On April 30, Front Page Magazine reported that David Horowitz, the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, has passed away from cancer at age 86.

The article reports:

The Freedom Center’s founder and guiding force was a relentless conservative warrior who survived a previous brush with death (chronicled in his book Mortality and Faith), confrontations with the Black Panthers, campus radicals, government investigations, death threats, and hate campaigns, some led by his former friends and allies, without ever considering giving up or letting up. Nothing short of the end that comes for us all could silence his voice. He continued writing, working, and steering the Center to the very last; his final article, “The Biggest Lie of All,” appeared earlier this month.

Although he was a giant in the conservative liberty movement for over 40 years, David was raised a Marxist and was one of the leading intellectuals of the New Left movement at Berkeley in the 1960’s. But David, along with his writing partner and Freedom Center co-founder Peter Collier, eventually had a political epiphany and joined the side of freedom in the early 1980‘s. They committed the second half of their lives and work warning Americans of the dangers of the Progressives whose intellectual roots and totalitarian aims they understood better than many Leftists themselves.

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.

Over the years, David became something of a Saul Alinsky for the conservative movement, shaking a complacent Right out of its sleep and reinventing it as a war machine, laying out the strategies and principles for defeating the Left in too many bestselling books, articles, and pamphlets to count.

David Horowitz’s book Radical Son was published in 1997. I remember reading it and being amazed at the thought transformation it represented. David Horowitz was a living example of the fact that people can radically change their views as they observe new things and process them. He will be missed by the American conservative movement.