David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi (born 1970) is an American journalist, columnist, author, and editor. He is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. In the past, he was a columnist at the Denver Post, one of the founding editors of The Federalist, and a senior writer at National Review. He is the author of six books.

Personal life Harsanyi was born in New York City in 1970. His parents were Jews who emigrated from Hungary to Rome in 1969, then to New York.

Career In his early career, Harsanyi worked as a sports-journalist, covering baseball for Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press.

He was hired as a press secretary for the Republican Jewish Coalition and then was a senior editor at the online publication, The Federalist, writing more than 800 columns. He became a senior writer at National Review in 2019. He left National Review in May 2022 to return to writing for The Federalist. In October 2024 he joined the Washington Examiner to write "In Focus" articles.

As of 2022, Harsanyi has appeared nine times on C-SPAN.

Critical response When Harsanyi began writing columns for The Denver Post, he was the subject of angry threats from readers. One reader threatened to take Harsanyi's head off and mount it on his wall. According to Michael Roberts of Westword, "Taxidermic threats are new for Harsanyi, whose pre-Post columns generally ran in publications that tilted to the right. 'When I was writing for the National Review, I had solely conservatives reading me,' he says, 'so I didn't get any nasty letters.' At the Post, however, he's been positively bombarded with negative missives during his first few weeks on the job, with many correspondents making sweeping generalizations about him based on perceptions of his politics." Roberts said, "Then again, Denver-area readers have had little recent experience with local columnists on the conservative side of the continuum."

Publishers Weekly's review said "the book would have benefited from more anecdotes and original reporting, instead of incessantly naming overzealous do-gooders. Moreover, Harsanyi barely considers business's role, as these dangerous do-gooders fight fast food and tobacco companies armed with hundreds of millions of marketing dollars. There's not much new, but fellow libertarians may enjoy getting carried away by the flood of Harsanyi's outrage."

Jeff Minnick wrote of The People Have Spoken,

Of First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, Duke University's Michael C. Munger wrote, "It is not a legalistic argument about the importance of the Second Amendment, but rather a description of the place of guns in American history and culture."

According to David French, First Freedom "simultaneously serves as a technical, legal, and cultural history — an ambitious effort that could easily bog down in any given American period. But Harsanyi smartly balances detail and overview."

Introducing an interview with Harsanyi about First Freedom, Bob Zadek wrote, "Today there are more guns than people in the U.S. — by a lot — thanks in large part to progressives' efforts to restrict our Second Amendment rights... David Harsanyi relays these counter-intuitively findings in his new book".

The New York Times wrote that Harsanyi's opinions are among "differing perspectives worth your time".

Selected publications Books

Articles