Yesterday, on April 29, 2025, David Horowitz left this world—and we’re all much, much poorer for it. (The editors at Front Page Magazine paid him touching homage, which can be found here.)

Horowitz was an intellectual giant. He was gentle but brave, he was principled, and his devotion to freedom and his fellow man came at great personal expense; he gladly directed his God-given talents and treasure to be used not for personal gain, but for advancing the cause of freedom for others’ sake.

His legacy is one of magnificent mind and service, and he will always be remembered for it.

My first realization about the greatness of David Horowitz came in 2012 or 2013, while doing some of my undergraduate coursework at Portland State University. During this time, I was actually taking a history class from another David Horowitz—a completely unremarkable one—and this professor required that we read That Noble Dream by Peter Novick. I discovered in the footnotes the David Horowitz name, and at that time being only vaguely familiar with the remarkable Horowitz, I asked the professor if the footnote was referring to his own writing and research. He scoffed, thoroughly offended, and said no, “that David Horowitz is a total kook, having gone off the rails some time ago.”

(Here’s some irony for you: the Novick book was all about the “noble” pursuit of objectivity in the discipline of history—how’s that coming from a communist leftard who calls an accomplished academic an off-the-rails kook simply because he’s actually being objective?)

It was at this point that I realized the good Horowitz was somebody very, very special—considering that a progressive Portlander had a visceral distaste for the man—so I bought my first Horowitz book: “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left”. Now, while I don’t agree with the book in its entirety (to be fair, a lot of ugly truths have been revealed since it was published in 2004), it was my second realization that he was in fact, a national treasure of a man with great insight, understanding, and prescience.

If you’re familiar with the remarkable Horowitz, you’ll understand my old professor’s comment: Horowitz was a Marxist by birth, having been born into a politically active family that held to the (ostensible) ideals of communism. It was only into adulthood that Horowitz realized he’d been misled—so he spent the rest of his life, more than four decades, fighting for truth and morality. See the tribute to this remarkable man and the life he lived, from his eponymous Freedom Center:

On behalf of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, we are very saddened to announce the passing of the Center’s founder, David Horowitz. After a lengthy battle with cancer, David passed yesterday at the age of 86.

David Horowitz, 1939-2025. Requiescat in pace. pic.twitter.com/F47yooJL3K

— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) April 29, 2025

There’s something amazing and significant about a brilliant and distinguished academic who can lay down his ego and walk away from the lies that are so ingrained and embedded for the sake of what is objectively right, good, and true—which also happens to be the very same root of my affection for Thomas Sowell.

To close, here’s my absolute favorite Horowitz moment, and I implore you to watch the clip in its entirety, it’s only three minutes long:

God bless the legacy of David Horowitz, and may he rest in peace.

For David’s contributions to American Thinker, see here.

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.