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[Please consider making a generous, tax-deductible contribution to the David Horowitz Freedom Center to help continue David’s mission far into the future: HERE.]
I learned of the death of David Horowitz in Colorado at age 86 a few days after it happened on April 29th, 2025.
A college friend of mine warned me that he didn’t like reading obituaries that were about the person doing the writing instead of the person who died, and I worried would happen which kept me from writing about David immediately. But now I don’t care about that. So here goes: my attempt to give one person’s perspective on David’s passing. Others might have other points-of-view.
It has taken me a while to write about it because so many different thoughts and feelings occurred since. I was conflicted because David was a complicated person to work for, something I did from 1992 to 1996. After I left his employ, he was nice to me in his autobiography, for which I am grateful.
David was ill for years fighting cancer that had spread, but since he seemed a born fighter, I never thought that it would lick him. I guess it didn’t occur that he was mortal, since he seemed like a force of nature, or even a supernatural being possessed of extra-terrestrial energy sources. I had never known someone with such energy and determination. While I was fighting writer’s block, David was always writing on his laptop, even in the doctor’s waiting room where I ran into him when taking my father for a checkup. He wrote on planes, in lobbies, everywhere and anywhere. In addition to his own writing, David simultaneously ran a publishing and activism empire, maintained a grueling schedule of public speaking and fundraising, and somehow had enough time left over to get married four times and father four children. When he died, it was reported that he had written fifty books. He had lived the lives of two, three, maybe even four men…
I read David’s Destructive Generation (co-authored with Peter Collier) after it came out and was affected by what he had written. I still think it is his best book. His description of Leftist nihilism is something obviously true but that I hadn’t noticed until David pointed it out.
Destruction is the aim of the enterprise. All the rest is just window dressing. Not only is the issue never the issue for the Left, as David repeatedly declared, The Revolution isn’t really the issue either–the issue is just destruction of all that exists, to return to a Year Zero…in other words the goal is nothingness.
I visited David in 2017 at his home in Simi Valley in order to congratulate him on the election of Donald Trump as President, since he had worked hard to make it happen. When I arrived, David handed me a signed copy of Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America, his blueprint for the Trump administration. At the time, David was recovering from an operation and was walking with a limp. He seemed frail, but full of energy and determination.
David told me he was working on several projects simultaneously and handed me a copy of the latest volume of his 7-volume series, The Black Book of the American Left, detailing the horrors of the communists in America. But that wasn’t all.
He spoke at length about his wife April’s charity work with injured horses, for which he was proud to have help establish a charity foundation. He then took me outside, on a tour of their corral to introduced me to their horses.
That was a side of David that I hadn’t seen much during the years I worked for him–gentle, compassionate, and seemingly at peace. I had no idea that he was an animal lover. He also talked about his ex-wife and children, of who he was also extremely fond. Again, I hadn’t seen the paterfamilias side of David before, only the crusader side. It was not long before David moved to Colorado.
We talked on the phone a couple of times after that, and exchanged a few emails, but I never saw David again.
I did think about him a lot over the years, and came to the conclusion that his conversion to anti-communism was sincere. He was a best-selling author whose establishment career ended when he announced his support for President Reagan. His departure from the Left cost him not only friends, but also career opportunities. David told me that he never got a good review in the New York Times after publication of “Lefties for Reagan” in the Washington Post in 1985. His political heresy cost him millions in royalties, I’m sure.
And I have no doubt that the murder of his friend Betty Van Patter by the Black Panthers launched him on the political trajectory which changed his life. He was obviously surprised that his old comrades and liberal friends sided with the Panthers and excused the murder of his bookkeeper for political reasons.
In microcosm, David had personally experienced the history of Liberals, Socialists and Communists making excuses for murderous Communism since the October Revolution in Russia. No crime has been too horrible to be excused by those who remain devoted to the shining future promised by scientific socialists. Of course, David had been one of those Leftists himself, a “New Leftist” raised by “Old Leftist” parents. Old wine in a new bottle. As he wrote in his autobiography, he thought nothing of his parents hiding an East German spy in their family home. How different was that from families who hid members of the Weather Underground in the 1960s? Not very.
Although murder had been well-established as a feature of communist regimes by the 1960s, it was only when such a murder struck close to home, to someone he knew, that David realized the nature of the forces he had been aiding as editor of Ramparts and fund-raiser for the Black Panthers.
Nevertheless, despite his political heterodoxy, David was loyal to his friends. His collaborator Peter Collier was like a brother, perhaps even a twin separated at birth. After Collier died, ending their writing partnership, David became more of an organization man, building up The David Horowitz Freedom Center into an institution which he planned to outlive him. Luckily for David’s legacy, President Trump was re-elected in 2024. David had lived long enough to see vindication.
In conclusion, David Horowitz was a human being. Like any man, he had his flaws, and he made mistakes. Once he realized the errors of his youth, caused both by a communist upbringing and the trends of the 1960s, David fought the good fight. Not perfectly, but doggedly, with determination and persistence. With his last ounce of dying strength, he was writing until the end. And he lived long enough to see Donald Trump return to the Oval Office.
He finished the race. He kept the faith.
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Laurence Jarvik is an author, thinker and scholar who worked for the Heritage Foundation and the David Horowitz Freedom Center when it was known as the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. An unedited original of this piece was first published at Laurence Jarvik Online here. All photos by Laurence Jarvik.
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