a shootout took place during which Haley’s head was blown off, and Jonathan Jackson was killed.”

Davis fled but was arrested in New York. At her 1972 trial more than 20 witnesses implicated her in the plot to free Jackson, but she was acquitted. That made her a national figure and helped launch her political career.

In 1979, she won the International Lenin Peace Prize, awarded by East Germany, a totalitarian state that shot people for the crime of attempting to leave the country, a practice Davis never criticized. The Lenin Peace Prize helped her rise in the Communist Party USA, a creation of the Soviet Union, whose vast Gulag prison system never bothered Angela Davis, a faithful soldier in totalitarianism’s alibi armory.

In 1980 and 1984 Davis was CPUSA vice-presidentialcandidate, on the bottom of the ticket under white Stalinist Gus Hall. She and Hall lost, but that defeat, her advocacy for totalitarian dictatorships, and her involvement in Soledad case, could not prevent Davis from becoming professor of history of consciousness and feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz. As such, Angela Davis is a highly paid and pensioned member of California’s ruling class. She is also, like the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, masquerading as human rights activist. But on another level, her activism makes perfect sense.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the question arises about the place in the revolution of wild, non-domesticated creatures. The revolutionary leaders decide that, yes, rats are comrades. Likewise, in the view from the Hollywood and academic Left, violent criminals like the Pelican Bay