Violent Haters in Love and Unity, Then and Now.
Posted by Ed Folsom, September 30, 2025.
Frank Hurley/NY Daily News via Getty Images, via ABC News
News broke late last week that Assata Shakur died, at age 78, in Cuba. Assata was born JoAnne Deborah Byron. She later took the nom de guerre, Assata Shakur, as a member of the Black Liberation Army. It was in that role, operating under her nom de guerre, that Shakur shot a New Jersey State Trooper to death in a firefight that broke out during a traffic stop, in May of 1973. She was convicted of murder in 1977. In 1979, while serving a life sentence, she was broken-out of prison by a cadre of comrades, eventually surfacing in Cuba, on the lam, where she was given asylum for the rest of her days. Right on, man.
A high-profile murder conviction leads to infamy for most, but it turned Shakur into a leftist folk hero. Upon her death, her murder conviction led to glowing praise from the Chicago Teachers Union and from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), among others.
The DSA’s tribute to Shakur, on the X social media platform, included this passage: “We vow to honor her legacy by recognizing our duty to fight for our freedom, to win, to love and protect one another because we have nothing to lose but our chains.” This is a fairly direct rip, with a slight twist, from Karl Marx’s and Fridrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, which concludes this way: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKINGMEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”
I point this out to those who might have failed to pick up on the DSA’s Marxist reference, or who might think that the democratic socialism that the Democratic Socialists of America advocate is a soft and cuddly return to the womb; a lovey-dovey bath floating in amniotic fluid, as opposed to the recycled Marxist hell-on-earth that it promises to be.
Another infamous woman from the 1970’s, Sarah Jane Moore, also died last week. Moore was 95. Back on September 22, 1975, Moore pulled out a handgun, in close proximity to then-President Gerald Ford, and tried to shoot him. Just seventeen days before, on September 5, 1975, a Charlie Manson disciple, Lynnete “Squeaky” Fromme, managed to squeeze off a couple of shots at Ford from close range, but she missed. The news stories surrounding Moore’s death explained that nobody was ever sure why she tried to assassinate Ford.
Moore was involved in some of the nut-bag, left wing politics that were so much in vogue in California in those days, but she had also worked as an FBI informant. Oddly enough, Moore had worked for the left-wing organization People in Need, in 1974. People in Need was established by the extraordinarily wealthy newspaper publisher, William Randolph Hearst, as he attempted to satisfy the ransom demands of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA had kidnapped Hearst’s 19-year-old daughter, Patricia “Patty” Hearst, on February 4, 1974.
The SLA kept Patty Hearst in its clutches despite her father funding People in Need. Patty famously went on to assist the SLA as they sought to fund “the revolution” with the proceeds of armed robberies. She was eventually arrested for her participation, on September 18, 1975. Exactly one week after she was arrested, Sarah Jane Moore, former worker at People in Need, attempted to assassinate President Ford. Small world…
Reading about the deaths of Shakur and Moore on the same day got me thinking about all the Marxists, Maoists, and other leftists who were running around carrying out “revolution” back in the 70’s. In 2016, Time magazine reported: “In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day.” If it wasn’t the Weather Underground, it might have been the Black Panthers, or the Black Liberation Army, or the Symbionese Liberation Army, or the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), or, any other of the Marxist/Maoist/leftist organizations sowing chaos in the U.S. at the time.
We even had a group of Marxist, revolutionary bank-and-armored-car-robbing bombers operating out of Maine, in the form of Raymond Luc Levasseur, Tom Manning, Joey Aceto, Richard Picariello, et al., as a faction of the Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR) morphed into the violence of the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit, then into the United Freedom Front (You can read a sympathetic account of it here).
In what violent ways do today’s Marxists, Maoists, and other assorted leftists manifest their sympathies with those violent Marxists, Maoists, and other assorted leftists of the 70’s? Writing messages on the casings of the bullets that they so lovingly fire at their hate-objects as they “love and protect one another” has really caught on among them. Cheering the murder of their hate-objects on social media, in open acts of unity that encourage what, when they accuse their hate-objects of doing it, they call “stochastic terrorism,” is another. All the while they declare themselves to be love, unity, and justice, battling against hatred, division, and injustice. That delusion is central to their sales pitch, and that will never change.
