Assata Shakur died Thursday. If you read The New York Times’ headline, you’d think Shakur was convicted for being a “revolutionary” and had to flee to Cuba. USA Today headlined their piece, “Assata Shakur, Tupac’s godmother who sought political asylum in Cuba, dead at 78.” Rolling Stone wrote she was a “Convicted Black Liberationist and Tupac’s Godmother.” Harper’s Bazaar wrote: “Assata Shakur, Legendary Revolutionary and Black Liberation Army Member, Has Died.”

But you wouldn’t necessarily glean from any of those headlines the actual truth — that is, Shakur murdered New Jersey officer Werner Foerster and was convicted of first-degree murder. She then escaped prison and was placed on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list. Shakur was also part of the Black Liberation Army, which supported “killing cops,” according to the Maryland state police, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

So why the whitewashed coverage?

Because the left weaponizes language to launder extremism into respectability. Branding Shakur as a freedom fighter is meant to justify being a cop killer — the same way the modern left brands itself “Antifa” to legitimize assaulting conservatives or fighting for “democracy” to justify violence, murder and destruction. In all of these instances, radical leftists seek a moral veil for their crimes.

And this isn’t a one-off trend. The left has a long history of glamorizing terrorists in order to reach a political end.

Take, for example, the Black Panther Party — a radical, militant group of anti-white, cop-hating terrorists. One example of their barbarism is their torturing of Alex Rackley. Rackley, a 19-year-old black kid who joined the organization but was accused of being a rat, was strung up in a noose during a mock lynching before he was placed in a wooden chair, as The Daily Beast reported. But his captors bound and gagged him so that his screams couldn’t be heard when the group proceeded to pour boiling water over his naked body. After days of torture, Rackley was murdered. The FBI states the Black Panther Party is an “extremist organization” that “advocated the use of violence and guerrilla tactics to overthrow the U.S. government.”

Nonetheless, The Black Panther Party has been recast as merely “challenging police and promoting social change,” and as a group that “protected black citizens from brutality” and created so-called “survival programs” to provide food, clothing, and transportation to the black community, according to the Smithsonian. PBS News said the group is “often misunderstood” and was “vilified by the white establishment.”

Or take Black Lives Matter — a radical left-wing organization that gained popularity in the summer of 2020. The organization led nationwide riots that resulted in burned-out police precincts, looted cities, toppled statutes, and the murder of retired officer David Dorn.

Despite the violence, bloodshed, and destruction, the propaganda press has spent the past five years peddling the lie that the riots were merely “protests” and “peaceful.” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi described watching a liquor store burn in Minneapolis in the days after George Floyd’s death, noting that the AutoZone that had been burned to the ground by rioters the night before was still smoldering. Velshi justified the violence, writing: “Violence that is intended to spread democracy, end injustice and encourage fairness in the application of the rule of law” is permissible, compared to “wanton” violence.

But that line encapsulates the left’s entire playbook: if violence can be cloaked in the language of “justice,” then terrorism is transformed into activism.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the recent acts of heinous violence we’ve witnessed.

When Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood on a New York City street less than a year ago, the left rushed to excuse the massive outpouring of ghoulish delight from the people who celebrated Thompson’s murder. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sympathized with the “visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies” and suggested Thompson’s death “should be a warning to everyone in the health care system.”

Then were was a proposed California ballot measure — “the Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act,” — that would target health insurance denials, one of Mangione’s reported flashpoints. It was a measure framed as “reform” but was nothing more than an attempt to legitimize a political assassination by turning it into a policy platform.

And, most recently, Charlie Kirk was gunned down on a Utah college campus by a deranged leftist who inscribed anti-fascist slogans on bullet casings. The message was clear: the alleged shooter thought Kirk was a fascist. Drawing such a historic parallel conditions people to believe that resistance to fascism by any means necessary is justified just as it was during WWII.

But the left doesn’t merely glorify terrorists — it rewards them. The same movement that rebrands radicals as “revolutionaries” and freedom fighters is the same movement that elevates them with commutations, pardons, honors.

Then-President Joe Biden commuted Leonard Peltier’s sentence despite Peltier having murdered two FBI agents. President Bill Clinton granted clemency to Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) members despite the “militant terrorist organization” having claimed responsibility for “the bombings of approximately 130 civilian, political, and military sites throughout the United States,” according to a congressional resolution deploring the decision. President Barack granted clemency to Oscar Lopez Rivera, who NPR describes as “either a freedom fighter or a terrorist” depending on who you ask. Rivera was a member of the FALN and involved in a deadly bombing in the United States.

Obama also has deep ties with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers is the co-founder of the terrorist organization, the Weather Underground. He and his wife were involved in the firebombing the home of a New York judge who was overseeing a case related to the terrorist group. Obama hosted a fundraiser at their home. Ayers went on to teach at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Or take Cambridge University, which conferred an honorary degree to Angela Davis earlier this year. Davis, as described in these pages by David Harsanyi, was a “Stalinist cheerleader,” and the Soviet Union propped her up via a propaganda campaign. Davis supplied the guns that black radicals used to take over a courtroom, kidnap a judge, and eventually kill four people. The killers were attempting to secure the release of other radicals from prison. Davis was later acquitted of involvement in the crime. She also stood by ideologies that led to the imprisonment of dissidents and the deaths of tens of millions of people.

But, as Harsanyi pointed out, Davis is “another reminder that the progressive left will tolerate the most odious characters as long as they seek ‘justice’ for a favored cause.”

Whether it’s the whitewashing of groups like the radical and violent Black Panther Party or the rewarding of violence, it’s clear the left seeks to turn terrorists into martyrs and to transform political violence into some type of virtue. The pattern is the same: violence for the cause is justified, as Velshi said. And until this is confronted, the cycle will continue.