Hard Revolution: Minneapolis, Marxism and ‘Riot Ideology’

    The riots that are likely to erupt in Minneapolis will have nothing to do with the death of a woman who was involved in an altercation with ICE officers. Her death will be the excuse that Marxists use to try and burn down the United States.

    We’ve been here before. After Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, more than 1,200 buildings in Washington, D.C.were burned. The cost was almost $25 million. The mayhem was caused by Marxist radicals. Near the end of his book Ten Blocks From the White House, Washington Post reporter Ben Gilbert – a black man and no conservative – introduces a theme that has reverberated through urban riots for more than fifty years. That theme is Marxism.

    Four months after the D.C. riot, in August 1968, Gilbert made contact with three men who claimed responsibility for the violence following King’s death. The men were left-wing agitators. They had been planning violence for months before King’s death. Then they used King’s death to spread chaos, from setting fires to throwing rocks and bottles to dynamiting buildings. According to at least one witness, they cared little or nothing about Martin Luther King, just as today’s anarchists care nothing about George Floyd or the person who was involved with the Minneapolis ICE encounter.

    After the D.C. riot, Gilbert met at a hotel with three men who claimed responsibility for the riot. The men were hidden behind ski masks and introduced themselves as Marxist revolutionaries. One quoted Che Guevara — “In a revolution, you either win or die.” Another called white people “the Beast” and insisted that King was killed because he fought “colonization.” Today, these men are probably tenured professors at America’s elite universities.

    From the D.C riots to George Floyd to the unrest in Minneapolis, the driving force is the same thing – what the late great urban historian Fred Siegel called “riot ideology.” In his 1997 book  The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities Siegel describes “riot ideology” as when“public officials are reluctant to confront public disorder and crime for fear of violent opposition.” Riot ideology was once a hallmark of Marxist groups like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. It is now ignored by the mainstream media even as it has helped destroy America’s cities. The 2020 urban riots over the death of George Floyd cost an estimated $2 billion, a record.

    In “Forever 1968,” a 2016 City Journal article, Siegel argued that “there is [a] continuity between the current moment and the never-ending sixties: the revival of Black Pantherism in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the new Eldridge Cleaver.” Siegel noted that “the sixties are sometimes associated with the idea of participatory democracy, but that concept was buried under the weight of Great Society bureaucracies.” Siegel pinpoints the main problem: “One feature of the sixties has endured: the glorification of violence…Violence incarnate was glamorized by the dashing, handsome, leather-clad Black Panthers and their gorgeous consorts. The Panthers colonized the minds of the New Left—particularly Students for a Democratic Society and its offshoot, the Weathermen—who longed to win their approval. Liberals were caught up in Panthermania, too.”

    This dynamic was captured not just in the work of Ben Gilbert and Fred Siegel but in Hard Revolution, a novel by the great D.C. author George Pelecanos. Hard Revolution is set in 1968 and revolves around the riots. As Pelecanos notes, there was trouble brewing long before Martin Luther King was killed:

In August of ’67, arson and minor riots had broken out along 7th and 14th Streets, with rocks and bottles thrown at firemen attempting to extinguish the flames. Since then, unrest and disorder had become almost weekly occurrences. Stokely Carmichael, the high-profile former spokesman for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had moved to town. H. Rap Brown was being extradited from New Orleans to Richmond and ultimately to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he faced charges of arson and inciting a riot in the town of Cambridge. Black Panthers and other Black Nationalist factions had become active and entrenched around the city.

    Pelecanos has written over 20 great novels and has written scripts for the television show The Wire. I’m inviting him to our Anti-Communist Film Festival this year. Hard Revolution was published in 2003 but it’s more relevant than the mainstream media coverage coming out of Minneapolis in 2026. The story is not about a tragic death, it’s not about community policing, it’s not about Donald Trump. It’s about what it’s always been about – Marxist revolution.

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