The issue of far-left anarcho-communist cuisine has received much attention in recent years. Many far-left camps within the “Peace and Justice” movement have sold everything from hot sauce and pralines to cookbooks in an effort to provide their chardonnay-sipping revolutionary counterparts (read: mainstream liberals) with a means of providing indirect support for fringe groups they would otherwise not want their names associated with.
Take, for instance, the about-face former Black Panther Party member and anti-capitalist David Hilliard took when he announced his revolutionary fervor had culminated in an effort to engage in the free market and sell hot sauce.
Hilliard’s product, “Burn Baby Burn Revolutionary Hot Sauce,” gets its name from a saying used by black militants to support the burning of communities, such as the 1965 Watts riots. Hilliard felt entitled to trademark the saying and sell the product to “fund the revolution.” Though many liberal culinary critics did their best to promote the sauce, it’s ultimately been a market failure and never achieved widespread distribution.
This story would hardly be complete without mentioning NPR’s effort to promote and “fund the revolution.” NPR’s popular “The Kitchen Sisters” program decided to promote the pralines of one former Black Panther member named Robert King Wilkerson.
According to the Huffington Post and Van Jones’ Color of Change, Wilkerson was a former “political prisoner who was held in solitary confinement for his views for 29 years until he was exonerated for a crime he didn’t commit.”
The group of “three innocent Black Panthers” Mr. Wilkerson joined of is known as the “Angola 3.” Unfortunately for these “innocent and oppressed Panthers,” social media revealed that the three were all in prison for heinous, nonpolitical crimes,so left-wing media could no longer ignore it. Even Mr. Wilkerson’s “exoneration” turned out to be a lie. He had served his time after admitting he was an accomplice to murder. There was no “exoneration” for an “innocent political prisoner.”
None of this stopped NPR’s Kitchen Sisters from promoting Mr. Wilkerson’s pralines in a segment titled “King’s Candy, A New Orleans Kitchen Vision.” Needless to say, the “Freelines” the former Panther sells have yet to generate the needed funds to overthrow the bourgeoisie-capitalist system.
The most recent example of far-left kitchens as financial failures comes in the form of the intended “Occupy Cookbook.”
A June 3rd Seattle Times piece titled “The Almost Cookbook of the Occupy Movement” outlines yet another far-left failure to work hard enough at accomplishing an intended goal.
Though we’ve all seen the Occupy movement’s ability to bake up a patty on a police car, you might be surprised to know each rat-infested encampment had kitchens to feed people with the food they either collected out of dumpsters or were handed by mainstream sympathetic liberals.
The idea of generating funds for the revolution by selling an Occupy cookbook became an official plan, and a former cookbook author stepped in to help. But the Obama/Pelosi-heralded movement was unable to agree whether “profiting” off of a “product” was ethically okay, so the Occupiers just never got around to finishing the Occupy Cookbook project.
This writer is torn: should we be saddened by mainstream Americans’ willingness to offer collateral support for radical political movements or joyful that the intended recipients of such aid are simply too incompetent to utilize the resources in any substantial way?
In an effort at full disclosure, the author’s dislike of anarchist kitchens has been profiled in a This American Life episode titled “Turncoat,” and the author was considered a “close comrade” by Robert King Wilkerson after the author rescued him by boat in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Sadly, Wilkerson now considers the author a “snitch pig” and an “enemy of the people” after the author worked with the FBI to prevent violence against US and Israeli citizens.
Headline image: Scott Roberts
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