Rev Left Radio - Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War On America's Maoists (1968-1980)

Episode Date: June 18, 2018

Writer and historian Aaron Leonard, the author of Heavy Radicals, joins Brett to discuss the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party of the 60's and 70's, of which Aaron was a member for 30 years.  Topics include Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, the FBI, Red China, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), The Weather Underground, Police Infiltration of Leftist organizations, the Black Panther Party, Bob Avakian, Mao Zedong, and much more! Find this book, and Aaron's other work here: http://heavyradicals.com Support Revolutionary Left Radio and get exclusive bonus content here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Hey everyone, before we begin the show, I just wanted to cover a couple of things up front. First of all, if you don't know, we have a sister podcast called The Geotene. It's at GeotenePod on Twitter. If you haven't heard it, go check it out. On Rev. Left, we cover theory and history. On The Geotene, me and my co-host cover current events from revolutionary anarchist and communist positions, so go check that out. Second thing is we've recently switched our Patreon from per creation to per month.

We took a big hit when we made that change. A lot of people have stepped up and helped us get back to where we were before. But if you have an extra few dollars and you like the show and you like what we're trying to do here at RevLeft, if you can go to patreon.com forward slash RevLeft radio and toss us a few dollars, we'd really appreciate it. I was recently on as a guest on Left Media podcast to do a Marxist film analysis of the Dark Night Rises. It was really fun and engaging. And I think we offered some unique analysis of that film that hasn't quite been put out there yet. So if you're interested in film analysis and you've liked the film analysis episodes we've done here on RevLeft, go check it out at Left.

media podcast. And finally, before we open the show, we're going to play a little speech from Bob Avakian at the conference for a united front against fascism in the late 60s, I believe, and that will be the way we intro the show. So having said that, let's go ahead and get into it. It is not just a local or a national fascism. There is fascist rule in Vietnam. There is fascist rule in Venezuela. And this is instituted by the very people who try to put on a liberal facade when they sit in the statehouse of New York like Rockefeller. And we have to understand that. there is no such thing in this age as a progressive capitalist or progressive imperialist

or even a progressive Democrat there may be people from among the working class or among the oppressed classes who are confused and still tricked into being in a Democratic Party or to going along with the imperialists, but there is no such thing as a progressive conscious Democrat, a progressive conscious capitalist, a progressive imperialist.

To think that way will deliver us under the hands of those very people that are responsible for fascism. Revolution, revolution, revolution, revolution. Revolution, revolution. the radio now oppose the system any way you know how unite the left against the capitalists lies and liberate the proletariat's mind fight for all the one-class far for equality fight against the right free fascist ideology tune it in and turn it up loud, Revolutionary Left Radio starts now.

Hello everyone, welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Brett O'Shea. And today we have on Aaron Leonard, the author of the book Heavy Radicals, the FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists. Aaron, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background? Yeah, I'm a writer and historian. Heavy Radicals was my first book. I wrote it two or three years ago, and I just published another book called A Threat of

the First Magnitude, which kind of goes further into the Revolutionary Union and Revolutionary Communist Party, but also steps back and looks at informants who have gotten into the very top of organizations deemed by the U.S. power structures as threats to the internal security. So I have those two books. I'm mainly focused on writing about repression. and radicalism, but also I've done a certain amount of journalism, which, you know, if people go to my website, Heavy Radicals.com, they can explore some of the interviews and some of the commentary I've done there.

Cool. That's in a nutshell, who I am. Yeah, and we'll absolutely link to all of that in the show notes as well. Before we get into the questions, what made you want to write heavy radicals? What made you initially interested in it, and why did you decide to make a whole book out of it? Well, you know, I was associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party for a very long time, actually, for like three decades. I started out as working in their unemployed group, then joined their youth group, and then wrote for their newspaper for the last part of my tenure there. And when I left, you know, I left in, you know, when one leaves these kind of things, it's generally, a crisis situation, and I had to reflect back on what was this group I was in, why had I been

in it, and where had it come from? And initially, the idea was to just write a political history and try to reclaim, you know, what I felt would be some of the good from the experience, but also to be able to kind of in a disinterested way, critique it. But as I got more and more into it, my colleague, Connor Gallagher, who had been in the youth group around the time that we both left, you know, we got to talking and thought we would try to get some documents from the FBI to see what kind of surveillance and such had been going on around the group. And that actually kind of led to a whole other dimension. So the book is both a combination of political history, but also exploration of kind of governmental counterintelligence if you made me write the book

was I wanted to understand this thing I was part of, which is, I guess it's a funny thing. You know, we affiliate with all these things and there's all these assumptions we make, but then when you disaffiliate, suddenly those assumptions don't stand. So the book was an attempt to reconcile that. Yeah, and I really appreciate the way that you go back. and forth to or from the like the internal machinations of the organization as well as the the FBI sort of monitoring of them there's this back and forth throughout the the book and you kind of you know keep both of those lines going and I think it's really fascinating I really really love this

book and this is a 300 page book so we simply won't be able to address every aspect of it however we will do our best to cover as much as we can and I really like from the bottom of my heart recommend that listeners go and read this book not just because of of the history which itself is fascinating and almost entirely absent from mainstream histories of this tumultuous time in the United States, but also because it does such an amazing job of highlighting the successes, failures, limitations, hardships, and obstacles of radical leftist organizing, as well as the tactics and strategies of the U.S. government and the lengths that the FBI and other governmental agencies will go to destroy left-wing organizations in this country. So it's truly a must-read

for all a communist and anarchist and radical organizers, and you'll learn a lot from this book. So having said that, again, thank you for coming on. Thank you for writing this. We have a lot to cover. So let's go ahead and just dive in. The way you start the book is probably the best way to start this interview, which is to talk about the founding members. So who were the foundational people principally responsible for the creation of the Revolutionary Union?

Well, let me just say before I do that. I do appreciate the opportunity to speak to your audience. I mean, some things go without saying, but I don't think that does. You know, I welcome the opportunity to, you know, be able to get this out there in front of this, you know, many people who are striving for something different as possible, saying that. I mean, the book, I wanted to try to humanize this some. So there was an element of trying to figure out who started this group. On one level, it was a collective that began, and there was probably, I think, about 50. or 20 people who kind of came together to start the group.

But within that, it seemed like there was some people who brought a little something extra. And that was four people we profile, which is Label Birdman, Steve Hamilton, Bob Avakian, and Bruce Franklin. And they're all very different. And on the one level, they're disparate characters. I mean, they're all white guys. And I think in the introduction, we make the point that actually there were a number of women who also were at the center of this. So as far as gender, you know, the group was pretty mixed. As far as nationality, less so, and I'll talk more about why that was.

But Label Bergman, we figured out the label is pretty much the guy who's responsible for making this thing happen. he is like in 1968 I think he's about 53 he comes out of North Dakota from a long line of rabbinical scholars and rabbis and he meets the Communist Party in 1937 apparently they had an

organizer in North Dakota so he joins the old Communist Party in 37 and stays with it right up until Khrushchev denounces Stalin and then in 1956 and then in the late 50s he has a falling out with the party and he goes on to join progressive labor party which was forming around 1962 he didn't stay long with progressive labor party which is something I'd actually like to understand better he actually goes to China China at that point is actively recruiting people from the United States because of the the Sino-Sovia split, they want progressive American experts. And when label comes back from China, he has this idea for a project of forming a new

Maoist Communist Party. That's kind of in a nutshell label, but he's very critical to making this whole thing happen. He's kind of the spark, if you will. Bruce Franklin is somebody who was a professor at Stanford, a very intelligent guy. He was a Melville scholar. He's in his early 30s, so he's kind of a grown-up, but he's not middle-aged, like labeled. So he's kind of able to reach across age groups, reach into the younger generation and not be too alien. He becomes politicized around the Vietnam War.

I think he talks about being in Paris, and that's where he became a Marxist-Lennonist. So he comes back to Stanford and starts organizing more. around Maoist politics and actually brings forward some people who would go on to be with the party forever, some graduate students and undergrats. I think they initially were called Red Guards on Stanford. So Bruce is, and you know, Bruce is like an academic, so he kind of brings a certain thing to this group that the others do not. I mean, he's a little bit more developed intellectually.

So that's Bruce Franklin. And then there's Steve Hamilton, who comes from a working class background. He's, excuse me, he's originally from Watts in L.A. His dad had worked in the factories and kind of contracted lead poisoning, which was a really awful circumstance. And his father died, and his mother had to work in the factories to support him. He was going to become some kind of a seminarian. He actually went to theological school for a while, but dropped out and then transferred to UC Berkeley right at the moment that the free speech movement was about to break.

He joined Progressive Labor Party early on, so he was in the crosshairs of both the campus authorities and the FBI opened a file on him at that point. So he was one of, and when, you know, he became more and more radical. He was in Stop the Draft Week in 1968, I believe, in Oakland. And he became more and more revolutionarily inclined. So he's one of the people that got with Label and Bruce Franklin. And then there's Bob Avakian who, to the degree anybody knows about the Revolutionary Communist Party. Today they know Bob Avakian, who's the preeminent leader of the, group. And he was a Berkeley student also. I think he studied English literature. He became active

first in, you know, this committee for new politics around Robert Shear, but then he became more and more radical. He joined the Peace and Freedom Party. He worked with Ramparts Magazine. He became more radical against the war. And eventually, he met Label, who, label trained him to be a Marxist-Leninist. So these four all came together. They all have their roots in the 60s in very significant struggles. In one sense, they're all unique. On the other hand, they're all pretty typical of the people who came into the RU, both in 68 and years later. They were the people who tended to be, and I'm not saying they're the only radicals who fit this description, but they tended to be on the front lines of this

struggles that were going on. I mean, this becomes even true later with the group Vietnam veterans against the war, which ultimately merged with the Revolutionary Communist Party. These veterans came back from Vietnam, and they became revolutionary, and they were looking for the most revolutionary organization to be part of, and the RURCP seemed to be it. So in a sense, these four and all the others who came around, They've all, I think you could probably take, you know, the early RURCP people to several hundred or whatever number there is.

And I think every one of their memoirs would be worth reading, you know, but they haven't been written yet. Right. And yeah, you mentioned Bob Avakian, and we'll get into later where the Revolutionary Communist Party is today. Just so people know, we're going to be using the sort of acronyms, RU, RCP, because the Revolutionary Union eventually turned into the Revolutionary Communist Party. so we're going to kind of use those interchangeably, as Aaron does in the book, just to give you a heads up. Before we move on to the second question, though, you mentioned in the intro that you were in the organization, the RCP, for many years. How did you get involved out of curiosity? Well, I became a radical when I was 13, just from being kind of plugged into what was going on in the situation.

It was the end of the 60s and the very beginning of the 70s. It was a very radical time. I mean, it's a very exciting time. And it's, you know, one minute, you know, it's short hair and leave it to beaver the next minute. It's like, you know, marijuana, long hair and everything else. I mean, it was a great time to kind of, you know, go through maturation. I started a group in my hometown in central New York called the Stone Rabbit's People's Party, which was kind of one of these radical groups that attempted to bridge the counterculture in Marxist.

and Leninism, which is no mean feat. But we had a lot of fun trying. You know, but it did lead me to start to dig into some of the deeper theoretical stuff. And when I left my hometown, I actually moved to the Northwest, and it was there that I met the party. And like I say, that relationship, you know, I met the party around Seattle, and I stayed with them for a long time. I started out working with the unemployed workers organizing committee and then went on to be one of the founding members of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade.

Wow, that's fascinating. Maybe at the end we'll get into what eventually made you leave, but let's go ahead and just keep moving in chronological order. In the book, you say, and I think this is, it's a quote, and it's somewhat lengthy, but I think it's a really good way to introduce this because you say in the book, quote, the standard script of the students for a democratic society, the SDS, read something like this. It arose in the early 60s, full of youthful idealism, got down to the hard work of joining with the civil rights movement, transition to anti-war activism, became increasingly radical, then self-immulated in sectarian squabbling with a small, hardcore, of weathermen, going off into a brief foray of infantile terrorism, while the rest of the organization faded away.

It is a tight narrative with a strong beginning, middle, and end. there is, however, a problem. The two huge pieces are left out, the emergence of the Revolutionary Union and its critical influence within the grouping, and the FBI's aggressive and elaborate efforts to destroy the organization. So with that in mind, what broad movements and organizations in the 60s did the Revolutionary Union come out of? And specifically, what was the relationship between the SDS and the RU? Well, you know, as I wrote and researched the book, I came to understand that a lot of people who joined the Revolutionary Union had actually passed through students for a democratic society. So in SDS, and we have a whole chapter on it because it's a thing where there's there's two books that have been written about SDS.

Kripetric Sale has a major, it's kind of a tour de force that goes into the nuts and bolts of the life of the group and it still stands as extremely helpful. And then there's a book about SDS after Progressive Labor Party essentially took organizational control. It's an interesting book, but it's not near as impactful as sales book. But that's pretty much it. There isn't an awful lot about SDS, but yet SDS is like this huge force in the 60s. You know, it's bigger than the Black Panthers. I think it's probably bigger than most any other group that existed. At some point, they had about 100,000 people who claimed to have been part of it.

I mean, the actual operating Padre, if you will, was probably considerably smaller. But SDS became more and more radical as the 60s went on. You know, and then in 69, it did get pulled apart because the group Progressive Labor Party, which was pretty much a kind of an old left group that had broken away from the common this party was trying to take organizational control or at least exerting a disproportionate influence and it was being resisted by a lot of these young college-based radicals who really weren't feeling that kind of conservative old left pull and you know within that the national leadership which went on to be the weatherman was able to organizationally kind of lead the

split of the group but in the meantime you know the revolutionary union had begun in 68 and they went into sDS and they had some policy things worked out that both what would become the weatherman and the progressive labor people didn't really have worked out which was how to basically take these radical youth who you know we're looking at some kind of socialist society in the manner of China or Cuba and how to take them to an actual organization that could attempt to programmatically implement this. I mean, PL had a PL as Progressive Labor Party. They had a very doctrinaire approach on this, and they were alienating people because they

were not even supporting the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, which was at the point of that national liberation struggle. And they came to be in opposition to the Black Panther Party, which were. hugely popular among radical youth at the time so they and you know they would soon denounce Maoism so they were in 68 they were headed in a different direction than a lot of the youth in SDS but you know these kids you know if I could say that they didn't know what they were doing and they didn't know how to do it and here comes the RU with kind of the strength of what people like Label Bergman and some of the other old line communists had they brought

in the experience of, well, you know, you've got to operate on a different level, you've got to get into factories, you've got to get into schools, you've got to get into social organizations, you've got to build a united front. You have to take a thoughtful stand on the matter of black liberation and the struggle of black people. So they had a whole program that they brought in in the form of this thing called red papers. And when they did bring it in, they showed the national leadership. And they were national leadership was immediately. struck by it. They really liked it. Now, as it turns out, that kind of unity didn't last. The national leadership actually developed their own program, which was more the Wetherman. But what the R.U. was saying did resonate. You know, it was a way to go forward to effectively build what they felt was a revolutionary movement without just, you know, going off and doing political violence at the moment, which, you know, they understood was essentially kind of crashing into a wall that it would be, you know, they would flame out very quickly. And this is something the FBI understood, too. I mean, one of the things we discovered is the FBI actually sent a

memo around instructing their informants in SDS, of which they probably had hundreds, to vote against the Progressive Labor Party faction. The FBI did not want Progressive Labor Party to control SDS because they did not want a coherent patient, if you will, organization running that group. They would rather something like the National Office slash Weatherman run it because they go off, they do something illegal, they'd be isolated from the wider public and they could be neutralized a lot quicker. So that's a long, long answer, but it's a long complicated process.

And frankly, I don't think the full story is out there yet. I mean, we're still discovering things about the FBI and progressive labor and all the various machinations that, you know, when we get more information, probably some of this history is going to get altered, our understanding of it. Yeah, and you make that clear in the book, which I think is interesting. It's an ongoing process. it takes a long time for some of these documents to finally come out and to be analyzed, etc.

But you did mention that the Revolutionary Union was a Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong thought organization. How did that tendency differ from traditional versions of Marxism, Leninism, and how did the Maoism of the RU shape the organization? Well, you know, it's a good question. I'm going to answer it, but I'm also going to say I'm still trying to sort this out. The thing is, is like, if you read Mao Satang, I mean, put aside whatever conception of Mao's China you have. If you actually read Mao, I mean, it's very, well, first off, I mean, the prose is excellent, and some of it is actually poetic, but he did have a very rebellious character.

I mean, in the text, he is somebody who really has no interest in a comment. with the present circumstance. He has no patience for oppression or for, you know, capitalism. And it comes through in what he writes. And it makes you strain towards something fundamentally different. And what was happening in China in the period of 66 to 70 was this cultural revolution. which on its face was an attempt to radicalize society to keep it from not becoming the bureaucratic conservative type state that the Soviet Union had become by that period, you know, that it was something

more radical, that it was putting a lot of agency in the hands of youth and saying that, you know, they were the ones who were responsible for creating a revolutionary society. So this had a lot of appeal for people in France and people in the U.S. Somebody has kind of remarked that the Cultural Revolution had a better effect in Europe and the United States than it did in China, which is kind of a provocative way of saying that something that does hold some truth. So it was animating people who really wanted, you know, I mean, Vietnam was here the U.S. going over and millions of people are being slaughtered. You know, for what, you know, so that the capitalism can maintain its strength and that the East doesn't turn wholly red. You have, you know, if you're in college and you're 18 years old and it's 1969, whether or not you're going to be dead in a year is an open question, dead in a military situation or in prison.

I mean, it tends to change the way you think about things. If you're at a demonstration, it's not at all inconceivable that you're going to come back bleeding, you know, that the police were brutal and they were overly brutal. I mean, there wasn't the type of video to document them. There was a lot that went unseen that people confronted. And people had been protesting this war for, what, five, six, seven years, and nothing was changing. So, you know, I mean, Steve Hamilton had started out, you know, protesting the war, but I think about 68, he said, look, we have to go from protest to resistance. You know, we actually have to take measures to try to stop this.

So I think Mao spoke to that sentiment and it animated people. And, you know, the other thing is, geez, you know, here's a model. This is something that doesn't exist today. It's where can you point to on the globe where it's like, you know, they're eliminating capital. They seem to be freeing women. They're dealing with drug addiction, you know, by being, you know, compassionate. I mean, these things appear to be true in China. I mean, the actuality is something else to talk about.

But it seemed there was a model, and that's a powerful force for a movement or an organization to be able to point and say, well, this is a template for how we want things to be. And they were very principled about it. They had line struggles inside the organization, which ultimately resulted in splits based on different interpretations of Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong thought, which we'll get into in a bit. But I want to shift over to the FBI and the U.S. government monitoring. So how did the Revolutionary Union come onto the radar of the FBI? And how did the FBI interpret the organization compared to other left-wing movements in the U.S. at the time? Well, you know, one of the things is I've come to have to appreciate the sophistication of the FBI.

And also, I think, you know, without getting all hypercritical, I think it's been a shortcoming of the left to make a lot of assumptions about surveillance, about the FBI, about the secret police. And the assumptions tend to be that we understand what they're doing and how they operate. And I know that's, well, you know, I can talk about myself. I can be the foil. I certainly thought I understood this stuff. I had figured out what they were and what they were up to. But then, you know, actually doing this research, I realized, well, no, you know, what they're up to and their level of sophistication is a great deal more than I had actually understood, which is not to say they couldn't, you know, be silly or stupid or ham-fisted and things like this, but they, you know, they had a few people who knew Marxism and Leninism very well. talk about this guy, Herbert Stallings, who was like an FBI intellectual.

He actually creates this group called the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, which in 1962 is basically a newsletter written by the FBI, proclaiming to be Maoist, circulated in the Communist Party USA as a way of creating division and factionalization. And Stallings continues that for the next decade, this ad hoc committee, continues for a decade, and it ends up impacting the Revolutionary Union and Revolutionary Communist Party, and I'm pretty confident in other organizations as well. It seems like they discovered the Revolutionary Union existed before the group even surfaced, because for its first year it was operating kind of behind the screen.

It hadn't publicly announced itself, but there's this one guy who we doubt. in the second book, Threat of the First Magnitude named Daryl Grover, who appears to have come out of the Communist Party and the Progressive Labor Party and joined the Revolutionary Union by its third meeting. So we have all these reports, and, you know, we documented pretty, we mentioned him. We allude to him in the first book as the original informant, but by the second book, we actually name him. so he is actually the treasurer of the Revolutionary Union by its fourth or fifth meeting and he's also reporting to the FBI the FBI is getting these we actually found in Steve Hamilton's file Steve Hamilton's file came to us just a month before we published and it's all these 10, 12 page single space typed reports on the formation of the RU from week 4

on. And they document all the different positions, all the members. And the informant is attempting to obscure his identity, but he keeps outing himself unintentionally. I mean, he didn't write these records ever expecting they were going to be released publicly. But even with that, he tried to obscure his identity. But, you know, you have a situation where one report refers to the treasurer of the group, and then the next report refers to Daryl Grover is the treasurer of the group. Actually, the most damning thing is toward the end. We read a report from Daryl Grover saying, look, I'm handing this into you, the FBI.

Sorry, it's late. I recently burned my hands in a fire. And then we see an R.U. report saying redacted can no longer serve on the proficiency committee, which is kind of a security committee because his hands were burned in a fire. So, you know, he's basically, you know, it's not rocket science to put that together. But nobody expected those reports to be public.

But that's how they, so they were there from the beginning. And, you know, they actually have a doctrine. Get people in there as the groups are form it. You know, before the group has its shit together, before it's screening people. And, you know, when it's eager to bring people in. and that's exactly what they did in this case. Yeah, I remember after Trump got elected,

there's a lot of radical activity all around the country, and we here in Omaha were putting together general people's assembly trying to bring in the community and all the various left-wing organizations to kind of strategize about how we're going to go forward. And, you know, we filled up pretty big rooms in the library, but from our very first general meeting, it was found out pretty quickly that the police had infiltrators

and undercover cops, even in those meetings. So to this day, those first, sorts of tactics are still very much being employed by the U.S. government. Oh, that's very interesting. Well, I mean, just on that, too, is, you know, I don't actually have any, you know, and these books are not written as advice as to how to overcome police penetration and informant. I don't think that's my responsibility. I do know, though, that and I hope the methodology of both my books bear this out, is that before one begins pointing fingers and making accusations, an awful lot of research needs to go on.

You can really make a lot of trouble for yourself by pointing fingers and making accusations when there's no actual evidence. I mean, how one deals with this? Well, you know, I can't really tell you. I do think there's a real benefit in understanding how, you know, the forces of the state work, and that's what I'm hoping that these books do. yeah i think that's a great point um there is like this notion of of snitchjacketing or like paranoia infiltrating groups and you know even if those those accusations are unwarranted that that's a

division that if the the government is trying to break up an organization that they'll play on those personal riffs and those personal differences as well and you're right that you don't give systematic answers to how to overcome it but i think by laying out all the various tactics from the extremely clever to like as you said the ham-fisted um i think just laying out is really interesting, and people can learn a lot from that and then make decisions based on understanding those facts about how the FBI and the government broadly addresses and infiltrates and tries to sow divisions inside organizations. So it's always this balance to maintain.

And we'll get more in the FBI a little bit because I'm going to go back and forth, kind of like your book does, but I do want to move on to the Black Panther Party. You mentioned earlier that the Black Panther Party was highly respected in these left-wing circles at the time, multiple organizations, including the Revolutionary Union, at one point, you know, we're very clear that the Black Panther Party was considered the vanguard of the revolution in America. So what was the relationship between the R.U. and the Black Panther Party, and how did that evolve over time?

You know, that's a good question. I understand it better than before I wrote the book, but in all candor, I don't think I understand it very well. I'm actually think somebody needs to write the book about the Black Panther Party. There's, there seems to be two types of literature on the Panthers. One is the mythology literature that you see in Huey Newton's book, Bobby Seals' book, and some more recent entries. And then the other literature is the myth-breaking books that, you know, kind of recount, you know, all the nefarious stuff that the Panthers were involved in.

I kind of feel like, you know, what we say in the book is that the idea of the Panthers compared to the Panthers actual ideas are two different things and the idea of the Panthers is very good. I mean, it animated a whole generation, this notion of, I mean, Huey Newton. I mean, Huey Newton became a revolutionary celebrity because he would stand in front of the police

and say, no, you're not going to fucking push me around in the face of an armed policeman. And that was some bold stuff. And he paid a price for that, But that is, you know, in the context of the civil rights movement giving a way to, giving way to the kind of urban insurrections, as some people refer to them in the 60s, you know, Newton embodied a whole different stand, which is that, you know, we are going to defend ourselves aggressively. We are not just going to peacefully resist, you know, we are going to demand to be treated and respected as human beings. but then, you know, because China existed, because Mao existed and this kind of revolutionary current, that gave the Panthers an extra force. Now, the RU and the Panthers are two different groups, and what comes through in the documents is, you know, the RU publicly upholds the Panthers, but internally they understand the limitations of this group.

And it comes through time and again. I think their policy initially was to send their cadre, if they met black revolutionary-minded people, especially in the Bay Area, they would direct them toward joining the Black Panthers. They did not recruit them themselves. And we make the point in the book that this would come back to haunt them because they became mainly a non-third world group. I mean, there were mainly white folks. They had a fairly significant Asian component, some Latinos, but hardly any African American. And I think actually Connor had kind of done a little map of the Bay Area from Palo Alto up to Richmond.

And the RU had branches or collectives in pretty much every part of the Bay Area with the exception of Oakland. And that doesn't seem to be something that would happen spontaneously. that had to be by a certain conscious design. But they did, you know, have ties. The vacant spoke at Huey's birthday party during the High of the Free Huey Movement. He also spoke at the United Front Against Fascism, convocation that the Panthers had, and I believe it was 69 or 70. They publicly supported the Panthers.

But, you know, by 1970, 1971, when Newton comes out of jail, the Panthers are, they're disintegrating. I mean, they've, they're calling all their people back to Oakland and all the, I mean, Fred Hampton, actually, before he was executed by the Chicago police in December, basically had his orders to come to Oakland. The Panthers were closing down all the other chapters as a way of centralizing. So, I mean, and that's the other point about the book is, you know, the RU obviously had some things sorted out that the Panthers didn't, you know. I mean, you know, the Panthers and the RU were dealing with the same FBI. Yep. Now, the FBI was murderous in regard to the Panthers, that's for sure.

But the, you know, the FBI was fundamentally concerned with neutralizing groups, you know, by whatever means necessary. And they were successful with the Panthers. They were not successful with the RU. Now, you know, it's kind of a question of the universe. I mean, I don't think the FBI gets to determine what groups exist and what don't, but from their standpoint, you know, they might think they do. But, you know, they were not able to stop the RU from stretching out and becoming a national group, whereas the BPP were, you know, were, you know, put on the defensive early on.

So the question ought to be is so what was going on that led that to happen. And part of it is the internal policies of the groups themselves. cells. And that's a whole can of worms that, you know, let's leave that for another time. Like I said, I really want to see that another book on the Black Panthers. I think it really merits some deeper going into, including, you know, the secret documents. I mean, there's, there's got to be a lot more that the FBI has on the Panthers, aside from just the counterintelligence documents that have been made public. So. And now we have, we've had episodes on the Black Panther Party. So if anybody wants to go back in our catalog and look at that, we had a whole episode on that, which was pretty interesting.

But one thing you talk about in the book, and I think it's kind of, it's really important to know is what you don't do is you don't blame the FBI for everything. You very much, you strike a balance between here's what the FBI was doing, but also here are the contradictions and the clashes inside organizations themselves, the BPP and the RU and every other organization had internal contradictions and internal conflicts to work out. So it's not laying the destruction of organizations solely at the feet of the government. It's saying, hey, both things come into play. Yeah, well, you know, I was talking to a friend just this morning about this. And this stuff, you know, this stuff is extremely complicated. I want to try to say something helpful on this, you know, without just saying, oh, it's complicated. But, I mean, what I've come to understand is, you know, there's dialectics in play, which is that, like, if the FBI gets an informant,

to the leadership of your organization, like they apparently did with the Revolutionary Union and the person of Don Wright, who was on the group's secretariat, you know, its four-person day-to-day leading group had an FBI informant, as near as we can tell. You know, when that's the circumstance, the FBI actually becomes part of your organization. On the other hand, you know, the RU was author of its own destiny, you know, the FBI was not calling the shots right was there but you know right was expelled you know they didn't you know just to see to everything he was saying so there's a there's a funny thing where well first off a lot of people have a notion of freedom and democracy in america which is fraught with a lot

of illusions that you know you can say or do pretty much anything you want um anybody who's actually gone out and attempted to do something contrary to you know what's accepted in the mainstream, soon discovers there are clear limits on what you can say or do. But I guess my point is there tend to be two sides. So you've got the RURCP, you've got the FBI within that group, but then you've got the RURCP in U.S. society. So you have this counter-force to U.S. capitalism existing in the U.S. society. So there's both the way the RURCP and the FBI meet on the field of battle in the sense of externally going. going after each other.

But then there's kind of this internal, more intimate way in which the FBI is operating secretly within the group, and in which the RURCP is actually operating openly, but in the society that's controlled by the U.S. government. So I guess I'm saying that there's some nuance here, because one thing that's been said that I used to believe is, well, you know, just because the place. political police are out there, you know, they can't stop us, you know, it's like, you know, we can, you know, they've done all this stuff, but they haven't been able to stop us. And that's a great feel-good argument, but then why do they keep doing it? Are they just stupid? I mean, they infiltrate people, they surveil people and it's never successful, but they just keep doing it. That's, that kind of counters logic. I mean, they do it because it's successful. So, you know, it's in, you know, If it's true, that it's successful, you know, you need to kind of grab hold to that fact and act accordingly. Yeah, absolutely.

I think that's all extremely fascinating and worth thinking over. One thing that you made me think about when you're talking right there is insofar as we have freedom of speech or, you know, you can do whatever you want. I find that when it comes to just random individuals, you can, like you can pretty much say whatever you want as just a random isolated individual and then they'll let it go. But the moment you start organizing and the moment you put an organization together, the bar, what's allowable goes way, way, way, way down. We saw that with the RU, we see that with the BPP, we see that with radical movements all over the time. So really the FBI really gets their eyes open when an organization forms and it starts

growing and expanding. And that's, do you agree with me that there's a difference between individuals and organizations? Oh, for sure. I think that's a very profound point that you're making. I mean, because, I mean, yeah, I've been recently studying the Communist Party USA in the 30s and 40s. I mean, the Communist Party USA went down south, and they started multiracial organizations, multinational organizations, black and white people working together. And I'm like, you know, say what one will about the Communist Party.

It's like nobody else was doing, well, very few other people were doing that kind of stuff. And the fact is, how would you be able to do that? I mean, there's, you know, I'm sure there were some brave people who stood up in Jim Crow South and said, I will not abide, you know, racial discrimination. But to do that as an individual, you know, you're going to do a once or twice. But to sustain that, you need an organization. You know, you can't just be hanging out there by yourself. And I think the powers to be, understand that.

Organization can do things individuals can. Individuals can be constrained relatively simply. You know, organizations, you know, not so much. Yeah, absolutely. Before we leave the Black Panther Party part of this interview, I wanted to read something from the book that really struck me as pretty intense, and it's indicative of how the RU came to reflect on the Panthers as time went on, and as the 70s advanced, and the Black Panther Party kind of fell apart. In the book, you say, some years later, when the fog of urban guerrilla warfare had cleared, Steve Hamilton was a bit more candid about the actual politics of the Panthers and the RU's need to come out from under their shadow. Steve Hamilton said, quote, the politics of the Black Panthers had always contained an unsteady blend of Marxism, anarchism, and utopian idealism.

Under Eldridge Cleaver's leadership in 1970, the Panthers developed an openly anti-working class and anarchist perspective that culminated in a sort of revolutionary nihilism. I was really taken aback by that sort of, you know, harsh condemnation of the Black Panthers by the R.U. What do you make of that? I wish I could remember there's a pamphlet that Eldridge actually wrote around that time where he's condemning the working class. And, you know, it's, I mean, Hamilton said it. And I actually went and researched and looked at, you know, the whole lumpin line, the brothers on the block line, I mean, the Eldridge actually felt like, well, you know, the pimps, the drug dealers, the muggers, whatever could be the backbone of this revolution. And in fact, the working class are just a bunch of racists and they can't be. So that was kind of a, you know, a thought-out articulated position, which, you know, the Panthers, to a degree, embraced.

And it led to all kinds of problems for them. They didn't really figure out how to, I think Newton actually was struggling this when he got out of jail about how to work with church groups and the larger black community and stuff. I don't know. It's a good question you're asking. I'm just trying to think about how to concisely speak to it. I mean, yeah, no problem, no problem. I was just going to say the last thing, I think if it hints at anything and perhaps it hints it a lot more than my brain can wrap around at the moment.

But one thing I do think that's worth noting is the Black Panthers were trying to do something totally new. And when you try to do something totally new, there's going to be problems. And it'll be like an experimental period. But one thing that the R you did that I think the Black Panthers might have not have done, ultimately was have a theoretical coherency and an astringent sort of set of ideological principles that steered and directed the organization and the Black Panther Party had different ideologies inside the organization that over time created riffs and conflicts and ultimately disallowed that

organization from going forward. Does that sound right? It does sound right. And they didn't have any wise old men. They didn't have a label Bergman. I mean, these were just some young guys doing this themselves. Yeah, teenagers when it first started. Yeah, and then, you know, and then they were having armed confrontations with the police and suddenly facing, you know, decades of incarceration. So, I mean, they were really dealing with some clear limits. You know, and it actually goes back to your point on organization.

It's like they didn't have some of the organizational sophistication brought to bear from the whole experience of the Communist Party that the label Bergman did. And then the other thing is like these various panther chapters, I mean, they were as different as night and day. I mean, the New York Panthers, I think, tended a lot more toward revolutionary nationalism than Maoism and such. In other chapters, you know, would have, you know, different stepping off points. And it didn't last very long either.

All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on because I think this is one. one of the most interesting chapters for me personally. I thought it was really fascinating. It revolves around the Franklin split. So you mentioned Bruce Franklin early on as a member of this, the 30-year-old professor. What was the Franklin split inside of the Revolutionary Union? What ideological differences between members of the RU did this split represent

and what ultimately came of it? Well, you know, again, this is a bit of a cipher too because, you know, as far as the text, the documents that were getting passed forward, You know, one view said, oh, we need to start engaging in political violence, more or less immediately, maybe not all out revolutionary struggle, but at least, you know, some forms, you know, where in we're not just waiting forever to start the revolution. And then, you know, the opposite view said, well, that's insanity. We're just going to set ourselves up to be smashed. So on the face of it, there were these two clear lines, but yet when the split happened, none of that really happened.

I mean, the book talks about this one incident where, you know, some of the people who had been aligned with Franklin are arrested for attempting to break somebody out of jail and two prison guards are killed. Even there, the affiliations and connections are, you know, not fully clear. I mean, my sense is that the Franklin stuff was a lot of bluster and posturing that, in fact, on the split, happened, you know, the group continued to work in the community and put out its paper and I think they might have even stayed in some factories. And, you know, perhaps they had some ideas. I mean, the first magnitude book talks about Larry Goff, who is a government informant, you know, sitting in one of these Bruce Franklin, Vince Ramos meetings and proposing some very provocative stuff. But as far as actually acting on it, there isn't an awful lot of evidence

that that actually happened. It did destroy that the earlier you. It broke it into two. And the people who went with Franklin stayed active for a couple years. But after this incident in Chino, the group fell apart as a result of the pressure and the scrutiny is my sense. So on the one And it theoretically cleared up some questions as far as practically, you know, it's a bit of a cipher as to why that struggle even had to happen, given that Venceramos did not go out and become the weatherman. At least that's not my sense of it. Right. And just to make it clear to everyone listening, the Bruce Franklin faction of the RU was more ready to pick up arms now and engage in, you know, domestic terrorism or whatever. the rest of the RU was against that because I didn't think the conditions were right.

And after the split, Bruce Franklin published a book. And in that book, he makes the argument that radicals need to choose between the two options that ultimately led to the Franklin split. It's a pretty concise way of summarizing the differences he had with other members of the RU. So I'm just going to read a quote from that book because in it he says, quote, American revolutionaries as individuals and organizations must decide which of two opposing courses they will follow on the question of armed struggle, whether to organize the people for an eventual armed uprising at some point in the future,

or to use the present as the very first stage of a protracted revolutionary struggle in which developing urban guerrilla warfare will play an integral part in the organizing activity? So he was very much a propaganda of the deed sort of person who wanted to take the struggle to the next level, and in the act of armed uprising, they would attract people to the organization. Is that correct? Yeah, and then within two years, he was back in the university as a professor. So it's all rather bizarre. Yeah, his faction, as you said,

some were arrested for attempting to bust somebody out of jail and killing guards and then just kind of petered out while the R.U. went on to grow and continue to develop. So I think that speaks of which line was superior ultimately. Well, yeah, and the book talks about, you know, Larry Goff, the informant, basically said, look, this Franklin thing, again, it's like the Weatherman. It's the Franklin people are going to go off. They're going to do this stuff that's illegal. and, you know, they're either going to end up dead or in jail.

The RU is actually more dangerous because they're not going to do that. And this is something I think the FBI actually understood. And it was kind of a lesson in doing this research that sometimes the more serious is not the people who actually have the more sensational proclamations. Right. Yeah. And as you say, even the FBI realized. as the more dangerous organization is the one that keeps its head down, keeps doing material work and doing, you know, work in factories and union organizing, et cetera, as opposed to the group that just wants to pick up guns, flare really quickly and then be just decimated. Well, and, you know, some of my recent research is kind of giving background because, again, Label Bergman comes through the Communist Party.

I mean, most people in this country don't understand that the Communist Party in this country, their leaders went to prison. You know, Earl Browder went to prison in the 30s, and then he went to prison again in 1940 for passport violation. You know, and then the 11 leaders of the Communist Party in 1948 went to prison for advocating the overthrow of the government. And, you know, never did they say, well, we're going to actually pick up arms and go after the state. They were just saying, we're communists, you know, and the government said, well, you know, you believe in this ideology that advocates the overthrow of the government. So the Communist Party, for all their faults, you know, I actually understood what it meant to have an adversary in the, you know, the power structure of the United States. And Label was quite familiar with that. Label and Larry Harris, who had also come through the CP, understood that if you start talking about picking up guns against the government, all shit's going to come down, aren't you?

You know, this is not a joke. And then the other thing, too, I think we learned in the course of writing this is, you know, the FBI is not an irrational organization. They use the law, you know, and they, you know, they hire lawyers, you know, a lot of their special agents have law degrees, at least I think a certain component. And they're always looking at ways to use the law to imprison people or stop them from doing things that they don't want them to do. So if you're going off and openly advocating doing illegal things, you know, you're going to be confronted by a force that understands the law and wants to use that law to stop you from doing what you're doing. Yeah, important to remember. I want to move on to the trip they took to China because the whole organization, or at least some core members of it, went to China. So can you summarize that trip?

Why did they go? What happened while they were there? And how did this trip influence the organization upon its return to the U.S.? Well, you know, I think around 71, Mao had. had essentially invited Nixon to come. Kissinger had been there. Nixon would come a few months after the Revolutionary Union went there. I believe our U was there in September, 1971, and Nixon came in early 72.

We could check those dates. But I think China was doing a funny thing. I think Mao was actually probably the source of this. On the one hand, they were reaching out to the West. They were worried about the Soviet Union. They were worried about war with the Soviet Union. There'd been border clashes. They were reaching out to the West, you know, I think probably in part economically.

And, you know, they were incubating the notion of rapprochman with the United States. But at the same time, you know, Mao was radical. So he invited all these radical forces to come and tour China. The Panthers had a tour. The Black Workers Congress had a tour. And the Revolutionary Union had a tour. I think China was looking for a representative in the United States. States because Progressive Labor Party was starting to denounce Mao.

So when Label, Baba Vakian, Joanne Zohuntis, Don Wright, Mary Lou Greenberg, and Pablo Guzman, who was in the Young Lords party, he was part of the RAU delegation, I think, is a special guest to theirs. They went to China. They met Joe in line. They spent quite a bit of time, and, you know, it was transformative. you know you go and you know look they were they were ushered around everywhere you know none of them spoke chinese um and they you know they didn't know their way around so what they saw was what the chinese wanted him to see but you know there was some pretty fascinating things to see i i believe bill hinton was their part of their delegation too bill hinton is a writer who worked a book fan shen

that talks about land reform just before the chinese communist seized power in 1949 but you know you to a country that, you know, is not capitalist, where the whole rules of dialogue and discussion and how social relations are operating is different from the United States, you know, with its, you know, advertising and consumerism and, you know, extremes of rich and poor, you go to China where it's, you know, more egalitarian and it had a profound effect. And it seemed to be a world that, you know, was desirable, you know, one that's, you know, free of the kind of, you know, awfulness that one lives in capitalist society. And, you know, they came back and they toured on it and they showed, you know, the collective life and how big problems were solved by bringing together a lot of people to do it.

And having various committees of old military cadre, you know, solving problems. It seemed to be a model for attacking problems. And it had a profound effect because people were. coming out of the 60s and 70s and, you know, understanding that the United States, you know, was responsible for a lot of bad in the world and that at its core there was something bad, that this drive for profit was leading to an awful lot of misery. So it seemed like there was an alternative, which was a very big deal. You know, the caveat is that, is that, you know, they were on a guided tour.

So, you know, the reality of what they were seeing was not the full of reality. My sense is things were more fraught than what they actually witnessed, which is not to say there weren't some positive things there, including probably things to be learned from now. But in the United States, we don't have those kind of discussions. I mean, communism is just bad, period. Well, let's go ahead and discuss some of the organizational successes of the Revolutionary Union. You have an entire chapter dedicated to their work inside union struggles, including some really impressive victories. what were some of the RU's biggest successes overall, and what stories from your research

stick out in your mind as especially impressive? Well, you know, I think for me, and people want more about what went on in the factories and the unions. You know, as I've spoken on this, they really feel like more was accomplished than the book highlights. And, you know, I guess my response is I would like to see these folks, you know, you know, write about their own experiences, you know, that would be valuable. For me, the biggest thing on this is that you had this cohort of radical youth coming out of the

60s who went well deep into the 70s and actually maintained that radical integrity, you know, that, you know, they continue to envision a world different than the one that they were brought up in, that they felt that the working class could be swayed or at least influenced in a radical direction. I mean, they did have a lot of success in the coal fields in terms of leading wildcat strikes. I think there was a strike of 100,000 people where the RCP's initiated minors' right to strike committee was at the heart of it, you know, led this union struggle. So, yeah, you know, that was cool. But even the fact that they did it, that they had caucuses in the United Steelworkers, that they had representatives in the post office that, you know, that they were in canneries and then, you know, food processing plants.

I think that in of itself is remarkable. You know, and there was a lot of, you know, union struggle, a certain upsurge of that kind of stuff in the early 70s. As far as how much it transformed things and the lasting legacy, well, you know, I mean there was, a serious deindustrialization that was starting to kick in in the mid-70s. So, you know, they were, you know, the RCP was sending its people into these factories when a lot of these factories were beginning to move south and then move overseas. So it's, you know, there's an irony in all this. But the lasting legacy is that, for me, is that they cohereed this group

and held it together beyond the 60s, that people didn't suffer the same fate as the weatherman or the panthers. You know, they actually grew. You know, the RCP actually continued to grow until like 73, 74. I think they took a big, a little bit of a bump when they formed in 75, you know, and then, you know, the decline set in. But that's a good five years more than a lot of these other groups. And it was based on having this model of China, I think, you know, mainly.

Yeah. And in 1976, Mao Zetong died. And that was a huge moment. in global politics as well as inside organizations basing themselves off Mao Zedong thought. So what was the reaction to Mao's death by the RURCP? What problems did it cause inside the organization? And what was the final split? Well, it, you know, it was a crisis because, you know, Mao died.

And I think within a couple weeks, four leading members of the Politburo were arrested who were closely aligned with, you know, the more radical edge of Mao's. The gang of four? Yeah, Mao's thinking, yeah, they were called the gang of four. I mean, what I've since come to understand is Mao actually supported both sides, but that's probably another discussion. You know, Mao was the preeminent authority in China. So, you know, Mao did appoint this guy, Waguo Feng, to lead the party after his death. And Waguo Feng was definitely more conservative.

And he did lead to, you know, he did supervise the arrest of the gang of four. But, you know, Mao appointed him into power. Mao actually is the reason that Deng Xiaoping was not, you know, sent into exile never to return. He's the reason Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated in the early 70s, knocked down, and then after Mao died, it was the basis for Deng Xiaoping to come back. Anyway, none of that was clear at the moment. The gang of four arrested and the leadership of the party, and this actually I didn't like it all, this discovery that, The whole question of what was going on in China seemed to be being decided by four people on the Secretariat. Within the party itself, there was no debate or discussion.

You know, people were instructed to study the situation but to not reach any conclusions. Meanwhile, the Secretariat apparently was having feverish debates on this with Bob Avakian and one other person arguing, well there's been a coup and we need to denounce it and label birdman and Mickey Jarvis arguing well no it's socialism and we need to support it and we need to in both sides basically seem to think well we need to do this right away so they spent a year debating that and then Bob Avakin had written a paper denouncing what he called the coup with the arrest of four and was able basically to get approval by the majority of the central committee, but the minority didn't accept it. And they, depending on who

you listen to, they were either kicked out or they quit. I don't actually understand the full nuance of how that actual split manifested itself. Both sides thought they were right. Neither side was going to reconcile with the other. So it basically took the largest Maoist group that had come out of the 60s and split it. Not quite in half, but, you know, the RCP people had a few more. I think they say two-thirds, one-third, but numbers aside, it rent the group in a way that it would never recover from. I mean, they'd had a split with Franklin, but they recovered from that.

When Franklin left, the group had not even a national organization at that point, but by 75, They were a national organization. So, you know, their organization in New York and Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and half of Chicago basically said, fuck this. You know, we're not going to be part of the RCP anymore. We're going to start the revolutionary headquarters. And the RCP were like, well, you guys are, you know, you guys are revisionists. We're not going to have anything to do with you. So, and that was the conclusion.

The Revolutionary Workers' headquarters continued for a couple years, and then they fused with other groups. the RCP continued on as the RCP but you know it actually started to lose people it had internal struggles and then they did a campaign in Mayday 1980 to essentially put the working class on the historic stage in a much more radical openly communist way and it was supposed to have drawn 10,000 people and I think it drew less than a thousand nationwide and a lot of people left after that, too. And that kind of laid the basis for the RCP you have today, which is not a group that's

based in the factories or, you know, based in kind of anchoring itself in any kind of community. They have a whole model of building a revolution. It used to be just based on their newspaper, then transformed into their newspaper and popularizing their leader. And today it's mainly by popularizing their leader, Babavakian. Yeah. So that's kind of interesting because I think most people, we mentioned at the top that most people know Bobavakian. And some people today, you know, like on the internet, there's memes about Bobavakian and a lot of people refer to the RCP today as cultish or a cult. How do you think about that diagnosis? Is that a fair way to think of them today? Or how do you think about them? Yeah, well, I think it's a fair way. But I think, you know, the memes and the snarkiness, you know, it's not really helpful.

I mean, it's not like I don't have a sense of humor. I don't even kind of chuckle at some of this stuff, but yeah, here's, maybe this is a little provocative. I remember watching some documentary years ago in a survivor of Jim Jones cult was being interviewed, and he said, well, you know, here's the problem. People call us cultists, and that just is a permission to not think about, you know, who we were and what we believed. And I thought he was actually, he had a valid point. Sure, yeah, you're a cultist. I mean, there's a definition for kind of, you know, giving over your will to a preeminent figure to, you know, adapting to the group holy and putting your own critical thinking aside. All these things are true and it's cultists.

But, you know, for people who are on the left, I think it's worth thinking about what's the character and nature, the cult, what's the actual content. I mean, actually, Jim Jones is funny. I just recently read The Road to Jones Town by this guy, Jeff Gwynn. I had no idea that Jones was really considered himself as socialist, and I'm not saying Jim Jones is good. I'm not saying he's good. I do not think he's good. I read the book, and I came to despise him on a much deeper level.

Same, yeah. But you can actually watch some videos of him leading his followers singing The International. But that's my point. It's like it doesn't really help anybody to say, well, Jim Jones was a cultist. It's like, okay, he was a cultist, but what was the content of that? Well, Avakian is leading a group that has a certain view about how you make revolution, and a lot of it is embodied in the cult of the individual. And I think it might be worthwhile to dig into, well, why is that not a good way to go about things?

You know, why was the cult of Mao not good? Why was the cult around Hewing Newton not good? You know, it's not helpful, you know. Or, you know, if you think it is good, let's debate that, you know. Sure. Does it really, you know, enable things that are otherwise not possible? So, yeah, it's kind of a long-winded answer. I cringe a little when I see making fun of a vacant, not so much because of any latent affection.

You know, I think it's really kind of screwed up, you know, the promotion. but I don't think it really helps people to make it into a joke. You know, it's not a joke. You know, and frankly, you know, the other side is the RCP's been catching hell from some of these, you know, hard-right Trump reactionaries. And, you know, people, you can't be ridiculing people who are going to get stomped on by the same people are going to stomp on you. I just don't think it's helpful.

Yeah, that's an amazing, great point. And I'm in total agreement with you. Real quick on the Jim Jones point, because I kind of have my own fascination with Colts in the history there. he started off as it's actually pretty yeah he was a socialist he was heavily involved in civil rights um trying to do good things and he actually did a lot of really good things early on but i think as the organization developed and became more cultish his ego took the best of them and there's a real personality change over time and by the end of it he was just

a paranoid egomaniac um but it's really fascinating history absolutely oh yeah for sure i do want to ask you though because i asked i was going to uh at the beginning of the conversation you talked about how you were in the organization for 30 years. Why did you ultimately decide to leave? Well, you know, what I tell people is if you don't leave, you stay. You know, look, joining a group like this is no small matter, you know, kind of saying, you know, you want a whole different world and you're willing to dedicate your life to it. And, you know, that's a real thing. You know, it's a real kind of promise. And one doesn't want to break that promise. And then over time, it becomes very familiar and leaving it means essentially saying well everything i've done with

my life up to now has basically been wrong um so you know without getting into all the nuts and bolts i did finally come to a crisis where it was like okay i'm leaving this is it this is done and it certainly was a crisis and uh certainly you know looking back i'm very happy the crisis came because uh you know it allowed me to reflect back on that group and it reflect on what I've learned. I mean, you know, I've lived a life I've lived. And as much as I would like to go back and do some things over, Ken, I don't get to do that. But what I do get to do is kind of bring the sensibility of having been through that and reflect on it critically. And hopefully that's some help. Do you think there's any parallels to what's going on today versus what was

going on in the 60s because, you know, I'm 30 years old. I look back at the 60s and I kind of see some interesting radicalization and this uprising of left as confused and disoriented as it may have been at the time. And I look at today and I see similar parallels. How do you think about the today versus the 60s in your experience? Well, there's always parallels. I think the mistake a lot of people make is attempting to think that certain historical stuff is going to come back and come back in more ways similar than dissimilar. And I don't think that's what happened. I mean, I am a historian. And my interest in history is because I want to understand what is the earth we're standing on now. You know, it's like you dig into the dirt and you see

history. You see the bases, the trees and the plants that have died, the animals that have fossilized. You know, the earth we're standing on is rich with history. You know, where we are right now is on the basis of everything we've come through. What I've actually been doing recently is, as I say, I've been looking more at the Communist Party, which I had no understanding of whatsoever, because they actually impact how the FBI got sophisticated. The FBI wasn't always that sophisticated. It was their interactions with the Communist Party and the Communist Party's interactions

with them that led that. So, again, I'm kind of losing my thought a little bit. Yeah, well, the relevance for today is, no, the 60s are not going to come back. And right now there's no model. There's, at least I don't see any model or program. And I've looked, you know, I've tried to read a lot of people who I think are interesting. And I think there's a lot of very exciting ideas and some really good insight. I've not found anybody or any group that brings it all together in one place.

And I don't think that's because the shortcomings of the individuals or groups. I think it's, you know, we're in a period where things are just going to have to develop. I mean, we've come through the 20th century, the socialist project of that period. And, you know, I think there's still some things to learn about that. I think there's still critical scrutiny about that. But it's not just a matter of resurrecting something and making a few tweaks. Sure. it happened and it didn't turn out very well and probably something new is going to have to

come about. I don't know what that is. I mean, there's a there's a thing. In order to look over the horizon, you're going to have to walk the miles to get there. I think we're walking right now. Right. Yes. So I feel like something's struggling to be born, but it's not quite, it's not quite being born quite yet. But I'm somewhat optimistic that something is happening, but it's in this very, very early stage. The final question, I'll leave it at this. What do you hope people take away from this book in the final analysis? Well, I just want people to understand this stuff in a way that I never understood it.

You know, here's how this actually happened. Here's how this actually worked. Here was this force on the political stage. They actually were there. They did play a big role on SDS. Everybody didn't just go back to school and get their doctorate or, you know, get a conventional job. You know, they actually try very hard to live up to the standards they set for themselves.

And also, I want people to understand how the FBI and these intelligence agencies work. It's just not good enough to be cliche or to assume you have an understanding of things that, you know, perhaps you don't. You know, we, Connor and I have learned some things, but frankly, there's a lot more we've got to learn. And I hope that people kind of get the methodology that, you know, if you want to engage and struggle for social justice or radicalism, you know, you will be confronted with some things. And, you know, you need to understand that, you know, as deeply and truthfully is how it operates as you can. Well, thank you, Aaron, so much for coming on. It's a fascinating book. This is a fascinating discussion.

Again, we only covered chunks and pieces of it. If any of this was interesting to you, please go read the book. It is Heavy Radicals, the FBI's Secret War on America's Maoist. Before we let you go, Aaron, where can listeners find you and your work online? Well, heavyradicals.com. Go to the website. There's both some more background on the books, and there's also a fair amount of writing, some of the reviews, and some of the critique of the books.

You can find them there. And also, if you go to the Heavy Radicals page on Facebook, you can follow us there. You know, I'm always posting and updating things. So, you know, we'd love to have you along for the ride.