Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo
David Horowitz speaks at Columbia University in New York, October 26, 2007.
David Horowitz died last Tuesday, but his spirit, I grieve to report, lives on. Indeed, it has state power.
Any number of public figures have careers that follow a left-to-right, or right-to-left, trajectory. Even among his fellow left-to-rightsters, though, Horowitz stood out. His journey from extreme left to extreme right was so, well, extreme that the through line of his affinity for extremism ultimately overshadows the claims of mere ideology. He carried with him from his youth the belief that any conflict he participated in (never mind that he provoked almost all of them) was, in the words of “The International,” “the final conflict.” No conflict was worth his time if it didn’t enable him to vilify, slander, and demonize his opponents, who, no matter where they stood on the ideological spectrum, necessarily had to pose a threat to civilization itself, according to the Horowitz gospel. So grave a threat required an almost Goebbels-esque level of vilification and falsification (else, you might not think it all that grave). But Horowitz was not only up to that task; he reveled in it.
Horowitz had a conventional American communist childhood—his parents were party members until they quit after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes—and in his twenties became a comrade of the great Marxist biographer Isaac Deutscher. While serving as an editor of Ramparts, he became enamored of the less scholastic revolutionaries of the Black Panthers, whom Horowitz hailed as “America’s Viet Cong.” He grew close to party leader Huey Newton. When a woman he’d recruited to be the Panthers’ bookkeeper was found murdered, however, he believed that the Panthers, in an effort to keep her from disclosing criminal irregularities, had been the killers. Beset by guilt and horror, he repudiated the Panthers, and over the next decade, the entire left.
But the attributes that had attracted him to the Panthers—not just their better angels, in their food banks and other community services, but also, more pointedly, their Manichaean worldview and their complementary belief in violence—were his own attributes as well. That’s not to say he ever took up the gun, but he very deliberately and consistently tried to approximate that by other means. As he famously instructed others on the right, they should “begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth.”
Decades before “woke” became a term of derogation, Horowitz began raging at the academic community: not just the far left, but even social democrats who criticized the far left, like Todd Gitlin, who figured prominently on a Horowitz-devised list of 100 dangerous academics who would be fired if Horowitz ruled the world. Even conservative leaders who declined to drink the Trump Kool-Aid were traitors to the cause: Writing in Breitbart, Horowitz labeled neocon Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew” for the sin of supporting a different presidential candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries. Fellow former lefties who’d repudiated the far left for mainstream conservatism, like the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern, also ran afoul of Horowitz’s diktats for their failure to join the far-right Visigoths taking arms in the culture wars. In 2021, Stern co-authored a New Republic piece with Ron Radosh (both of whom had known Horowitz since his far-left days) in which they documented Horowitz’s career-long commitment to violent extremism. “In that earlier era,” they wrote, “he celebrated the burning of a bank by a student mob. Today he’s an intellectual pyromaniac who honors the MAGA mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6.”
Of course, in the world according to Horowitz, the Capitol was full of traitors. The “totalitarian movement … destroying America,” he wrote in one of his more recent tracts, was headed by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, among others.
Horowitz worked to cultivate a younger generation of right-wing extremists, but his greatest achievement was to both inspire and instruct the most hate-filled member of Donald Trump’s inner circle: Stephen Miller. He first became aware of Miller when he was a wildly obstreperous far-right kid at Santa Monica High (where, among other things, he was known for ostentatiously dumping his trash on classroom and hallway floors and insisting that the school’s janitors pick it up). Horowitz nurtured Miller’s preternaturally boundless antagonisms, got him a job with Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, and when Miller left Sessions for Trump’s 2016 campaign, began coaching him on inserting properly inflammatory language into Trump’s speeches. Mentors matter: As Roy Cohn once instructed Trump in the power of lying, so Horowitz instructed Miller in the power of hating.
That power was in full display last Thursday, when Miller, now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, went before the White House press corps for a full half-hour to praise his boss’s first hundred days as a second-term president. Miller had long since won a reputation as the architect of Trump’s cruelest policies, most notably, the separation of border-crossing small children from their parents during Trump’s first term. He enhanced that reputation by his performance on Thursday, where his praise of Trump was eclipsed by his Horowitzian attack on the press. As The Washington Post recounted, Miller “raised his voice and banged the lectern. He accused the media of siding with ‘terrorists’ in its coverage of undocumented immigrants, told them they live in condos in nice areas [far from the terror of gangs] and decried the “‘cancerous, communist, woke culture that is destroying this country.’”
One might conclude that Miller, reeling from the news of Horowitz’s death, was simply channeling Horowitz from the podium. But Horowitz’s handiwork is no such short-lived phenomenon. His bile flows through every Miller utterance. And, far worse, through every Trump policy.
