More disturbing, Harris’s radicalism leads him on more than one occasion to embrace an ends-justify-the-violent-means ethic of the sort espoused by utopian revolutionaries from Robespierre to Stalin to Mao. He characterizes the 1980 murder of the liberal politician Allard Lowenstein, who was seen as a sellout by the radical left, as “chickens who have come home to roost,” and quotes from a Workers Vanguard article whose headline read “No Tears for Allard Lowenstein!” The radical paper summed up the murder with an analysis right out of a Stalinist tract: “Sides were taken and there were victories and defeats.” Harris writes, “That’s as good a summary as I’ve found.”

Or take his assessment of the 1967 encounter in which the Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton fatally shot the Oakland police officer John Frey. “In October,” Harris writes, “a car stop gone awry left one pig dead and Huey under arrest for murder.”

Once you have climbed the great mountain of scientific socialism, the murder of one liberal or one “pig” becomes a minor detail, a skirmish in the revolutionary struggle.

cry about it you fucking lib