When not leading revolution herself, Davis has been a key influence over younger ideologues vying to become the American Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, or Fidel Castro. The founders of the BLM organizations adored her and drew inspiration from this former vice presidential candidate for the Communist Party.

I propose we look at news events swirling in the ether today, as she described the current decade in a recent interview in Brooklyn. Indeed, we should look at everything through this prism, from the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America to President Donald Trump’s fight with the Smithsonian Institution to the continuing struggle over diversity, equity, and inclusion at schools, universities, and workplaces.

Marxists nearly overthrew the American regime in 2020, when seven years of street violence culminated in monthslong riots sparked by the police killing of George Floyd on May 25. The stewards of our cultural institutions lost their nerve, surrendered, and accepted the lies the revolutionaries were spreading as justification for overthrowing the system. They then began instituting policies that would have changed the country beyond recognition.

But conservative forces recovered in the nick of time and stalled the advance while electing the political leaders needed to reverse course. Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin was the first in 2021. Then came the second election of Trump in 2024.

“I suppose I would say that this period has qualities of, characteristics of, counterrevolution,” Davis said when asked by the moderator, Jelani Cobb, what accounted for what is, in Cobb’s view, the rapid fragmentation of democracy under Trump. “What we’ve experienced over the last years, including the last elections, has been a response to a powerful, progressive surge of history.”

Cobb had asked, “What do you think goes into this rapid devolution that we’ve seen of American democracy, which was fragile from the gate? … I think of myself as fairly skeptical, [but] I’ve been shocked by the velocity at which these things have transpired.”

Cobb himself personifies the surrender by our top institutions. In 2022, the trustees of Columbia University appointed this leftist firebrand, who quoted Marx to Davis during the interview and gushed at one point, “God bless you,” as the dean of the highly acclaimed Columbia Journalism School and the “Henry R. Luce professor of journalism,” so he could mold the minds of future journalists.

Davis, 82, is lionized in the progressive world. Her Kahn Humanities lecture at the Brooklyn Public Library reached capacity early on, and the wait list, too, filled up. But this former Black Panther is not a nice person, to say the least.

Not only does she continue to support communism, an ideology responsible for the death of 100 million people, but, despite advertising herself as a “prison abolitionist,” she showed no qualms about anticommunist dissidents languishing in gulags behind the old Iron Curtain.

Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz once asked her to intercede on behalf of Jewish refuseniks in Soviet prisons, given that Soviet leaders feted her. Davis, he said, replied, “They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.” She showed the same contempt for Czech dissidents, of whom she said, “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.”

And that would undoubtedly be the fate of Americans who dared to question the regime if socialists ever grab the reins of power in America.

Which makes it frightening to hear her describe the 2020 BLM insurrection as having come so close to succeeding, as a period of such potential, and as such a missed opportunity.

“I ask people to remember what it felt like, only six years ago,” she told Cobb. “To remember, you know, what the collective sentiment was, in 2020, when more people than ever before in the history of this country went out into the streets.

“At the time, I was thinking: This is what we’ve been waiting for, since the end of the Civil War. And there were others who were very much aware of the potential of what was happening.”

Masses of people in 2020, including many whites, she said, were “stimulated, you know, by the possibility of real democracy … We were really ready to move forward. We were really ready to take that step.”

What Davis means by democracy, she lets us know later, and, no, it’s not the “putative democracy” that we have in America.

“Unfortunately, democracy is often represented as only voting and everyone having the right to choose those who lead the country,” she said. “But of course, it’s much broader than that. We can talk about economic democracy.”

But, alas, “the revolution in relation to the organization of the means of production has not happened.”

And that is because “we hadn’t really taken into consideration what would be necessary in order to challenge the counter forces,” Davis told Cobb. “And so, it was at that moment that the conservatives took advantage of all of the work that they’d been doing. … Immediately, we had this offensive against education, this offensive against black studies or critical race theory, and we weren’t prepared. We weren’t prepared to challenge that.

“We need to learn from that. Because that was a moment where we really could have seized the time.”

But not all is lost. “But if we didn’t do it in 2020, there may come another conjunction, and we need to be more prepared for that.”

That is Davis’s summation, and it’s an accurate one. The old totalitarian is explaining to us that everything still hangs in the balance.

Conservatives may think that they have defeated DEI and critical race theory, but teachers and professors keep trying to conceal the continued existence of these practices, often by simply renaming them. The White House has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Smithsonian’s leaders are biased against the country that pays their salaries, and yet they brazenly hang on and dare Congress to act.

And the most violent members of the Marxist universe keep telling us that there’s another revolt afoot. Late last month, Manolo De Los Santos, leader of one of the most violent Marxist groups, the People’s Forum, called on Marxists to take to the streets.

“What happened in 2020 during the George Floyd uprising? Twenty, 30 million people were on the streets all across the country. The country was ungovernable,” De Los Santos, who has spent years training in communist Cuba, told an audience, which you can see in this X post by the Manhattan Institute’s Stu Smith, whose research first alerted me to the Davis-Cobb exchange.

WHY ARE SOCIALISTS UNFAZED BY THEIR ABYSMAL HISTORICAL RECORD?

“I mean, Trump went down in his bunker, because they really thought, like, the end times were coming,” said De Los Santos, who is under investigation by Congress. “It’s important for us to say this because when we make the formulation that we have to make a revolution, to change things, that we have to smash the state.”

You thought the job was done? The Left did not win in 2020, but it has not given up. Just listen to real communists.