The Evolution of Extreme Thinking

Trump may not be perfect but he’s a damn sight better than these phony PC ‘Democrats’ & their allies who seek to smash free speech & dialogue.

Larry Pinkney, one of the original founders of the Black Panther Party

The fact that one of the founding members of the original Black Panther Party, Larry Pinkney, sees Donald Trump as “a damn sight better than these phony P.C. Democrats” is interesting enough in itself.  However, what is even more interesting is that no one knows this because Pinkney’s views, which deliver a body blow to the essential Democrat-media Trump-racism narrative, have been censored by the media.  If one clicks on the link to Pinkney’s tweet praising Donald Trump’s positive policies for black people in the Wikipedia article one is sent to a site in which Twitter informs the peasants that the relevant tweet is unavailable because it is from a “suspended account.”  Once again, it appears that our media overlords have deemed that the peasants may not be permitted to have access to certain views or information that contradicts their partisan world view.

Pickney is, admittedly, not an unproblematic character. Forty years ago in his radical days, Pickney spent five years in a Canadian prison for attempted extortion.  However, there is such a thing as growing up and there is such a thing as redemption.  The point is that people should be permitted to state their opinions in the United States.

Pickney’s case is reminiscent of another Black Panther from the 1960s, Eldridge Cleaver, who, while a member of the Panthers, called for an armed insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government and replace it by a black socialist government.  On April 6, 1968, Cleaver, with 14 other Black Panthers armed with M16 rifles and shotguns, engaged in a shootout with police in which the 17-year-old Panther, Bobby Hutton, was killed.  Cleaver was charged with attempted murder and sent to prison but was released two months later.  He even, during this time, gave some lectures at the University of California at Berkeley. 

Cleaver challenged the governor of California at the time, Ronald Reagan, to a duel and threatened to beat him to death.  He also admitted to plotting to assassinate Reagan. Cleaver’s parole was revoked but on Nov. 24, 1968, three days before he was due to turn himself in to the police, he fled to Cuba and spent the next seven years travelling through various socialist and communist countries, including Algeria, North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union, before settling down for a period in France.  Cleaver also developed a strange alliance with the communist government in North Korea and its strange reclusive leader, Kim Il Sung.

However, experiencing the joys of socialism and communism first-hand in numerous leftist Utopias around the world, as opposed to daydreaming about them in Sociology 101, has a way of opening one’s eyes.  In a 1986 interview with Reason magazine, Cleaver explained that he had once sought to “fight against what I saw as the evils of our [American] system” but when he visited countries “like Cuba or Algeria or the Soviet Union” and saw the way they treated their own people “it was shocking to me. I didn’t want to believe it, because it meant that [my earlier radical] politics was wrong.”

Disillusioned with socialism and communism and homesick for the United States, Cleaver returned to America, even though he was still facing a murder charge and a charge for skipping bail.  Apparently, facing a murder charge in the United States is significantly preferable to being given the red-carpet treatment in the various socialist and communist paradises around the world.  In 1977 he surrendered to the FBI under a deal in which he pled guilty to the assault charge and was sentenced to 1,200 hours of community service in exchange for dropping the attempted murder charge.

Cleaver later joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints before becoming a Christian conservative, a member of the Republican Party and a supporter of Ronald Reagan, the man he had once wanted to assassinate.  In his later years, Cleaver lived in a modest apartment in Berkeley.  A large American flag, testifying to his gratitude to the United States, flew from his front porch.   

Cleaver may have spent some time at the University of California in Berkeley classrooms but his real education came while living in socialist and communist countries.  Both Cleaver’s and Pickney’s cases show that some people are actually willing to learn from their experience and make the difficult transition from adolescent daydreams to mature thinking.  

Unfortunately, our overlords in the media feel entitled to prevent the peasants from knowing about such stories.  For if the peasants do learn of these stories the elites will be forced to defend their adolescent views, something they are clearly too frightened to do.  This is why many on the Left and in the media are terrified at the news that Elon Musk may actually buy Twitter and return it to the traditional American norm of freedom of speech.

It is much easier to silence people than it is to grow up and it is much easier to call people names than to solve problems.  However, Cleaver and Pickney demonstrate that, though it is difficult to shed one’s adolescent fantasies growing up is both possible and better. 

adapted from article by Richard McDonough at AmericanThinker.com on October 8, 2022