The closest this country has been to the violent mobs of the French Revolution was the upheaval of the anti-war protests and race riots of the late sixties—all led by liberals.
The beginning of the student insanity of the sixties is commonly marked by the June 1962 Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Michigan. Among the vaporous idiocies of this proclamation was the demand that work “should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility.”
So it was either the manifesto of the New Left or a cheap imitation of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Written mostly by Tom Hayden, the manifesto pompously drones on about “the emptiness of life.” This from a man who married Jane Fonda, whose most important career move was getting breast implants. But Hayden’s nails-on-a-blackboard, Valley Girl gibberish was hailed as the voice of the new “Youth Culture.”
In no time, a series of student riots erupted on college campuses based on rumors and hyperbole, following the French pattern. Students would create chaos and tumult, and then the college administrations would promptly capitulate to the student mobs and their incomprehensible causes. Nathan Glazer said that the student protests all came down to the argument that “any mob is right as against any administrator, legislature or policeman.”1
The Berkeley “Free Speech” movement kicked off the campus riots in 1964. There were protests, sit-ins, even Joan Baez singing folk songs to demand “free speech.” (Liberals supported free speech until they realized, years later, how bad speech is for them and began demanding hate crimes legislation, speech codes, and sexual harassment laws restricting speech.) After days of protests, the Berkeley faculty responded forcefully by passing a resolution calling for no discipline for the students.
Shockingly, this did not bring the protests to a screeching halt. Vagrants and professional protesters joined the party. Putting their love of speech on hold, the thugs firebombed buildings and hurled rocks at the police. Soon the free speech protests turned into rallies for cop-killer Huey Newton, even though murder wasn’t exactly speech either.
Seeing how well total capitulation had worked in the past, college administrators tried it over and over again. A few years later, student and nonstudent protesters objected to a new dormitory building at Berkeley. They wanted a “People’s Park” so they would have a nice place for more demonstrations. Students, homeless people, and recently paroled criminals occupied the university-owned property and violently attacked the police with rocks, bricks, and pipes. Protesters painted graffiti saying “Yanqui go home”—to demonstrate their solidarity with the Third World against “Amerikkka.”
During one of the brick-throwing melees, a twenty-five-year-old nonstudent, James Rector, who had heard about the riots and come to join the fun, was on a roof above the clash heaving debris on the police. Rector was hit with police buckshot, from which he later died.
Governor Ronald Reagan ordered the National Guard to shut down the violent student protests throughout the state. He blamed Rector’s death on “the first college administrator who said it was all right to break laws in the name of dissent.”2 Appalled by their first-ever glimpse of manly force, the Berkeley faculty and administration were soon demanding that Reagan call off the Guard. Hirsute counterculture girls gave the guardsmen LSD-laced juice and brownies, requiring some to be taken off duty. These were the “idealists” the faculty was protecting.
Eventually, the protesters prevailed when the college administrators refused the protection of the National Guard and surrendered to the students—as they had always planned to do. The “People’s Park” was established and to this day remains a picturesque quadrant where criminals, drug dealers, and homeless people congregate.
This was the basic set piece for all the university protests of the sixties. The students would cook up some synthetic “cause” that seemed to link them to Third World people, and law enforcement would move in and restore order. Then college administrators would demand an immediate surrender to the drug-fueled protesters while heaping praise on them as the most idealistic and brilliant generation in all of human history. It was the perfect incubator for creating the Worst Generation.
Would the herd of individualists on college campuses in the sixties have been so brave without the approval of college administrators and the mainstream media? Why so violent at home but afraid to go to war?
Student radicals behaved like feral beasts not only because of the group dynamic of a crowd, but because they had no criticism. They never had a reason to pause, reflect, or repent because, between acts of violence, they were busy reading the press reports describing them as “idealists”—indeed, “the best informed, the most intelligent and the most idealistic this country has ever known,” as the Cox Report on the student riots at Columbia University put it.3 In a self-reinforcing circle, the mobs took their cues from the elites and the elites praised the “idealistic” mobs.
Far from rebelling, student radicals were perfectly in tune with authority figures in their lives, both at home and on campus. As political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out, because of the “enormous growth in the number of liberal Jewish faculty” in the post–World War II years, American universities went from being mostly apolitical to places with strong liberal views.4 The alleged radicalism of the students, Lipset says, was “approved by the community within which they operate.”
The alleged radicals weren’t even rebelling against their parents. Numerous studies at the time showed that left-wing students were “largely the children of left-wing or liberal parents.”5 Weatherman Eleanor Raskin attended protests at Columbia University and the Pentagon with her mother, who was “as militant as protesters one-third her age” and whose antics “seemed excessive, even unseemly.”6 The left-wing congressman from Boulder, Colorado, Jared Schutz Polis, elected in 2008, has childhood memories of being brought to anti-war rallies by his parents.7
To be sure, the conservative students tended to reflect the views of their parents as much as the liberal students did. Also like the liberal activists, politically involved conservatives had higher IQs than apolitical students.8 The main difference between the conservative and liberal activists, based on a comparison of SDS and YAF conventions, was that the conservatives came from less wealthy families than the liberals.9
In 1970, a violent student mob rampaged for three days at Kent State University, smashing store windows, breaking into a jewelry store, and starting street bonfires. The ROTC building at the university was burned to the ground, as hundreds of students stood around cheering. When the fire trucks arrived, the mob threw rocks at the firemen and slashed the fire hose. The riot had been instigated by Terry Robbins, the Weatherman leader who had sex with Bill Ayers and later blew himself up while assembling a bomb intended for soldiers at Fort Dix.
Day after day, thousands of protesters ran wild, throwing beer bottles, bricks, rocks, and smoke grenades at the police. Wielding baseball bats, golf clubs, and foot-long pieces of steel wire, they screamed “Bring the war home!” and “Death to pigs!” Even after the National Guard had been called in, for days law enforcement responded with nothing more than tear gas.
On May 4, National Guard officers were trying to disperse thousands of violent protesters in the middle of the campus. According to the recent reporting of James Rosen,10 the guardsmen were fired upon first, leading twenty-nine guardsmen to shoot back at the protesters, killing four students in thirteen seconds—Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder.11
If Louis XVI had been that decisive, 600,000 Frenchmen might not have had to die. As his grandfather, Louis XIV, had said: When war is necessary, it is a “grave error to think that one can reach the same aims by weaker means.” Though decried thoughout the land—and in a Neil Young song!—the shooting at Kent State soon put an end to the student riots.
Student radicals had never imagined anyone would fail to praise them, much less shoot at them. Taken in by the establishment, they were instantly commercialized, hailed as “idealists”—and then most of them headed off to law school and university jobs.
Consider the complete absorption of Weathermen member Kathy Boudin into the liberal elite of this country.
Truly psychotic radical behavior was the only thing Kathy Boudin had left to impress her father when she couldn’t get into a top-notch law school. As described by Susan Braudy in her book Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, poor Kathy had terrible board scores. First, she couldn’t get into Oberlin, then she couldn’t get into Yale Law.12 She was terrified of “losing her place as [her father] Leonard’s most cherished offspring.”13
Her brother Michael, the Republican, had nearly perfect board scores and would go on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard, attend Harvard Law School—where he was president of the Law Review back when it meant something—and work for the Reagan administration. Today, he is a federal appeals court judge, appointed by the first President Bush.
The only path Kathy had to impress her radical lawyer father was to be more insane than he. It wouldn’t be easy. Boudin père was a member of a communist front group, the National Lawyers Guild, and had represented Fidel Castro and Soviet spies Judith Coplon and Alger Hiss, as well as Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, among other left-wing celebrities. When passing through customs at Logan Airport after arriving from London, Boudin grandly announced to the nonplussed Customs official, “I am the lawyer for the revolutionary government of Cuba. My destination is my office at Harvard Law School.”14
Leonard and his wife Jean relished inviting celebrities to their home for dinner, where they showily displayed tchotchkes from their radical fame, such as Kathy’s motorcycle helmet from her participation in the Days of Rage in Chicago. Jean Boudin’s “pride in her aristocratic position on the left,” Braudy writes, made her “the match of any Palm Beach hostess.”15
Kathy called her branch of the Weathermen “the Fork” in honor of the Manson family’s murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson’s followers had defiled the bodies, most famously by leaving a two-tined carving fork protruding from Mr. LaBianca’s gut. This charming scene was first commemorated by Boudin’s fellow Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn, who gave the “fork” salute at a rally, saying, “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!”
These are the people who became respected advisers to a Democratic president.
The Weathermen predicted that 20,000 students would show up at their Days of Rage protest of the Chicago 7 trial in October 1969, an imitation of the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the year before. Planning for war in the streets, they did push-ups and practiced street fighting in public parks to prove they weren’t “hippie faggots associated with SDS.”16
The Weathermen were too psychotic even for the Black Panthers, who denounced the Days of Rage in a beautiful statement from Fred Hampton saying, “We oppose the anarchistic, adventuristic, chauvinistic, individualistic, masochistic, Custeristic Weathermen.”17 The Black Panthers may not have been the Girl Scouts, but they were not insane. While liberal elites enjoyed the constant tumult, most blacks did not; they just wanted the crime to stop. In 1968, the NAACP’s Harlem branch was calling for mandatory five-year sentences against muggers, minimum ten-year sentences for drug pushers, and thirty-year sentences for first-degree murderers.18
In the event, no more than a few hundred wastrels showed up, prepared for battle with the police by wearing helmets and fatigues and carrying poles and baseball bats. Flying the Vietcong flag, they called themselves the “Americong.” They started a bonfire with park benches and blew up a statue of a policeman by placing a bomb between its legs. The explosion was so huge it blew out nearly a hundred windows in surrounding buildings. Then the Weathermen ran into the streets, smashing cars and storefront windows, throwing rocks, and swinging their bats at cops. Approximately ten minutes later, they were all in police custody with lots of broken eyeglasses.19
In a way, what the Weathermen did was even more serious than Sarah Palin’s putting crosshairs on congressional districts.
After a Chicago Democratic official, Richard Elrod, became paralyzed for life while fighting with a privileged looter during the Weathermen’s Days of Rage, Obama adviser Bernardine Dohrn led the Weathermen in a song sung to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady, Lay”:
Lay, Elrod, Lay,
Lay in the street for a while
Stay, Elrod, stay
Stay in your bed for a while
You thought you could stop the Weatherman
But up-front people put you on your can,
Stay, Elrod, stay
Stay in your iron lung,
Play, Elrod, play
Play with your toes for a while
The author of that ditty, Ted Gold, was later blown up in an elegant Greenwich Village townhouse while assembling the bomb intended for a new-recruits dance at Fort Dix.
Kathy was part of the brain trust that blew up the townhouse, but fled before the police could talk to her. Kathy’s parents were delighted with the townhouse bombing. Her mother had always envied the home’s owners for their wealth anyway,20 and her father thought seeing his daughter on FBI “Wanted” posters was “good for his legend.”21
Usually the aging radicals cite their ineptitude at setting bombs to brag about how few humans they murdered. But these bombs were made with nails, and nails don’t destroy property, they maim and kill people. The three Weathermen who accidentally dynamited themselves were completely dismembered, their body parts splattered all over the walls and ceiling.22
Fortuitously, going underground after the townhouse explosion finally gave Kathy an excuse to get a nose job. She also dyed her hair bright red—the better to hide—mimicking Bernardine Dohrn, born Bernardine Ohrnstein.23 These revolutionaries would engage in sex orgies to “smash monogamy,” but one convention the gritty radicals adhered to was the WASP ideal of beauty and gentrified names.
Being “underground” gave them all celebrity status. The only thing that terrified Kathy, Braudy says, was that “if stripped of her glamorous and dramatic revolutionary attachments and subterfuges, she would be the dullest person in Leonard’s circle of admirers.… She would be a woman, no longer young, whose work was waiting tables and cleaning houses.”24
In 1974, Kathy, Dohrn, and Bill Ayers were thrilled when a documentary filmmaker, Emile De Antonio, offered to make a movie about the Weather Underground. De Antonio was solidly in the liberal firmament, having made the movie Point of Order, attacking Senator Joseph McCarthy. In a letter to the Weathermen, he gushed over them, praising their “masterstroke of political theater” and the “tender loving care” they took making bombs. He signed his letter “Bang. Bang. Bang.”25 He also offered to give them final approval over content, location, cinematographer, and film editor.26 (I wonder if McCarthy got that for Point of Order.)
Some would argue that setting bombs, rioting in the streets, and trying to blow up American servicemen was even worse than identifying a communist as a communist. But that wasn’t the view of American liberals.
After the Weathermen led De Antonio on a two-hour game of hide-and-seek before their first meeting, the steeplechase ended at a restaurant, open to the public. But they couldn’t have said, “Let’s meet at Appleby’s” because, you see, they were “underground.” Their subsequent meetings with the filmmaker were in restaurants, on street corners, and in public parks, including Central Park.
They apparently relished playing cops-and-robbers—but it turns out the FBI wasn’t even looking for them anymore. Kent State had put an end to the student riots, and in any event, the Vietnam War was over. No one cared about the Weather Underground. Around the time of the filming, a newspaper in Wisconsin printed David Gilbert’s whereabouts and—nothing happened. “No one arrested him,” Braudy writes, the “authorities weren’t interested in him.”27 But De Antonio asked them if he should bring a gun to the filming.28
After five more years of playing underground, in 1981, Kathy conspired with addled, drug-addicted members of the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brinks armored truck in Rockland County, New York. They wanted drug money and she wanted something exciting to do. Her six BLA co-conspirators murdered Brinks guard Peter Paige and wounded two others at the Nanuet Mall, then hopped in the back of the getaway truck, with Kathy and her partner, David Gilbert, in the truck’s cab.
When the truck was stopped by the police minutes later, thirty-eight-year-old Kathy played the innocent housewife, frightened by firearms. She emerged from the cab, begging the police to put down their guns. The perplexed cops, who had been told to look for a U-Haul truck full of black gunmen, did so. No sooner were their weapons holstered than six black men leapt out of the back of the vehicle, guns blazing. Firing wildly at the cops, they instantly killed the force’s only black officer, Waverly Brown. Sergeant Edward O’Grady died a few hours later on the operating table.29
Decades later, Kathy continued to deny she intentionally disarmed the cops by pretending to be a middle-class suburbanite afraid of guns. And yet her partner, David Gilbert, tried the exact same ruse about an hour later. Stopped by a policeman, Gilbert calmly walked toward the cop, innocently asking for help, as his co-conspirators in the car loaded their weapons. It didn’t work a second time. The cop yelled for Gilbert to get down and soon another cop arrived with a shotgun. Gilbert and his posse were taken into custody.30
A mob’s behavior, Le Bon says, is an “atavistic residuum of the instincts of the primitive man.” It is the fear of punishment, he says, that “obliges the isolated and responsible individual to curb” his barbarism.31 But the Weathermen never faced punishment. To the contrary, they were showered with praise and admiration.
Even in 2000, the New York Times was still describing Kathy Boudin as “deeply committed to civil protest against what [she] saw as injustices.” Leonard—Castro’s lawyer—was said to have been “on the front line fighting for civil liberties and human rights.” And Kathy’s uncle, I. F. Stone—a paid Soviet agent, as established in the Venona papers in 1995—is simply identified as a “liberal journalist.” After reeling off these insane encomiums, Times critic Mel Gussow concluded, “Kathy grew up surrounded by activists and artists. Her social consciousness came naturally.”32
If the Weathermen had succeeded in transporting their bombs to the Fort Dix dance, instead of blowing themselves up, they would have murdered lots of U.S. servicemen and their dates. For liberals, that’s “social consciousness.”
Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door to the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed by the inept revolutionaries, reminisced in 2000 about the explosion that blew out his living room wall. He told the Times, “Since then, we’ve seen killings of abortion doctors, killings by Christian fundamentalists.”33 (In the four decades since Roe v. Wade took away Americans’ right to vote on abortion, eight people working at abortion clinics have been killed—versus 53 million babies.)
Even when a liberal’s own house is blown up by left-wingers, he still somehow manages to blame right-wingers.
At her trial, Kathy was represented by a string of dazzling attorneys, many of them working free, and received celebrities in her jail cell as if she were a visiting dignitary. Meanwhile, one of her pro bono attorneys, Dan Pochoda, grandly announced to reporters, “The test of a civilization is how it treats the people it dislikes.”34 Dislikes? Boudin was bigger than Sean Penn, with slightly less moustache.
Her father Leonard, a great advocate of the communist redistribution of wealth, felt differently when it came to his own money. After ponying up $1.5 million in legal costs for Kathy’s defense, he heatedly argued to his tax accountant that he should be able to deduct it as a “business expense.”35
In prison, Kathy wrote poems about her incarceration and her crime, mostly focusing on herself as the victim and what it was like to be stopped at gunpoint by the police. Luckily for Kathy, her boundless self-love was shared by the elites. She won first prize for her prison poetry at the PEN awards in 1997.36
Actor Danny Glover read one of Kathy’s poems at a PEN ceremony, dedicated to political prisoners. Her poetry was also read at a Lincoln Center benefit in the late nineties. (Perhaps they can rustle up a poem from Jared Loughner for next year’s benefit!) In 2001, the New Yorker ran an admiring feature story about Kathy—a “model prisoner”—endorsing her utterly tendentious version of the Brinks robbery. Alas, the piece laments, “friends and families of the victims are not interested in what Boudin is really like.”37
After decades of recounting her sufferings since the robbery that left Waverly Brown dead, Kathy was told that Brown’s son still attended the memorial service held for his father and Sergeant O’Grady every year. Hundreds of uniformed policemen from all over the state attend the ceremony, replete with bagpipes and a color guard, held at 4 p.m. every October 20.
“Really?” Kathy said. “I never knew the guy had a son.”38 There’s the mob’s idealist.
But according to the New Yorker article, it was “one of the crime’s crueller ironies” that the “revolutionaries” had killed the first and only black member of the Nyack police force.39 Ironic, one surmises, because the Weathermen had done so much to enrich the lives of black people in America. Kathy would surely agree—if only she could remember who Waverly Brown was. The $1.6 million stolen from the Brinks armored car wasn’t going to build charter schools in the South Bronx. It was to buy cocaine.
And yet Kathy portrayed her participation in a robbery that left nine children fatherless as a charitable act, saying, “Had I been Roman Catholic, perhaps I would have been a nun.”40
When the police searched Kathy’s Morningside Drive apartment after the Brinks robbery, amid the food stamps and welfare forms they found Kathy’s application to New York University Law School.41 That’s what it was always about.
Not anyone could go to a good law school, but anyone could become part of a violent America-hating rabble—and be a superstar. Kathy couldn’t get into a good law school, so she had to declare war on the country. If only this pathetic creature had been accepted by a decent school, she would never have had to become a radical. But the academic establishment spurned her. So she did the only thing she could to make the fashionable set revere her, make movies about her, and publish admiring profiles in the New Yorker about her. Had student radicals received a fraction of the contempt heaped on Sarah Palin daily, it might not have been so much fun.
They were showered with fawning press coverage and numerous admiring documentaries and sought out by Hollywood celebrities. They have won tributes in endless magazine profiles, awards ceremonies, Hollywood documentaries, and sympathetic portrayals on television shows like Law & Order. Before fleeing from the townhouse explosion, Kathy had to cancel an appointment with a Random House editor.42 Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn was photographed in a leather miniskirt by celebrity photographer Richard Avedon.
Compare the bien-pensants’ treatment of women who participated in bombings and cop-killings to their treatment of Carrie Prejean. Dohrn and Boudin enthusiastically endorsed the Manson murders; pageant contestant Prejean only endorsed marriage. Guess which one was relentlessly mocked? Christianity is never trendy, which is one reason Christians can never be a mob.
Where are Prejean’s celebrity photographs hanging in chichi New York museums? To the contrary, Prejean—the actually attractive one—has been called ugly, stupid, hateful, and bigoted and has had her plastic surgery broadcast around the globe, while the genetic misfit Weathermen are hailed for their glamour and style. To applause and laughter, Obama adviser David Axelrod went on NPR and said the president was naming the White House dog Miss California after Prejean.43 If only Prejean had praised Manson instead of marriage, liberals would finally have a female “idealist” who doesn’t look like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Dohrn and her husband Ayers have dined out for half a century on the glory of their days as Weathermen. They’re the domestic terrorist version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? They give dramatic renderings of their days “underground” as if it took wily stratagems to hide in a country where 12 million illegal aliens stroll about Los Angeles undetected.
The aging lothario, five-foot-four Ayers particularly enjoys recounting his sexual exploits. Here’s a selection from his 2001 book on—guess what?—his days as a Weatherman: “She felt warm and moist” … “Her mouth opening slightly, our tongues touching secretly” … “Another night Diana and Rachel and Terry and I bedded down together” … “You were supposed to f—k no matter what.” …44
In 2002, there was yet another movie made about these narcissistic sociopaths, The Weather Underground. Naturally, it was nominated for an Oscar.
The moment Yale-reject mediocrities became “radicals,” throwing rocks at cops and setting bombs, they entered a lifetime of praise—and insta-rehabilitation. When it was time for them to make money, they were hired for cushy teaching jobs at the nation’s universities.
To name just a few:
• Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga, was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI. In 1971, Karenga was convicted of torturing two members of United Slaves. The Los Angeles Times reported on the trial testimony of one of Karenga’s victims:
Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.45
Karenga is a professor of black studies at California State University, Long Beach.46
• William Ayers put a bomb in the Pentagon and now teaches childhood education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
• Ayers’s wife, Ohrnstein/Dohrn, called for revolutionary war in the United States, praised the Manson family, laughed about a paralyzed DA, said “Bring the Revolution home, kill your parents—that’s where it’s at,” and participated in the bombing of the Pentagon. She is a professor at Northwestern University’s Children and Justice Center.
• Mark Rudd, also a Weatherman leader, who led the student strike at Columbia University, taught at a community college in New Mexico until retiring in 2007.
• Angela Davis, former Black Panther, was the legal owner of the guns the Panthers used to blow off the head of Marin County judge Harold Haley in an attempt to free Davis’s boyfriend, George Jackson. Today she is a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
• Eleanor Raskin was involved in all the Weathermen’s lunacy, from the Days of Rage to the Greenwich Village townhouse bombing. She now teaches at Albany Law School.
• Mike Klonsky was National Chairman of SDS in 1968, during the violent riots at the Democratic National Convention, and founded the Maoist October League, which later adopted the catchy name “The Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).” In 1977, he was an honored guest of the Communist Chinese government, where he comically vowed to “topple the U.S. imperialist ruling class” and told the Chinese “we are determined as well to make a contribution to the worldwide struggle against the two superpowers.” The Chinese enjoyed his presentation because they don’t speak English.
Today, Klonsky is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. When Barack Obama was doling out various foundation grants, he funneled nearly $2 million to Klonsky and Bill Ayers. Klonsky was also on President Clinton’s Advisory Council of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence.
• David Hilliard, the Black Panthers’ “Field Marshal,” did not do anything as threatening as ask to see a president’s birth certificate, but he did stand in front of a quarter million people and scream, “Later for Richard Milhous Nixon, the motherfucker! … Because Richard Nixon is an evil man! … Fuck that motherfucking man! We will kill Richard Nixon!”47
Hilliard has taught at Merritt College, Laney College, New College, and the University of New Mexico.48
• Susan Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and The Family. She conspired to kill cops, blow up buildings, and stage an armed robbery of the Brinks truck in Nanuet, New York. Sentenced to fifty-eight years in prison for felony murder and possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives, Rosenberg was released from prison by President Clinton on his last day in office.
Just a few years later, Rosenberg was offered a teaching position at Hamilton College, despite having absolutely no qualifications to teach—with only a master’s degree in writing she got through a correspondence course in prison.
In addition to springing various Weathermen from prison, President Clinton also pardoned sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists who had set off more than a hundred bombs in New York and Chicago in the seventies and eighties, killing a half dozen people and injuring more than seventy. They hadn’t even asked for pardons.
If Charles Manson’s followers hadn’t killed Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, Clinton would have pardoned him, too, and he’d probably be teaching at Northwestern University.
And yet we still have to hear it asked: Why did this group of privileged kids declare war on their own government? Perhaps the next batch of glowing articles, books, and movies will get to the bottom of that brainteaser. If only liberal elites had treated these social climbers a little bit less like Jennifer Aniston and a little bit more like Mel Gibson, nine children in Nyack, New York, might have grown up with their fathers.
With embarrassing bravado, Bill Ayers told his fellow Weathermen, “It’s not a comfortable life, it’s not just a dollar move, it’s standing up in the face of the enemy, and risking your life and risking everything for that struggle.”49
Of course it was a dollar move. Like no-name rock bands and comedians staging “benefits” ostensibly for left-wing causes, but actually to benefit themselves, student radicals declaring “war” on Amerikkka had found a surefire path to celebrity. Ted Gold was making note for his memoir before blowing himself up in the townhouse. For some people, nothing is more important than fame. The Weather Underground was the sixties version of The Jersey Shore—except Obama doesn’t know Snooki. Let’s see these brave dissidents, allegedly willing to risk “everything,” try to get through one day in the life of non-elite-approved Sarah Palin, Scooter Libby, Mark Fuhrman, Linda Tripp, Clarence Thomas, Dan Quayle, Ken Starr, Karl Rove, Carrie Prejean, Michele Bachmann, or Katherine Harris, to name a few people liberals would run over with their cars and laugh about it.
A century earlier, Fyodor Dostoyevsky captured the identical sickness in 1860s Russia in his novel The Demons, depicting the corrosive effect of the French Revolution’s ideas on Russian society. After so many years of peace and calm, the older generation couldn’t imagine that anything could possibly go wrong with the conscienceless children they had raised. Exhibiting the mad narcissism of the liberal intellectual set, the fashionable people in The Demons are constantly entertaining deranged revolutionaries at the town’s most desirable social events. One character, a failed Russian novelist, toys with nihilistic anarchists to feed his own ego, flattering them as the only generation to speak truth boldly, while boasting about his own atheism.
The Demons was as prescient a warning regarding the disaster about to befall Russia as Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was about that cataclysm. On the eve of the French Revolution, Burke cautioned that “criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.” He said the moment one capitulates to the idea that mayhem and murder are justified for the greater good, the greater good is forgotten and mayhem and murder become ends in themselves, until only violence can “satiate their insatiable appetites.”50
Beginning in the 1960s, American liberals were unable to stop flirting with mob violence. Like Dostoyevsky’s unsuccessful author, they embraced sociopathic malcontents because it made them feel hip and young. Today, the angry rabble is simply another faction of the Democratic mainstream. As Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield has said, the sixties bequeathed us radicals who are “neither so outrageous nor so violent as at first. The poison has worked its way into our soul, the effects becoming less visible to us as they become more ordinary.”51