David Horowitz, a radical leftist of the 1960s who did a political about-face to become an outspoken conservative author 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 Center, a think tank he founded in Southern California, said the cause was cancer. His wife, April Horowitz, said he died at his home in Colorado.
Once a self-described Marxist, Mr. Horowitz executed a dizzying transit from the extreme left to the extreme right. He argued that the Black Lives Matter movement had fueled racial hatred; he opposed Palestinian rights; he denounced the news media and universities as tools of the left; and he falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election, which Mr. Horowitz called “the greatest political crime” in American history.
A prolific author since his early 20s, Mr. Horowitz published several pro-Trump books, including “Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America” (2017) and “The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America” (2021). The enemies he accused of totalitarian impulses were the mainstream Democrats Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, and Kamala Harris, then the vice president.
Mr. Horowitz was a mentor to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, whom he met when Mr. Miller was a California high school student fervidly critical of multiculturalism.
At Duke University, Mr. Miller started a chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, a grass-roots advocacy group founded by Mr. Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz asked him to help coordinate an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses, according to 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 Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who participated in a retreat sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The center describes itself on its website as opposing “efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country.”
Mr. Miller joined Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, and Mr. Sessions served as attorney general under Mr. Trump from 2017 to 2018.
Before his turn to the far right, Mr. Horowitz was a mainstream conservative who in 1984 cast his first Republican ballot, to re-elect President Ronald Reagan.
He and a fellow convert, Peter Collier, writing in The Washington Post Magazine in 1985, described their transformation as a response in part to what they considered the left’s naïve views of communist movements, and in part to Reagan’s blunt assessment of the Soviet Union as an enemy of freedom.
“We agree with his vision of the world as a place increasingly inhospitable to democracy and increasingly dangerous for America,” they wrote.
In a 1997 autobiography, “Radical Son,” Mr. Horowitz identified a more wrenching moment when he broke from the left: the death of a friend, Betty Van Patter, whom he had recruited for a bookkeeping job at a foundation associated with the Black Panther Party.
Mr. Horowitz believed that Ms. Van Patter was murdered by the Panthers, though the case was never officially solved. The New Left movement, he concluded, was too wrapped up in fantasies of revolution to see the Panthers as thugs.
Reviewing “Radical Son” in The New York Times Book Review and speaking of Mr. Horowitz, the historian Richard Gid Powers called it “a courageous book, full of self-revelation and with a willingness to expose his own frailties.” However, he continued, Mr. Horowitz “is nothing if not contentious, and some of his contentions will rub readers the wrong way.”
Identified in the 1980s as a neoconservative, Mr. Horowitz began moving farther right with the emergence of culture wars. He co-founded Heterodoxy magazine in 1992 to critique political correctness on American campuses. In 1988, he and Mr. Collier founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which changed its name in 2006 to the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Mr. Horowitz pressed universities and state lawmakers to adopt an “academic bill of rights,” which he argued would expose students to broader viewpoints. Critics said it was an effort to purge liberal professors and create quotas for hiring conservatives.
In years of public speaking, often on college campuses at the invitation of Republican students, Mr. Horowitz was known for a pugilistic style. He advised conservatives to “begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth.”
“If you’re nuanced and you speak in what I would call an intellectual manner, you get eaten alive,” he told The Times in 2017.
In speaking engagements that sometimes required security details and drew explosive responses from students, Mr. Horowitz often criticized Islamic radicals and the Palestinian cause, which he equated with a desire to wipe Israel from the map.
“There is a movement for a second Holocaust of the Jews that is being supported on this campus by the Muslim Student Association,” Mr. Horowitz said at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2008. The student group’s faculty adviser rebuked him.
In 2013, in an article in National Review titled “How Obama Betrayed America,” Mr. Horowitz attacked President Barack Obama for “minimizing” the threat of Islamic terrorism.
The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2014 called Mr. Horowitz “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.”
Two longtime former colleagues of Mr. Horowitz’s, Ronald Radosh and Sol Stern — who also turned their backs on the New Left — wrote about their friend’s more extreme political arc in The New Republic in 2021, lamenting that he had metamorphosed from “a thoughtful conservative” into a “Trump propagandist.”
“When the full history of the Trump intellectuals’ betrayal of decent conservatism is written, David Horowitz will have special pride of place, a chapter all to himself,” they wrote.
David Joel Horowitz was born on Jan. 10, 1939, in New York City, in Queens. His parents, Phil and Blanche Horowitz, were schoolteachers and members of the American Communist Party. They quit the party in 1956 when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin.
David grew up “a sheltered child in a Marxist bubble,” he later wrote, attending a May Day parade at age 9.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1959 and a master’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. He helped found Root and Branch, a campus-based New Left magazine.
While living in London in the mid-1960s, he wrote a leftist critique of the Cold War, “The Free World Colossus,” which excoriated the United States as imperialist.
Returning to California in 1968, Mr. Horowitz became co-editor of the influential New Left magazine Ramparts, which ultimately reached a paid circulation of nearly 250,000. In its pages, he celebrated the Black Panther Party, and he became friends with one of its leaders, Huey Newton.
Beginning in 1976, after he fell out with the left but before he embraced the right, Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Collier wrote best-selling biographies of the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford families.
Mr. Horowitz’s marriages to Elissa Krauthamer, Sam Moorman and Shay Marlowe ended in divorce. In 1998, he married April Mullvain.
Besides his wife, he is survived by a sister, Ruth Horowitz; three children from his first marriage, Anne, Jonathan and Ben Horowitz, who is a co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; a stepson, John Kibbie; and seven grandchildren. A daughter from his first marriage, Sarah, died in 2008; Mr. Horowitz wrote about that loss in his book “A Cracking of the Heart” (2009).
His other books include “Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America” (2018) and “I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America” (2021).
