The Biden administration must be panicking about the shift in black support for Donald Trump. With one of the original Black Panthers chiming in to endorse Trump—and to say that Trump is not now nor has he ever been a racist—it’s nice to imagine that the panic has just escalated dramatically.

The Black Panthers, a violent, criminal, radical Marxist, race-based organization, was organized in 1966. Its members had grown up in the Jim Crow South or in other American regions that, while not having any official Jim Crow policies, still practiced actual systemic racism (unlike the imaginary systemic racism that today’s race hustlers traffic in for power and profit).

One of the people who joined the Black Panthers in their earliest incarnation was David Hillard, who was born and raised in Jim Crow Alabama. He was right there when Huey Newton and Bobby Searle formed the organization. When Newton was arrested in 1967 following his involvement in Officer John Frey’s death, Hilliard became the Panthers’ interim leader.

In 1968, Hillard himself was arrested for his involvement in an attack on two Oakland police officers. He was arrested again in 1969 for threatening Nixon. He went to prison in 1971 and served several years of a one-to-ten-year sentence. When Newton was murdered during a drug deal in 1989, Hilliard gave his eulogy.

My point is that Hilliard is the real deal: He was a victim of Jim Crow racism who became part of the core of true radical black activism in America.

However, it’s important to understand one of the beliefs that powered these original Black Panthers. Nine points out of the ten in the Panthers’ “Ten-Point Program” were pure Marxist agitation. The tenth, however, was a universal cri de couer:

We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities.

We believe that black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities.

“We want the power to determine” our destiny. Of course, what’s happened since then is that blacks have been denied the power to determine their destiny.

Democrats have systematically stripped from blacks the tools of liberty–family, education, and a well-ordered society—and, instead, substituted an ideology that destroys black communities from within. They are told that promiscuity is freedom; mind-altering, debilitating drugs are a right; violence is forgivable; education and the Bible are racist; abortion is a virtue; and voluntarily assumed salaried work is slavery.

The inevitable result is huge pockets of poverty and dysfunction. In these communities, there’s a perpetual battle being waged between those who embrace violence and those who merely wish to survive it, and almost all are locked into the pathologies of those same damaging behaviors that Democrats encourage as virtuous symbols of genuine black identity.

The best analogy is the wife-beater, who insists that the abuse is an outgrowth of his love for his wife. When she’s finally broken, she’s dependent on him because she can no longer function normally. In the same way, those blacks who have bought into the Democrat definition of black culture can survive only when the Democrats provide for them.

Donald Trump has never played that game. Whether as a developer or a president, Donald Trump simply said, play by the rules, and I will give you opportunities that you can grab. In the environment I create, you will have space for your initiative, skills, ambition, and hard work.

And sure enough, during Trump’s presidency, blacks made their greatest economic gains in American history. It turns out that when you treat blacks like people of dignity and worth and remove artificial barriers to their achievement, they thrive.

Moreover, Trump has always been personally popular among non-Marxist blacks. The endorsements Trump recently got from rappers Sheff G, Sleepy Hallow, and Ice Cube are not anomalous. Rappers have always liked Trump’s style.

Currently, Trump is gaining increased respect across the board from blacks. His travails in the legal system seem to have struck a chord. No wonder that a stricken CNN noted a huge shift in black votes, with support for Biden dropping from 81% four years ago to 69% now. At the same time, support for Trump went from 9% to 22%. It’s even higher among black men, 30% of whom support Trump.

And this is where that old radical, David Hilliard comes in. He just endorsed Trump because Trump, whom he knows personally, is not a racist and has been good for blacks:

BREAKING: Following the New York conviction, David Hilliard, one of the founders of the Black Panther party has given a SHOCKING endorsement to Trump and revealed that Trump financially supported the party

“Trump’s a friend of African Americans, and I knew Trump from the 1960s… pic.twitter.com/44eOmWsutr

— George (@BehizyTweets) June 5, 2024

We’re seeing a great electorate redistribution in America. The old, post-WWII alignments (blue-collar workers and minorities with the Dems; white shoe country club types with the GOP) are gone. Now, the division is much more basic: Individual liberty versus subordination to a giant, corrupt government. Hilliard reflects that shift.