In the supposed causes of love, tolerance, and equality, leftist groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter are copying the violent practices of Mao's Red Guards.

Over the past year, America’s university campuses and city streets have erupted in rioting and pitched battles that point toward a return to the violent civil turmoil and social conflagrations of the 1960s. Masked, black-clad thugs claiming to be “anti-fascists” (thus using “Antifa” as their adopted moniker) employ fascist/communist terror tactics to silence those they deem to be enemies. Militant activists of Black Lives Matter (BLM) have likewise used rioting, violence, threats of violence, and accusations of racism to defame, cow, and intimidate their opponents, meaning virtually all white people, all police, all commentators, and all black people and members of other racial minorities who challenge the radical BLM agenda. The shock troops of the aggressive LGBTQ community, as well as the extremists of the environmental/global-warming alarmist chorus, are resorting to increasingly hostile and violent rhetoric and action. Elites in the media, political circles, and academia turn a blind eye to the Antifa violence or actually egg it on, while decrying the alleged “structural” flaws of American society — racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia — that they insist are especially rampant among conservatives and Christians, and can only be rooted out through deep “systemic” reform and aggressive policing of politically incorrect thought and speech.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign provided the perfect pretext for the organ­ized forces of the political Left to go into rhetorical meltdown mode. His election has sent them over the top, into apocalyptic conniptions. Not only is President Trump “Hitler,” “Mussolini,” “racist,” “fascist,” “Nazi” — i.e., evil incarnate — as a wide swath of Trump critics insists, but he must be “resisted” by “all means possible,” including violent riots and revolution, even assassination. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election victory, colleges and universities provided surreal video spectacles of students and faculty members wailing inconsolably, many being referred to counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder. However, as dictated by political expedience, many of these alleged PTSD “crybullies” quickly and adeptly shifted gears from fearful victim to defiant revolutionaries, rhetorically attacking Trump and physically attacking his supporters. YouTube and the social media universe abound in videos of Trump haters chanting, “Stop the Hate!” and “Love Trumps Hate!” — as they curse, scream at, beat, kick, spit on, and set fire to fellow Americans who are merely exercising their rights to express support for the candidate of their choice, or to attend the inauguration of the legally elected president of the United States.

While the Trump election may be the focus of the frightful explosion of vicious verbal violence and actual physical violence that have beset America, the real forces at play have been building for many years, carefully nurtured by a new class of professional revolutionaries: tenured radicals, community organizers, politicians, and their elite promoters in the “mainstream” media, major corporations, and tax-exempt foundations. Those with memories long enough and those who have studied 20th-century political history may recognize in the current tumult many familiar contours that are strikingly similar to the horrendous communist convulsion in China known as Mao Tse-tung’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” This is not mere coincidence; there are direct, as well as ideological, ties connecting Red China’s Cultural Revolution and Mao’s murderous, fanatical Red Guards to the unfolding chaos that is enveloping our nation. The frenzied Antifa/BLM/LGBTQ/enviro-climate zealots are the vanguards of a Maoist culture that has taken root in academia, Hollywood, Big Labor, and Big Business, and if allowed to thrive unchallenged will undoubtedly result in now-unimaginable death and destruction, as did Mao’s “glorious experiment” in Orwellian social transformation.

During the terrifying decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Chairman Mao sent millions of youth into the schools, streets, and countryside to terrorize the Chinese people into total submission. These Red Guards — mostly high-school and college students, but also including elementary-school pupils — accused and denounced their own parents, grandparents, and siblings, as well as their neighbors, teachers, and professors, of such “crimes” as being “capitalist roaders,” or “rightists,” or of showing “bourgeois tendencies,” or expressing “politically incorrect thought.” Many of these young communist accusers actually played lead roles in physically attacking, humiliating, torturing, even killing the accused “enemies of the people.” Even many leading Communist Party officials were arrested, tried, imprisoned, and then “re-educated” and “rehabilitated” — or killed. Tearing down and destroying tens of thousands of churches, shrines, temples, statues, and monuments was also a key part of the Cultural Revolution, to cleanse the nation of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Sound familiar?

In Chinese Shadows (1973), one of the most perceptive books on the Cultural Revolution, China scholar Simon Leys laments the “years of systematic incitation to ‘class hatred’ and the denunciation of basic human impulses, such as compassion for suffering, whoever is the victim (this is now condemned as the expression of a bourgeois humanism that denies the class struggle),” which has “brought about the general and willed lowering of the traditional virtues that gave harmony to Chinese life.”

In the years before 1966, the Chinese Communist Party had prepared the way for this enormous, violent convulsion with intensive ideological indoctrination similar to what we are witnessing here today. In China, as in Russia and other developing countries, the Marxist-Leninist revolution emphasized “class warfare,” pitting poor against rich, peasant against landlord. However, in the United States and other wealthy developed countries with a large middle class, other differences and hot-button issues must be exploited to divide and conquer: race, sexual orientation, environmental crises, immigration amnesty, etc. So in the interest of examining the ties and parallels of America’s current trends to the ongoing revolution of “Mao Tse-tung thought,” allow me to survey a relatively small sampling (out of myriad  possible examples) of recent manifestations that illustrate the depth and breadth of the crisis we face:

“All White People Are Racists” — According to Critical Race Theory, as taught in many of our high schools and colleges, America is systemically, irredeemably racist. But only white people are racist, and it is “impossible” for a non-white person to be racist, no matter how virulently anti-white his/her words and actions may be. Thus we have actress Logan Browning, a star of the controversial Netflix series Dear White People, claiming that “Black people can’t be racist.” “They can be biased,” she admits, “but they can’t be racist, and why is that?… Racism is the oppression of a marginalized group in a society that’s based on white supremacy.” So, “If you are a white person, I’m sorry, you naturally benefit from white privilege,” she insists.

Dr. Saida Grundy, a black feminist professor at Boston University, is notorious for anti-white/anti-male tweets, including: “White masculinity isn’t a problem for America’s colleges, white masculinity is THE problem for America’s colleges.” Also: “dear white people: …those euphemisms for ur ancestors like ‘farmers’ & ‘pioneers’ means owned humans & killed natives.”

Georgetown University Professor Preston Mitchum, a “progressive” who has written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Think Progress, declares: “Yes, ALL white people are racist. Yes, ALL men are sexist. Yes, ALL cis people are transphobic.” In the same vein, Tim Donovan, a writer for Salon.com and Alternet.org penned a provocative screed entitled “Yes, All White People Are Racists — Now Let’s Do Something About It.” “The first step to ending racism,” he avers, “is acknowledging that most of us harbor ‘implicit bias,’ whether we realize it or not.” Dr. Shakti Butler helped formulate a “Diversity Facilitation Training” program for dormitories at the University of Delaware that provides the following definition for “racist”: “A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists.”

We find abundant similar fare from MSNBC pundit and Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson, Professor Tommy Curry at Texas A&M, Professor Gavin Mueller at the University of Texas, Dallas, and dozens — if not hundreds — of like-minded academics. On Christmas Eve last year, Professor George Ciccariello-Maher of Drexel University took this all-whites-are-racist view to what many of its subscribers, no doubt, consider the logical conclusion. He infamously tweeted, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” He followed with this sanguinary tweet: “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution [of 1804], that was a good thing indeed.”

Are academic subversives such as these fired, censured, or even disciplined for their incendiary and racist statements? It does not appear so; in fact, in most cases we’ve observed, college and university administrators defend their rhetoric and actions under the guise of “academic freedom.” Only significant public outrage, apparently, can prompt the removal of some of the most outrageous extremists, as the cases of Professor Johnny Eric Williams at Connecticut’s Trinity College and Professor Kevin Allred at New Jersey’s Montclair State University show. Williams went over the top with indefensible tweets in the aftermath of the shooting attack on Representative Steve Scalise and other congressional Republicans by a Bernie Sanders Democrat this past June. Williams signaled his support for the belief that first responders to the shooting should have “#LetThem****ingDie” because they are white “inhuman ***holes” and “vectors,” as in pathogenic agents (such as rats, fleas, ticks, parasites, microbes) that spread “their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system.”

Among Allred’s many offensive comments is this death-wish tweet: “Trump is a f***ing joke…. I wish someone would just shoot him outright.”

“All Men Are Rapists” — That sweeping charge, made by a character in Marilyn French’s bestselling novel The Women’s Room (1977), has become feminist dogma, as taught in Women’s Studies and Gender Theory classes at high schools, colleges, and universities. “All men are rapists and that’s all they are,” charged self-described “radical feminist” French. “They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.” Feminist author Susan Brownsville, in her book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, holds that “[rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

Radical lesbian feminist Julie Bindel, who writes for Britain’s largest “progressive” newspaper, The Guardian, last year put a finer point on her obvious man-hatred. In a Twitter response to comments from readers she called “misogynist trolls,” she tweeted, “All men are rapists and should be put in prison then shot.” In an interview with RadFem Collective, Bindel expanded on this thought, proposing a kind of concentration camp for all men. “I mean, I would actually put them all [men] in some kind of camp,” Bindel said. “We would have wardens, of course! Women who want to see their sons or male loved ones would be able to go and visit, or take them out like a library book, and then bring them back.” Bindel told her RadFem interviewer that she doesn’t view men as human beings, and stated further, “I hope heterosexuality doesn’t survive, actually.”

Chapman University Professors Peter McClaren and Lilia Monzo, self-described Marxists, combine their hatred of “racism” with their definition of patriarchal, heterosexual society and capitalism. “Our struggle to end racism then must be closely aligned with our struggle against patriarchy and capitalism,” they assert in their paean to communist social reconstruction, “Red Love: Toward Racial, Economic and Social Justice.”

As extreme as these voices are, they are part of a chorus whose refrain has been reverberating in academia for years, with alarming results. One young man who had recently returned from military service in Afghanistan related to me an unnerving experience he had while walking across campus at a (relatively) conservative university where he was attending law school. A young woman who was approaching him from the opposite direction, stopped, pointed at him, and screamed, “rapist!” — and then continued on her way. “I didn’t even know her, had never seen her before, and wasn’t even looking at her,” he said. “It was insane. But it, apparently, is a feminist ‘exercise in empowerment,’ because I’ve heard of other men being subjected to the same experience.”

Bias Response Teams — The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has brought to national attention a burgeoning threat that has been proliferating below the radar on campuses: “Bias Response Teams.” These teams monitor and investigate student and faculty speech, directing the attention of law enforcement and student conduct administrators toward the expression of students and faculty members. FIRE discovered and surveyed 231 Bias Response Teams (BRTs) at public and private institutions during 2016; BRTs affect expression of at least 2.84 million American students. Many of these teams tend to cast a wide net when defining “bias,” FIRE notes in its 2017 report. Almost all use categories widely found in discrimination statutes (race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.), while others investigate bias against obscure categories, such as “smoker status,” “shape,” and “intellectual perspective.” Some BRTs “include political affiliation or speech as a potential bias, inviting reports of and investigations into political speech by law enforcement and student conduct administrators.” Thus, “administrators are frequently armed with vague or overly broad rules granting them leeway to impose sanctions for speech they dislike” — such as a Twitter comment or an overheard private conversation in which a “homophobic,” “sexist,” “racist,” “hateful,” or “hurtful” expression is detected.  Adding to the opportunity for abuse, many of the BRTs do not publicly divulge who the team members are, which allows anonymous, unaccountable individuals to make damaging (and perhaps unfounded) accusations against faculty members and students, whether for political reasons or personal spite. Many of these Mao-style thought police teams also include law-enforcement officers as members, which increases the likelihood that students and faculty members may find themselves entered into criminal justice databases for politically incorrect statements that in many jurisdictions fall under broad “hate speech” and “hate crime” definitions.

Prison (or Death) for Climate “Deniers” — “The police would start to identify the most influential Global Warming deniers,” under Professor Richard Parncutt’s proposal, and “These individuals would then be charged and brought to justice.”

Because global-warming (GW) “deniers” will be responsible for the death of millions of people, says Parncutt, they must be imprisoned until they confess their errors and prove their contrition by participating, from jail, “significantly and positively over a long period in programs to reduce the effects of GW.” However, he notes, “At the end of that process, some GW deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed.” Parncutt, who teaches music in Austria, may be on the extreme end, but not by too far. The call for firing, persecuting, and prosecuting scientists, professors, writers, and others who question the belief that man-made CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming has been gathering momentum for years. In 2015, 20 prominent climate scientists/activists — including UN IPCC Lead Author Kevin Trenberth — joined Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) in calling on President Obama to prosecute global-warming skeptics under the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute, which was enacted, ostensibly, to combat the mafia, drug cartels, and the like. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has called for some climate skeptics to be prosecuted as war criminals, and Bill Nye the “Science Guy” says he’s open to that idea. John Gilkison, an astronomer at New Mexico State University, penned a climate fantasy in which he envisioned future “Climate Crimes trials” in which skeptics would be convicted and sentenced to death. He lists by name many scientists, pundits, scholars, and politicians who would be executed.

Conservatives Out, Communists In — Over the past year, left-wing students and faculty members have prevented a number of well-known conservative authors, pundits, and scholars from speaking at colleges and universities, or have raucously (sometimes violently) disrupted their talks. Some of the speakers so affected by the Marxist Taliban patrolling our campuses include Heather Mac Donald, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, political commentator, and a contributing editor of City Journal; Charles Murray, author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; Ben Shapiro, author, commentator, and radio host; Ann Coulter, author, political commentator, syndicated columnist, and lawyer; and, of course, Milo Yiannopoulos, “conservative” homosexual provocateur and former senior editor at Breitbart.com. It was Yiannopoulos’s scheduled speech at the University of California’s Berkeley campus that touched off the violent conflagration — riots, fires, assaults, and vandalism — by Antifa communists in that city this past February. Communists? Really? Yes, really, but it is a reality that even conservatives appear to be loath to mention. (Can’t use the “C” word; that’s so 1950s, you know. Besides, we don’t want to be accused of “McCarthyism” — still the ultimate opprobrium.) So, conservatives, libertarians, and other Americans who have absolutely no connection to or sympathy for Nazism/fascism can be roundly and falsely vilified as Nazis and fascists (with the defamatory charges endlessly repeated by the “mainstream” news media), but the communist sponsors of the Antifa criminals/terrorists cannot be truthfully identified as communists.

We have witnessed this over and over again for years with violent demonstrations and riots staged by the Left for “abortion rights,” “immigration rights,” “LGBTQ rights,” “social justice,” “racial justice,” “climate change,” “peace/anti-war,” etc. The fact is that in virtually all of these cases the critical leadership has been provided by trained communist cadres of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Workers World Party (WWP), Progressive Labor Party, and Socialist Workers Party (SWP). However, the controlled media remain willfully, obstinately blind to this reality and steadfastly censor this information so that readers/viewers remain ignorant of the facts that are necessary to make informed judgments. Thus, for example, we see, time after time, demonstrations in which the vast majority of participants are holding signs provided by, say, the RCP or WWP, most often with the party’s website actually printed on it. In addition, well-known officials and activists of the communist parties are leading the events with bullhorns. Ergo, these are communist events posing as demonstrations about peace, race, civil rights, immigration, etc.

Consider for instance the Revolutionary Communist Party, which openly, ardently glorifies mass-murderer Mao Tse-tung and his Cultural Revolution. Sunsara Taylor, the RCP’s fanatical “Madame Mao,” who erupts with volcanic intensity to denounce President Trump as a “Nazi” and a “Fascist,” is a frequent guest on national television and radio, where she is regularly introduced as a spokesperson for RefuseFascism.org. Even Fox News, on which she has repeatedly appeared, does not identify her as an official of the RCP and a regular writer for the RCP newspaper, Revolution, and the RCP website, revcom.us. She speaks at colleges and universities, without facing any rioting from “right-wing” students and, apparently, without any difficulties or reservations from administrations that throw up all manner of obstacles for conservative speakers. This is all the more offensive since she is never called out for supporting the most murderous and oppressive regime in the history of the world, while claiming to be mortally concerned that Donald Trump is going to stamp out all freedom. Her living idol is RCP Chairman Bob Avakian, who, to the RCP faithful, is the equivalent of Mao reincarnated. RCP cadres have played a leading role in violent confrontations and deadly riots for decades, including in Los Angeles in 1992, on up through the more recent mayhem in Ferguson, Baltimore, Portland, Milwaukee, Oakland, Berkeley, Charlottesville, and more.  

In addition to Sunsara Taylor and Avakian, the RCP receives regular positive exposure through friendly media interviews with longtime communist organizer (and RCP officer) Carl Dix and “public intellectual” Cornel West (former professor at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale). The New York Times allows the RCP’s RefuseFascism.org to place a full-page ad in its pages, while refusing to accept ads from groups that are pro-life or that align themselves with other positions that fail the “progressive” litmus test. In its anti-Trump broadside in the Times, the RCP/RefuseFascism attack ad declares: “NO! IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA!”

The RCP/RefuseFascism Maoists call on Americans to “Take to the streets” and “Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!” Yes, that’s Red Guard “democracy” for you, courtesy of communist terrorists whom the establishment media and politicians present as legitimate players in our political “conversation.”

Like the RCP, the Workers World Party is avowedly communist and has been committed to violent revolution since its inception by breakaway members of the SWP and CPUSA in 1959. Just as the RCP operates through RefuseFascism and other front groups, the WWP has its main fronts, the International Action Center (IAC) and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), through which it attempts to broaden its appeal. In the current wave of rioting and destruction, the WWP’s hand was made manifest by the arrest of some of its key members. The highly publicized toppling of a Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina, on August 14 was the handiwork of at least four WWP communists: Takiyah Fatima Thompson, Dante Emmanuel Strobino, Ngoc Loan Tran, and Peter Hull Gilbert.

In many of the other violent incidents littering the landscape of the ongoing cultural revolution in our midst, agents of the RCP, WWP, SWP, and CPUSA can be identified in photos and videos as key participants and leaders. However, their identities often are not officially revealed because they are protected from arrest by left-wing city and county governments that tell police to “stand down,” as we have seen in Baltimore, Portland, Berkeley, and elsewhere. This too follows the script written by Mao, who ordered the police and military to stand down, allowing the Red Guards to carry out their rampage — until they had completed their purpose. Then they too were brought low and subjected to the iron fist of the Communist Party.

“The Revolution Eats Its Own”

Many of the most fanatical of the wannabe Red Guards now stalking America’s streets, campuses, work places, and corporate board rooms would do well to learn some relevant lessons from history. After murdering tens of thousands of their fellow citizens ­— by guillotine, noyades (mass drownings), and cannonades (group execution by cannon and explosives) ­— Robespierre and 21 of his top Jacobin executioners during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror were themselves summarily arrested, during the Thermidorian Reaction of July 1794, and sent to the guillotine — by their fellow revolutionists. The revolution has continued to “eat its own” ever since, as purge and counter-purge has shown in every communist regime.

Some of the “progressives” responsible for the cultural revolution in America are already beginning to get a taste of this experience. Consider, for example, Professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College in the state of Washington, whose case has garnered considerable attention. A self-described “progressive,” Dr. Weinstein was nonetheless verbally and physically attacked by a mob of “people of color” racists (some of which was caught on video) and forced to flee his classroom because he had not heeded their demand to leave the campus on the no-whites-allowed day they had designated as a “Day of Absence.” Under orders of the college president, the campus police were ordered to stand down and not allowed to rescue him.  Evergreen’s Maoist thought police have continued to hound him on social media, condemning him as a “racist,” while providing not a scintilla of evidence to back up the defamatory charge.

Similarly, Professor Allison Stranger at Middlebury College in Vermont was set upon by a violent mob of students (egged on by her fellow faculty members) for having the audacity to serve as the moderator for a talk by conservative scholar Charles Murray this past March. After a raucous mob of students shut down Dr. Murray’s lecture, he and Professor Stranger fled to another site to broadcast the presentation via livestream. But the mob hunted them down, banged on the doors and windows, and then attacked them when they tried to leave. They shoved her and pulled her hair. “I feared for my life,” Dr. Stranger says. They then attacked the car as the duo attempted to escape. She recounts that “protesters climbed on it, hitting the windows and rocking the vehicle whenever we stopped to avoid harming them.” She sustained a concussion, requiring her to spend a week in a dark room, and a whiplash, for which she had to be fitted with a neck brace. Being a progressive Democrat and publicly stating her disagreement with Dr. Murray’s beliefs was not sufficient to confer immunity on her or protect her from the raging mob.

Like many other liberals, progressives, and radicals, professors Weinstein and Stranger are beginning to discover that the revolution they have been assisting, whether wittingly or unwittingly, has a dangerous life of its own. So too “comedian” and atheist provocateur Bill Maher, long a darling of Hollywood and the left-wing noosphere. Maher, who was uncritically cheered while bashing Christians, conservatives, Republicans, creationists, and heterosexuals, is now under the lash for the heresy of “Islamaphobia”: He has dared to criticize Islam. But Weinstein, Stranger, and Maher should ponder the fate of Beijing teachers Liu Meide and Bian Zhongyun, two of the earliest victims of Mao’s Red Guards. Liu, a vice principal and chemistry teacher was attacked by her female middle-school students, who beat her, stuffed dirt in her mouth, cut off her hair, and forced her to kneel on a table — all despite the fact that she was pregnant. When they knocked her off the table, it killed her unborn baby. Bian Zhongyun, a vice principal at another girls’ school, suffered similar abuse for weeks, before being killed in a three-hour torture session in August 1966. Her story is movingly told by her husband, Wang Jingyao, now in his nineties, in a courageous film, Though I Am Gone.

One of the most important lesson to be learned from their tragedies is that prior to being singled out as “enemies of the people,” Liu Meide and Bian Zhongyun were considered politically correct members of the Communist Party ­— as were many of the millions of other victims of the Cultural Revolution. Many who are currently riding the cultural revolution wave in America would surely face similar fates if it were to succeed.  This is not merely some passing “craziness,” as some critics suggest, but a very profound, deeply laid, foundational revolution that must be forthrightly confronted, exposed, and opposed.

Attorney Hiram Mann put it well: “No man escapes when freedom fails, the best men rot in filthy jails; And they who cried: ‘Appease, appease!’ Are hanged by men they tried to please.” But freedom need not fail. The would-be Red Guards surging through our street and campuses — and those who are supporting them — represent only a tiny fraction of Americans. The presidential and congressional elections of 2016 (as well as many state and local elections) demonstrate that many of our fellow citizens sense something is wrong and reject the Orwellian appeals of the Left to “transform” our nation and our culture. However, all of that could be for naught, unless more Americans develop a keener understanding of the deadly peril we face and commit to fighting it, with all the time, energy, and resources at our disposal.

Photo of Confederate statue toppled in Durham, North Carolina: AP Images

This article originally appeared in the September 18, 2017, of The New American.