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To view this on the COS website, click here [[https://conventionofstates.com/news/honoring-a-legend|honoring-a-legend]]


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====== Honoring a legend ======


Thank you, Mr. Horowitz, for a life well lived.


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|Renowned conservative intellectual, culture warrior, activist, and author David Horowitz passed away on Tuesday, leaving behind a legacy of dedication to the principles of liberty. He was 86.\\ \\ Horowitz, who began his career as a Marxist, eventually strayed from his political roots and became a noted critic of the far left. In 1985, Horowitz [[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1985/03/17/lefties-for-reagan/c3d58778-8ec9-4463-9252-3a032e078d36/|revealed]] to the readers of //The Washington Post// that he had voted for President Ronald Reagan, marking a pronounced shift in his political views. The article was titled “Lefties for Reagan.”\\ \\ The following year, he dropped the descriptor altogether. In his article “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist,” the defector traced his political evolution and why he lost faith in the progressive cause. He described how his revolutionary parents became disillusioned when they “discovered that the socialist future they had served all their lives was a monstrous lie.” “They had thought they were fighting for social justice, for the powerless and the poor,” he wrote. But when the true horrors of Stalinism were laid bare, the delusion was shattered.\\ \\ “After Stalin’s death, it was the confrontation with this reality, and not Senator Joe McCarthy’s famous crusade, which demoralized and destroyed the old Communist guard in America,” Horowitz [[http://www.horowitzbiobooks.com/why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/|recounted]]. “I was seventeen at the time, and at the funeral of the Old Left I swore to myself I would not repeat my parents’ fate. I would never be loyal to a movement based on a lie or be complicit in political crimes; I would never support a cause that required the suppression of its own truths, whether by self-censorship or firing squads or political smears. But my youth prevented me from comprehending what the catastrophe had revealed. I continued to believe in the fantasy of the socialist future. When a New Left began to emerge a few years later, I was ready to believe that it was a fresh beginning and eager to assist at its birth.”\\ \\ [[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/22/the-making-of-the-new-left|According to Professor Louis Menand]], the New Left “made individual freedom and authenticity the goals of political action, and it inspired people who cared about injustice and inequality to reject the existing system of power relations, and to begin anew.” Members of this loose coalition, Horowitz among them, saw themselves as crusaders who would achieve the goals their ideological predecessors had failed to realize. But soon, their faith would be rattled, too.\\ \\ In his zealous crusade against perceived capitalist repression, fascist attacks, and racist authority, Horowitz began working with the Black Panther Party in 1974. “At the time, the left saw the Panthers as a persecuted vanguard, victimized by racist police because of their role in the liberation struggle,” he wrote. But what would happen when the so-called victims became the victimizers? One year after locking shields with the black power political organization, his world was thrown into disarray when a woman he worked with “was kidnapped, sexually tormented, and then brutally murdered by my Black Panther comrades.” The Panthers then threatened him to keep silent about the crime.\\ \\ This shocking (and contradictory) display of injustice and cruelty perplexed Horowitz. Cracks began to form in the foundation of the young radical’s radicalism. He was forced to confront the same unsettling possibility that had haunted his parents: that those who most passionately preached the radical dream had also most ruthlessly exploited its believers. “The Stalinists and the Panthers may have operated on stages vastly different in scale,” he wrote, “but ultimately their achievements were the same.”\\ \\ It mattered not, he concluded, what strain of progressivism he subscribed to; the rot was intrinsic. “By crowning the criminals with the halo of humanity’s hope, the left shields them from judgment for their criminal deeds. Thus in the name of revolutionary justice, the left defends revolutionary injustice; in the name of human liberation, the left creates a new world of oppression.”\\ \\ Horowitz initially kept his shifting views to himself. But when he finally spoke out, the backlash was swift and unforgiving. Instead of sparking dialogue or winning converts — as he had hoped — he was cast out and labeled a heretic.\\ \\ “My intention in publishing 'Why I Am No Longer a Leftist' in a leftwing paper … was to encourage its readers to have second thoughts and to warn them about the dangers of failing to have them,” he [[https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/the-black-book-of-the-american-left.php|remembered]] in //The Black Book of the American Left//. “What I elicited instead was an anathema upon myself—an excommunication from the progressive community. The anathema was pronounced in the form of an article that appeared in the same paper shortly afterward called, 'The Intellectual Life and the Renegade Horowitz.' It made clear that my words were not going to be taken as an attempt to retrieve a bitterly earned truth about what we leftists had done, but as the betrayal of a noble cause by a person who had gone over to the dark side.”\\ \\ The criticism never relented (the Southern Poverty Law Center still accuses Horowitz of “giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation”). But neither did Horowitz. The former progressive doubled down on his critique of the left, launching a prominent conservative career as the founder of the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles (later renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center) and a bestselling author. His many books, including //The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America//, //Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America//, and //Radical Son: A Generational Oddysey//, transformed Horowitz into a nationally-known scholar of the American Left.\\ \\ More than two decades after publishing “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist,” the author encountered a disturbing trend: fringe, right-wing groups embracing many of the same talking points he was familiar with from across the aisle. These “strange bedfellows,” he noted, had united in their opposition to the Article V convention — a constitutional process by which the American people, acting through their state legislatures, could reassert their dominance over the federal government. Drawing upon his expertise, Horowitz pointed out the hypocrisy in their stance. \\ \\ “The sad thing is the conservative opposition groups don’t even seem to realize that in stoking fears about an Article V convention, they are reading right out of the left’s playbook,” he [[https://conventionofstates.com/news/david-horowitz-why-conservatives-need-to-amend-the-constitution|opined]]. “While they tell the conservatives on their direct-mail lists they are working to save the Constitution from being rewritten by George Soros and his ilk, Mr. Soros smiles, breathes a deep sigh of relief, and toasts to their success.”\\ \\ Horowitz defended the Convention of States movement against accusations from the unusual coalition of fringe-right and far-left critics. He concluded that the Article V convention process was safe and that those on the right who opposed it had been influenced by their progressive counterparts. It was one of many examples of the unique insights Horowitz’s past afforded him.\\ \\ From the time he abandoned the left in the 1980s, Horowitz used that gift to serve the conservative cause in America. His death on Tuesday prompted an outpouring of gratitude from many prominent conservative voices and COS endorsers, including [[https://x.com/benshapiro/status/1917426704747802788|Ben Shapiro]], [[https://x.com/marklevinshow/status/1917534859347578939|Mark Levin]], and [[https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1917368183268466847|Charlie Kirk]], who praised Horowitz as a “friend and mentor.” As the founder of Turning Point USA put it, “David Horowitz was a lion. A fighter. A father of modern conservatism.”\\ \\ > Rest in peace to my friend and mentor David Horowitz, who has just passed away. A fearless truth-teller, David was a titan in the battle of ideas and a warrior for Western civilization.\\ \\ David grew up on the hard Left and remained a committed Marxist into his 30s. But he had the… [[https://t.co/7QucnlO1Lf|pic.twitter.com/7QucnlO1Lf]]\\ \\ > — Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) [[https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1917368183268466847?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw|April 29, 2025]]\\ \\ The conservative legend’s extraordinary life reminds us that there is no shame in evolving. “There is, on the other hand,” he commented, “considerable shame in letting fear and ignorance triumph over reality, reason, understanding, and cold, hard, historical facts.” Horowitz dedicated his life to uncovering those facts and speaking unpopular truths, even though it cost him the prestige he likely would have received on the left. For him, it was worth it. \\ \\ //In honor of Horowitz’s memory, we will continue our fight for the Article V convention and to save Western Civilization. Sign the COS petition below to join us.//\\ \\ #|PETITION_WIDGET{petition_tag:comms_blog_NA_04/30/2025_honoringalegend05302025;coalition_id:;anedot_url:}|#|


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|Login Required to view?  |No                  |
|Created:                 |2025-04-30 22:38 GMT|
|Updated:                 |2025-05-07 07:00 GMT|
|Published:               |2025-04-30 19:00 GMT|
|Converted:               |2025-11-11 12:05 GMT|
|Change Author:           |Jakob Fay           |
|Credit Author:           |                    |