The most significant political influencer in my lifetime was President Ronald Reagan. He was once a Democrat but said famously when becoming a Republican, “I did not leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left me.” To the millions of Americans who followed him to the Republican Party, he said, “I know what it’s like to pull the Republican lever for the first time … and I can tell you it only hurts for a minute, and then it feels great.”

Not long after first meeting President Reagan, I became aware of another outspoken advocate for American Liberty, David Horowitz, who had a much more polar epiphany in his political beliefs. David had once embraced the Marxist doctrines that many of today’s Democrat Party protagonists quietly embrace, but like other contemporaries — Chris Hitchens, Norm Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Nat Hentoff, Marvin Olasky, Bernard Goldberg, and Evan Sayet — deductive logic and a keen sense of the obvious broke the death grip of Marxism on David’s worldview. And like the others on that list of converts, David quickly found himself persona non grata among his old colleagues.

David was born just before World War II and grew up in Queens, New York, the son of Jewish Marxists Phil and Blanche Horowitz. His parents were steeped in the Great Depression-era propaganda of the American Communist Party and strong supporters of Joseph Stalin.

David was the product of early leftist indoctrination, which was reinforced by his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and graduate work at UC Berkeley. He lived in London after his graduate studies and considered himself a Marxist intellectual. (Don’t they all!)

Returning to the States, he became disillusioned with Marxism in the 1970s and was heavily influenced by the rise of Ronald Reagan. In 1985, Horowitz and his conservative friend, Peter Collier, wrote an article for The Washington Post Magazine titled “Lefties for Reagan” over the subtitle, “We have seen the enemy and he is not us.” That article would later be revised as “Goodbye to All That,” a testament to his path out of the leftist cesspool of sick think.

That article closed with this assessment: “One of the few saving graces of age is a deeper perspective on the passions of youth. 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.”

In 1992, Horowitz and Collier founded the monthly magazine Heterodoxy, which focused on exposing the excessive “political correctness” that was rising on college and university campuses. They were way ahead of today’s critical assessments of speech suppression at collegiate institutions.

In 1998, Horowitz and Collier founded The Freedom Center and its flagship publication, FrontPage Magazine.

The success of Freedom Center and FrontPage Mag was fully affirmed when they became targets of the hate profiteer Morris Dees and his corrupt SPLC hate hustlers.

After decades as a giant advocate for Liberty, David drew his last breath this week at the age of 86 after a long battle with cancer.

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, which has established a substantial collegiate presence nationwide, wrote a great tribute to his mentor, concluding: “David Horowitz was a lion. A fighter. A father of modern conservatism. He was a teacher to me, a mentor, and a friend. Turning Point USA will continue its successful movement in your honor, and thanks to your help.”

Of his passing, the editors of FrontPage Magazine wrote: “David’s legacy is vast and the number of people that he inspired, mentored, and impacted is incalculable. That we live in a world today where there is a fighting chance of defeating the Leftist utopians who would enslave us is due in no small measure to the rare courage and unflagging passion that exemplified David’s work these past 40 years.”

The Freedom Center’s Robert Spencer noted, “If free people prevail in this great struggle in which we are now engaged, and if an honest history of our turbulent age is someday written, David Horowitz will stand as one of those who shone forth most brightly when the darkness seemed all-pervasive and invincible.”

I am deeply grateful for David’s example of courage and fortitude in the face of constant adversaries. Requiescat in pace.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.