RON RADOSH: The Angela Davis Moment.

The article also hails Davis as a pioneer who “understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented” — that is, the belief that all struggles are united and that one can’t work for black liberation without championing the liberation of other oppressed groups. (It doesn’t mention that one of her intersectional causes, as she said in a recent interview, is uniting “antiracist efforts” with “global resistance to the apartheid policies and practices of the State of Israel.”)

George does address Davis’s years of membership and leadership in the (Soviet-run) Communist Party of the U.S.A. Bizarrely, he writes that she stayed in the party even as communist regimes “became more and more totalitarian” (as if the Soviet Union or East Germany had been less totalitarian when they treated Davis as a guest of honor!), leaving its ranks only in 1991 because it did not embrace democratization. But this unsavory part of Davis’s history is placed in the exculpatory context of the Communist Party’s supposed laudable role in the struggle for black equality, “sanitized from many histories of the civil rights movement.” In a particularly dishonest aside, George points to the fact that “Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington” as an example of this role.

In fact, the CPUSA’s role in fighting for civil rights was always conducted within the context of Moscow’s needs. In 1941, Rustin’s mentor A. Philip Randolph planned a massive March on Washington to protest discrimination against blacks in the defense industry and the armed forces and other racial injustice. The CPUSA strongly opposed the March as an action that would interfere with wartime unity and the American-Soviet alliance; Rustin, then in his late 20s and a member of the Young Communist League — the Party’s young-adult wing — supported it and was helping organize it. This was one of the issues that led to Rustin’s break from the Communist group. (Eventually, Randolph called off the March after Roosevelt passed the Fair Employment Act.) It is extreme chutzpah for the Times to suggest that Rustin’s leadership in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s had anything to do with his very early membership in the YCL — especially since, in later years, he still considered himself a democratic socialist but was also a staunch anti-Communist.

Davis, on the other hand, tells George that she still believes in communism and Marxist ideology; she doesn’t expect much from the Democratic Party as far as “transforming America,” but does believe that “it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left.” (She’s also a big fan of the progressive “Squad” of AOC+3— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.) The article concludes with Davis saying that “our work as activists is always to prepare the next generation … to engage in even more radical struggles.”

We’ve had nearly a  century of what we now call the MSM airbrushing communism, when not outright praising it. No wonder Davis is considered a hero by the far left. As blogger Moe Lane once wrote, “Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.”