[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

Author and journalist Edward Jay Epstein, who died at 88 in January, “made a career of questioning accepted narratives, from the Kennedy assassination to the Black Panthers to the diamond industry.” In his last book, Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe, Epstein revisited many of those narratives, including one still clinging to the Black Panthers.

In 1970, New Yorker editor William Shawn tasked Epstein to investigate an alleged conspiracy by the Nixon administration to murder the entire leadership of the Black Panthers. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers had reported “as fact,” that the police had killed 28 Panthers since 1968,  and Shawn wondered if it was “part of a pattern of genocide.” On February 13, 1971, Epstein’s 10,977-word piece came headlined “The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?”

Ralph Abernathy, successor to Martin Luther King Jr. as chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, attributed the death of Panther leaders to “a calculated design of genocide in this country.” For Julian Bond, then a member of the Georgia state legislature, “the Black Panthers are being decimated by political assassination arranged by the federal police apparatus.” Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, urgently requested the Attorney General to convene federal grand juries in those “jurisdictions where nearly 30 Panthers have been murdered by law-enforcement officials.” Epstein set out to document every case and hired Harvard law school researchers to dig up court records.

The 28 number came from the Panthers’ chief counsel Charles Gary, who changed it to 20, then 19 names. As it turned out, one of the  deceased on Gary’s list was still alive and “of the 18 remaining eight had been killed by other militants, storekeepers during attempted robberies, or their wives.” That left 10 Black Panthers allegedly killed by police.

Of those 10, “six were killed by seriously wounded policemen who clearly had reason to believe that their lives were in jeopardy from suspects in burglaries and robberies, and, according to the evidence, these police had no way of knowing that they had been shot by Black Panthers. That left four questionable deaths in shootouts, and all of them were local, not federal, police.” So there was no “calculated design of genocide” and no plot by police at any level.

One of the Panthers killed by “fellow militants” was Alex Rackley, brutally tortured, shot in the head and dumped in a river. Epstein’s account helped reveal the Panthers as a murderous criminal gang masquerading as persecuted political activists. At the time, one of their allies was David Horowitz, son of Communist Party members.

David raised more than $100,000 for the Oakland Community Learning Center, the Black Panther Party’s “showpiece and base of operations throughout the seventies” and hired his friend Betty Van Patter as the school’s bookkeeper. As David learned, the school was “a front for a criminal gang attempting to control the illegal traffic of the East Oakland ghetto.”

On January 17, 1975, Van Patter was found in San Francisco Bay, dead from a blow to the head.  The case signaled David’s departure from the left, charted at length in Radical Son. Decades later, the myth of the Panthers as “agents of black empowerment” lingers on through California Assembly member Mia Bonta, wife of state attorney general Rob Bonta.

Mia Bonta has donated $1.2 million to the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland, and in 2023 Bonta honored former Panther Elaine Brown as a “social justice advocate, story teller, trailblazer, accomplished musician and a strong advocate for communities of color especially when it comes to breaking barriers to employment.” No word from Bonta that Elaine Brown was the head of the Black Panther Party at the time of Van Patter’s murder, one of many that remains unsolved.

After Epstein’s New Yorker piece, the Washington Post, New York Times and other papers printed editorial apologies for their reports about the 28 Panthers. That brand of journalistic responsibility has long since disappeared, but the “accepted narrative” continues.

“If black men are being killed on the streets, we bear witness.  For me, that means to call out the poison of white supremacy, to root out systemic racism. . .  . What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street?”

That was Joe Biden, in a May 19 speech at Morehouse College. The graduates should know that Biden was a consort of segregationists such as John Stennis and James Eastland, and a staunch supporter of Sen. Robert Byrd, the former Klansman who voted against Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. The Morehouse grads might also recall Biden’s claim that African Americans who fail to support him “ain’t black.”

Meanwhile, fact-based stories about the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the M19 Communist Organization are hard to find in the establishment media. On the other hand it’s easy to find glowing accounts of groups such as Black Lives Matter, a direct descendent of the Black Liberation Army. BLA cop-killer Joanne Chesimard now calls herself Assata Shakur, the icon of BLM.

Establishment media sign on to the Russia hoax and other myths, but when these are exposed as false they simply move on to the next wave of fake news, with no second thoughts. In similar style, they now avoid 10/7, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and retail the notion that the Israeli response amounts to “genocide.” It isn’t,  and neither was there a “pattern of genocide” against the Black Panthers.

Edward Jay Epstein was willing to go wherever the facts led him. As his body of work confirms, it’s all about memory against forgetting.