NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC rocks Black Panthers shirt, touts group’s free food program.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sported a Black Panther shirt in an Instagram post Wednesday touting the organization’s influential early 1970s free food program.
“Did you know: If you or anyone you know ever benefited from free & reduced school lunch, you’ve likely benefited from the work and legacy of the Black Panthers?” Ocasio-Cortez said in the post to her Instagram story.
The militant organization launched the “People’s Free Food Program” back in Oakland in 1969 as a way to both improve its image and feed students breakfast before school in marginalized communities of color.
Flashback: Bobby Seale’s Confession: David Horowitz Was Right On.
In the now famous 1998 60 Minutes program during which he admitted the pernicious ruthlessness of the Panthers, the former Panther leader discussed his change of heart. Cleaver stated,”If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.”
Betty Van Patter was one of the tragic victims of that holocaust in its beginning stages –- and fortunately that potential holocaust did not animate itself into a larger force.
Betty had been recruited by Horowitz in the early 1970s to keep the books of a”Learning Center” in Oakland that he had created to run a school for the children of Black Panthers. A Leftist radical at the time, Horowitz had become affiliated with the Panthers after he met their infamous leader, Huey Newton, and became enchanted with him.
Horowitz didn’t have a clue that the”Learning Center” served as a cover for Panther criminal activity; it was a military training center that was also being used as a vehicle to embezzle millions of dollars in California state and local education funds.
After Newton killed a teenage prostitute and fled to Cuba in 1974, Elaine Brown took over as leader of the Panthers. She asked Horowitz to recommend an accountant to run the Party’s finances. Horowitz suggested Betty.
Extremely naïve about what she was dealing with, Betty found something wrong with the Panthers’ record books and went to inform Brown. She subsequently disappeared. In January 1975, Betty’s battered body — with her head caved in — was found floating in San Francisco Bay.
Horowitz was horrified by the murder of his friend. He felt a personal responsibility because he had brought Betty into the fold. He began to ask questions about her death, but he faced a disturbing lack of curiosity among his Leftwing associates.
AOC’s Black Panther T-Shirt is of a piece with her former chief of staff and Green Nude Eel ghostwriter Saikat Chakrabarti being photographed last year wearing a T-shirt with “Subhas Chandra Bose on it — the Indian nationalist whose plan for fighting British colonialism involved sucking up to, uh, Hitler.” That was around the same time that AOC praised Evita Peron. As one wag joked on Twitter at the time, “Look just because she’s favorably comparing herself to the lady that Franco liked a lot who sheltered Mengele doesn’t mean… OK, I forgot where I was doing with this.”
