Aging Sixties Radicals Pass Their Hatred On to a New Generation
Today's Antifa Terrorists and Pro-Hamas Protesters are the Grandchildren of the Weathermen
One of the advantages of aging is that you can see history repeat itself, see the same ideas and events recycle through culture and, sometimes, witness the same consequences.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, there were two kinds of counterculture revolutionaries. First, there were the hippies, spoiled suburban kids like myself who listened to folk rock music and dreamed of a life closer to nature. This was just a fad, of course, and for most it didn’t last long. The goofy hippies, who smoked pot but didn’t wish anyone harm, soon outgrew their bell bottoms and love beads and became lawyers and investment bankers.
But there was another, smaller, more sinister group in the 1970s for whom the counterculture was not a mere fashion statement. They were hard-core Marxist true believers. Brainwashed by such left-wing radicals as Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis and George Jackson, they genuinely despised America and her founding ideals of freedom and equality under the law.
These people didn’t live in tipis in the woods. They planted bombs in the U.S. capitol, Pentagon and State Department, ambushed police, murdered black officials they deemed insufficiently loyal to the cause, sought “asylum” in places like North Vietnam and Cuba, and talked openly of igniting race wars as a means of destroying capitalist society.
Virtually all “anti-fascist” communists of one form or another, given to street brawls with the police, these self-styled urban commandos had names like the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, Black Muslims, and the Black Liberation Army.
They openly promoted violence and hatred of “Amerika.” They said Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colorblind society was merely another form of white supremacy. They insisted, like Mao, that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
If you think society is unraveling today, try living in the 1970s – the era of plane hijackings, race riots and seemingly daily bombings of federal institutions. According to Time Magazine, “in a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day.” Eventually the total number of bombings reached 6,000.
I remember very clearly when Patty Hearst, the heiress, was kidnapped in 1974. I was seventeen and in my junior year at a Catholic high school.
She was only two years older than I was, and yet, after she was brainwashed by her captors, there Patty was on the evening news, brandishing her sawed-off M-1 rifle during a bank robbery. In a chilling 1975 film called “Katharine,” Sissy Spacek portrayed this type of brainwashed white girl who joins a violent underground terror cell, loosely based on the Weather Underground’s Diana Oughton.
Well, you know the rest of the story.
Most of sane America recoiled from these would-be communist revolutionaries – opposed, as they were, to everything America represented. Even the Beatles mocked them (“You say you want a Revolution?”)
The country elected law and order candidates like Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, vigilante movies like “Dirty Harry” (1971) and “Death Wish” (1974) became popular, and people even began to reconsider the whole drug and free love culture that, some suspected, may have led to this insanity.
Yet the hard-core true believers didn’t go away: after serving time in some cases for their crimes, they began the “long march through the institutions” advocated by the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci.
Having failed to overthrow society directly, the urban commandos infiltrated America’s schools, newspapers, TV networks, and board rooms. The members of the Weather Underground, like founders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, became “educators” and lawyers, venture capitalists and TV executives. Quite a few became Democrat politicians and hob-nobbed with future president Barack Obama, who himself became a “community organizer” like his hero, the radical activist Saul Alinsky.
The hard-left revolutionaries who built bombs in the 1970s went on to join college faculties and the media, brainwashing a whole new generation of impressionable kids with their hatred of peaceful “suburban” society. Many are now in the 70s and ‘80s, demented former radicals who showed up at Black Lives Matters demonstrations and yelled insults at the police, just like when they were seventeen.
Their messages are the same today as they were in the 1970s: America is “systemically” racist, police are the enemy, democracy is a con, and violence is necessary to effect political change.
Their children and now grandchildren have taken up the cause of screaming insults at police and undermining America’s democratic institutions from within. You can see them daily on the evening news, chanting antisemitic slogans and supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas.
Chesa Boudin, the son of Weathermen terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert – convicted of killing two police officers and a security guard during a 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored car – was elected in 2019 the San Francisco District Attorney.
Like his parents, Boudin believes that arresting criminals for committing crimes is “racist.” He advocated eliminating cash bail, emptying the prisons, and prosecuting members of the country’s border police. After four years of watching Boudin release the most violent criminals onto the streets of San Francisco and refusing to prosecute routine crime, even the city’s most demented liberals eventually had enough. In a special election in 2022, Boudin lost by a landslide in a recall election.
Just as the riots and domestic terrorism of the 1970s filled America with revulsion, so, too, the “mostly peaceful protesters” of today – the Antifa rioters in the streets of Portland, the pro-Hamas protesters on college campuses, and the BLM grifters who tore down monuments of America’s founding fathers at the instigation of Democrat politicians -- are also triggering a massive backlash among ordinary Americans of all creeds and colors. A recent Gallup survey found that, contrary to what America’s controlled corporate media claim, most black Americans want the same or more police in their neighborhoods, not less.
Bottom line: America is a country that cherishes her history of self-government and the institutions that make it possible. You can peacefully protest all you want (it’s a right guaranteed in the First Amendment), but the moment you start throwing bricks and burning down buildings, you lose the argument among ordinary Americans.
That is the lesson that the radicals who bombed buildings and murdered police officers in the 1960s and ‘70s, and their armies of sympathizers in the media, academia and among Democrat elites, never learned.