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 me a 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.
One year ago, David Horowitz succumbed to his 25-year battle with cancer. He however never succumbed to his 40-year battle against the left that he was convinced was killing America.
It still is.
The Trump reforms for the first time showed that a conservative president and administration could do what Horowitz had been calling for all these years: unapologetically fight back. The Trump administration was the culmination of the hard work of the warriors, like Stephen Miller and Charlie Kirk, whom David Horowitz had mentored over the years, of the conservative connections that happened every year at the Center’s Restoration Weekends (the next one is coming in November) where relationships were built that redefined the conservative movement.
But the fight’s not over. Far from it.
The Left was never going to give up and go home. The Trump era was the moment that it realized that it could expect an actual opposition, not just Romneys and McCains, good losers, but the movement that butchered millions in the USSR, China and around the world isn’t done.
David Horowitz often said that when he became a conservative, he had joined the losing side. His mission was teaching the losing side how to win. Now it’s actually happening.
But part of the fight is being able to carry on a ‘long march’ to take back America.
The midterms may come with a reversal. David had formally become a conservative with Reagan, only to endure and build an army of conservative warriors in the Clinton and Obama eras. He knew how to keep on fighting even when the outlook seemed grim.
That’s because David Horowitz never stopped being a revolutionary. Setbacks didn’t overwhelm him. They energized him. The bigger the fight, the more enthusiastic he became. Whether it was fighting leftism or cancer, he never gave up until the last minute, and he survived and thrived longer than most people could have managed when facing those same terrible odds.
David’s endurance is a reminder that we can fight harder, longer and better than we think.
How do we do it? Bracing truths and bare knuckle tactics. As a true revolutionary, David Horowitz found being the underdog to be liberating. Power creates opportunities, but also imposes restrictions. The Freedom Center didn’t build its power through huge D.C. offices (we originated in a California garage and started sending out a newsletter to D.C. and while we’ve moved on from the garage, our offices are still small and far from the centers of power) or massive operations, but by being willing to say the things no one else would put out there.
That’s what David always did. The Trump era perfectly mirrors his confrontational style.
But the movement is more than one man, either David or Donald, it’s about what we learn from them. And we’re not done learning yet. Every time we’ve gone into the wilderness, the conservative movement has come back stronger, more determined and with a clearer vision of victory.
Most conservatives still don’t see it that way, agonizing over the horrors of the Clinton and Obama years, while forgetting the milquetoast Republicans who dominated the party before the Democrats became radicalized. The Republicans, before the Reagan era and Horowitz, would have slowly allowed leftists to take over and digest the country from within while doing nothing. They would (and did) sign off on amnesty, on mass migration, on every leftist scheme, as long as it didn’t affect their taxes, and would have maintained a bipartisan coalition for ending America.
David Horowitz used the organization that eventually became the Freedom Center to go out there, to provoke liberals and leftists and to prod conservatives, fearlessly and unapologetically, creating confrontations that forced leftists to show their true faces and forced conservatives to wake up and start fighting. The Obama years took the David Horowitz Freedom Center to a new level as growing numbers of conservatives started to realize how bad the situation really was.
The current incarnation of leftists is nakedly worse, more horrifyingly obvious, than they have ever been before. The most nightmarish radicalism of the seventies has become the mainstream position of a party where cheering on domestic and international terrorism is the new normal, where advocating for a total seizure of power and the massacre of political opponents is considered a populist position, and which has completely endorsed socialism.
The mask is more off than it ever was before. And that’s a good thing.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has never had any part in the weak sister conservatism pleading with leftists to behave better. We want them to show everyone exactly what they are.
The times ahead will be dark and ugly. In the face of what will come, some conservatives will falter and fall apart. Others will vanish into social media echo chambers full of cranks.
But we will come out of them stronger than ever.
David Horowitz said many times that he didn’t set out to build a ‘think tank’, but a battle tank. We’re a fighting machine. And when we lose valued mentors, founders and fellow warriors, we mourn them, and we go on fighting in their name.
Not all that long ago, I watched Charlie Kirk speak at David’s memorial service. And not all that long ago, we lost Charlie too. We will lose others too, some to the ravages of time and others to leftist terror. We will be hounded, harassed and persecuted, just as we’ve been for the past six years by the government, but we will fight on and we will live to see the downfall of leftists as we now see the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center which had long tried to destroy us.
In death, David Horowitz is more relevant than ever because his spirit infuses a fighting movement and a fighting organization. Mainstream Republicans are terrified of the midterms. And they ought to be. Too many of them stand for nothing and will fall easily. But we’re not a PAC or a political operation. We are here to carry on David’s war against the Left.
We are here to expose the enemy. To provoke it. To confront it at every turn. To speak truth about it no matter the consequences. And to show how it can be defeated and destroyed.
David Horowitz wasn’t waging a political campaign, he was fighting a revolution. And in the months and years ahead, we must all become revolutionaries too.
Previous article in the series:
It’s Clearer Than Ever: David Horowitz Was Right All Along. -by Robert Spencer.
In order to eliminate spam comments that have historically flooded our comments section, comments containing certain keywords will be held in a moderation queue. All comments by legitimate commenters will be manually approved by a member of our team. If your comment is “Awaiting Moderation,” please give us up to 24 hours to manually approve your comment. Please do not re-post the same comment.
