ANGELA DAVIS, WOMEN’S MARCH HONOREE AND CHAMPION OF TERROR, PRISONS, AND TYRANNY. As David Harsanyi writes at the Federalist, “You can tell a lot about people by looking at their heroes:”
There could be an entire book written detailing Davis’s loathsome views and actions (Cathy Young has a good article here.) Still, it’s quite striking to see folks like TED talker Sally Kohn taking to Twitter to let her followers know that she stands with Davis because of her fight against the “prison industrial complex.” In the real world, Davis was an enthusiast supporter of the largest and most lethal prison system the world has ever known.
It was “human rights activist Angela Davis,” as NPR astonishingly described the woman in an article this week, who bought the shotgun that was used in a 1970 Marin County court room kidnapping and shootout that ended up killing a superior court judge and three others. The subsequent manhunt and trial of Davis, a proud lifelong communist, would be a very big deal in Soviet nations.
In 1971, in fact, the CIA noted that Davis’s case had become “a Soviet manipulated international anti-US campaign reminiscent of the orchestrated by Communist propaganda efforts made on behalf of atomic spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.” The CIA estimated that at least 5 percent of the entire Soviet Russian propaganda budget had been aimed at propping up Davis. To put that in context, that’s more than was being spent on propaganda directly about the Vietnam War. All schoolchildren in East Germany were ordered to collect flowers and stamps for Davis.
Davis soon traveled to many of these nations to stand with leaders who, collectively, had jailed hundreds of thousands of political dissidents. She visited East Germany, and effusively praised Erich Honecker while the Stasi were torturing political prisoners and his border police were summarily executing those who tried to escape.
Read the whole thing, including Harsanyi noting that Davis “personally assured the people of Jonestown that they would be safe, only two months before their massacre.”
To borrow a passage Mark Steyn wrote on Hollywood red Dalton Trumbo, but with a change in gender, in regards to that famous question, “‘Are you now or have you ever…?’ – the answer is: yes, [she] was. The more interesting question is: How do you feel about getting one of the great moral questions of the century wrong?”
