David Horowitz (1939-2025): Farewell to a right-wing revolutionary

Conservative writer and activist David Horowitz died of cancer at his Colorado home on April 29, 2025, at the age of 86. His storied life, detailed in his brilliant memoir Radical Son, took him from one end of the political spectrum to the other, from his Communist childhood and his socialist youth, to his conservative adulthood, and finally, his final phase as a self-described bomb-thrower for Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

Until the end, David Horowitz was engaged in a battle over history—especially the history that he had personally experienced. When I spoke with him about his second-last book in 2021, he was incensed and incredulous that Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, had been presented as a victim and compared to George Floyd in a prominent magazine. His hatred—I think that’s the right word—for the Left was palpable.

“Huey Newton was a stone-cold murderer,” Horowitz told me. “He murdered an 18-year-old black prostitute. He raped pregnant women. He buggered Bobby Seal. Killed other people. This is all very well-known and well-established stuff. He derailed my life for a good decade because I put a lot of faith in him. I believed our own propaganda.”

And no wonder—Horowitz was weaned on revolutionary principles. “I was raised by card-carrying communists,” he told me. “I was born in 1939, so I was there at the beginning of the Cold War. We had an FBI car sitting outside our house, and the guys inside it taking notes on everybody who came and went. That was intimidating. But the reason the FBI was there was that my parents were hiding an East German Communist agent in the basement.”

Phil and Blanche Horowitz were both members of the Communist Party of the United States, and by age 13 Horowitz was the youth editor of The Daily Worker, the party’s daily newspaper. Both he and his parents rejected Stalin when the full extent of his crimes became clear, detailed by Khrushchev in a secret speech leaked to the public by the Israeli Mossad. “I was one of the founders of the New Left because I wanted to save socialism from being tainted by the crimes of Stalin,” Horowitz told me.

Horowitz earned a degree at Columbia, a master’s at Berkeley, and became a top editor at Ramparts, a key 1960s and ‘70s magazine of the New Left. In the early 1970s a Hollywood producer introduced him to Huey Newton, co-founder of the revolutionary Black Panthers. He raised money for them from Hollywood (and the Rockefellers), bought a Baptist Church in Harlem for their headquarters, and worked closely with Newton. Access to power and glamour, Horowitz told me ruefully, “makes you feel important.”

In 1974, Horowitz recommended that Newton hire 45-year-old Betty Van Patter, who had previously worked for Ramparts, as bookkeeper. Van Patter drew attention to several financial irregularities she discovered. She was fired on December 13, 1974, and headed to Berkely Square bar, upset. While at the bar, she left with a man who had handed her a note, and vanished. On January 17, 1975, her severely beaten body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. The mother of three had been killed by a blow to the head after being tortured and raped. Huey Newton later confessed to ordering the murder but was never charged or convicted.

“That sent me into a personal tailspin,” Horowitz told me. “I suffered from clinical depression for a decade. Everything I believed in had led to this. I had thought I was sophisticated; I knew about Stalin’s crimes; I knew the Viet Cong were criminals. But that didn’t prevent me from being involved in the chain of events that led to this poor woman’s death. That was my turning.” Horowitz entered a dark period of despairing self-reflection.

Horowitz’s first public declaration of his turn to the Right was a 1985 column for Washington Post Magazine written with Peter Collier titled “Lefties for Reagan.”  The two former leftists explained their change:

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. This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime’s experience, it seems about right.

For the rest of his life, David Horowitz attacked the Left with a ferocity that matched his previous defense of it. His personal writing, as Ronald Radosh noted in his eulogy for Horowitz, was often deep, nuanced, and profound. His political polemics were very often not—but his anger was clearly just as personal. His Black Book of the Left was a brilliant exposé of America’s leftist movements and detailed the truth about many figures he had known personally. Horowitz displayed the zeal of a convert—a man constantly redeeming himself for his past life and associations.

Horowitz, of course, wasn’t the only American ex-Communist who turned to the Right. Whitaker Chambers, James Burnham, Max Eastman, Grace Lumpkin, Marvin Olasky, and others made a similar journey. All became influential figures and eloquent opponents of the views that they had once held. Horowitz, in many ways, went further than them all—he embraced Trumpism precisely because he fervently believed, until the day he died, that the Left must not merely be exposed, but utterly destroyed. Many of those he mentored came to share those views.

In his book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, Horowitz made a potent observation, based on his own revolutionary past. “Injustice is not caused by an abstraction called ‘society,’ as we on the left had maintained,” he wrote. “Nor was injustice caused by oppressive races and genders, or solely by our political enemies. Injustice is the result of human selfishness, deceitfulness, malice, envy, greed, and lust. Injustice is the inevitable consequence of our free will as human beings. “Society” is not the cause of injustice. Society is merely a reflection of who we are.”

He was right—and thus, we would all do well to remember that evil can infect all sides of the political spectrum because always, as Genesis 4:7 tell us: “Sin crouches at the door.” This is perhaps never more true than when we are convinced that the rightness of our cause justifies any response.