Right Web

PRA's Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.

David Horowitz is a vocal member of the far right whose rhetoric often exceeds that of the neoconservatives. He is known for his comments on the so-called culture war and the perceived discrimination against conservatives on U.S. college campuses; his views are frequently published on conservative websites like FrontPage Magazine (of which he is editor) and NewsMax. A vociferous proponent of an expansive "war on terror," Horowitz has actively championed the idea that "Islamo-fascism" is the next great evil confronting America, designating October 22-26, 2007, as "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" to "break through the barrier of politically correct doublespeak that prevails on American campuses [and support those] who are fighting the Islamo-Fascists abroad" (quoted in Maureen Dowd, "Rudy Roughs Up Arabs," New York Times, October 17, 2007).

Horowitz, like many neoconservatives, began his journey to the right from the far left. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, he studied at Columbia University and University of California-Berkeley, where he became an outspoken proponent of radical Marxism and the "New Left" (David Horowitz Profile, Media Transparency). After a period in the 1960s serving as Bertrand Russell's political aid, Horowitz wrote several books, including The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, which attempted to examine the origin of the Cold War and define the conflict through the lens of the New Left.

Horowitz's political and social beliefs began to change in December 1974, after Horowitz's friend Betty Van Patter, a bookkeeper for the Black Panthers, was killed. Horowitz had lent support and legal assistance to Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton and had recruited Van Patter for the bookkeeping job. Although the case remains unsolved, Horowitz contends that she was killed by the Panthers to prevent her from disclosing financial corruption ("Who Killed Betty Van Patter?" Salon.com, December 13, 1999). He subsequently came to revile the left, which he felt had protected the Panthers from being brought to justice.

The mid-1970s also brought the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, both of which disillusioned Horowitz with the left's seeming disinterest in human rights and unquestioning attitude toward communist regimes. Horowitz "came out" as a member of the right in the 1980s with the "Second Thought" project, a joint endeavor with Peter Collier that culminated in a 1987 conference in Washington, DC and a coauthored book, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (1989). Horowitz's shift to the right and his reflections on the left were documented again in his 1996 book Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

By the late 1980s, Horowitz and Collier were being feted by Republican Party elites. In 1988 they reportedly wrote speeches for Bob Dole, and dined with Ronald Reagan, William Bennett, and Newt Gingrich ("David Horowitz's Long March," Nation, July 3, 2000.)

Horowitz set his targets on what he perceived as the left-leaning bias of baby-boomer academics and the supposed discrimination faced by conservative students at the university level. His medium was Heterodoxy magazine (now defunct), which he founded in 1992 with Collier. Horowitz's articles detailed his socially conservative views, including his opposition to affirmative action policies.

"It could have been an intellectual journal," Collier wrote in a note heralding the online republication in 2005 of all Heterodoxy back issues on FrontPageMag.com. "But it occurred to us that those of us who opposed this new treason of the clerks were in a position similar to the one we had been in [during] the early 60s—a counter culture fighting against an establishment. (Except that in the historical turning of the tables this ruling elite was now leftist with a deconstructive agenda.) And our publication should therefore resemble the counter cultural underground papers of our wicked youth—irreverent and provocative and willing to enter the house of power and rearrange its furniture" ("Heterodoxy Lives!" FrontPageMag.com, August 26, 2005).

During the 2000s, Horowitz has continued to focus his efforts on academia and on what he perceives as the imposition of liberal ideas on students.

The publication of Horowitz's 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, caused a commotion in academia when it purported to reveal the "most dangerous" professors on U.S. campuses, with danger apparently being defined as something along the lines of very liberal or very nonconservative-leaning.

In a scathing review published in the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) journal Academe, AAUP President Cary Nelson wrote: "The well-funded industry that is David Horowitz would like the book's biased, shoddy imitation of scholarship to enter the national consciousness as doxa. ... Like right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh on the air or right-wing cultural critic Ann Coulter in print, Horowitz preaches to the converted. They come to have their convictions not only reinforced but applauded. Horowitz is the claque, celebrating those who agree with him. That said, The Professors is certainly one of the most depressing books I have ever tried to read. That such unbridled malice toward progressive faculty exists in the world is depressing enough, but the shallow, casual, purely opportunistic character of what it offers as scholarship may be still more disheartening" (Academe, November/December 2006).

Apparently in reaction to the publication of The Professors, several groups came together to form the Free Exchange on Campus, "to protect the free exchange of speech and ideas on campus." Comprised of well-respected entities such as the ACLU, the AAUP, the American Library Association, American Federation of Teachers, and others, the coalition released a press release condemning Horowitz's book, criticizing it on several levels. One example: "University of Illinois communications professor Robert McChesney, whose students have selected him as an award-winning instructor, comes under attack by Horowitz for raising questions about the news media, its corporate ownership, and what effect that has on news coverage. 

"Said McChesney, 'They used two quotations from my two decade-long career as a teacher as evidence that I somehow use the classroom as a bully pulpit to push liberal causes. This is as illogical as taking two paragraphs from a conservative faculty member and concluding that they propagandize exclusively for conservative ideologies'" (Collegiate Presswire, February 14, 2006).

Another of Horowitz's high-profile efforts has been the so-called Academic Bill of Rights. The "bill" is a project of Students for Academic Freedom (motto: "You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half the story"), which was founded by Horowitz and is affiliated with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which until July 2006 was called the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC).

"The bill's purposes are to codify that tradition; to emphasize the value of 'intellectual diversity,' already implicit in the concept of academic freedom; and, most important, to enumerate the rights of students to not be indoctrinated or otherwise assaulted by political propagandists in the classroom or any educational setting," Horowitz wrote ("In Defense of Academic Diversity," Chronicle of Higher Education , February 13, 2004).

The Horowitz Freedom Center publishes the online website FrontPage Magazine (FrontPageMag.com), which serves as a forum for Horowitz and others, including columnist Ann Coulter. Horowitz, editor-in-chief of the site, frequently posts to a blog on the site, devoting his space to such things as reprinting Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-CT) June 2007 defense of the Iraq War and calling President Jimmy Carter a " well-paid shill for the Saudis and rationalizer of Islamic Jew-hatred" (FrontPageMag.com, June 15, 2007 and June 10, 2007).

The center also publishes DiscoverTheNetworks.org, a website that says it " identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left's (often hidden) programmatic agendas and it provides an understanding of its history and ideas" (DiscoverTheNetworks.org).

On the analytical blog Crooked Timber, George Washington University political science professor Henry Farrell explained why he felt Horowitz and his ilk should be treated as politicians rather than as public intellectuals. "[Horowitz's] main line of attack is that of the standard political hack, concocting a farrago of innuendoes, half-truths, and out-and-out lies in order to beat down those whom he sees as his political opponents. However, when he's attacked in the same terms as those he himself engages in, he's perfectly happy to appeal to academic norms of reasoned debate in order to accuse his accusers of themselves being politicized," Farrell opined. "... Because Horowitz is able to use the low standards of political debate, while demanding that his intellectual opponents adhere to the high ones of academic argument, he wins either way. In order successfully to argue against him, it's necessary to recognize that the battle Horowitz is fighting is political rather than strictly academic. He's not acting as an academic interlocutor (some conservatives and other critics are, and they should be treated very differently). He's acting as a politician and looking to win political changes outside the academy that would radically reshape its internal practices" (Crooked Timber, June 11, 2007).

Horowitz has supported the Bush administration's foreign policy and the invasion of Iraq.

"Baghdad is liberated. In the days to come let us not forget that if it were not for one man, and one man alone—George Bush—the people of Iraq would not be celebrating in the streets and pulling down Saddam's statues today. ... We have entered the era of a new civil war between the forces of freedom and the powers of Islamo-fascist and communist darkness, and once again the left is clearly determined to take its stand on the other side. The good news is that America is back," Horowitz wrote on FrontPageMag.com in April 2003. "Our military has performed superlatively. Our leadership has stood tall. We ourselves can celebrate over this and look confidently toward what lies ahead" ("Liberation! Wankers Go Home," FrontPageMag.com, April 9, 2003).

In March, 2007 Horowitz's latest diatribe was published—Indoctrination U: The Left's War Against Academic Freedom. FrontPageMag.com naturally gushes over the book: "Horowitz unveils the intellectual corruption of our universities by faculty activists who have turned their classrooms into platforms for radical political causes. He shows how tenured radicals with little regard for professional standards or the pluralistic foundations of American society have created an ideological curriculum that subverts the purposes of a democratic education."

But others had a different take. "Indoctrination U is essentially a rehash of Horowitz's career in right-wing activism, calling out all the supposedly politically correct zealots who have wronged him since his conversion from radical left to hard right in the 1980s. Horowitz's ability to co-opt the language of oppression and turn a supposedly theoretical manifesto into his personal soapbox would put even the most emo slam poet on your campus to shame," wrote reviewer Amy Schiller ("Indoctrinating You?" CampusProgress.org, March 21, 2007).

In June 2006, Horowitz signed an open letter to President George W. Bush along with numerous other conservative figures that encouraged the "enforcement first" approach to immigration. " We are in the middle of a global war on terror. 2006 is not 1986. Today, we need proof that enforcement (both at the border and in the interior) is successful before anything else happens. As Ronald Reagan used to say 'trust, but verify,'" the letter stated. Organized by the Hudson Institute, the letter was signed by Bennett, Gingrich, Robert Bork, Daniel Pipes, David Frum, Frank Gaffney, Fred Ikle, and Phyllis Schlafly, among many others (National Review Online, June 19, 2006).

The David Horowitz Freedom Center paid Horowitz a salary of $352,647 in 2005 for his services as the center's president (David Horowitz Profile, Media Transparency). The Freedom Center has been largely supported by the Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin foundations. Each foundation consistently makes contributions in excess of $100,000 per year in order to assist in the operations and expenses of David Horowitz's projects (David Horowitz Profile, Media Transparency).