Why have Democrats mainstreamed a terrorist?

On September 26, the Chicago Teachers Union, representing all of the teachers in America’s second largest city, posted on X upon the death of “Assata Shakur” AKA Joanne Chesimard, that “The life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.”

That would be one way to describe Shakur.

Another way to describe her would be as a woman convicted of the murder of New Jersey police officer Werner Foerster, a former FBI most wanted terrorist who was broken out of jail by armed comrades and eventually escaped to Communist Cuba, where she lived under the protection of the totalitarian Communist Castro regime for the remainder of her life.

And Foerster’s murder was far from the only serious crime Shakur was charged with or accused of involvement in. In another instance, she was identified by John Powis (a politically progressive priest) as part of a group of people who robbed his church and threatened to “blow his head off” if he did not cough up $1,800 that had been earmarked for the poor from church funds.

That one of America’s largest teachers’ unions, fattened by millions of taxpayer dollars, would choose Shakur as a figure to lionize reveals much about the modern left. While the union celebrates radicalism, the most recent test scores for Chicago Public Schools show fewer than one in three students can read at grade level. Fewer than one in five can do math at grade level. Chicago does this while spending almost $20,000 per student, almost two thirds more per student than is spent in my “affluent” school district in Montana. As is so often the case with the left, radicalism goes hand-in-hand with the collapse of basic governance and competence.

There is no meaningful political differences on these questions between Democrat unions, political activists, the media and academia and many Democrat politicians. All heads of the same leftist hydra. The AP described Shakur as a “black liberation activist” on X – as if this was why she was punished rather than for her crimes. The Washington Post praised her “near mythical status” while USA Today noted her as a “potent political symbol, representing for some a valiant soldier in the war against an oppressive and racist police state.” At least three Democratic Congresswomen, none of them marginal figures, went online to praise her after her death.

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley also honored Shakur both online and on X. Pressley, whose district is just 20 percent African American, represents most of Cambridge, Massachusetts, including Harvard University, the pinnacle of the elite left-wing establishment. She could make her statement fully confident in her warm reception in the hallowed halls of academia. After all, Angela Davis, an African-American radical whose guns were used by the brother of her then boyfriend to kill a judge and several others in a courthouse (landing her on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list), was eventually fully rehabilitated by the establishment, serving for decades as a distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz and receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge University this year, all while declining to repudiate her radical past.

Other politicians praising Shakur included Congresswoman Yvette Clarke (head of the Congressional Black Caucus) and Summer Lee, who represents Pittsburgh in Congress. Clarke Tweeted that “If there is a single truth in the world it is that Assata died a free woman. May she rest in power and paradise for all eternity.” Clarke had no thoughts at all, of course, as to the victims of her terror campaign.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America announced “Rest in Power, Assata Shakur. The American state brutally oppressed Assata and her Black Panther Party Comrades,” praising the “solidarity” and “loyalty” of the totalitarian Cuban regime that kept her from justice. Zohran Mamdani, the likely next mayor of New York City, is a DSA member who declined to condemn the stance when pressed by the New York Post.

What we see with the Chicago teachers is the normalization of radicalism on the American left, where there is increasingly no real and meaningful gap between the establishment and the extremists. All political movements have dangerous fringe figures, but the Democrat media, academia and political establishments have embraced some of their worst and most violent ones.

There were a few honorable exceptions, of course, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called the celebration of Shakur “shameful and depraved.” But Murphy a 68-year-old white male former investment banker, does not likely represent the future of the Democratic Party. The people celebrating Shakur do.

And that should frighten us all.