The Weather Underground's Lasting Victory - Law & Liberty

3/11/2021 The Weather Underground’s Lasting Victory - Law & Liberty
FORUM MARCH 10, 2021
The Weather Underground’s Lasting

Victory
I , ,
the New Left. I grew up in its heartland—which is not, contra the
impression Jay Nordlinger leaves the reader, New York City but
Northern California. My mother, who served as a career criminal
prosecutor in two counties in that region, tried some New Left figures
and personally knew and faced off against Faye Stender. I attended or was
affiliated with more than one institution that either incubated or suffered
from New Left violence—in most cases both.
Fascinated by the subject from an early age, I sought and read the
literature, original as well as secondary. The best account by far remains
Destructive Generation by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, which is
both: a firsthand retelling by direct participants who later became
disillusioned with the entire movement and sought to explain what went
so disastrously wrong, augmented by interviews, original reporting and
research.
https://lawliberty.org/forum/the-weather-undergrounds-lasting-victory/ 1/10
The first two-thirds of Nordlinger’s piece offers a fine, if well-trod,

overview of the Weather Underground, one of the New Left’s most
notorious groups (its only real competitor in infamy being the Black
Panthers). Yet Nordlinger brings to light something I didn’t know. West
th Street—the house a few Weathermen (and wymyn) blew up on
March th, while in the basement building a bomb intended to kill
soldiers and their dates at a dance—once belonged to the founder of
Merrill Lynch.
“Merrill Lynch” is today—owing to mismanagement leading to its near-

collapse in the financial crisis of —only a name, a brand owned by
Bank of America. But for almost a hundred years it was one of Wall
Street’s biggest and most profitable brokerages and, for a time, the largest
securities firm in the world. Nordlinger mentions that suggestive bit of
Greenwich Village real estate trivia in order to link the bombing to a
poem, but otherwise passes over it without connecting any other dots or
noticing any other patterns. Thus he misses what is really the most
important lesson to be gleaned from his subject.
By the time I came of age and started reading about the New Left, nearly
all of Haut California assumed that the whole ordeal was behind us—an
interesting subject for KQED documentaries but otherwise confined to
the past. At that time, the state’s former conservative Republican
governor was president of the United States. He would be succeeded by
his own vice president, who would in turn be succeeded by a “New” (read:
centrist) Democrat. “The Sixties,” or at least their most radical aspects,
were well and truly behind us.
Not the cultural parts, of course. Free love and dank weed were here to
stay—in moderation for the professional classes, more or less unlimited
for the upper and lower orders, but in any case, without judgment for any.
The violence, though—that was passé.
Or so some of us hoped.
Family Business
Nordlinger’s piece is historical, so it might seem unfair to judge it by its

failure to look the present (and future) squarely in the face. But when the
past bears so directly on the here-and-now, I don’t see how the criticism
can reasonably be avoided.
A telling fact Nordlinger does not mention is that the biological son of one
of the villains of his story, Kathy Boudin, and the adopted son of two
others, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, is now the elected District
Attorney of San Francisco County. It may be reserved to God to visit the
sins of the fathers unto the sons, but what of those sons who, like Michael
Corleone, enthusiastically embrace the family business—and then expand
it into the corridors of power à la Damien Thorn?
Chesa Boudin differs from his parents, biological and adoptive, in one
respect only: rather than fighting the system to inflict harm, create chaos,
and do evil, he puts the system to work toward those ends. It’s not just
that Boudin works to make everyday life more awful by refusing to
enforce what he dismisses as mere “quality of life” (e.g., open drug use
and public defecation) and “victimless” (e.g., burglary and auto theft)
crimes, so that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rates
and arguably the worst quality of life of any big city in the nation. Boudin
is also against using the powers of his office to go after what even he is
forced to admit are non-trivial offenses.
On his second day in office, the brand new radical-chic DA fired his seven
most-experienced prosecutors because they were too good at their jobs.
Two weeks later, he ordered his office never again to request cash bail for
any offense, guaranteeing that dangerous criminals would roam the
streets and that many would never face trial for their crimes. Earlier this
year, a parolee plowed a stolen car into two pedestrians, killing both. The
“driver”—Troy Ramon McAllister—had been arrested by the SFPD five
times in the prior eight months, only to be released without charges on
Boudin’s orders every single time.
As Boudin has redefined his role, it is no longer to convict criminals but

to further “social justice.” He favors babying the violent with so-called
“restorative justice.” It’s unclear what, exactly, “restorative justice”
entails; it’s easier to say what it’s not: punishment or deterrence. Early in
Boudin’s tenure, after two (nonwhite) young men assaulted an elderly
man (also nonwhite) who was collecting cans to recycle, the SFPD did its
job and arrested the assailants. The DA, though, declined to press charges.
This pattern has since been repeated enough times—including, most
recently, the homicide of an -year-old—that local media and the
intelligentsia realize they can no longer ignore it. And so, to cope, they
blame … “white supremacy” and Trump.
Boudin is hardly alone in his anti-anti-crime fervor. Indeed, we may say

that the full consolidation and institutionalization of “The Sixties” is
happening only now, as “prosecutors” all over America, elected with Soros
money (am I allowed to say that?), eliminate bail, empty jails, refuse to
prosecute nonviolent offences, undercharge violent ones, replace
punishment with “counseling,” and racialize enforcement (and non-
enforcement), all the while vindictively hectoring the law-abiding over
trivialities. In most American big cities, and in an increasing number of
Blue precincts, government does not effectively protect life, liberty, or the
pursuit of happiness. It rather works—from the same ideological zeal that
inspired the Weathermen—to make people vulnerable, afraid, and
miserable.
Going Mainstream
Nordlinger says nothing about any of this. He mentions last year’s mass
riots—in scope and scale, if not in blood (that distinction belongs to the
New York draft riots of ), the largest in American history—only to
insinuate that there was nothing particularly unusual about them.
Really? Leaving aside their unprecedented scope and scale

(underappreciated because deliberately underreported), when before has
an entire ruling class sided with the forces of evil, ponying up billions to
fuel the fire, all the while preening over its superior morality for
supporting death and destruction?
The answer, so far as I know, is never. The very idea is unthinkable

without the mainstreaming of the Weather ideology. Nordlinger touches
on this when he mentions the rehabilitation of Ayers and Dohrn—both

now academics in good standing—and the pardons promiscuously
handed out to other New Left figures by “New Democrat” Bill Clinton.
Nordlinger quotes one of Bill Ayers’ more pungent statements but leaves
out his most notorious of all. On September th, —the very day of
an event another Weather Underground terrorist could finally see clearly
as “kindred” to her own activities—Ayers, close pal of a future president,
was quoted in the New York Times saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I
feel we didn’t do enough.”
That “feeling” has infused subsequent generations—not least because of

the extent to which Weather ideology was allowed to take over not just
elite academia but, more sinisterly, schools of education, through which
it has taught and continues to teach generations of high school students
to hate their country. Nordlinger hints at that important detail only by
stating Ayers’ current job title. Then he pulls back from a full realization
of its implications with a quote from, of all people, Noam Chomsky:
“[violence] is a major gift to the Right.”
In contemporary America, capital—economic no less than

political and social—is and for some time has been aligned with
the hard left. It used to be wary of the left’s more radical
elements, muttering empty dodges about “not condoning but
understanding” violence.
Chomsky, whom Nordlinger rightly notes “has never been overly

squeamish about violence,” must be pleased at how far the country
traveled in a mere three years. For violence most certainly was not a
major gift to the right in —quite the opposite. Violence helped the
left assert or consolidate power over institutions throughout the land.
Violence defanged law enforcement from coast to coast (“defund the
police”), yielded an avalanche of public and private money (corporate
America pledged more than . billion to BLM in alone), and an
outpouring of official sympathy to organizations and individuals
fomenting violence (the future vice president of the United States intoned
last September that it was “critically important” that the riots “protests”
continue). Seemingly ad unno tratto, violence managed to stigmatize as
unsayable formerly common-sense truisms about the value of human life

and public order while elevating noxious falsehoods to dogma.
The Attractions of Violence
Most disturbing of all, may have been the first election in American
history—certainly the first national one—in which violence net attracted
rather than repelled votes. It used to be taken as axiomatic in American
politics that law-and-order issues favor Republicans. This is, apparently,
no longer the case. Millions have become so convinced of their own
and/or the surrounding society’s inexpungable guilt that, to assuage their
consciences, must vote against order and life as a way to expiate sin.
Perhaps the supreme moment of was the sight, in Washington, D.C.’s

richest and most liberal suburb, of a mass of overclass winners bowing
and begging forgiveness from a group of people none of them had ever
harmed. The clear—and only—visible distinction between the penitent
and the righteous was demographic. Both groups fervently believe in
Manichean wokeness; the only difference is that the righteous feel not
guilty but aggrieved. They want revenge. This, let’s call it, Dom-Sub
coalition is the heart of the modern Democratic Party, and is a direct
legacy of the Weather Underground and New Left insistence that America
and Americans (or to be more precise, a certainly part thereof ) are
irredeemably evil.
Which brings us back to Mr. Merrill. On one level, it was surely a

coincidence that the former home of a Wall Street tycoon ended up
housing a leftwing terrorist cell. Yet on reflection, it’s the kind of detail so
perfectly attuned to contemporary reality one almost suspects a sentient
Fate of engineering it, the way a good novelist ties together disparate
elements of his plot to help readers see the bigger picture.
In today’s America, capital—economic no less than political and social—is

openly aligned with the hard left. It used to be wary of the left’s more
radical elements, muttering empty dodges about “not condoning but
understanding” violence. Now capital doesn’t merely understand
violence; it underwrites it. (It’s worth noting in this context that the last
recorded sale price for the rebuilt West th Street was million; its
current asking price is . .) Elite opinion, power, and money are on the
side of—downright encourage—rioting, looting, arson and death,
insisting that the resultant turmoil is necessary redress for past and
present grievance.
If Nordlinger sees any of this, he says nothing about it. Instead, he

concludes with a weak dodge of his own: both sides have committed
political violence throughout American history, therefore both are to
blame. The unspoken but unavoidable implication: if both sides are to
blame, then everyone is, and if everyone is, no one really is. Certainly not
the left.
The pose appears to be “let he who is without sin,” etc. Except that
Nordlinger definitely casts stones—to his right. He is a member in high
standing of that part of the “right” in whom actual conservatism is hard
to detect but from whom attacks on conservatives, assertions of moral
equivalence, and excuses for leftist excess abound. How else could a piece
ostensibly about the Weather Underground culminate in the risible
calumny that the gravest threat of political violence facing America in
comes from “white supremacist violent extremists”? Was that who
torched American cities and killed some three dozen people last year?
To “support” this absurdity, Nordlinger cites some heated rhetoric (none

of it even remotely “white supremacist”), protests at which some people
were armed (though he declines to mention: no shots were fired and no
one got hurt), a selective list of recent mass shootings cherry-picked to
show left-right equivalence, culminating with a reference to “carnage” at
the U.S. Capitol on January th.
An Unfolding Crisis
No doubt Nordlinger and I differ on the significance of that event. What

he seems to believe was a genuine attempt to overthrow the government,
I saw more as the inchoate, imprudent and counterproductive
culmination of decades of frustration, finally ignited by weeks of
irresponsible rhetoric.
But even if one accepts the worst possible interpretation of that day, the
root of “carnage” remains the Latin word for “flesh,” connoting bodily
harm. Five people died at the Capitol. Four of them were protestors. One,
the unarmed Ashli Babbitt, was shot by a Capitol Police officer. That’s
carnage. Another, Brian Sicknick, was himself a police officer. But
contrary to initial “reports” that he died of blunt force trauma from a
protester, the cause, according to his family, appears to have been a
preexisting medical condition. Of the three others, two also appear to
have died of preexisting conditions and one was accidentally trampled.
This, then, is the “carnage” that Nordlinger equates with mass left-wing
terror—which accounted for at least , bombings in one eighteen-
month period alone. Whatever true or moving things he says about the
Weather Underground in his essay’s first part, Nordlinger undermines in
its last third.
To make sure we get the point that the right is every bit as bad, if not
worse, than the left, Nordlinger ends with the laziest and hoariest faux-
comparison of all: Kristallnacht. The fact that he had to go back in time
years, and overseas , miles, just to find an example this inapt should
have caused him to rethink his thesis. This is to say nothing of the fact
that the very regime, and people, Nordlinger accuses of being so prone to
rightwing violence are the same regime, and descendants of the same
people, who overthrew the regime responsible for Kristallnacht.
It would be one thing, though hardly original or illuminating, to assert

that political violence waxes and wanes, that in some eras there’s a lot of
it and in others very little, and sometimes it’s more prevalent on the left,
at others on the right. That alone would not prove equivalency: one side
could still be more prone to violence over the long haul. At any rate, that’s
a historical question. The urgent practical questions for statesman and
citizen alike are: how much political violence is being committed right
now? And by whom?
The answer is obvious enough: a lot, and the left. Less than last June to be
sure, but a lot more than last March. ’s mayhem and the ruling class’s
excuses and encomiums for it “legitimized” political violence in a way and
to a degree that the Weather Underground in its heyday could only have
dreamed of.
By equating this massive, nationwide wave of leftist violence with a

handful of right-inspired incidents and a farcical protest that physically
harmed no one (as far as the currently known facts can establish) beyond
a few of its own participants, Nordlinger not only distorts the truth, he
does so in a way that (at best) unwittingly advances leftist ends. With a
“right” like this, no wonder the left rolls from victory to victory, using
whatever means it chooses, fair or foul, peaceful or violent, without
effective opposition.
A RESPONSE TO
MAR 1, 2021
“We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy”: The Weather

Underground and Its Legacy
VIEW FULL FORUM
Michael Anton is a lecturer in politics and research fellow at Hillsdale

College and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought
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© 2021 Liberty Fund, Inc. The opinions expressed on Law & Liberty are solely those
of the contributors to the site and do not reflect the opinions of Liberty Fund.
DESIGNED BY BECK & STONE

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3/11/2021 The Weather Underground’s Lasting Victory - Law & Liberty

FORUM MARCH 10, 2021

The Weather Underground’s Lasting

The first two-thirds of Nordlinger’s piece offers a fine, if well-trod,

“Merrill Lynch” is today—owing to mismanagement leading to its near-

Nordlinger’s piece is historical, so it might seem unfair to judge it by its

As Boudin has redefined his role, it is no longer to convict criminals but

Boudin is hardly alone in his anti-anti-crime fervor. Indeed, we may say

Really? Leaving aside their unprecedented scope and scale

The answer, so far as I know, is never. The very idea is unthinkable

on this when he mentions the rehabilitation of Ayers and Dohrn—both

That “feeling” has infused subsequent generations—not least because of

In contemporary America, capital—economic no less than

Chomsky, whom Nordlinger rightly notes “has never been overly

unsayable formerly common-sense truisms about the value of human life

The Attractions of Violence

Perhaps the supreme moment of was the sight, in Washington, D.C.’s

Which brings us back to Mr. Merrill. On one level, it was surely a

In today’s America, capital—economic no less than political and social—is

If Nordlinger sees any of this, he says nothing about it. Instead, he

To “support” this absurdity, Nordlinger cites some heated rhetoric (none

No doubt Nordlinger and I differ on the significance of that event. What

It would be one thing, though hardly original or illuminating, to assert

By equating this massive, nationwide wave of leftist violence with a

“We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy”: The Weather

VIEW FULL FORUM

Michael Anton is a lecturer in politics and research fellow at Hillsdale

PART OF THE LIBERTY FUND NETWORK

DESIGNED BY BECK & STONE

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