The inability of leftists like Linda Evans to recognize their own deeds was made vivid in a recent New York Times story on the parole appeal of political prisoner Kathy Boudin. The Times had run a series of stories on Boudin, which did everything possible to create sympathy as her appeal date approached. Like Sara Jane Olson, Boudin proposes herself as a "changed woman," who has been incarcerated (or in Olson's case prosecuted) almost as a matter of mistaken identity. Commented the Times: "Today, her supporters say, Ms. Boudin is a different woman. During her 20 years in prison she has helped to create several innovative programs for AIDS victims, incarcerated mothers and inmates seeking to take college courses."

As part of its promotional effort on Boudin's behalf, the Times even ran a 3,000-word feature on her graduation from the college program she had created, which was funded by actress Glenn Close and "Vagina Monologues" author Eve Ensler among others. Boudin's boosters include the Nation magazine, numerous organizations advocating prisoner rights and "social justice," and the socially prominent and influential mandarins of the "progressive" elite.

Like her comrades, however, Kathy Boudin remains -- despite all the cosmetics of social uplift -- a lifelong enemy of American democracy and a committed terrorist. She was part of the Weatherman team constructing the anti-personnel bomb whose explosion in the New York townhouse killed three of the guilty and prevented the loss of innocent lives. Far from renouncing her communist and terrorist past, Kathy Boudin now embraces the same radical support network that fuels Linda Evans' seditious projects as an integral part of the permanent revolution both signed on to in the 1960s. In the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Kathy Boudin joined a gang of black criminals calling themselves the May 19th Communist organization and became part of the getaway team in a $1.6 million robbery of a Brinks armored vehicle. The funds would have been used to finance a revolution that would carve a "New Afrika" out of the United States.

In the botched robbery attempt, an innocent Brinks guard and two Nyack police officers were killed. Nine children ranging in age from 2 months to 21 years were left without fathers, and with permanent wounds that are beyond the powers of the courts or Kathy Boudin to heal. One of the murdered officers was the first black policeman on the Nyack force, whose hiring was the result of a lengthy civil rights struggle undertaken by blacks and whites in the Nyack community. Yet, here is how Kathy Boudin explained her collusion in the cold-blooded killings of these men to a New York Times reporter: "I went out that day with a lot of denial. I didn't think anything would happen; in my mind, I was going back to pick up my child at the baby-sitter's."

Like Linda Evans and Sara Olson, Kathy Boudin is, in fact, part of a community of political monsters. These are not prisoners of conscience. They are prisoners without conscience, incapable of even a minimal accounting of what they willed and did 20 or 30 years ago, or what they are attempting to do right now. It is not just that their deeds are monstrous. It is that their evil is masked by a false idealism and deceptive goodwill, and they have consciously concealed their agendas behind an aura of vulnerability and innocence that allows them to manipulate real institutions of power in American society, even the highest office of the land, making the unsuspecting abettors of their malign intent.

For 40 years, Linda Evans and a sinister network of political comrades have inhabited an alternative reality that makes innocence seem criminal and their own criminality like nobility itself. They are supported in their delusions by an academic industry in anti-white, anti-capitalist, anti-male, anti-American ideologies and screeds. As in the days of Weatherman, the support network for their unholy war is recruited from college campuses and supported by journalists themselves captivated by the "progressive" worldview. Three thousand benighted activists attended a conference this year at the University of California to protest the "prison-industrial complex." The event was organized by longtime Communist Party activist professor Angela Davis. In New York, a similar rally demanding the right of felons to vote was organized by the misnamed Center for Constitutional Rights and was addressed by speakers like Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo and TV pundit Arianna Huffington.

The ideas behind this movement are the ideas of the anti-American, anti-globalization left. Their agenda is to attack legitimate law enforcement and to defame American justice as a system of racial oppression and -- though they do not reveal it to outsiders -- to enlist the antisocial and the violent as a military vanguard. "Like the military/industrial complex, the prison industrial complex is an interweaving of private business and government interests. Its twofold purpose is profit and social control ... This monumental commitment to lock up a sizable percentage of the population is an integral part of the globalization of capital." These sentences are taken from a pamphlet written by Linda Evans and her lover Eve Goldberg under the title: "The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy."

As their pamphlet makes clear, the new radicalism is the old Weatherman race war brought up to date (if a reactionary religious fanaticism can ever be said to be "up to date"). Globalization is depicted as the white man's aggression on the nonwhite races of the world. It is American capitalism vs. Third World victims. The prison networks, the "social justice" organizations, the anti-globalist protesters are the Fifth Column vanguards envisaged by Weatherman, declaring war on the Empire and plotting to tear down its walls from within. "Tear Down the Walls" is actually the name of the next big mobilization of Linda Evans' army, an "International Human Rights Conference on Winning Amnesty For U.S. Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War [Mumia Abu Jamal, Kathy Boudin and H. Rap Brown, of course, among them]." The majority of the "political prisoners of war," as the brochure for the conference explains "are Black/New Afrikan ... These political prisoners of war are women and men incarcerated because of their involvement in political activities which challenged the unjust nature of the U.S. socioeconomic system and its hegemonic policies around the world."

The conference will be held seven months from now at the end of March 2002, in the mecca of the revolutionary faith that is Fidel Castro's Cuba, one of the last surviving Communist police states, whose sadistic tyrant (and the conference host) has turned his unhappy nation into an island prison.

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