This is the first section of the narration script for my documentary film The Bloody Road to Philadelphia, about the real history and danger of the Black Lives Matter movement. You can listen to the narration in a raw form here and I’m posting clips and having conversations about the film on my Twitter feed at @Stranahan.

Nobody in America can help noticing that something has gone very, very wrong.

Racial tensions and violence flaring up around the country. Demonstrations. Riots. Police officers being executed in the streets. Murder rates spiking across America.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

For millions of Americans voted for Barack Obama — and I was one of them — we were told things that would be different. That Obama would heal America’s deep racial wounds.

So what went wrong?

It’s 50 years since the race riots began in the 1960s. Why does it seem like history is repeating itself, and is there anything — anything at all — we can do to keep things from spinning out of control?

It’s not like that the protest movements are brand-new. In 2012, I was part of a documentary that exposed the rise of the the radical Occupy Wall Street movement that happened in Barack Obama’s first administration. Along with my friend Andrew Breitbart and other former leftists, we explained how the media was covering up the real nature of the Occupy movement and the communist and anarchist behind it.

But there were signs even in Obama’s first term that the media was covering up something much more sinister.

Across the country, a pattern of disturbing violence began to emerge that the national press was silent on. There were scattered local news reports about a wave of flash mob violence, which consisted of large groups of black teenagers attacking people, stealing, and destroying property.

But the big newspapers and national networks pretended not to notice. The American media remained quiet, even when these attacks were obviously racially motivated, such as when black mobs attacked white people at state fairs.

While the national press buried their heads in the sand, people in black America did notice, because they were also victims of the shocking crimes.

Some people, even Democrats like Philadelphia’s Mayor Michael Nutter were brave enough to actually speak out on this frightening new crime phenomon and he got cheers and applause from an all-black audience.

In President Obama’s first term, men like Mayor Nutter were voice in the wilderness, saying things that everyone knew was true but weren’t being allowed to say because of the growing atmosphere of political correctness.

In this new climate created by President Obama and his team of Clinton administration insiders, you had to be brave tell the truth.

When Andrew Breitbart began to expose occupy Wall Street for what it was, he was tarred with the same dishonest insults the Obama and Clinton team always fell back on. They called him racist.

But Andrew’s outspoken passion for the truth inspired millions of people, people who felt like the first time like they may have had a voice.

Then, just a month after we finished filming Occupy unmasked, the unthinkable happened. Andrew Breitbart died of a heart attack, the result of a pre-existing medical condition. I lost a friend and America lost one of its bravest voices.

The Playbook

Just a couple of days before Andrew died, on the night of February 26, 2012, something happened in a small city near Orlando Florida. At first, it was just a local story, not something on anyone’s radar outside of Central Florida.

That was the first local news report about the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. A witness told a reporter that someone who fits Martin’s description was beating up someone who fits Zimmerman’s description. That initial news report also showed Trayvon Martin’s father, obviously devastated by his sons death.

What nobody could’ve known that night watching the local news, is that the Trayvon Martin story would blow up in just a few days to become national news, then go on to become a topic of national debate leading up to the November 2012 Obama reelection campaign, and then go on to become the flashpoint that would kick off the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Trayvon Martin story would be transformed when a Florida attorney named Benjamin Crump got involved in the case.

After Benjamin Crump came onto the Trayvon Martin story, Al Sharpton was brought in to help lead protests, as was Jesse Jackson. Another group of younger black activists known as the “Dream Defenders” were brought in and the story began to make national headlines. Photos of Trayvon Martin as a young boy were everywhere and they blanketed the media. But the Trayvon Martin story was assured of a place in history when the President of the United States, Barack Obama, talked about it on national TV.

But one of the things that the national media didn’t report was that Benjamin Crump use the same media tactics before. In a Florida newspaper interview, Crump admitted that he was using the same playbook used for another case he worked on, the Martin Lee Anderson case. So what was Crump’s playbook and more importantly, who were the players?

In 2006 Crump was the attorney for the family of Martin Lee Anderson, who died as a result of rare medical condition while at a boot camp for juvenile offenders in Florida. In that case, just as he would do in the Trayvon Martin case years later, Benjamin Crump he showed photos of Martin Lee Anderson as a child. He brought in Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to help protest and used that group of young black activists called the Dream Defenders to lead protests. But Crump also enlisted the help of someone else in the Martin Lee Anderson case — a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

This play book, and these players, would all be apart of the Ferguson riots that blow up in Barack Obama’s second term, but it also established another pattern that we’ve seen over and over again. The national media would play a huge role in distorting the story and hiding the truth.

The pressure from the President, the media, and Benjamin Crump eventually forced the arrest of George Zimmerman. Meanwhile, the 2012 reelection campaign for Barack Obama continued even while it became clear that some of his policies were turning out to be disastrous. For instance on the foreign-policy front, Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s support of the Arab spring uprisings in the Middle East was showing itself to be a complete, total disaster.

Clinton and Obama’s policy of romanticizing revolutionary uprisings was beginning to have deadly consequences as it turned out that the rebels that the United States were supporting, were actually worse than the dictators they were replacing. In Egypt, the Muslim brotherhood that had replaced Hosni Mubarak and then imposed a brutal Islamic dictatorship. And as the election approached, on September 11, 2012 it was the clear that the wheels had come off the Clinton foreign policy. US embassies in Cairo, Egypt and Benghazi, Libya were both attacked by Islamic radicals. Radicals that Clinton and Obama had both assured the United States were really our friends.

But like clockwork, the media came to Obama and Clinton’s rescue. A clear example of this came after Barack Obama suffered two disastrous defeats in his first two debates with Mitt Romney, only to be saved by CNN’s Candy Crowley.

The media fix was in and Barack Obama won reelection 2012 with the help of Occupy Wall Street radicals. But Occupy Wall St. began to fade from memory.

Part of the reason that occupy walls never really caught on with the mainstream American public, was that it focused on economic issues, and in particular the issue of income inequality. Occupy Wall St. had taken the old communist trick of trying to pit the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie — and given them new names — the 99% versus the 1% . But by trying to play the class struggle card, occupy Wall Street failed where communism had failed the number of times before — it turned out that poor people were less interested in eating the rich, than they were becoming rich themselves. Mainstream America still believed in the value of hard work, and they were buying the class struggle rhetoric of occupy Wall Street.

But history shows us that this failure was nothing new. Going back to the communist revolution in the Soviet Union, Karl Marx himself was dismayed that communism started in Russia, and not in England.

Black Lives Matter’s Radical 60s Roots

The failure of communism to take hold worldwide is the problem that number of communist philosophers began dealing with in the 1930s. This group was organized at the University of Frankfurt featured thinkers such as Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, Collectively, they became known as the Frankfurt school.

The history and the ideas of the Frankfurt school are still relevant today and as you’ll see in a moment, Herbert Marcuse in particular had a lasting impact, on the intellectual history of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The mainstream media has written much about the Black Lives Matter movement, but they never talk about the group’s communist origins, their anti-Americanism, their deep-seated hatred of the police, or their connections to the 1960s radical movements.

The basic facts to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement aren’t in dispute. During the summer of 2013, George Zimmerman was on trial for the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida. After days of deliberation, with the entire world’s media looking on, the jury brought back a verdict of not guilty.

After the verdict came in, two radical socialist community organizers in California — Patrisse Cullors and Alisha Garza began talking online. It was there that they came up with the slogan Black Lives Matter. Later a third cofounder, Opal Tometi began working with them. Their goal — in their own words — was to reignite the black liberation movement.

The symbol of the modern black liberation movement was the 1960s radical group the Black Panthers. Formed in Oakland in 1966, the Panthers have become legendary. And as you’ll see, the media’s version of that legend is simply propaganda and lies.

Alisha Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors made no attempt to hide their Black Panther inspiration. The first set of demands issued by the Black Lives Matter founders was directly copied — in some cases word for word — from the Black Panthers ten point program.

One of the demands in that ten-point-program may sound crazy, but it’s actually gone on to become a real policy proprosal in the Black Lives Matter movement. One that Barack Obama has successfully begun to implement, and that if history is to be judge, Hillary Clinton would continue to carry out. That idea is point 8, which reads “We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails We believe that all black people from the many jails and prisons, because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.” That demand is exactly what it sounds like. Releasing every black prisoner. But today, that demands goes as another more acceptable name, “Ending Mass Incarceration”. As you’ll see, the goal is actually releasing every prisoner, no matter what crime they commited. The real motive is to guerilla army of prisoners to overthrow the United States government.

Now that sounds absolutely crazy, but when we untangle the truth behind the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 50 year history behind the black liberation movement, you’ll see that this is actually the real agenda behind the movement’s leaders. And once again, the media has helped them to bury the truth in plain sight. Part of understanding the truth behing the Mass Incarceration movement is understanding what black liberation movement actually means when they talk about “political prisoners”. When black liberation activists talk about freeing all political prisoners, they don’t mean people who were commiting explicitly political crimes. They actually mean, just like the Black Panther’s ten-point-program says that all black people are political prisoners. Their theory, taken from their own communist ideology is because black people in America are raised in an oppresive, racist system, no black criminal — not one of them — have received a fair trial. According to this view, no matter who the judge was or what the make up of the jury was, no black defendant ever received a trail by a jury of their peers.

In addition to viewing every black prisoner as a political prisoner, the black liberation movement, going back to the Black Panthers, also has a long history of celebrating political prisoners as heros. This continues to this day with the Black Lives Matter movement, and it’s notable that most of their heroes are cop killers. One of the most famous Black Panther slogans was “Free Huey”. This referred to Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton who was arrested for killing a police officer. Another hero is convicted cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal who was convicted of killing a police officer in Philadelphia in 1981. There’s ‘Hands off Assata’, or convicted cop killer Assata Shakur — currently in exile in Cuba — And the list goes on, and on, and on.

Another famous Black Panther connected trial in 1970 happened in New Haven, Connecticut. This one was for the torture and murder of a young Black Panther from New York named Alex Rackley. After the Black Panthers suspected Rackley of being an FBI informant, he was tied to a chair, tortured for 2 days by having boiling water thrown on him, and then taken into the woods and shot execution style. 9 people were indicted for Rackley’s murder including Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seal and New Haven’s Black Panther president Erica Huggins. Huggins’ voice can be heard on this audio recording of Rackley’s torture. Of course, the response of the activist community to this brutal crime were crys of “Free Huey” and “Free Erica”

One of the people helping to organize the protest was a young Yale law student, named Hillary Rodham.

In 1971 Rodham would move to this apartment in Berkeley, California where she’d eventually meet the man who would become her husband, Bill Clinton. While in the Bay Area, Hillary Clinton interned for the law firm that also helped defend Black Panther Huey Newton in his trial for killing a police officer. That law firm where Hillary Rodham Clinton interned was Treuhaft, Walker, Burnstein, well known as one of the country’s most famous radical communist law firm.

The connection between the communists and the Black liberation movement runs deep, and the Communists aren’t doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.

Due to communism’s inability to gain much popular traction in its early days, the Frankfurt school had risen in Germany and just before World War II, one of their leading scholars — Herbert Marcuse — would flee Germany and come to United States. There, he would begin teaching philosophy and a number of United States universities including Massachusetts’ Brandeis University.

It’s there that Herbert Marcuse would meet the girl who would eventually go on to become his protégé and one of the most famous black liberation activists of the 1960s and 70s, Angela Davis.

With her striking looks and afro, Angela Davis would only become one of the most powerful visual symbols of the black power movement in the 1960s.

Today, Professor Angela Davis is one of the leading advocates of the push to end mass incarceration and free as many prisoners as possible. She learned from Marcuse, and at his urging, Angela Davis studied at the Frankfurt school herself in the 1960s.

Herbert Marcuse & Angela Y. Davis

In the late 1960s, Marcuse would publish one of his most influential essays, called “On Liberation” that inspired radical groups from the Students for a Democratic Society, to the Weathermen, to the Black Panthers.

In “On Liberation”, Marcuse lay out the Communist idea of using the inner city black Americans as the front line troops of a guerrilla revolutionary overthrow of the United States — He called them the “most elemental, the most immediate force of rebellion” and he wrote:

The ghetto population of the United States constitutes such a force. Confined to small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily organized and directed. Moreover, located in the core cities of the country, the ghettos form natural geographical centers from which the struggle can be mounted against targets of vital economic and political importance.

One of the symbols of this idea of using black criminals to kick off the revolution was a street thug turned radical named George Jackson.

Although he’s virtually unknown to the general public today, in his time George Jackson was a best-selling author, a well-known and influential leader in the black liberation movement, and focus of activism for his lover Angela Davis.

George Jackson and Angela Davis

George Jackson was a dream come true for communists looking for a revolutionary thug.

As Bryan Burrough writes in his book Days of Rage:

George Jackson would spend his entire adult life behind the walls of California prisons, initially in a juvenile facility, then San Quentin, and later Soledad, a hulking fortress outside the farm town of Salinas, an hour south of San Francisco. He was an extraordinarily violent prisoner, earning forty-seven disciplinary actions in just under ten years, an average of one every ten weeks.

But George Jackson took the shortcut to media respectability: he became a communist.

Jackson would later say that in 1966 while in prison he met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao (…) “and they redeemed me.”

One of Jackson’s communist lawyer’s ghost-wrote a book for him called Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

It was published in October 1970 and became a best seller praised by The New York Times

But his most vocal advocate was Angela Davis, the protege of Herbert Marcuse. George Jackson became Angela Davis’ cause. She led events to Free The Soledad Brothers, and Jackson’s lawyer would secretly arrange for Jackson and Davis to make love during prison visits.

Another one of George Jackson’s biggest supporters was his 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson, who is frequently seen at Angela Davis’s side during protests to support George Jackson.

On August 7, 1970 that devotion turned deadly when Jonathan Jackson entered into a Marin County California courthouse armed with a pistol, and M1 rifle and a sawed off shotgun — all weapons that were owned by and registered to Angela Davis.

After sitting in a court room for a few minutes, Johnathan Jackson threw a pistol to the Black Panther member who was on trial that day. The two were soon joined by 2 other prisoners and began taking hostages. A district attorney and three female jurors were tied up with piano wire, while the presiding judge in the courtroom that day — Judge Haley — had the sawed-off shotgun taped to his neck.

Johnathan Jackson and the three other Black Panther marauders demanded that George Jackson be released by noon that day, even though George Jackson was on trial for killing a prison guard.

But Jonathan Jackson’s plan went horribly wrong when a police shootout occurred, leaving four people dead and two wounded including the prosecutor, who was paralyzed for life. Jonathan Jackson was killed. and Judge Haley had his head blown off by Angela Davis’s shotgun.

Jonathan Jackson became a martyr and a hero, and hundreds of people attended his funeral singing the praises for the man who had been responsible for the death and injury of law enforcement.

Angela Davis went on the run, and the call went out to free Angela Davis and all political prisoners. The only Black Panther to survive, Ruchell Magee — the left wanted to freed him, too.

After a nationwide manhunt — Angela Davis — the college professor and radical communist trained at the Frankfurt school — was captured by law enforcement.

While Angela Davis was awaiting trial in 1971, George Jackson would be killed, dead in a hail of gunfire as he attempted to escape prison.

Still awaiting trial, Angela Davis wrote a eulogy for George Jackson and vowed to continue fighting for him. She spoke about her love for the man she had declared her comrade and lifelong husband. Davis said in her eulogy:

I will try my best to express that love in the way he would have wanted — by reaffirming my determination to fight for the cause George died defending.

Angela Davis went to trial and was found not guilty of all charges against her, This, despite testimony that she had bought guns with Jonathan Jackson just days before the Marin County Courthouse massacre.

The legend of George Jackson and Angela Davis lives on today in the Black Lives Matter movement. Angela Davis has carried on the cause by promoting an end to “mass incarceration”, which is one of the Black Lives Matter movements key demands.

And the legacy of George Jackson — the imprisoned thug who became a communist martyr — was directly responsible for the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement nearly fifty years later.

Another part of George Jackson’s continuing legacy is a prison gang he helped form called The Black Guerilla Family. The Black Guerilla Family still exists in prisons today and like Jackson, they have a communist ideology and they believe that all black people are political prisoners.

The black guerrilla family members can be identified by their tattoos which include images of crossed swords, machetes, rifles, and shotguns…as well as this image — a black dragon overtaking a prison or a prison guard. In fact, George Jackson referred to himself as the Dragon

The image of a black dragon, an image still seen in the tattoos of members of the black guerrilla family prison gang today, has an important political significance.

The dragon imagery comes from a quote from the the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh who said “When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.”

In other words, the radicals in the black guerrilla family, like their leader George Jackson and their communist inspirations like Ho Chi Minh and Herbert Marcuse believe that releasing prisoners is an important part kicking off a communist revolution.

While the communist ideas of George Jackson and his comrades continue to be an important ideological influence on the Black Lives Matter movement there’s an even more direct connection between George Jackson and the chaos we’ve seen coming out of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

While the mainstream media never talks about any of this, George Jackson is actually a key inspiration for the man who’s the grandfather of the Black Lives Matter movement, a white 1960s radical named Eric Mann.

Eric Mann: The Grandfather of Black Lives Matter

In 1975, Eric Mann was a young a dedicated communist revolutionary who just finished spending 18 months in prison. In the 1960s, Mann was part of a group called the Students for a Democratic Society and their violent offshoot, The Weather Underground.

Along with his comrades in the Weather movement, Mann had assaulted a woman and destroyed property to fight against what they called American Imperalism.

Once out of prison in 1975, Eric Mann layed out his vision for the overthrow of the United States in a book he’d written called Comrade George: an Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson.

Eric Mann pictured an American socialist revolution that began in the inner-cities.

Like Herbert Marcuse, Eric Mann fantasized about a world where angry, down-trodden black citizens would rise up, rebel, and begin an armed struggle. But there was one major snag in Eric Mann’s plan to bring down the United States — he was white.

According to his own revolutionary believes, that meant that Eric Mann’s ability to lead the movement was limited. White revolutionaries like Mann and his comrades in the Weather Underground like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn thought that black revolutionaries needed to be the one to lead the movement, what they called the Vanguard of the Revolution.

As Eric Mann put it in an interview in 1975, his book about George Jackson “argues for the centrality of the Black Community”. Over the next several decades Eric Mann continued to work as a community organizer, a revolutionary organizer in California. It would take almost 40 years for radical activist Mann to see his vision spring to life as the Black Lives Matter movement, created by his disciple Black Lives Matter co-founder, Patrisse Cullors.

Eric Mann would later write that in 2000 his organization “recruited” — that’s his term — a 17 year old angry black lesbian named Patrisse Cullors. For the next 10 years, Eric Mann would teach her politics, in fomenting the revolution. Twenty-five years later, Mann’s organization would “recruit” 17 year old Patrisse Cullors and for the next ten years, teach her politics and “revolutionary organizing”. The goal of Eric Mann and his organization are as clear and revolutionary today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Here is Van Jones talking to his mentor Eric Mann on a radio interview. In Barack Obama’s first term, Van Jones was appointed by President Obama as his “green energy” czar. Today, Eric Mann’s protégé, Van Jones is part of the CNN team. And Jones also has connections to revolutionary Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza.

Before his job with CNN, Van Jones was one of the leaders of a socialist organization called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement — known as STORM. As they say in their manifesto, “reclaiming revolution”. Members of STORM would later form a group called People Organized to Win Employment Rights — or POWER. Alicia Garza was the executive director of POWER for years. That group POWER would later merge with another group that was promoting an open borders agenda. This new group was called Causa Justa — Just Cause, and as you’ll see later this new merged group is still a powerful political force in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2013, revolutionary communist community organizers Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi would co-found the Black Lives Matter movement. Their stated goal was to reignite the black liberation movement. With the cultural Marxist forces of academia and the entertainment industry behind them, and with the explicit support of President Obama, it was time for the revolution to begin.