Democrat’s Radical Frontrunner For 2028 Is A Nightmare Hiding In Plain Sight
She has all the unwritten qualifications for a progressive nominee, too: non-male, non-white, adept at lapsing into the accent of the constituency of the day
Want a recession? Kill this business deduction and wait
When President Donald Trump returned to office in January, nearly everyone in his circle agreed on the top priority: renewing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Without action, a crushing 22% tax hike looms, threatening to undo the economic gains of the past decade.
Extending the tax reform would also give businesses and investors the long-term stability they need to plan, expand, and hire.
Repealing the C-SALT deduction would hammer small businesses — the backbone of the American economy.
Instead, the administration has sent mixed signals. Daily shifts in tariff policy have rattled markets and injected uncertainty into every sector of the economy. Investors are jittery. Business leaders are holding back. And analysts are already warning of a potential recession.
These mistakes make it even more important to switch the focus to the tax package. The Trump administration should stop talking about tariffs and focus, along with Congress, on stabilizing markets and laying the foundation for economic growth by getting taxes down.
C-SALT: A conservative’s dream
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act delivered everything conservatives had long demanded: 100% expensing for business property, a 21% corporate income tax rate, and a child tax credit that rewarded work. It stood as the defining achievement of Trump’s first term. Making it permanent could help revive the pre-COVID economic boom.
But lawmakers must resist the temptation to gut the law’s pro-growth provisions to fund unrelated priorities. That includes rejecting the misguided push to repeal or limit the corporate state and local tax deduction, known as C-SALT.
Debates about the individual SALT deduction cap have dominated headlines in Washington. Some reforms to that cap may make sense. But individual SALT and C-SALT are not the same issue, and they shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable.
C-SALT promotes growth by preventing double taxation on businesses. It lets employers reinvest earnings, stay competitive, and create jobs. Rolling it back would hit business owners hard, slow hiring, and weaken America’s edge in the global economy.
Policy groups like Americans for Tax Reform and the Tax Foundation agree: Gutting C-SALT would put long-term growth at risk — and betray the core economic agenda that fueled Trump’s first-term success.
For businesses, state and local taxes are an operating expense. If businesses lose the ability to deduct these taxes, they will be paying taxes on taxes.
Small businesses pay the price
Repealing the C-SALT deduction would hammer small businesses — the backbone of the American economy. Many already struggle under heavy corporate, state, and local tax burdens, especially in rural and Republican-leaning states. Removing this deduction would force them to shoulder a disproportionate share of the pain.
No serious conservative case exists for eliminating or capping the C-SALT deduction. Some Republicans seem confused, conflating C-SALT with the personal SALT deduction, which overwhelmingly benefits wealthy taxpayers in high-tax blue states. But they are not the same. As the Tax Foundation notes, capping C-SALT won’t “reduce distortive tax benefits or enhance state competition” the way a cap on the personal SALT deduction might — because corporate and individual tax systems function differently.
In 2023, American businesses paid nearly $1.1 trillion in state and local taxes. Stripping away their ability to deduct those taxes from federal corporate income tax amounts to a massive tax hike — potentially hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
That kind of tax increase would erase much of the economic progress since the 2017 tax law was passed. It would punish the very job creators conservatives claim to champion.
Lawmakers in Congress — especially Republicans who support free enterprise and pro-growth tax reform that spurs economic growth — should focus on restoring and making permanent the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s tax cuts without jeopardizing the benefits that the C-SALT deduction provides for American businesses of all sizes.
Rule by the people? Not anymore in the Western world
On Friday, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency officially labeled Alternative for Germany — the country’s most popular conservative party — as a “right-wing extremist” organization. The nationalist party surged to second place in February’s federal election, winning 20.8% of the vote. This new designation grants the ruling government expanded powers to surveil Alternative for Germany leaders and supporters and sets the stage for an outright ban.
Germany has now joined a growing list of Western governments that delay elections, disqualify candidates, and ban opposition parties — all in the name of defending democracy.
Democracy has become a marketing slogan — useful for justifying war and globalist expansion, but disposable when it interferes with ruling-class priorities.
To call Germany’s relationship with authoritarianism “complicated” understates the case. The country’s historical memory fixates on Nazism as the ultimate expression of right-wing extremism and mass atrocity. But that singular focus conveniently ignores the fact that the Soviet Union, which helped defeat the Third Reich, imposed its own brutal regime across East Germany until the Berlin Wall fell.
Modern Germany has seen tyranny from both the far right and the far left. Yet its national identity now orbits entirely around a rejection of right-wing politics. Anti-fascism has become something like a state religion. But when a country builds its identity on shame and self-repudiation, it risks cultural collapse. We’ve seen the same pathology infect America, where elite institutions push a national narrative defined entirely by slavery and racial guilt.
Every nation has dark chapters. A mature society learns from them. It doesn’t define itself by them forever.
While German history explains some of its deep aversion to nationalism, the trend of suppressing populist movements in the name of democracy has spread far beyond Berlin.
Brazil’s Supreme Court banned former President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking office until 2030. Romania’s Constitutional Court voided its 2024 election, citing supposed Russian influence in the rise of populist candidate Călin Georgescu. And in the United States, courts came dangerously close to removing Donald Trump from the ballot — while the president now fights legal battles over whether he can exercise executive power at all under Article II of the Constitution.
This isn’t democracy defending itself. It’s ruling elites trying to outlaw their opposition.
Western elites justify their dominance by invoking democracy and individual liberty. That wasn’t always the case. The West once called itself Christendom — a civilizational identity grounded in faith, tradition, and truth. But it abandoned that foundation in favor of secular platitudes.
The United States has waged entire wars in the name of exporting democracy to places like Iraq and Afghanistan — nations that never wanted it and were never going to keep it. These projects were doomed from the start. Yet at least they wrapped American power in the language of benevolence.
Today, even that fig leaf has disappeared.
The modern West treats democracy as a branding exercise, not a principle. Leaders like Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and Keir Starmer love lecturing the world about “liberal norms,” even as they jail political dissidents, censor speech, and turn domestic intelligence services against their own citizens. They condemn Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism while staying silent as NATO allies crush dissent at home.
Democracy has become a marketing slogan — useful for justifying war and globalist expansion, but disposable when it interferes with ruling-class priorities.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both slammed the German government for labeling Alternative for Germany as extremist. On social media, Rubio went further, blaming Germany’s open-border policies for the Alternative for Germany rise and calling the state’s surveillance powers tyranny in disguise.
Germany’s Foreign Office issued a formal reply, insisting the decision stemmed from an “independent” and “thorough” investigation.
The claim is absurd on its face.
No government can “independently” investigate and condemn its most prominent political opposition — especially not when the accusation is “extremism,” a term that now means little more than holding views the ruling class finds inconvenient.
I’ve made no secret of my dislike of modern mass democracy. But the original concept, at least, had merit. Democracy once meant rule by the demos — the people of a particular nation, rooted in shared history, culture, and civic identity. Its legitimacy came not from procedure or process but from the bonds between citizens and their country.
Today’s ruling class has twisted that definition beyond recognition. As I’ve written before, globalist elites now use the word “democracy” to describe a system governed by unaccountable institutions they alone control. Populism, they say, is dangerous. Democracy, they insist, must be preserved. But in practice, they oppose the popular will and protect only the process they’ve captured.
Elections have become sacraments — rituals that legitimize the rule of bureaucracies, not expressions of the people’s will. The process is sacred, not the outcome. That’s why Western politicians now speak of “our sacred democracy,” which must be defended not from tyranny, but from actual democratic movements.
Western leaders still try to justify their global power by invoking freedom and liberty. But their credibility has collapsed. It’s farcical to hear men like Justin Trudeau or Keir Starmer preach about “shared Western values” while jailing political opponents and silencing dissent at home.
The moral authority of liberal democracy is crumbling. And the cause isn’t Putin or China. It’s Western leaders who’ve gutted the electoral process and replaced it with rule by managerial elites.
The Trump administration should continue to expose this hypocrisy. But it also must act. That means offering political asylum to dissidents facing persecution in places like Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Americans rightly recoil at repression in Russia. They should feel the same revulsion when it comes from our “allies” in Berlin, Ottawa, or London.
Trump’s DC prosecutor pick blocked by a Senate saboteur
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) is actively sabotaging President Donald Trump’s pick for Washington, D.C.’s top prosecutor, derailing the hard work to restore safety, law, and order to the capital city — and also threatening to upend the president’s ultimate (and more important) legislative agenda.
Ed Martin currently serves as acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and has been nominated to keep the job permanently. In just a few months, he’s begun dismantling the political weaponization of the office that flourished under his predecessor, Matthew Graves.
This fight is bigger than Ed Martin. If not handled correctly, it all threatens to bleed over into the far more important budget reconciliation battle.
Graves spent four years refusing to prosecute 67% of arrests in Washington, D.C. Even felony arrests rarely led to charges. If police arrested you for a serious crime, your odds of walking free were better than your chances of facing trial. When Graves did take action, he often downgraded charges — reducing assaults on police officers to simple misdemeanors. Meanwhile, he directed his office’s full attention toward prosecuting rioters, trespassers, and innocent bystanders caught up in the Jan. 6 chaos.
Under his leadership, D.C. became one of the most violent and lawless major cities in America.
Republicans barely put up a fight when Graves was nominated. The Judiciary Committee approved him by voice vote. The Senate confirmed him the same way.
Now compare that to Martin.
In his first three and a half months, Martin flipped those numbers, prosecuting 65% of all arrests in the D.C. His efforts didn’t stop at charging criminals. He also demoted and fired the partisan loyalists who turned the office into a political operation over the past four years. CNN and the New York Times have responded with their standard meltdowns — a reliable sign that he's doing something right.
Tillis doesn’t see it that way. He especially opposes Martin’s reforms related to Jan. 6 prosecutions and has made it his mission to stop the nomination.
This showdown didn’t happen by accident. Martin can serve as acting U.S. attorney for only 120 days. To avoid a lapse, the Senate Judiciary Committee needed to advance his nomination by Monday. Trump made calls and publicly reaffirmed his support. But the committee still didn’t move.
Why?
Because Tillis — no stranger to obstructing conservative priorities — vowed to oppose Martin. And he didn’t stop there. The Beltway Brief has learned that Tillis has been actively whipping fellow Republicans to sink the nomination. He’s likely targeting senators such as Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Curtis of Utah, and Todd Young of Indiana.
Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a conservative but also a Senate institutionalist, wants to avoid a messy intraparty fight — even behind closed doors.
This nomination battle has become a litmus test.
On one side stand Trump and his base, who’ve rallied behind Martin. On the other side are Tillis and the Republicans, who’d rather side with Beltway politics than back the president. The moment reveals who’s really prepared to obstruct the White House’s agenda over the next four years — and who’s just pretending to govern.
“This is far from over,” Oversight Project founder and Martin ally Mike Howell promised Tuesday morning.
The fight has put the White House in a brutal bind. The president backs Martin, and making D.C. a clean and safe city once again is one of his top priorities, but Martin’s confirmation is far from the most important objective his administration is working to achieve.
The administration’s number-one goal is passing the budget, which would fund and power Trump’s agenda and the U.S. economy through tax cuts, deportations, border enforcement, new energy policies, etc. The last thing his Office of Legislative Affairs needs is a battle with Republican senators — even the squishy ones more eager to fight conservatives than Democrats.
Tillis is apparently counting on this reality. He knows the White House needs his vote on the budget, so he feels empowered here, as well. His goal for his own political future is less clear. He was already censured by his state GOP two years ago and faces party voters in a primary contest a short 10 months from now. Even if he’s expecting his state, which Trump carried by three points in 2024, to shift purple in the coming years, Tillis needs to survive a primary. Though, by all insider accounts, his dislike of Martin runs more on personal animus than calculated politics.
If Tillis refuses to budge even under White House pressure, he’ll leave the president with just three real options.
Option 1 is surrender to Tillis, drop Martin, and nominate some Federalist Society-approved Republican who won’t cause any trouble. This is an ugly path and essentially admits that Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) run the committee with Republican help. More: It wouldn’t contribute remotely as much to cleaning up Washington.
Option 2 would be to nominate a placeholder and let Martin run the show from behind the scenes. This is still an ugly option, but it has its merits.
Option 3 is for Trump to say he’ll let Tillis block the nomination and say he’ll allow anti-Trump Judge James Boasberg to appoint the next U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, then see if Tillis has the guts to take it that far. This sort of brinksmanship comes with obvious risks for Trump, the capital, and Tillis himself.
This fight is bigger than Ed Martin. The base is activated, the talk-show hosts and writers are cranking away, and, if not handled correctly, it all threatens to bleed over into the far more important budget reconciliation battle.
But this fight can be useful, too. It’s best to know your opponents early and engage them if necessary. They’re not planning on fading away on their own.
Blaze News: Republican senator turns against key Trump nominee, potentially empowering activist Judge Boasberg
Blaze News: Reconciliation or capitulation: Trump’s final go-for-broke play
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America needs prudent power, not globalist delusions
In the first major shake-up of Trump’s second term, Michael Waltz has been removed as national security adviser. The White House gave no explanation, but sources say Waltz drew fire for adding Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, to a Signal chat with other national security officials about a recent U.S. strike on Houthi targets in Yemen.
But Waltz’s ouster likely runs deeper. It reflects a growing internal struggle over the direction of national security policy — a familiar pattern in American politics. From Hamilton’s Federalists to Jefferson’s Old Republicans, the fight over foreign policy priorities has shaped administrations since the founding.
Good strategy requires focus and discipline. The United States must prioritize its goals, not squander its power on open-ended crusades.
In a recent American Enterprise Institute essay, Hal Brands identified five competing foreign policy factions jockeying for influence under Trump. The two most influential camps are the “global hawks” and the “come home, America” bloc.
The Global Hawks — often dismissed as neocons — include Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They insist on maintaining U.S. primacy to preserve global security and stability. This faction champions aggressive containment of adversaries like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. It also defends long-standing U.S. alliances, though now under pressure to renegotiate the terms.
The other faction, often called the “disengagers,” frames U.S. strategy through the lens of “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their primary goal is to avoid further entanglements in the Middle East by scaling back U.S. military involvement. They also oppose military aid to Ukraine, citing the risk of escalation with Russia. Vice President JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard stand out as leading figures in this camp.
Brands identifies three additional factions: the “Asia firsters,” the “economic nationalists,” and the “MAGA hardliners.” The most consequential alliance may be the one forming between the “come home, America” bloc and the “MAGA hardliners.” That coalition threatens to upend decades of Republican foreign policy — to the country’s detriment.
Force without strategy
Since the Vietnam War, the GOP has generally stood for national security: strong defense, reliable alliances, and a forward-leaning military posture. President Trump largely embraced that tradition during his first term. His national security strategy took a clear stance, particularly on South Asia, replacing President Obama’s unfocused approach to Afghanistan with a more coherent plan.
Yet, as H.R. McMaster notes in his memoir “At War with Ourselves,” Trump often strayed from those principles. While many of his instincts were sound, he frequently abandoned them when challenged — or simply deferred to whoever had his ear last.
Some observers see Waltz’s ouster as a sign that the “come home, America” faction is gaining influence within the White House. That remains uncertain. But one thing is clear: Abandoning the traditional Republican defense posture would be a mistake.
The core issue isn’t military force itself — it’s the use of force without a coherent strategy rooted in defending U.S. interests. Too many in Washington treat national security as a tool for serving some imagined “international community.” That’s how the Obama-Biden team, and even George W. Bush, stumbled: They lacked prudence.
Prudence, as Aristotle defined it, is the political virtue essential to statesmanship. It’s the ability to match means to ends — to pursue what’s right with what works. In foreign policy, that means setting clear objectives and taking deliberate action to apply power, influence, and, when needed, force.
Return to what works
Since the 1990s, U.S. foreign policy has often shown hubris rather than prudence. Clinton, Obama, and now Biden have placed their faith in global institutions, believing U.S. power exists to uphold abstract international norms. Their goal has been to build a “global good” — a corporatist globalism detached from national interest and patriotism.
These Democratic administrations have repeatedly failed to distinguish allies from adversaries. Nowhere was this clearer than in Obama’s tilt toward Iran, which came at the expense of both Israel and Sunni Arab states. Biden has doubled down with his disgraceful treatment of Israel, undermining one of our closest allies while appeasing their enemies.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush pursued his own misguided vision — an effort to remake the Middle East in America’s liberal image through force. That project collapsed under the weight of religious conflict and tribalism in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while Washington obsessed over exporting democracy, China quietly rose — unfazed, unchecked, and happy to let us believe it would someday play by our rules.
The best way to secure America’s liberty, safety, and prosperity is to return to a strategy that resembles the one that won the Cold War — one that brought the Soviet Union to collapse and elevated the United States to unmatched global power.
Ronald Reagan summed it up in three words: peace through strength.
I call it prudent American realism. This approach blends principle with power. It recognizes that the internal nature of regimes matters. Thucydides understood this over 2,000 years ago. In “The Peloponnesian War,” he noted that both Athens and Sparta sought to promote regimes that mirrored their own values — democracies for Athens, oligarchies for Sparta.
The lesson? A nation is safer and more stable when it is surrounded by allies that share its principles and interests.
Two sides of the same coin
Prudence also demands restraint. While regime type matters, trying to spread democracy everywhere is a fool’s errand — one the Bush administration disastrously pursued after 9/11.
Resources are limited. Good strategy requires focus and discipline. The United States must prioritize its goals, not squander its power on open-ended crusades abroad.
Reagan’s foreign policy understood a timeless truth: Diplomacy and force go hand in hand. Too often, American policymakers — steeped in the fantasies of liberal internationalism — act as if diplomacy alone can achieve strategic goals. But as Frederick the Great put it, “Diplomacy without force is like music without instruments.”
A sound U.S. strategy treats diplomacy and force as two sides of the same coin.
President Trump should follow Reagan’s lead. That means maintaining a forward defense posture with the support of reliable allies, projecting strength through presence, and defending freedom of navigation around the globe.
Strategically, the goal must be clear: Preserve the U.S. maritime alliance that defends the “rimlands” of Eurasia — a term coined by Nicholas Spykman. This system exists to contain any aspiring hegemon, whether it’s Russia or China.
This approach has served the nation well before. Trump should carry its lessons forward.
The abortion pill crisis Big Pharma doesn’t want you to see
A bombshell new study has found that women are suffering serious harm from chemical abortions at a rate 22 times higher than what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or abortion pill manufacturers are reporting to patients.
The federal government must step in now to protect women. It can no longer shirk its responsibility by “leaving it up to the states.”
If a drug is this dangerous, Big Pharma should not be allowed to hide its risks from women.
The study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which analyzed insurance claims of 330 million U.S. patients and over 850,000 cases of mifepristone abortions since 2017, is the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on the effects of America’s most common chemical abortion drug.
The numbers don’t lie
While the FDA and abortion drug manufacturers tout serious side effects in only 0.5% of cases, actual insurance claims from patients reveal the number is much higher: Nearly one in nine women experience severe or life-threatening events within 45 days of taking mifepristone, including sepsis, hemorrhaging, blood transfusion, infection, and surgeries tied directly to the abortion drug.
Nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States are now chemical, according to the Planned Parenthood-founded Guttmacher Institute, suggesting that hundreds of thousands of women over the past 10 years have suffered serious complications. That is neither “rare” nor “safe” by any definition.
By contrast, according to the EPPC, the federal government’s claims of the drug’s “safety” rely on small, outdated trials — some conducted over 40 years ago — on a combined total of only 31,000 mostly healthy women in doctor-controlled environments.
In real-world environments, however, the abortion drug has proven significantly more dangerous.
The EPPC study found 10.93% of women suffered significant harm from taking the drug. What other FDA-approved drug would remain on the market with such a high rate of serious adverse events?
No state is safe
In light of this data, the federal government can no longer justify the lifting of oversight protocols for the abortion drug. Under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, critical safety measures — such as in-person supervision by a doctor and adverse event reporting — were eliminated. These federal safeguards must be restored, and the drug’s safety and FDA approval must be re-evaluated.
This is not a mere “states issue.” Abortion drugs are often shipped across state lines without a doctor’s involvement. Pro-abortion states like California should not be allowed to pump this dangerous drug into Texas or other states that have enacted reasonable protections for women and their babies.
The leaders we send to Washington, D.C., cannot hide behind federalism on this issue under the guise of “leaving it up to the states.” If just one aggressively pro-abortion state is allowed to ship abortion pills nationwide, women across all 50 states remain at risk — even if the other 49 state legislatures vote to protect them.
Women deserve the truth
Regardless of opinions on abortion, all Americans should agree on this: Women have a right to accurate information about the drugs they take. If a drug is this dangerous, Big Pharma should not be allowed to hide its risks from women. And the FDA cannot turn a blind eye, becoming complicit in a cover-up.
We must demand that the FDA take action. I’ve joined with dozens of pro-family leaders nationwide in writing a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to act. The letter reads, in part:
All the original safety protocols on mifepristone must be restored, and the FDA must investigate mifepristone, reconsidering its approval altogether. The lives of women and unborn children and the rights of states depend on it.
Furthermore, here in Iowa — home of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus — we are committed to making safeguarding women from the dangers of mifepristone an issue for any candidate who seeks to follow President Trump in the White House. We urge voters to ask the same of any of their candidates: If you seek federal office, will you insist on seeing the safeguarding of women as a federal issue?
The revolutionary who switched sides — and never wavered
David Horowitz, the ex-radical firebrand who spent the last 40 years of his life exposing the left’s lies, hypocrisies, and crimes, died on April 29 after a long battle with cancer. He was 86.
A former Marxist intellectual and New Left insider who became one of the most prolific and pugilistic conservative writers of his time, Horowitz was many things: essayist, agitator, memoirist, mentor, and iconoclast. But above all, he was a political street fighter of the first order. He saw himself on a battlefield of ideas — and he had no interest in compromise.
Horowitz spent the second half of his life warning Americans about the first half. And he never, ever backed down.
He was also my first boss.
Born in Forest Hills, New York, in 1939 to Communist Party members, Horowitz was steeped in ideological certainty from the cradle. He earned degrees at Columbia and UC Berkeley, gravitated toward literary criticism, and helped lead the radical journal Ramparts in the 1960s. By the early ’70s, he was deep in the orbit of the Black Panthers, whose criminality and murder of Horowitz’s friend Betty Van Patter all but obliterated his faith in the left.
That trauma marked the turning point and the beginning of a long journey rightward. He completed his break from his old comrades in 1985, when he and his longtime friend and collaborator Peter Collier published a scorching essay in the Washington Post Magazine with the cheeky title “Lefties for Reagan.”
“One of the few saving graces of age is a deeper perspective on the passions of youth,” they wrote. “Looking back on the left’s revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years, we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: that we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse — much worse. This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime’s experience, it seems about right.”
Horowitz would later write in his autobiography that his “moral conscience could no longer be reconciled with the lies of the Left.” If it could kill and lie and justify it all in the name of justice, what the hell kind of justice was it?
Horowitz’s political evolution was more than a turn — it was a total break. And once broken, he threw himself into the cause of exposing the radicalism, corruption, and totalitarian impulses of his former comrades. He brought to the right a kind of inside knowledge and rhetorical ferocity that few others could match.
In the late 1980s, he and Collier (who died in 2019) launched the Center for the Study of Popular Culture — originally just a room in Horowitz’s house in the San Fernando Valley. “The name identified its focus,” Horowitz wrote, “but also made it harder for the Left to attack.” It wasn’t a think tank like Heritage or Cato. “Our combative temperament was hardly suited to policy analysis,” he admitted. The CSPC would become the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 1998 — what Horowitz proudly called a “battle tank.”
I started working there in 1994, fresh out of college. David and Peter gave me my first real job. I wasn’t there long — only a couple of years — but the lessons stuck. When I gave notice to join the Claremont Institute, Peter warned me: “I certainly wish you luck. I don’t think David will take the news very well, though.” Oh, boy, was he right.
“JESUS CHRIST! HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME?” was David’s immediate, explosive reaction. Such outbursts were legendary in the office — others had gotten the same treatment — but after a talk, he settled down. I finished my two weeks, and he shook my hand and wished me well as I left.
It took me a while to understand his wild response. But as he admitted in “Radical Son,” he had “a strain of loyalty in me” and “an inability to let go of something I had committed myself to.” That loyalty was fierce. And once you were in David’s circle — whether as comrade or colleague — he expected you to stay. Nothing mattered but the cause. “I would not run when things got tough,” he wrote of his hesitation to break from the Panthers. It was personal for him, always.
Peter once described his friend to me as “four-fifths of a human being.” That was generous on some days. Horowitz could be cold, irascible, and prone to volcanic rage. But he also had a great heart, one which bore scars from a lifetime of tragedy and regret. One of his most affecting books is “A Cracking of the Heart,” the 2009 memoir of his rocky relationship with his daughter Sarah, a gifted writer in her own right, who died suddenly in 2008 at the age of 44. It’s the reflection of a fully formed human being.
I was proud to publish David’s work years later. It always tickled me when he pitched articles — my old boss, pitching me — but I was pleased to publish them out of gratitude for the start he and Peter gave me.
While David became famous for his political transformation, in some ways he never changed. “You can take the boy out of the left,” one wag quipped, “but you can’t take the left out of the boy.” Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, David’s son, put it even more precisely: “While David became known for his change in views, in a sense he never changed at all.” His method of ideological engagement — fierce, unrelenting, totalizing, moralistic — remained constant. Once an ideologue, always an ideologue.
And thank God for that.
David launched and encouraged the careers of many others, including Donald Trump’s domestic adviser Stephen Miller and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. His Freedom Center helped shape the new generation of conservative activists — and sharpened the right’s sense of urgency and resolve. Though he often complained that Republicans lacked the stomach to fight, he lived long enough to see another political pugilist from Queens take and retake the Oval Office.
His nine-volume “The Black Book of the American Left” was arguably his life’s last great project, modeled in part on “The Black Book of Communism.” Where others flinched or equivocated, Horowitz named the threat. The left wasn’t simply wrong — it was dangerous, deceitful, and, at its root, totalitarian.
David Horowitz is survived by his wife, April, four children, and several grandchildren.
He spent the second half of his life warning Americans about the first half. And he never, ever backed down.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at Chronicles Magazine.
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