also with a note of relief.
I was wrong. He was right.
But of all my mistakes, it was the most understandable. David Horowitz first came down with cancer after 9/11. He wrote about that in ‘The End of Time’. He continued fighting cancer and writing about his experiences facing death in ‘A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next‘. He nearly died in 2015 and wrote about that in ‘You’re Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story’ and then collected all three together in ‘Mortality and Faith’ in 2019.
David Horowitz fought off cancer for almost a quarter of a century. Even when he went into a coma and the doctors expected him to pass right away, he held on for nearly a week.
The one thing that David would never do is give up.
His superhuman endurance was not physical, it was a matter of conviction. Long after his body had failed, he kept going, writing, thinking, arguing and above all else… fighting.
In his final op-ed, ‘The Biggest Lie of All’, published weeks before his death, David reproved Republicans for underestimating Democrats and the Left. That had been his overriding theme since joining and redefining the conservative movement. “Republicans,” he would tell me over and over again, “don’t understand how to fight.” But that’s no longer entirely true. And much of that is due to him. The passing of David Horowitz is an incalculable loss, but he lived long enough to see the movement he had helped recreate become an actual fighting force.
David Horowitz dismissed the Republican country club circuit for not understanding the enemy. Faced with a movement that seemed clueless about the scope of the Left, he became its ‘Alinsky’, helping spread awareness of ‘Rules for Radicals’ and laying out the tactics and principles for a conservative revolution. Horowitz was dismissive of the think-tanks, many of which later proved to be rotten with Never Trumpers. The Freedom Center, he would say, “is not a think-tank, it’s a battle tank.” David was a great thinker, but he was an even greater warrior.
Horowitz officially made his break when the Reagan Revolution came along because it was his first glimpse of a Republican Party that was willing to fight the Left. David Horowitz was ready for the fight, but too few Republicans were. David Horowitz didn’t just shock liberals when he left their movement, he shocked many Republicans with tactics that they thought were too harsh.
When David Horowitz took the war to college campuses not just with speeches, but by naming and shaming the radical professors and student activists, Republicans feared being accused of McCarthyism. Horowitz, a red-diaper baby, not only dismissed neurotic fears of being called names by leftists, he welcomed the confrontation and was eager to debate them anywhere.
While many Republicans pursued respectability politics and corporate sponsors, Horowitz built the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and later the David Horowitz Freedom Center, into the epicenter of a new movement that would later evolve into MAGA. But David was MAGA before there was a MAGA and without the movement he helped build, it might never have come into being.
“Since its formation in 1988, the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration,” the Washington Post wrote in 2017 and urged the IRS to investigate the Center. (The resulting investigation aimed at crippling the Center went on for six years. It only finally concluded shortly before David’s death.)
President Trump’s 2024 victory robbed the Freedom Center’s 2024 Restoration Weekend of some key guests, including Vice President J.D. Vance and the attorney general nominee (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth however drove four hours to be there.) What made the Weekends so special was that they brought together a rising conservative movement. Not the establishment movement, but a movement as revolutionary and pugnacious as Horowitz.
The Post’s accusation that David Horowitz was the secret mastermind behind the Trump administration was wrong. Horowitz was no mastermind, he was a visionary. He didn’t tell politicians what to do, he taught them how to fight. And he told them not to be ashamed of fighting and broke the moral blackmail and suicidal empathy burned into them by the Left.
Before the Republican Party was ready for Trump, David Horowitz had to teach them how to call the Left by its right names. Traitors. Insurrectionists. The Enemy Within. And he taught them to hit as hard as possible. Leftist institutions didn’t need to be debated, but destroyed. This was not an argument to be settled on a CNN panel, but a war that would end in survival or destruction.
The tragedy is not just that he’s gone, but that he’s missing out on seeing his vision come to life.
David Horowitz had called for defunding the universities. Now President Trump is defunding them. After over a generation of fighting the campus wars, David is not here to see federal law enforcement arresting the student activists who threw things at him and threatened his life. Leftists, he argued, were insurrectionists. Now the Trump administration is considering invoking the Insurrection Act. He had called for a working class minority populist conservative coalition.
Now it’s here.
“Why are Republicans so self-destructively polite? Why do they fail to see, or to identify their opponents as the criminals they are?” he demanded. Now the politeness is finally done with.
David Horowitz paved the way for this victory. He held on just long enough to see President Trump’s first 100 days in office. And as a family man frustrated at times by the gaps between the worldview of his children and his own, he lived long enough to see his son support Trump.
David passed away with the fruits of his lifelong work unfolding all around him. The David Horowitz Freedom Center is the battle tank that will carry it forward. His ideas, his fighting spirit and his determination to never give up lives on within us. Like him, we pull no punches, we tell hard truths and we take on the enemy within. David lived long enough to see America win a great victory over the forces that had brought it to the brink of destruction, but he would have been the first to tell us that the war isn’t over and that the real battle is about to begin.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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