The Revolution Is Winning
This is what the revolution looks like.
Weather Underground terrorists, who made no secret of being anti-AmeriKKKan “small-c” communists, are having more success than they could have dreamed of in the 1960s.
Among their most influential thinkers was Bill Ayers. He got a windfall from the government’s failure to prosecute him for the bombings he carried out and the mass murders he planned but was insufficiently competent to execute. It was a second career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education” at the University of Illinois. As Sol Stern relates in a 2006
City Journal essay that should be required reading today, this entailed designing curricula used by today’s hard-Left academics, based on what Ayers saw as a moral imperative to convert schools into social-justice indoctrination labs.
It worked.
Of course, in the days before they brought the revolution into the classroom, they pursued it on urban streets, prioritizing war on cops. To the avant-garde, the police are the pointy end of the oppressive government spear, enforcing its laws and imposing the racist society’s caste system. For the revolution to succeed, the police have to be discredited, defunded, and defanged. For the Weather Underground, that meant branching into such radical offshoots as the
May 19 Communist Organization and conspiring with black separatists.
So it was that such Weather confederates as Susan Rosenberg, Kathy Boudin, and David Gilbert, among others, teamed with the Black Liberation Army to carry out the infamous 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored truck at the Nanuet Mall near Nyack, N.Y. At the time, Rosenberg was already a suspect in the 1979 New Jersey jailbreak of Joanne Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army leader who had been convicted of murdering New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster. Chesimard fled the country and was given asylum by Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba, where she has lived ever since.
In robbing the Brinks truck, the terrorists shot at the security guards, murdering one of them, Peter Paige. In a firefight with Nyack police while trying to escape, they killed Sergeant Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown — the latter a Korean War veteran who had joined the force in 1966, the first African American to serve in Nyack’s police department. Rosenberg went on the lam, finally captured three years later in possession of over 700 pounds of explosives she and her fellow radicals were planning to use in additional mayhem. A federal judge in New Jersey sentenced her to 58 years’ imprisonment.
Boudin and Gilbert had left their 14-month-old son, Chesa, with a sitter in order to participate in the Brinks heist. But unlike Rosenberg, they were captured right after the bloody shootouts. Boudin was sentenced to a minimum 20 years’ imprisonment (with a maximum life sentence), and Gilbert to 75 years’ imprisonment.
With his parents in custody, young Chesa Boudin was raised by their confederates, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Like Ayers, Dohrn was a Weather Underground leader who became an academic after eluding significant prosecution for their bombings and mass-murder conspiracies — though she did do a short stint of jail time for contempt after defying a grand-jury subpoena to testify about Rosenberg.
In addition to his American academic work, Ayers became a supporter of the late Communist dictator Hugo Chávez’s education programs in Venezuela. There, in a 2006 speech with the strongman looking on, Ayers proclaimed, “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large.
La educación es revolución!” Later, Chesa Boudin would follow in Ayers’s footsteps, working as a translator and think-tank researcher for Chávez’s regime.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, Ayers and Dohrn seamlessly became prominent in Democratic Party politics. At their Hyde Park home in 1995, they held a coming-out party for an ambitious political unknown, a community organizer named Barack Obama. Two years later,
the future president breathlessly endorsed Ayers’s polemic, A Kind and Just Parent?, as a “searing and timely account.” The book is an indictment of the U.S. criminal-justice system, which Ayers likens to South Africa under apartheid.
As Stanley Kurtz has recounted, Ayers helped pave Obama’s way into the radical Left’s extensive fundraising networks; the two collaborated as board members of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, doling out more than $100 million to community organizers and education “reformers.”
Sixties Radicals Hold Powerful Positions in Government & Academia | National Review
