The Ongoing Leftist Revolution

Late one night in May 1973, New Jersey trooper James Harper stopped a speeding white Pontiac LeMans for a broken taillight. Sundiata Acoli was driving the car. In the back was Zayd Malik Shakur, the minister of information for the Harlem Black Panther Party. In the passenger seat was 26-year-old Joanne Chesimard, wanted by the FBI for armed bank robbery and by the New York police in connection with the slayings of two policemen and a hand‐grenade attack on a police car. Six months before, she and two men stole $1,800 in bingo money from a church safe. When Monsignor John Powis let them in, Chesimard put a gun to his head until he opened the safe, and they told him, “We usually just blow the heads off White men.”

Noticing a “discrepancy” in the driver’s identification, Trooper Harper asked Acoli to exit the vehicle. Meanwhile, State Trooper Werner Foerster, who had arrived as backup, reached into the car and pulled out a semi-automatic pistol magazine. Harper ordered the car’s nervous occupants to keep their hands on their laps. Chesimard suddenly raised a pistol and shot Harper in the shoulder; he fired back into the car, hitting Zayd Shakur. Acoli attacked Foerster, seized his pistol, shot him in the head, and jumped back into the car. He sped off down the turnpike with the injured Chesimard and dead Zayd. They were soon apprehended.

In 1977, Chesimard (now Assata Shakur) was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Two years later, members of the May 19th Communist Organization took several guards hostage at the Clinton Correctional Facility and freed Shakur. She fled to Cuba, where she was granted asylum. After Shakur’s death earlier this year at the age of 78, legacy media outlets described her as a “Black liberation activist” and a “revolutionary.” Shakur, who was a member of the Black Liberation Army—whose goal was the assassination of policemen—had long been memorialized in hip-hop music.

The BLA was one of numerous left-wing groups, including the Weather Underground, that initiated a decade of terrorist attacks. The Weathermen plotted to blow policemen up, but changed their strategy to “safer” bombings of symbolic targets after a nail bomb planned for a non-commissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix prematurely exploded, killing three members and completely leveling a townhouse in Greenwich Village.

During a mere 18 months in 1971-72, there were 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil. In 1978, when William Webster accepted the position of FBI director, there were more than 100 terrorist attacks a year, including assassinations, hijackings, hostage situations, armed assaults, and bombings. Leftist violence accompanied a rise in violence across the United States: from 1960 to 1980, the homicide rate doubled, violent crime tripled, and robberies quadrupled.

To explain the increase in violent crime in the 1970s, many scholars point to the Baby Boom, the disproportionate number of young people, especially men, who commit most violent crime. But this alone cannot explain the surge.

Scholars like Steven Pinker have proposed cultural factors, namely, attacks on self-control, societal connectedness, and marriage and family life, which “had done so much to domesticate male violence in the preceding decades.” This trend, he argues, was democratic: it discredited the older social and upper-class hierarchies of taste and manners that had kept order. But leftist violence was hardly democratic. The product of elitist ideas, it took direct aim at the middle class and remade American culture.

Shakur, Acoli, and Zayd Shakur had been educated to be patriotic Americans. In her autobiography, Shakur recalled an early fascination with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But then she “grew up and started to read real history” about that “old cracka slavemaster” Washington. The Revolutionary War “was led by some rich white boys who got tired of paying heavy taxes to the king. It didn’t have anything at all to do with freedom, justice, and equality for all.” Lincoln was an “archracist,” and the “Civil War was fought for economic reasons.”

Acoli went to college and worked for NASA before joining the civil rights movement. At his sentencing, he declared himself a soldier of the BLA. He read from his own notes: “If the police don’t want to get killed, they should stop murdering blacks and Third World people…. The poor people of the nation are being victimized by the system.”

Zayd Shakur had been honorably discharged from the Navy before converting to Islam. At his funeral, his coffin was draped with black nationalist flags. Zayd, said one admirer, “died the way he lived—in combat, resisting the forces of oppression.”

It is no accident that Assata Shakur and her fellow revolutionaries called themselves soldiers. All communities must constrain human aggression among their members. One way to do this is scapegoating, channeling that aggression toward outside groups. Another method is to permit violations of sexual and aggressive moral prohibitions in specially sanctioned rituals. Ideas play a crucial role in justifying the cause of one’s own group while dehumanizing the enemy.

Leftist revolutionaries pored over the writings of Frantz Fanon, Vladimir Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh. The cops were “pigs,” and the goal was the destruction of “whiteness.” Their memoirs often combine personal tragedy with a revelatory insight into the supposed evils of the American regime that justified their actions and provided a sense of meaning. Leftists not only romanticized violence as moral courage, but they also used it as a form of consciousness-raising. They featured violence and sexual orgies in collective transgressive rituals that dissolved the individual into a group identity. Weatherman Mark Rudd recalled, “We had unwittingly reproduced conditions that all hermetically sealed cults use: isolation, sleep deprivation, arbitrary acts of loyalty, even sexual initiation as bonding.” These radical groups, of course, had high costs for entry and exit.

A History of Violence

Violence from the New Left is often contrasted with the earlier “nonviolence” of the civil rights and antiwar movements. But even sympathetic observers have noticed a seamless transition between them.

To get media attention, Martin Luther King Jr. needed a violent response. Rather than “tender supplications for justice,” he recommended “militant non-violence that is massive enough, that is attention-getting enough to dramatize the problems.” Student activists chose obstruction over withdrawal and adopted “confrontation politics”: they blocked doorways, disrupted classes, shouted down opponents, and forcibly seized buildings. Sit-ins violated laws against trespassing and disturbing the peace, intimidating store owners and customers, not to mention destroying property, which protestors argued was less important than achieving equity.

In 1964, Martin Mayer wrote of the Congress on Racial Equality’s “nonviolent” tactics:

In San Francisco, a CORE group has attacked a chain of supermarkets by loading shopping carts with groceries, then dumping them on the floor around the cashiers’ tables. In St. Louis, pickets have blocked access to a bank that refused to hire Negroes…. In New York, CORE members have dumped garbage in the roadway to block a major bridge at rush hour, chained themselves to construction cranes, and jammed the stairs to a union office.

Protestors demanded the right to be heard, which is to say to constrain listeners. Weatherman Billy Ayers said, “You can’t ask us to protest politely so that you can dismiss us.” This supposed nonviolence introduced a squad of cops babysitting unemployed protestors in a brinkmanship of who would commit the real violence first.

Militant nonviolence, said activists, stripped away the “veneer of civility” to show the hidden violence of “the system itself.” One San Francisco State leaflet listed “the violence of hungry children,” “the violence of minority unemployment,” and “the covert violence of corporate control.” At Columbia, a member of the Radical Action Cooperative that disrupted Jim Shenton’s history class said, “We do not aim to criticize…Shenton as an individual; rather, we aim to criticize our insane, repressive, and inhuman society…. Gentle Jim Shenton is doing violence to you, and to himself, by creating a false consciousness of security within the University.” The culprit was not a person but a violent system of white supremacy or patriarchy, in which the “privileged” oppressed the “underprivileged.” “Racism,” wrote Ayers, was “the glue that held the whole thing together.”

Words that supported this system inflicted psychological injury. Herbert Marcuse argued that because speech could be structurally violent, society should withdraw the rights “of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.” Looking to this standard of efficacy, one Columbia student noted in tandem the good changes that had come from “the ‘illegitimate’ protests of the early civil rights movement, the Northern ghetto riots and the Columbia demonstrations.”

If America is an evil order, then violence against its deplorable supporters is a form of self-defense. Indeed, acts of looting, robbery, beatings, rape, and murder were justified as forms of political resistance. Riots were revolutions against colonialism; incarcerated violent offenders were political prisoners.

Tom Hayden described the four-day Newark riots (one of 150 riots in 1967), which resulted in 26 deaths, as resistance against the “Occupation of Newark.” Blacks were allies with the Vietcong fighting a “colonial occupation.” His solution was “bringing the war home” in urban riots, university upheavals, and war against the Democratic Party at the 1968 convention.

King himself maintained only a thin rhetorical line between nonviolence and violence following the 1966 Chicago West Side riots, which began after police arrested an ex-convict suspected of armed robbery. After 200 young blacks looted a drugstore, threw stones, and even fired upon officers, wounding seven, Mayor Richard J. Daley called in 1,500 National Guardsmen. King replied, “The vast majority of Negroes still feel that the best way to deal with the dilemma…is through nonviolent resistance,” but “the cry of Black Power is at bottom a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary.… A riot is the language of the unheard.” Whites, he suggested, had stubbornly refused to hear—that is, to adopt his redistributionist plans of racial quotas and reparations. America, he warned, didn’t have long.

Anarchy in the USA

The civil rights regime included what was essentially a federally funded state church that took aim at middle-class asceticism and self-control. Under the religion of diversity, college professors guided students in a critique of the West. They condemned the American Founding and our nation’s laws as systemically racist and sexist. Racism, they taught, was embedded in “institutional structures” and practices such as merit employment programs. Professors, bureaucrats, and teachers’ associations led the endless parsing of students’ identities, placing them into racial and gender groups with concomitant privileges and duties. They preached toxic masculinity, intersectionality, and white privilege.

During the 1980s leftist terrorist attacks declined, but violent crime continued to rise, peaking in 1992. Disapproving of the criminal reforms of the 1990s, activists remained ensconced in taxpayer-funded jobs in the bureaucracy and the halls of education, where they continued the assault on self-control, marriage, and patriotism.

The Occupy Wall Street movement and Black Lives Matter accompanied a revival of theories of violence in thinkers like Slavoj Žižek, who praised Robespierre’s “revolutionary terror,” and reverence for radicals like Assata Shakur, whose writings became a BLM rallying cry for the destruction of the nuclear family. Those teachings have clearly had some effect on American culture.

American birth rates have reached record lows; by 2030 45% of child-bearing-aged women will be single (and childless). The record numbers of single young men will be those most prone to violence. The teaching of diversity and the importation of millions of migrants are destroying norms of reciprocity and civic trust, and have fostered the worst aspects of tribalism, including fashionable calls to “abolish whiteness.”

Leftists again are calling organized violence an effective political strategy. Professor Daniel Gillion argued that “violent protest has a positive impact on political and policy change.” NPR featured Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting, which presents the “strategy of looting” as a way to attack “whiteness and white supremacy.” Politicians kneeled to BLM, encouraged protests, and ignored victims of the George Floyd riots, which caused at least 25 deaths and $1-2 billion in property damage.

Democrats promoted defunding the police and placating homeless drug users and the mentally ill in major cities, where violent crime rates rose. Ninety percent of the leftist rioters, some of whom torched a federal building in Portland, were not prosecuted. Media hysteria about fascism and white supremacy inspired trans school shooters, two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and the murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah. In one Rutgers study of this “assassination culture,” 50-56% of those left of center agreed that killing Trump or Elon Musk would be “somewhat justified.”

The greatest lie of the leftist incitation to violence is that it is truly political. But political rule—unlike the rule of animals through pleasure and pain—requires a culture of honor and shame, which in turn presupposes a unified people and way of life. Until Americans foster a common heritage, they will be plagued by the violence of the leftist “armies of the night.”

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