It’s Clearer Than Ever: David Horowitz Was Right All Along

This article is part of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the passing of our founder, namesake and visionary. If you have memories of David to share, please leave them in the comments or drop Daniel Greenfield line.

And please consider making a generous, tax-deductible contribution to the David Horowitz Freedom Center to help continue David’s mission far into the future: HERE.

Leftists love to call themselves “progressives,” and to do so was one of the most effective propaganda initiatives in history. The label is derived from Marxist theory, which holds that all of history is inevitably tending toward the final victory of Communism and the full implementation of a socialist society. The “progressives” are those enlightened people who are helping history make its way along its predetermined track.

The late, great David Horowitz, however, who passed away one year ago, on April 29, 2025, knew that this was a manipulative rhetorical trick designed to make people think both that the victory of socialism was inevitable and that they would be among the enlightened ones if they embraced it. He indelibly quipped, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

If I could talk today to my dear colleague and friend, with whom I worked for over twenty years, I’d give him the news: They’re out. A leftist just tried yet again to murder President Donald Trump, and his manifesto (all shooters seem to think it incumbent upon themselves to write one these days) sounds as if the Democratic National Committee could have written it.

Leftists are so avid to regain power and never lose it again that they’ve departed unapologetically even from any pretense of caring about the “democracy” they profess to be saving. Their idea of saving it is to murder their principal opponent, Trump, arrest his supporters (as several leftists have vowed to do once they’re back in power), and ensure that no dissent from their positions will be tolerated.

The Biden regime moved in a totalitarian direction, even as Old Joe was reading off his teleprompter about how “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” The Biden regime announced a Disinformation Governance Board that would have policed speech that dissented from the leftist establishment’s perspective, although that initiative crashed and burned when angry patriots reminded the Biden regime top dogs about that pesky thing known as the First Amendment. The Biden regime also sicced the FBI on angry parents protesting at school board meetings, worked with Twitter and other social media giants to silence and deplatform people with opposing views, and even sent spies into Catholic churches.

David Horowitz saw all this coming with a certainty and clarity that leftists wish they had for the alleged coming victory of their “progressive” (and in reality, confiscatory and authoritarian) policies. In his 2021 book The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America, he warned that “the apparatus of a totalitarian tyranny already exists for a party willing to use it to acquire and keep the reins of power.” And there is no doubt whatsoever that if the Democrats regain control of Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028, they will use that apparatus against patriots and begin in earnest the work of constructing a totalitarian socialist state.

David Horowitz spent decades after his conversion from socialism to patriotism fighting to ensure that such a final victory for “progressivism” would never come, and that “progressivism” itself would be unmasked in the minds of as many Americans as possible as a system that would, behind its lofty rhetoric of “justice” and “equity,” make American citizens nothing more than slaves of the state.

In an age when “progressives” dominated the political and cultural intelligentsia of the West, this made David Horowitz one of the great prophetic voices of the age, piercing through the fog of the left’s fashionable lies and calling the nation back to a sounder, saner societal course. He was never deterred, even though many lean years.

It’s hard to believe now, as Trump continues to do battle against the totalitarian forces in his second term, but during the Obama years and even to some extent during the Biden period of clownish autopen misrule, there were times when the left’s final victory seemed as inevitable as the “progressives” proclaimed it to be. Patriots were deplatformed, silenced and marginalized at a word from the Southern Poverty Law Center, and people were compelled (in true Orwellian “2+2=5” fashion) to choose between professional ruin and their knowledge that men couldn’t become women and vice versa, and that a host of other cherished leftist beliefs weren’t true, either.

Now, the “progressive” victory is by no means assured. The hitherto unassailable SPLC itself has been dealt a severe blow, and had already lost a great deal of its credibility among people who aren’t leftist fanatics. Trump has dealt the leftist money machine and propaganda machine a series of severe blows, especially with the gutting of USAID.

Yet as pivotal as Trump’s work has been and still is, much of the good he has done would not have been done if David Horowitz hadn’t paved the way for a presidency of the kind we are enjoying now. His cheerfully combative refusal to be cowed in the face of the left was virtually unprecedented and unique in its day, and foreshadowed the advent of Trump the politician. His determination to uphold and defend American values even when the whole world was calling them antiquated or worse (including the kiss of death, “racist”) heralded the coming of a new crop of patriots who find the left far less intimidating than their predecessors did.

David Horowitz labored, and we are now enjoying the fruits of his labors. He opened doors, and numerous patriots are now walking through. We shall not see the likes of him again, and are the poorer for it. But because he lived and labored, our nation and the world are incomparably richer. May his memory be eternal.

Previous article in the series:

Why David Horowitz is More Relevant Than Ever. – By Daniel Greenfield.