The firehose of bile from Twitter users at the death of former First Lady Nancy Reagan on Sunday reveals the success of leftist radicals’ attempts to rewrite the facts of the War on Drugs, the program put into place by Ronald Reagan with the support of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. That revisionist history is a key component of the current “mass incarceration” movement that is aimed not only at putting dangerous felons back on the street, but also in turning them into both foot soldiers in the revolution and a voting bloc for Democrats.
An analysis of hundreds of tweets revealing the left’s outpouring of hatred in the 24 hours after Nancy Reagan’s death shows that much of the animosity towards the Reagans stems from anger about the War on Drugs.
I discussed this on today’s edition of Breitbart News Daily (full audio below).
As you’ll see in the dozens of tweets we’ve included below, many of the angry haters directly blame the Reagans for the plight of black people, a situation that they tie into the drug war.
This hatred isn’t just an outburst that should be blown off. It’s part of the revolutionary left’s 50-year plan to fundamentally transform America, and it’s happening right under our noses.
Worse, the mass incarceration agenda is being implemented by President Obama in conjunction with Republicans.
Understanding this history is crucial to understanding the hate and, in turn, asking Republicans to recognize the very real threat posed by the mass incarceration movement.
Five Decades of Agitprop on Black Incarceration
Twitter’s foul blast of hate against Nancy Reagan is no accident. It’s the direct result of a 50-year propaganda campaign aimed at black Americans—and, frankly, liberals of every color—promoting the Black Panther Parties anti-American, anti-law-enforcement agenda and reviling and rebuking Ronald Reagan, a champion for the United States and law and order.
The animosity between radical black activists and Ronald Reagan goes back to the days when Reagan was the Governor of California and an outspoken critic of radical leftist movements.
The modern mass incarceration movement also has its ideological origins in the 1960s, when the idea of releasing black people from prison en masse was popularized by the Black Panther party in its “10-Point Platform.”
Point 8 of the 10-Point Platform called for every single black person in the United States to be immediately freed from prison. Quoting:
8) We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
This agitprop—propaganda designed to agitate the masses—continues today in the Black Lives Matter movement’s focus on the issue of “mass incarceration.”
The Black Panthers believed that every incarcerated black person was a “political prisoner,” a belief which led to protests and slogans in the 1960s such as “Free Huey,” “Free Bobby,” and “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners.” These referred to Black Panther party cofounders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, and Black Panther ally Angela Davis.
It didn’t end in the 1960s, however.
This same line of sloganeering exists right now with current campaigns to Free Mumia and Free Rasmea Odeh. These refer to former Black Panther and convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and Palestinian terrorist Rasema Odeh.
Last year, Breitbart News reported on a video put out by the Black Lives Matter movement that featured both Odeh and Angela Davis.
What’s important to understand is that none of these “Free Whoever!” movements are based on a belief in the innocence of the people that the activists want to be freed; they are all actually based on the ideological belief that every single black person should be released from prison.
The racist idea of simply opening the prison doors to black Americans is, obviously, a bizarre and intellectually indefensible position that wouldn’t pass the smell test for any person with common sense.
Black radical activists are aware that their real position about freeing every black person from prison is both dangerous and nonsensical, so they hide their position. This effort at muddying their real objectives has been aided by liberal media outlets, who don’t report the truth of what these Black Power advocates believe, even though it’s right there in the 10-Point Platform.
Attacking the Reagans became part of this active disinformation campaign, as the overtly black nationalist revolutionary goals of the Black Panthers morphed into an academic and legal agenda that has become the mass incarceration movement.
Mass Incarceration’s Anti-Reagan History Rewrite
One of the leaders and forerunners of the modern mass incarceration movement is 1960s radical Angela Davis. Davis comes from an academic background; she attended Brandeis University and was mentored by the intellectual father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse from the Frankfurt School.
Around the time she joined the Communist Party of the United States, Davis became enamored with the gun-toting Black Panthers and fell in love with the violent Black Panther cofounder George Jackson, who spent his entire life in prison. Angela Davis fled authorities after guns she owned were used in the bloody Marin County Center hostage takeover that was done in an attempt to free George Jackson. As the New York Times reported in a story on her eventual acquittal:
The charges against her were lodged late in August, 1970, shortly after Jonathan Jackson, 17, smuggled guns into a Marin County courtroom in San Rafael, Calif, and armed three black convicts. They then attempted to escape by using a judge, an assistant district attorney and three women jurors as hostages.
The judge was taken hostage with a shot gun taped to his neck. He died in the getaway vans outside the civic center along with Jackson and two of the three convicts who participated in the escape.
But no horrible act goes unrewarded by the left.
Today, Angela Davis is a professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz and one of the revered leaders of mass incarceration movement.
The Black Power Movement’s fifty-year obsession with the Reagans continues with their constant refrain hammering on the idea that the War on Drugs is part of a racist system of oppression designed to keep “people of color” down.
As Angela Davis described the War on Drugs in a 2014 interview:
…drugs have served—the so-called war on drugs, which, as we know, has been a war on poor communities, black and Latino communities, all over the country—that so-called war on drugs has been the major motor driving the rising prison population. So, I often point out we need to look at the corresponding pharmaceutical-industrial complex when we, you know, think about the way drugs have served as a pretext for incarcerating such vast numbers of people of color.
This argument is prevalent on the left and by extension to many black Americans, who have shown undying fealty towards the Democrat Party despite having nothing to show for it regarding a better life for millions of black Americans.
Part of the argument that the War on Drugs was effectively a war on black people is based on the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on October 27, 1986.
One provision of the act mandated a minimum sentence of 5 years without parole for possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine while it mandated the same for possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine, a disparity that critics say was caused by racism due to the idea that crack cocaine is used predominantly by black people whereas powder cocaine was used by whites.
The “blame Reagan” narrative, however, ignores the real history. As Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason O’Reilly wrote at The Federalist:
The harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including New York Representatives Major Owens of Brooklyn and Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black communities, and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentences. “Eleven of the twenty-one blacks who were then members of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the law which created the 100-to-1 crack–powder differential,” noted Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy.
A Change in Tactics Spawns the Modern Mass Incarceration Movement
1960s-era Communists like Angela Davis longed for revolutionary change, but they grew tired of life on the run underground. They learned that the smarter route to the revolution they longed for was to put down their guns and bombs and head into the ivory tower.
In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, they began affecting change the way that Davis’s mentor Herbert Marcuse in the Frankfurt School had suggested: through cultural Marxism, which included impacting the culture through academia and the arts.
Art continues to play an important role in this propaganda effort, including recent films meant to agitate black Americans by whitewashing the real history of the ’60s. These include the taxpayer-funded The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution documentary and the film Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners. It has even made its way to popular culture, such as Beyoncé Knowles’s Black Panther inspired Super Bowl halftime show, which acts as a gateway drug to interest in radical black groups.
Professor Angela Davis is joined in the halls of academe by the likes of Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, who currently teaches law at Emory University, as well as former Students for Democratic Society communist revolutionaries such as Bill Ayres, Bernardine Dohrn, and Kathy Boudin, all of whom went on to become teachers after years underground plotting the overthrow of the United States.
That generation helped lead the way for the current crop of academic black liberation radicals, including Michelle Alexander, the former Stanford Law School professor who wrote the movement’s bible: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Alexander’s patron in this endeavor was billionaire leftist philanthropist George Soros.
As her biography states:
In 2005, she won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of The New Jim Crow, and that same year she accepted a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. Since its first publication,The New Jim Crow has received rave reviews and has been featured in national radio and television media outlets, including MSNBC, NPR, Bill Moyers Journal, Tavis Smiley, C-SPAN, and Washington Journal, among others. In March, the book won the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction.
The awards, glowing reviews, and academic air of respectability are all designed to cover the tracks of the movement’s real goal of releasing all black prisoners, a topic we will highlight and prove in future stories at Breitbart News.
Of course, Michelle Alexander also has attacked Ronald Reagan and Republicans as waging a racist war on black America. As she wrote in 2011 at the Huffington Post:
President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action.
From the 10-Point Platform to Obama Policy
The mass incarceration movement has a friend in the White House in the form of President Barack Obama, as well as allies in the Department of Justice such as former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was a black student activist for black liberation at Columbia University in the early 1970s, and current Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
President Obama put this policy into action with the largest release of prisoners in U.S. history, and Attorney General Lynch indicated that, with the help of Republican politicians, more prisoner releases are on the way. Lynch outlined this in an interview on PBS last year:
GWEN IFILL: And so this week, one of the things you suggested was release — the beginning of a series of releases, starting with 6,000 prisoners who have been held, you believe, too long.
That’s a drop in the bucket against the 2.2 million people who are held in federal and local jails and prisons. How do you expand on that?
LORETTA LYNCH: Well, the sentencing reform efforts that are on the Hill, I think, are very encouraging.
The Senate came out with a bill just last week. I believe the House is announcing their bill today. We look forward to reviewing those and working with both houses to make them not only effective, but productive in a way that keeps our communities safe and also gives people a chance at rebuilding their lives, because that can be done.
While Republican politicians have bent over backward to prove how bipartisan they are in working with mass incarceration advocates, they seem to forget that everything President Obama does has a political purpose.
One immediate goal is to turn ex-felons into a voting bloc. As Mother Jones reported one month ago, in Maryland alone approximately 40,000 felons in that state have been given the right to vote, and it’s just the beginning:
At issue in Maryland’s bill was whether to restore voting rights to felons who have completed their prison sentence but are still on parole or probation. The bill passed the legislature last year, but Hogan vetoed it. Last month, the state House voted to override the veto, leaving a squeaker of a vote in the state Senate.
Unlike in many states, ex-offenders in Maryland already had the right to vote after all terms of their sentences were met. (Felons still in prison remain unable to vote.) The new law makes Maryland the 14th state to allow felons to vote once out of prison. But as the Baltimore Sun reports, it was tough to muster enough support for the override, which ultimately broke down along party lines.
The Impact Isn’t Just Academic: Twitter Shows Street Hatred of the Reagans
The left’s push for mass incarceration and it’s parallel attacks on Ronald Reagan can be seen in the hate-filled tweets directed at his widow after her death.
Now that you know the history, you’ll see the results in the disgusting rhetoric of “the people” on Twitter, as five decades of steady propaganda have trickled down from the ivory tower to the gutter.
https://twitter.com/lulee95/status/706642022925336576
https://twitter.com/MattUtters/status/706651423216312320
https://twitter.com/Nihilistopheles/status/706558562818850816
https://twitter.com/arln1966/status/706657328867774465
https://twitter.com/baldheadbasset/status/706670847742877696
https://twitter.com/regguevara/status/706680869046480901
https://twitter.com/dimitriDutch/status/706700429816688640
https://twitter.com/tinycicada/status/706643559298965505
https://twitter.com/bigBoDawson/status/706658106218942465
https://twitter.com/Ben_Neato/status/706706267436232705
https://twitter.com/SMOKELAHOMA420/status/706707617914048512
https://twitter.com/FulcrumAmber/status/706721830136991744
https://twitter.com/Dream_Elusive/status/706721979009671168
Note: My article yesterday featured two vile tweets directed at Nancy Reagan that were actually from months ago, not from immediately after her death. I regret the error; however, it in no way changes the fact that there was an immediate outpouring of hatred towards Nancy Reagan, and there were hundreds of tweets that I did not post in that story.
Below is the full audio from interviews on this topic today on Breitbart News Daily and yesterday on Breitbart News Sunday:
For more details on the Black Panthers and Black Lives matter, follow Breitbart News leader investigative reporter and Citizen Journalism School founder Lee Stranahan on Twitter at @Stranahan.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.