History professor details conservative’s journey from neocon to 'far-right' MAGA 'firebrand'

Many neocons are scathing critics of President Donald Trump, including The Bulwark's Bill Kristol — who endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 and Kamala Harris four years later. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton served in Trump's administration but was fired and often attacks him on foreign policy.

But far-right firebrand David Horowitz, who was 86 when he passed away on April 29, went from being an outspoken neocon to a supporter of Trump and the MAGA movement.

Horowitz went through a lot of political changes along the way. During his youth, the native New Yorker was a Maoist — while others who became converts to neoconservatism were ex-Trotskyites (including Bill Kristol's late father Irving Kristol).

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Ronald Radosh, a history professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), details Horowitz' complicated political journey in an article published by The Bulwark on May 8.

"I met David in New York City in the early 1950s, when I was a 15-year-old communist and member of the Upper West Side branch of the Labor Youth League, the name at that time of the official youth organization of the American Communist Party," Radosh recalls. "At one meeting, David, age 13, came to our chapter in his position as the newly appointed youth editor of the Communist Party's daily newspaper, The Daily Worker."

But Horowitz later abandoned the far left and, according to Radosh, became an "in-your-face, uncompromising member of the far right-wing." And after Horowitz embraced Trump and the MAGA movement, Radosh recalls, there was considerable tension between him and the neocons he once embraced.

"As the George H.W. Bush and Clinton years gave way to the George W. Bush and Obama years," Radosh explains, "David's yearly meetings began to welcome only the most extreme of Republicans. Eventually, only those sworn to support Trump and the MAGA movement would participate. When Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016, David welcomed and honored Steve Bannon, whom he regarded as a fellow warrior for freedom and to whom he gave his organization’s annual award for his role in getting Trump into the White House."

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Radosh continues, "Neoconservatives whom David once regarded highly and honored were disinvited from his events and openly scorned and attacked, especially if they rejected Donald Trump. Bill Kristol, then a leading light of neoconservatism, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and an early critic of Trump, was attacked in a vicious fashion by David, who called Kristol 'a renegade Jew' in what at the time was emerging as a MAGA organ, Breitbart.com."

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Ronald Radosh's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.