The Passing of a Patriot

The PAC Perspective by Ted Flint

David Horowitz was a different kind of conservative. A former member of the radical Left, Horowitz knew how the Left thinks, their tactics, their modus operandi.  David Horowitz passed away this week at the age of 86. Through the years, despite his illness, he never stopped fighting and was even working on another column when he finally succumbed to the cancer he had so valiantly fought for 24 years.

It was quite a life he lived. I had the pleasure of interviewing David many times during my seven-year stint as a radio talk show host at an Albany station.

He told me how his parents were communists who belonged to a New York City cell in the 1930’s and 40’s. But his father became disillusioned at the end of his life when the promise of a “socialist utopia” never materialized. A big supporter of Stalin, the elder Horowitz died a broken man. Not so with David. He lived long enough to see his hard work and dedication for the cause of liberty pay off.

As Daniel Greenfield writes in Frontpage Magazine, a publication Horowitz founded:” Horowitz taught republicans how to fight. He was MAGA before there was a MAGA.” In fact, he had written several books explaining why the country needs Donald Trump at the helm of the federal government. Among them: Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America, and BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win. It appears both books were prescient.

Well educated, Columbia University and U.C. Berkeley, Horowitz smashed the stereotypes the left often uses to portray Trump supporters as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. He was fearless when it came to calling out the Anti-American Left for what they are: Traitors, Insurrectionists, The Enemy Within. And he taught conservatives how to punch back – hard. As Daniel Greenfield points out: “Leftist institutions didn’t need to be debated, but destroyed. This was not an argument to be settled on a CNN panel, but a war that would end in survival or destruction.”

At one time Horowitz identified as a Marxist intellectual who, in the early 1970’s, developed a friendship with Huey Newton and worked closely with the Black Panthers. That relationship ended when he suspected the Panthers had murdered a close friend and colleague. This turn of events and others led to his ideological transformation which he chronicles in Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

A prolific writer right up until his death, Horowitz authored over five dozen books, including: Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America; The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America; I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America, and Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. A staunch supporter of Israel Horowitz once compared Islamists to Nazis, saying: "Islamists are worse than the Nazis, because even the Nazis did not tell the world that they want to exterminate the Jews."

Horowitz was a frequent guest on Sean Hannity’s Show on both TV and radio. As he got on in years, the mainstream media looked for a shiny new object, but Horowitz kept writing, speaking, and advocating for conservative causes and against anything he viewed as a threat to America.

Horowitz identified as agnostic, but few writers were as effective as he in articulating the threats facing Christianity.

He wrote about cancer and about facing his own mortality in ‘The End of Time,’ and in ‘A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next.’ In 2015 he wrote about a near death experience in ‘You’re Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story’ and then combined all three in ‘Mortality and Faith’ in 2019.

Christians understand that our redemption comes through no other source but Jesus Christ. Hopefully, David Horowitz found that redemption. May he rest in peace.