"I admired the personal courage and commitment of individual Black Panthers I got to know, but I was not a fan of their politics. With the Panthers you found this curious mixture of selfless dedication and some of the worst aspects of street culture. They maintained discipline in their party "with a stick," as their own phrase had it. In Los Angeles they would run classes every Saturday in "political education" in which their members had to memorize sections of Mao's little red book. If they failed to memorize their assignment, they were beaten up. The same thing would happen if they failed to sell their weekly quota of their party newspaper. The Panthers picked up the Maoist slogan "All power grows out of the barrel of a gun" and made an ideological fetish out of it. That phrase has to be one of the stupidest things Mao ever said, because what power really grows out of is the organized consciousness of millions of people. At some point guns may become important tactically in the revolutionary process in some countries, but that isn't where power comes from-and a good thing, too, because revolutionaries are always going to be outgunned by the forces defending the old order."