America recently lost a great social historian when New Yorker Fred Siegel died in May at age 78 . Siegel was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His work, as the obituary in City Journal noted, “was central to the renewal of American cities beginning in the 1990s, especially New York, where he was a senior adviser to Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign and later wrote speeches for the mayor.”

Central to Siegel’s work is opposition to what he called “riot ideology.” Riot ideology got its start in the turmoil of the 1960s. In his 1997 book The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities , Siegel describes it as when “public officials are reluctant to confront public disorder and crime for fear of violent opposition.” Now the main weapon of leftist groups such as antifa, the riot ideology was once a hallmark of Marxist groups such as the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. It is ignored by the media even as it has helped redestroy America’s cities after an urban renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s.

The 2020 urban riots over the death of George Floyd cost an estimated $2 billion — a record. Even worse is the psychological hangover that remains as people are too fearful to live in or even visit some of America’s once-great cities.

In “Forever 1968,” a 2016 City Journal article, Siegel observed that “there is [a] continuity between the current moment and the never-ending ‘60s: the revival of Black Pantherism in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates , the new Eldridge Cleaver.” Siegel argued that “the ‘60s are sometimes associated with the idea of participatory democracy, but that concept was buried under the weight of Great Society bureaucracies.”

Then he explores the main problem: “One feature of the ‘60s has endured: the glorification of violence … Violence incarnate was glamorized by the dashing, handsome, leather-clad Black Panthers and their gorgeous consorts. The Panthers colonized the minds of the New Left — particularly Students for a Democratic Society and its offshoot, the Weathermen — which longed to win their approval. Liberals were caught up in Panthermania, too.”

Reading Siegel for the first time in the 1990s inspired me to research the riots that had torn apart my native city of Washington, D.C. Siegel was right: The violence had been fueled by radical politics. In the book Ten Blocks From the White House, by reporter Ben Gilbert and the staff of the Washington Post, there is a theme that has reverberated through urban riots for more than 50 years. That theme is Marxism.

Ten Blocks from the White House tells the story of the riots that erupted in Washington, D.C., in 1968, after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. More than 1,200 buildings were burned, and the cost was almost $25 million, the third-highest in U.S. history. As with the summer 2020 riots, the mayhem was caused by Marxist radicals.

Four months after the D.C. riot, in August 1968, Gilbert, a black reporter for the Washington Post, made contact with three men who claimed responsibility for the violence following King’s death. The men were left-wing agitators who had been planning violence for months before King’s death, then used King’s death to spread chaos, from fires and bricks to using dynamite to blow up buildings. Many of the rioters were looters, criminals, and children who, according to at least one witness, cared little or nothing about King — just as today’s anarchists care nothing about George Floyd.

After the smoke cleared, Gilbert put word on the street that he wanted to meet the men who had sparked the conflagration. He got word back that the main instigator would meet him at an old D.C. hotel. When Gilbert arrived, three men were there. The men were hidden behind ski masks and announced themselves as Marxist revolutionaries. One quoted Che Guevara — “In a revolution, you either win or die” — while another called white people “the Beast” and insisted King was killed because he fought “colonization.” Today, these men are probably tenured professors in one of America’s elite universities.

The leader then admitted they had been planning violent action since February, two months before King was killed. The men then explained how they triggered violence after King’s death. “A lot of areas we went into,” said one, “there was nothing going on till we got there. But once we started our thing, man, people just took up.” Using Molotov cocktails and dynamite stolen from construction sites, the men bombed stores, most of them white-owned businesses in the black neighborhood now known as Shaw. One of the men claimed responsibility for at least 15 of the fires that destroyed parts of the city. He further explained that he had more than 25 men working with him: “There is organization. Don’t you realize that, as I said, there’s a revolution going on; there must be organization! That’s the reason that it was not a riot but a rebellion! There is organization. You have your assigned districts that you work with.”

As Fred Siegel observed, an identical theme was heard in 2020. Reporting has revealed that Marxist groups such as antifa used bricks, rocks, fireworks, and a network of scouts and cars to bring mayhem to Los Angeles, New York, and other cities in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Their violent forefathers are men such as Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael, a communist, took over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966 and was a main agitator in the 1968 D.C. riots. Carmichael had, according to Siegel, an “ideological infatuation with violence.” He and other totalitarian visionaries wanted to wed the violent action of the street radicals to the civil rights movement. As described by historian Benjamin Muse, Carmichael’s rhetoric “resembled at times the anti-white fulminations of Malcolm X, at times a harangue of [Spartacus] to the Roman gladiators, at times the senseless bawling of an angry child.” In 1968, Carmichael was stationed in Washington, D.C., after spending time in Hanoi, Havana, and Moscow.

It’s interesting to compare the reporting of the 1968 riots with the present day. “The crowds … generally were made up of bands of youth,” the Washington Post reported in 1968. “Some were schoolchildren, younger than 10 years old; some were teenagers and 20-year-olds — many dropouts or unemployed.” A young black man at the scene put it more bluntly: “The death of Martin Luther King had nothing to do [with this]. It was an excuse to be destructive or clean up.”

Today, the Washington Post and the New York Times, infected with riot ideology and Marxism, would never report so accurately.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.