A network of figures like Ben Shaprio, think tanks, and foreign policy advocates helped shift the right from advocating free speech to embracing blacklists.

Since the early 2000s, writer and activist David Horowitz has been at the center of a movement that claimed to defend free speech while portraying Muslims and leftists as existential threats to Western civilization. In the aftermath of 9/11, Horowitz called for the profiling of “Palestinian” and “Islamic” people and infamously stated that “the Palestinians are Nazis.”

Through the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), founded in 1998, he and his donors built a media and policy network that shaped the careers of nearly every major pro-Trump conservative figure active today. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated the DHFC a hate group, and it has received anonymous dark money routed through Donors Trust, which has also funded white nationalist causes.

Following Horowitz’s death on April 29, 2025, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk acknowledged his influence: “Without David Horowitz, I’m not sure Turning Point USA would exist. Over 90% of our earliest major donors were introduced at a David Horowitz event—thanks to his warm endorsements and generous introductions. His support opened doors that would have otherwise remained closed.”

Elon Musk’s growing alignment with Israeli policy became publicly visible in 2024, when he forged a surprise relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu. But his ties to the Freedom Center ecosystem began earlier. Musk has amplified Freedom Center talking points, including a study falsely claiming that USAID helped fund the Taliban—a narrative later used to justify calls to defund the agency.

More consequentially, when SpaceX sought to raise $750 million in January 2023, the lead investor was the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, co-founded by Ben Horowitz—David Horowitz’s son.

  • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    I guess he went down the Trotskyism to neoconservatism pipeline.

    The Curious Case of the Late David Horowitz

    Soon he was renouncing even his dead parents’ memberships in the Communist Party when they were raising him in Queens. He began a hard turn toward the right. His denunciations of his former comrades devolved into a bitter resentment, and his scorched-earth tactics remained rooted in a Trotskyite Manichaeism that continued to mark his worldview.

    He found rich backers to fund his fulminations. He excoriated America’s colleges and elite universities as Trojan Horses harboring diehard Marxist professors who, in his view, had bent the pedagogy to the inculcation of ideological biases in their young charges. He mentored Stephen Miller, now Trump’s Gauleiter of immigration. In many respects, Steve Bannon could be said to be Horowitz’s Frankenstein.

    • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
      0·
      23 hours ago

      This dude had clearly never been to a university, or he’d know we don’t have time for that shit. There’s enough math and actual science crammed into curriculums that they don’t have time for indoctrination. I didn’t know this was someone I hated until I found out he died today.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      24 hours ago

      Many Jews were Communists before they were massacared in the Holocaust. Feels like Horowitz turned from Judaism to Zionism after his parents death.