David Joel Horowitz (10 January 1939-29 April 2025) was an American neoconservative writer, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and author of FrontPage Magazine.
Biography[]
David Horowitz was born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York City, New York on 10 January 1939 to a Jewish family. He was raised in Long Island City by his parents, CPUSA members who joined the anti-Stalinist left in 1956, and Horowitz graduated from Columbia University in 1959 and moved to London to work for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation as a Marxist intellectual. Horowitz began to have reservations about the New Left after Russell proposed a war crimes tribunal to investigate the United States' actions in the Vietnam War, and, in January 1968, he returned to the United States and worked for Ramparts magazine. He befriended Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton and bookkeeper Betty Van Patter, whom he introduced to BPP leader Elaine Brown in 1974. After Van Patter was found murdered by the Panthers in January 1975, Horowitz began a realignment away from the New Left, and, in 1985, he and Peter Collier co-authored "Lefties for Reagan". In 1986, he published "Why I Am No Longer a Leftist" in The Village Voice, identifying as a neoconservative. In May 1989, he took part in an anti-communist rally in Krakow, Poland, and, in 1992, Horowitz and Collier cofounded the monthly Heterodoxy magazine to criticize political correctness. In 2001, he spoke out against reparations for slavery as racist against African-Americans, claiming that it defined them only in terms of their descent from slaves. He also supported George W. Bush's interventionist doctrine, although he had opposed the Kosovo War in 1999, and he later spoke out against universities' bias against hiring Republican and conservative faculty members. Horowitz later became controversial for his many anti-Islam statements.