The College Fix

OPINION: Horowitz, a ‘Radical Son,’ was a fearless trailblazer

The conservative movement lost a towering freedom fighter and fearless truthteller with the passing of David Horowitz last week.

He was perhaps the first culture warrior on the right to truly grasp the critical need to boldly tackle the lies and corruption on college campuses head-on, exposing the influence of what he called “tenured radicals.”

Long before activists harnessed social media to drop higher education bombshells, Horowitz invented the game, dropping bombs of his own on campuses, charting a course for others to follow.

I met him when he was doing just that. In 2000 I was hired to help edit his website, FrontPage Magazine. At that time he was taking out full-page ads in college newspapers nationwide headlined “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Are a Bad Idea—and Racist Too.”

The stunt drew major media attention and outrage among students, sparking a conversation that wasn’t otherwise happening. A victim of campus cancel culture before the term was coined, Horowitz faced intense backlash.

As student Alex Epstein, then an undergrad at Duke, reported at the time: “Angry Duke students staged a sit-in to demand an apology by the school’s newspaper, the Chronicle, for running the ad. … At the University of Wisconsin, students trashed stacks of the Badger Herald. At Brown University, the entire press run of the Brown Daily Herald—4,000 copies—was stolen.”

Epstein added it was too bad students taught to be victims could not instead grapple with the intellectual arguments in the ad.

“It presented factual evidence and gave reasoned arguments for its viewpoint,” he wrote. “It explained why the idea of punishing white individuals who had not been guilty of slavery, and rewarding black individuals who had not been enslaved, was itself pure racism.”

Horowitz built a career in the conservative movement unapologetically championing truths others shied away from, forging a career on arguments too daunting or taboo for most.

In his 1989 book “Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties,” co-authored with friend Peter Collier, Horowitz renounced his Marxist past, condemning communism as ineffective and evil.

“If you want to understand how and why the academy became possessed by radical anti-American attitudes, that book is still a good place to begin,” National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood noted in his memorial tribute.

“…Truth be told, there have been few leaders in higher education in the last century more committed to intellectual freedom than David Horowitz. He was a pugnacious fighter who hit hard at the academic and political left because he knew whereof he spoke.”

Having been involved in the Black Panther movement and a prolific writer for the socialist-revolutionary cause, Horowitz detailed his conversion to conservatism in another seminal work, “Radical Son,” his autobiography.

Over the last three decades, he has given hundreds of talks at college campuses and conferences, sharing personal stories and insights in the battle of ideas.

Some of The College Fix’s coverage of his campus adventures include: “David Horowitz takes credit for #JewHaters posters at UCLA targeting SJP” in 2015 and “Claiming ‘pervasive, college-sponsored anti-Semitism,’ Horowitz preps lawsuit against Pitzer, Pomona” from 2020.

During a speech at the University of North Carolina in 2015, he had argued that Muslim Student Associations and Students for Justice in Palestine are sympathetic to terrorists and support Jewish genocide. The remarks prompted students to claim they felt unsafe on campus.

Horowtiz, in an interview with The Fix at the time, scoffed at the notion.

“That’s what they learn from the left. It’s always ‘you’re a victim,’” he said. “Who is doing the attacking? Who is conducting all the events attacking other religious groups? It’s the MSA and SJP. They attack Israel and bring in speakers who glamorize terrorism.”

“Why are these schools giving them money?” Horowitz added. “They wouldn’t do it if they were spewing hatred against blacks, but they do it when they spew hatred against the Jews. I’m just trying to inspire patriotic Americans to stand up and fight. Don’t roll over for these people.”

Horowitz was one of the smartest men I’ve ever met; his brain worked at warp speed, keeping us on our toes at FrontPage Magazine.

One of the projects he tasked me with was to take printed out lists of professor rosters from various California campuses and go look up at registrar of voters offices whether they were registered as Republicans or Democrats to help quantify the deep-rooted bias in academia.

Inspired by my time with Horowitz, it’s a project we’ve repeated several times over the last 15 years at The College Fix, most recently during this 2024-25 school year.

Horowitz illustrated how important it was to expose the rot in academia, for example with his book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.”

He tirelessly sounded the alarm on how the Left’s stronghold on higher education was one of its most powerful weapons in warping and recruiting young minds.

The College Fix’s executive director, John J. Miller, also crossed paths with Horowitz, writing on X: “I met him when I was a college student, and he was fighting in the trenches against the scourge of what we then called ‘political correctness’ but which now goes by other names.”

“He was an American original.”

Truly he was. Thanks for teaching us how to fight hard. David Horowitz, 1939–2025, RIP.

MORE: Protesters disrupt David Horowitz talk at Dartmouth

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: David Horowitz giving a speech; Gage Skidmore, Flickr

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