Background:
David Horowitz was born on January 10, 1939, in Forest Hills, N.Y., into a household of schoolteachers and Communist Party USA members. In his 1998 memoir Radical Son, recounting his life and departure from 1960s member of the New Left, Horowitz describes the political convictions of those around him.
Underneath the ordinary surfaces of their lives, my parents and their friends thought of themselves as secret agents. … Even if we never encountered a Soviet agent or engaged in a single illegal act, each of us knew that our commitment to socialism implied the obligation to commit treason, too.
Horowitz moved to London following the completion of his graduate degree and began work with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. Established in 1963, the Foundation sought focused on human rights, social justice and peace with a particular interest in the ending the nuclear arms race. He returned to the United States five years later in 1968, where he took work as co-editor at #Ramparts, a magazine associated with the New Left movement of liberal activists seeking to drastically reform the cultural landscape with a wide range of social reforms. #
By the 1970s, though, Horowitz had begun working with the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Calif., and formed a close relationship with the group’s co-founder, Huey P. Newton. Horowitz collected funds for the purchase of a Baptist church that was then converted into a learning center for children of members of the Black Panthers. But the relationship soon soured.
In 1974, Betty Van Patter, Horowitz’s friend and colleague at Ramparts who he brought into the Black Panther movement, was found dead on a San Francisco Bay beach. She had been severely beaten, and Horowitz was convinced members of the Panthers were involved.
Hugh Pearson, author of the Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in American, wrote in recounting Horowitz’s feelings: “Without question, David Horowitz was extremely traumatized by what happened with Betty Van Patter, as I think anyone would be. … As a result, David just totally went berserk with regard to the left-liberal community.”#
It isn’t an overstatement, in fact, to note that Van Patten’s death served as a grand catalyst for Horowitz’s quick departure from the radical left he helped found.
Increasingly disillusioned with his political course in life, the decades that followed would see Horowitz adopt increasingly right-wing positions on matters of sexual promiscuity in the gay community, LGBT rights, U.S. foreign policy, the question of racial equality and affirmative action and, in 1985, he publicly announced that he had voted for Ronald Reagan the year before.
In the essay published in The Washington Post titled “Goodbye to All That.” Horowitz and his writing partner Peter Collier –- both luminaries on the Left – came clean. “Casting our ballots for Ronald Reagan was indeed a way of saying goodbye to all that –– to the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt Third Worldism; to the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypocritical mainstream politics,” the pair wrote.
The essay was the beginning of a new course for Horowitz. Three years later, he founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) in Los Angeles, which sought to “establish a conservative presence in Hollywood and show how popular culture had become a political battleground.” Horowitz spent much of the 1990s securing financing for the CSPC while railing against “political correctness” in American universities.
In 1992, he began publishing the monthly tabloid “Heterodoxy,” which was “meant to have the feel of a samizdat publication inside the gulag of the PC [politically correct] university.” #The tabloid targeted university students who Horowitz viewed as being indoctrinated by the entrenched Left in American academia. Horowitz has maintained his assault on the political left to present day, and in 2005 established DiscoverTheNetworks.
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