Rest in Peace, David Horowitz

[Help us preserve David’s legacy: HERE.]

The world is a poorer place with the passing of David Horowitz.

David is one of the three true fathers of the modern conservative movement (the other two being William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan).

He taught us the art of political warfare. Much more than a mere ideologue, David was a warrior — and a happy warrior, to boot.

Those who did not have the good fortune to know David personally may know him by those he nurtured, which include the likes of deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller; Charlie Kirk, founder and driving force behind Turning Point USA; Middle East scholar Walid Phares; and of course, the Freedom Center’s Robert Spencer, Jamie Glazov, and Daniel Greenfield.

I have been blessed to have known and worked with David on and off for the past two decades. He was so gracious that he tried to broker a publishing deal for my latest book, The Iran House, from his hospital bed last year, unbeknownst to me.

That gesture revealed one of the enduring aspects of David’s character he always saw himself not only as an author and polemicist but also as a mentor — or if you prefer, a talent-spotter. He was always willing to give a hand up to those younger and less well-established than he was.

Like David, I began on the Left and discovered that the Left had deserted me and the values I had thought we shared — a certain iconoclasm, fierce individualism, and an unquenchable thirst for freedom. That journey formed an immediate bond between me and David.

Many of David’s books explored themes that continue to nourish the daily thinking of our conservative universe. They have become so familiar that many people have forgotten that David first introduced those ideas into our intellectual slipstream.

Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, is one of these books. In it, less than three years after the 9/11 attacks, David explored what former CIA Director Jim Woolsey called the “Hitler-Stalin Pact of our time.”

More recently, in Dark Agenda: the War to Destroy Christian America, David — a Jew — explored not only the Left’s war on Christian America, but why Christianity itself is absolutely central to the America that is good and moral and worthy of emulation.

May you rest in peace, friend. And give us a nudge from time to time!