Assata Shakur and 6 more: A rogues’ gallery of leftist America’s heroes

Weeks after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the liberal media continues to grapple with his legacy: Just how much damage did he wreak upon democracy by regularly inviting college students to debate him in public?

“Hate” is understandably difficult to measure when it comes in the form of rational arguments. When it comes in the form of a bullet — a bullet that tears through flesh and destroys lives — you’d think it would be more cut-and-dried.

Shakur did her killing as a member of the Black Liberation Army, a black-nationalist/Marxist group that rose from the ashes of the Black Panthers.

Not so when it comes to a convicted cop-killer and fugitive from justice who died earlier this week: “Assata Shakur Was a Black Revolutionary Who Fought for Freedom Even in Exile.”

Admittedly, that headline — from the leftist radicals running Teen Vogue — was from one of the more glowing obituaries for the woman born JoAnne Byron. But even the New York Times glossed over Shakur’s sordid crime by dignifying her with the label “convicted revolutionary.”

Technically the FBI branded her a “terrorist,” but why split hairs?

Amerikan woman

And while the NYT piece does include the damning facts of the case — a jury found Shakur guilty of fatally shooting New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a routine traffic stop in 1973; sentenced to life, she escaped justice by fleeing to Cuba — it also gives much more space to the self-justifying words of Shakur herself.

“I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman,” the article quotes from Shakur’s 1987 memoir, “Assata.”

Underneath this mask of “objectivity,” the NYT is doing what it does best: reinforcing the common liberal consensus.

Roughly speaking, that consensus is this: Shakur’s intentions were noble and her cause important, and that makes her an American (or “amerikan”) hero — no matter that an innocent man had to die.

‘Rest in power’

It’s this consensus that has led hip-hop artists like Common and Public Enemy to name-check Assata as an anti-racist hero. It’s this consensus that led the Chicago Teachers Union to eulogize Shakur as a “leader of freedom” — with nary a mention of the man whose freedom she took away forever with the pull of a trigger.

You may notice that those on the left tend to eschew the standard “rest in peace” when acknowledging the deaths of their heroes. Instead they opt for “rest in power.”

That’s because liberals by and large don’t believe in any kind of afterlife — a “peace” for which we can hope once we exit this realm of suffering and strife. For them there is only “power,” and the purpose of this one and only life is to seize it — and keep it.

When that’s your only metric for a life well lived, you can excuse all sorts of “collateral damage.”

RELATED: Radical killers turned campus heroes: How colleges idolize political violence

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A murderous failure

You also don’t have to look too closely at your accomplishments. Shakur did her killing as a member of the Black Liberation Army, a black-nationalist/Marxist group that rose from the ashes of the Black Panthers.

According to the group’s manifesto, the BLA’s mission was to “strive for the abolishment of [capitalist, imperialist, racist, and sexist] systems and for the institution of Socialistic relationships in which Black people have total and absolute control over their own destiny as a people.”

By the time the group dissolved in 1981, it hadn’t achieved these ambitious — if exceedingly vague — goals. What it had achieved in its 11 years of existence was to carry out some 60 acts of violence, ranging from bombings and hijackings to armored truck robberies to the execution of more than a dozen police.

Any sane culture would write off the BLA as a murderous failure. Instead we downplay the mayhem and amplify the message. Is it any surprise that the Black Lives Matter generation is ready to pick up the torch?

The next time you hear a liberal complain that Kirk’s mourners are celebrating a “hatemonger,” consider some of the left’s other “activist” heroes.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

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The legend: An “internationally celebrated black writer and radio journalist … author of six books and hundreds of columns and articles [and] organizer and inspiration for the prison lawyers movement,” Abu-Jamal has been unjustly imprisoned since 1982. An early 1990s cause célèbre thanks to the “Free Mumia” movement, Abu-Jamal’s relevance has faded, although he apparently carries enough intellectual respect that Brown University recently acquired his papers.

The reality: Abu-Jamal, born Wesley Cook, was convicted in the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, after Faulkner pulled over Abu-Jamal’s brother, William Cook, in a routine traffic stop. Eyewitnesses saw Abu-Jamal run from across the street and shoot Faulkner in the back. After Faulkner returned fire and shot Abu-Jamal in the chest, Abu-Jamal stood over Faulkner and shot him four times, once in the face.

Leonard Peltier

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The legend: Leonard Peltier is a leading member of the American Indian Movement and martyr for indigenous resistance whose case has been taken up by Hollywood celebrities, Amnesty International, and even members of Congress. His decades in prison — portrayed as proof of U.S. government hostility toward native sovereignty — finally ended when President Biden granted him clemency on the last day of Biden’s presidency.

The reality: Peltier was convicted of murdering two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, during a 1975 shoot-out on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Both agents were executed at point-blank range after being wounded. Ballistics tied Peltier’s AR-15 to shell casings at the scene. While courts acknowledged procedural flaws in the investigation, his conviction has been upheld on appeal for nearly 50 years.

Kathy Boudin

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The legend: Kathy Boudine was a tragic child of the 1960s who, after serving her time, redeemed herself as an academic and advocate for prison reform. When she died of cancer in 2022, the Center for Justice at Columbia University she co-founded lauded her for her “lifelong work as an activist, organizer, teacher, and champion of social justice.”

The reality: In 1970, Boudin narrowly escaped death when three of her fellow Weather Underground members blew themselves to smithereens trying to build a bomb, most likely meant for Fort Dix in New Jersey. She resurfaced 11 years later when she pled guilty to felony murder for her role in a 1981 Brinks robbery. Acting as a getaway driver, she enabled the ambush that killed two police officers and a security guard. While she expressed remorse for her victims, she never denounced the leftist worldview that directly led to her crimes.

Bill Ayers

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The legend: Bill Ayers is an “anti-war activist” and education reformer who staged “symbolic acts of extreme vandalism” to protest the Vietnam War before settling into respectability as a professor of education. He is cast as a thoughtful radical and elder statesman whose youthful excesses are overstated.

The reality: Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a domestic terrorist group responsible for bombing the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and police stations. He escaped serious punishment on technicalities, not innocence. In 2001, he told the New York Times: “I don’t regret setting bombs. … I feel we didn’t do enough.” That line ran the morning of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center — an atrocity committed in the name of the same “anti-imperialism” Ayers espouses to this day. Ayers’ early fundraising for a young Barack Obama would come back to haunt the then-presidential candidate in 2008.

Bernardine Dohrn

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The legend: Bernardine Dohrn is a feminist revolutionary and law professor who dedicated her life to fighting injustice, later channeling her radical energy into more mainstream activism.

The reality: Dohrn, married to fellow Weather Underground leader Ayers, publicly glorified Charles Manson’s followers after their grisly murders, exclaiming, “Dig it … they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” The remark shocked even fellow radicals; Dohrn later claimed it was an “ironic joke.”

Angela Davis

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The legend: Angela Davis is a brilliant scholar and activist, wrongly accused and hounded by the FBI because of her communist politics and black liberation work. Acquitted of charges, she has been celebrated worldwide as an icon of resistance and prison abolition.

The reality: The firearms used in the 1970 Marin County courthouse hostage crisis — in which Judge Harold Haley was killed — were registered to Davis. Though a jury found her not guilty, the fact remains that her guns enabled a deadly assault. Davis has never expressed remorse for the judge’s murder, and her continuing status as a celebrity intellectual glosses over that reality.