David Horowitz, who passed away on April 29 at the age of 86, authored Student, The Free World Colossus, and co-authored The Kennedys: An American Drama with Peter Collier, his colleague at Ramparts. In his 1996 book Radical Son, David charted his Communist upbringing, the rise of the New Left, and his dealings with the Black Panther Party in Oakland. That marked his exit from the left, but there’s more about him that people should know.

In 1981, San Francisco Chronicle writer Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On, The Mayor of Castro Street) tipped off David to a potential epidemic known as AIDS, rapidly spreading through the bathhouses in San Francisco. As David explained in Radical Son, “For political reasons, there would be no systematic testing or reporting, or contact tracing of infected parties—standard health measures in stemming contagions in the past.”

David Horowitz was one of the first to call out the government’s politicization of disease and departure from established medical practice. He should be remembered as an early opponent of what I have called the “white coat supremacy,” later imposed nationwide by Dr. Anthony Fauci during the COVID pandemic. On the political side, Radical Son details a murder that remains unsolved.

David raised money for the Oakland Community Learning Center, the school that became the Black Panthers’ base of operations. In 1974, David recruited his colleague Betty Van Patter to keep the books. With Huey Newton exiled in Cuba, Elaine Brown took over the Black Panther Party. Brown fired Van Patter, and on Jan. 17, 1975, her battered body was found in San Francisco Bay.

At the time of the murder, Elaine Brown was running for Oakland City Council. The Panther boss was a favorite of Gov. Jerry Brown and Panther consiglieri J. Anthony Kline, who became  Gov. Brown’s legal affairs secretary. In 1982, Brown appointed Kline to the California Courts of Appeal, where he served until retirement in 2021. To this day, Kline and Jerry Brown never revealed what they knew about the Van Patter murder, or when they knew it. Of course, for the left, murder has never been a problem. David Horowitz didn’t live to see the assassination of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10. But given his experience, I’d wager he was on to it from the start.

Predeceasing David, on April 13, was Mario Vargas Llosa, author of The Time of the Hero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010. The gifted Peruvian should be remembered for speaking the truth to power.

In 1990, Vargas Llosa described Mexico as “the perfect dictatorship … the permanence not of one man but of an unmovable party.” The reference was to Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), in power since the 1920s. Mexico holds ceremonial elections, but dictatorships are places where people who threaten the ruling party tend to suddenly die or disappear without explanation.

In the run-up to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Mexican police and troops gunned down hundreds of students gathered to protest the PRI regime. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was never held accountable, nor was Interior Secretary Luis Echeverría. He became president in 1970, escaped blame for the Corpus Christi massacre in 1971, and never spent a day in prison before dying at age 100 in 2022.

In 2001, President Vicente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) ordered the creation of a “special prosecutor for the crimes of the past,” but nothing of substance came to light. The alleged reformer continued the cover-up, but the people had not forgotten. In 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School boarded buses for an event to commemorate the 1968 massacre. After an encounter with Mexican police and military forces, the group of 43 mysteriously disappeared.

Parents of the 43 formed a caravan to publicize the crime, but Fox told them they “need to accept reality” and move on. In 2018, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, also known as the Morena party, pledged to “never ever use the military to repress the Mexican people,” but released no new information on the 1968 massacre. “Amlo,” as he was known,  also pledged to establish a truth commission on the missing 43 students.

“The whole government is going to help with this plan,” the president told the victims’ families, “and I can assure you that there will be no impunity either in this sad and painful case or in any other.” Amlo’s administration issued dozens of arrest warrants for members of the military and police, but nobody has been convicted for what the president called a “state crime.”

In a similar style, President Claudia Sheinbaum called the 1968 massacre an “atrocity” but failed to release a complete list of those killed or imprisoned. Despite the arrest of a retired judge, Sheinbaum has not achieved justice for the missing students from 2014. For all but the willfully blind, Morena and PAN are fronts for the PRI, the “unmovable party” increasingly dominated by drug cartels. Uruapan Mayor Carlos Manzo, an opponent of the cartels, was recently gunned down during a festival. That’s what happens in the “perfect dictatorship” Mario Vargas Llosa so bravely called out.

The first American president to take the offensive against the cartels is Donald Trump. Vicente Fox trolled Trump in the style of a UC Berkeley Chicano Studies major. “If that worn-out baseball glove tightly gripping a turd can be president, then amigos, anyone can,” said Fox. “Donald, you suck so much at this job.” The people didn’t think so, and since his reelection, Trump has targeted cartels in Mexico and Colombia, saying he would do “whatever we have to do to stop drugs.”

In response, Sheinbaum rejected any “opportunity for the U.S. to invade our sovereignty,” and denied charges that the Mexican government is allied with drug cartels. This allegedly “sovereign” nation allowed passage of more than 10 million illegals to the United States, including some 500,000 criminals now preying on Americans coast to coast. Long before this invasion, Mexican politicians such as Marcelo Ebrard were blatantly interfering in American elections.

Meanwhile, three days after Christmas, French film star Brigitte Bardot passed away at 91. God did indeed create woman, but not many like her. Brigitte, Mario, and David rest in peace. In 2026, as Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.