When the Radical Left Murdered Dozens and Bombed Thousands in the Name of Communist Revolution

We've Seen Leftist Terror Before

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As always, when the left does some monstrous thing and then immediately tells us to forgive, there is talk of not doing so. Of civil conflict, of a “Second Civil War” more like the Yugoslav Wars than the War Between the States.

What all that misses is that America already had a second civil conflict, and the left got off scot-free: from the end of the ‘60s to the beginning of the ‘80s, the radical left carried out a bombing and shooting campaign that roiled the entire nation. Police officers and bankers were murdered in cold blood, entire floors of skyscrapers were demolished by planted bombs, and New York was turned into a warzone as the left waged war on normal people to bring about a communist revolution.

They attempted to recreate Castro’s success in Cuba, and were supported in doing so for years by nearly all of the mainstream left, from lawyers and professors to media figures and leading politicians. And, despite their bloody hands and the body bags of dead cops they left in their wake, those most responsible got off without even a slap on the wrist. Many now inhabit the halls of power across our broken nation, and some were even close friends with former President Barack Obama.

Such is the parade of horrors that Bryan Burrough exposes in his flawed but nevertheless fantastic Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. As I’ll show below, it’s a must-read that exposes how violent the left is, and what is on the horizon now that the left is back to its violent roots. In it, Burrough exposes what the race communist revolution looked like.

In the article below, I’ll first tell the story of the left’s terror campaign, then get into why it is relevant in this new era of leftist terror, and finally do a brief review of the book. When necessary, I used block quotes in the article, others that are useful but not critical are in the footnotes. I suggest reading both, as the quotes are quite useful for understanding what happened.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

The Left Already Waged a Murderous Second Civil War, and No One Was Punished

America’s Days of Rage

History rhymes, and one of the periods with which our present era most rhymes, thanks to the murderous violence of the American left, is the period Burrough covers in his Days of Rage: the disastrous 1970s that were marked by violence, chaos, and disorder, thanks largely to the various leftist terror groups that dominated the decade.

And violent it was, with a constellation of leftist terror groups carrying out thousands of bombings over an 18-month period in 1972-3 alone,¹ along with thousands of other bombings throughout the decade and hundreds of shootings that saw dozens of police officers, armored car personnel, and bankers left dead. They robbed banks, bombed skyscrapers, and ambushed cops, leaving a bloody trail of destruction and tragedy in their wake. All of this was done by “the Movement” in the name of a vague revolution, a race communist²-style mixture of economic grievance and desire for a racial Götterdämmerung. While the Weather Underground (also called the Weathermen) is the most infamous group of this period, others included the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the FALN, and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Though somewhat more violent than the present, the period was not unlike ours, and indeed was strikingly similar in many ways. Such is immediately obvious from the book’s introduction:

Imagine if this happened today: Hundreds of young Americans—white, black, and Hispanic—disappear from their everyday lives and secretly form urban guerrilla groups. Dedicated to confronting the government and righting society's wrongs, they smuggle bombs into skyscrapers and federal buildings and detonate them from coast to coast. They strike inside the Pentagon, inside the U.S. Capitol, at a courthouse in Boston, at dozens of multinational corporations, at a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. People die.

They rob banks, dozens of them, launch raids on National Guard arsenals, and assassinate policemen, in New York, in San Francisco, in Atlanta. There are deadly shoot-outs and daring jailbreaks, illegal government break-ins and a scandal in Washington.

Yes, that did seem inconceivable—or at least nearly so—a decade ago. But now? Luigi Mangione murdered a CEO, and cheering leftists not only supported him, but also supported further assassinations of the wealthy merely because they were wealthy. The thugs affiliated with Black Lives Matter and Antifa assassinated cops and murdered dozens of others in their orgy of destruction in 2020. Bands of armed criminals have taken over swathes of our cities. ICE agents are under attack. Anti-white violence is a massive problem, and Charlie Kirk was just assassinated.

Our leftist terror campaign is different than the one that roiled the ‘70s, with far fewer explosives (dynamite is now far more difficult to buy than it was then), but the vector and impulse are quite similar.

The Defining Matter of the 70s

It’s important to recognize, to provide context for what Burrough covers in Days of Rage, that the terror campaign was not just a fringe or unpopular movement, at least on the left. The press intentionally ignored it, the universities supported it, the municipal governments abetted it, and the legal profession saved its members from jail. Trust fund leftists even used the accumulated family wealth of decades, if not centuries, to bail out murderous communists.

Why? Because though the vague “Movement’s” goal of communist revolution in America was next to unachievable, its path followed the falling star of the left as the dreams of the ‘60s turned into STD-ridden, drug-addled dust. The hippies turned into saboteurs, bombers, and urban guerrillas, and the American left—or at least its “radical chic”³ elements, namely the professional and academic classes—followed in lockstep with it.

That behavior, and the immense domestic decline that came with it—from cities as violent as those in postcolonial Africa to an economy so rotten the Soviet Union looked vibrant—is what represents America during the ‘70s. And because the perpetrators of the attacks were leftists, urban guerrillas who hid in a network of safehouses across the country, the media and academia have covered for them. As Burrough notes:

This was a slice of America during the tumultuous 1970s, a decade when self-styled radical "revolutionaries" formed something unique in postcolonial U.S. history: an underground resistance movement. Given little credibility by the press, all but ignored by historians, their bombings and robberies and shoot-outs stretched from Seattle to Miami, from Los Angeles to Maine. And even if the movement's goals were patently unachievable and its members little more than onetime student leftists who clung to utopian dreams of the 1960s, this in no way diminished the intensity of the shadowy conflict that few in America understood at the time and even fewer remember clearly today.

How Did Hippies Become Bombers?

The natural question is how the hippies turned into bombers and gunmen who murdered cops and bankers in cold blood. They had been gross, unproductive, and buffoonish during the ‘60s, but not necessarily violent.

That changed in large part thanks to a leftist activist and hippie named Samuel Grossman, who became known as “Sam Melville.” Obsessed with the Vietnam War, deeply attached (alongside his girlfriend, Jane Alpert) to the loose collection of hippie groups and leftist organizations called “the Movement,” and fascinated with the story of NYC bomber George Metesky, Grossman developed the bombing tactic that would define the Days of Rage groups. Using dynamite, which at that point could be bought easily in any hardware store, Grossman and a few accomplices started bombing buildings across New York City in 1969.

They attacked government buildings, bank buildings, and the buildings of America’s largest and most influential companies, such as General Motors. Grossman and his accomplices developed the tactic of planting a hidden bomb with a timer set for later, calling the building to encourage an evacuation and prevent casualties, and then sending out communiques after the bombing caused destruction and drew headlines. Grossman was detained late in 1969, and died in prison after starting a revolt two years later.

But not before inspiring “the Movement” to turn violent in an organized way by using bombs. Closely affiliated with the Black Panthers and Weather Underground (which began as a splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society⁴), Grossman’s innovations spawned a rash of copycat organizations that took his tactics and refined them into violent political activism.

Each group had its own specific tactics, but collectively, the half-dozen or so serious terror networks and their hangers-on were similar enough to be part of “the Movement” and were together waging war against the system:

Call it war or something else, but it was real, and it was deadly. Arrayed against the government were a half-dozen significant underground groups—and many more that yearned to be—which, while notionally independent of one another, often shared members, tactics, and attorneys. Of these, only the Weather Underground, the first and by far the largest, has earned any real analysis. The Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag collection of California ex-cons and radicals who pulled off the underground's most infamous action, the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974, was widely dismissed as a pack of loonies. Many doubted that the Black Liberation Army, a murderous offspring of the Black Panthers, even existed.

A Puerto Rican independence group known as the FALN, the most determined bombers in U.S. history, remains cloaked in secrecy to this day; not one of its members has ever spoken a meaningful word about its operations. The United Freedom Front, a revolutionary cell consisting of three blue-collar couples and their nine children, robbed banks and bombed buildings well into the 1980s. An interracial group of radicals called the Family did much the same…

So, it was Grossman who helped push “the Movement”—which up until that point had largely been about sit-ins, meetings, protests, and the like—into something violent. As he told Alpert, "This country's about to go through a revolution. I expect it to happen before the decade is over. And I intend to be a part of it." He meant that, and helped spark America’s communist revolution by giving it the characteristic tool—the timed bomb—with which it waged its war against the system.

How Race Kicked Off the Violence

But while the use of and inspiration from Grossman’s tactics were what turned the Weather Underground-type hippies into terrorists, he wasn’t the force that propelled “the Movement” once it turned violent. Nor, contrary to legend, was the Vietnam War.

Rather, the violent campaign of bank robberies, building bombings, and assassinations was seen by the members as a fight for the equality of blacks, particularly in America, but also in South Africa and Rhodesia. The drift to violence came alongside the death of MLK in 1968 and in the urban riots that followed:

An even more prevalent myth, however, is that the radical violence that commenced in 1970 was a protest against the Vietnam War. In fact, while members of this new underground were vehemently antiwar, the war itself was seldom their primary focus. "We related to the war in a purely opportunistic way," recalls Howard Machtinger, one of the Weather Underground's early leaders. "We were happy to draw new members who were antiwar. But this was never about the war."

What the underground movement was truly about—what it was always about—was the plight of black Americans. Every single underground group of the 1970s, with the notable exception of the Puerto Rican FALN, was concerned first and foremost with the struggle of blacks against police brutality, racism, and government repression. While late in the decade several groups expanded their worldview to protest events in South Africa and Central America, the black cause remained the core motivation of almost every significant radical who engaged in violent activities during the 1970s. "Helping out the blacks, fighting alongside them, that was the whole kit and caboodle," says Machtinger. "That was all we were about."

The Black Panthers

Naturally, then, the Black Panthers were integral to “the Movement” drifting from typical hippie tactics into violence. By the late 1960s, the bombing-heavy tactics had been developed, the organizations (or at least collections of radicals) were around, and the radicalism was certainly present. All that was needed was a spark. The Panthers, in their intentional drift towards violence and intimidation, provided it.

The path of the Panthers to prominence and violence came with the end of the Belgian Congo,⁵ namely the early fight between the various post-colonial factions that saw communist-friendly African nationalist Patrice Lumumba killed by either the Belgians, the CIA, or some other pro-order group.⁶ It was this incident that, paired with the state of Civil Rights in America, gave the early black radicals like Malcolm X their path to fame and grassroots political power.

It gave them a message—domestic decolonization and armed resistance—that proved enticing and was wholly new to the black American political scene. Describing as much, Burrough quotes black militancy historian Peniel E. Joseph as saying that while Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution "helped create a new generation of black nationalists who studied local organizing, the politics of armed self-defense, and global upheavals with equal fervor," really it was "the 1961 assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba [that] transformed them into radicals."

The Panthers then turned that furor into organization when they formed in 1967, taking advantage of forces—such as the Malcolm X-style black acceptance of violence —that were something “altogether new in America,” as Burrough notes,⁷ to create an organization founded on the principle of armed advocacy. Kitted out in black leather, openly carrying firearms, and intimidating whites at every opportunity, the Panthers started clashing with police more or less immediately after they formed, though initially the police quailed rather than fight back.⁸

As the assassinations of Malcolm X and MLK Jr. cleared the field of charismatic competitors and pushed many blacks toward violence, the Panthers then became the dominant political force on the black left. Meanwhile, they did what Malcolm X and other earlier black nationalists had struggled to do or intentionally eschewed—they drew white radicals to their cause,⁹ tying in the acolytes of Grossman with the Panthers and their violent attitude. That came despite the fact that Black Panthers founder Eldridge Cleaver raped white women for fun, and wrote about wanting to slit their throats as well in a book praised as “brilliant” by the NYT.¹⁰

This meant the Panthers and the Weathermen became intertwined, and soon “the Movement” was carrying out a bombing campaign on behalf of the Panthers.

The Weathermen

This is where the great villains (though by far not the most violent) of the Days of Rage radicals enter the scene for good.

By 1969, when Grossman was refining and popularizing the bombing tactic, the Weathermen had formed and were closely affiliated with the Panthers, particularly the group’s increasingly violent and radical New York faction. That was the tinderbox that started the bombing campaign, as the Panthers were, by 1969, basically at war with the police in NYC.¹¹

For those who don’t know, the Weathermen were a group of hardliner terrorists who modelled themselves on Castro¹² and formed out of the anti-Vietnam War Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) protest group. After forming in that group’s ashes, they decided to respond to the police crackdown on their friends the Panthers with a massive bombing campaign that would shake the nation’s foundations.

Initially, they even planned on escalating Grossman’s tactics, killing cops and military men in addition to blowing up buildings and infrastructure. As Burrough notes, the group’s veterans have since tried to hide that fact.¹³ But, at the time they formed, they planned on killing cops to help the Panthers. As Burrough notes:

In fact, what constituted a legitimate target for a Weatherman bombing was the topic of sensitive discussions among the leadership at Flint.¹⁴ It was during these talks, according to Howard Machtinger and one other person who were present, that the leadership agreed that they would, in fact, kill people. But not just any people. The people Weatherman intended to kill were policemen.

"If your definition of terrorism is, you don't care who gets hurt, we agreed we wouldn't do that," recalls Machtinger. "But as to causing damage, or literally killing people, we were prepared to do that." According to one side of the argument, says Machtinger, "if all Americans were compliant in the war, then everyone is a target. There are no innocents. That was always Terry and JJ's argument. But we did have a series of discussions about what you could do, and it was agreed that cops were legitimate targets. We didn't want to do things just around the war. We wanted to be seen targeting racism as well, so police were important." Military personnel were ruled to be legitimate targets as well.

In so doing, the Weathermen saw themselves as latter-day John Browns (notably, the Antifa-affiliated militias call themselves after John Brown as well¹⁵), murdering whites—particularly cops¹⁶— to help out the black man. As Burrough tells it, the group’s early leader, John Jacobs (JJ), declared that “Every white revolutionary, he argued, was duty-bound to become 1969's version of John Brown, the Civil War-era antislavery zealot. ‘John Brown! Live like him!’ became JJ's rallying cry.”

The final spark to that tinderbox of plans for bombings, bombing capabilities, and a toxically radical milieu came when multiple Panthers were killed in a police raid and the (justified) Kent State shooting happened shortly thereafter. Responding to the death of Panthers and student radicals, the Weathermen issued their “Declaration of War” against the United States government.¹⁷ With that, their reign of terror began.

First, the group started bombing policemen. Then, recognizing the heat brought on them by that approach made it “unsustainable,” they reverted to Grossman-style tactics that saw buildings destroyed or damaged and civilians put at risk, but no intentional killings. That bombing campaign raged over the 70s, particularly after the “Panther 21” trial provided a further emphasis for those latter-day John Browns,¹⁸ and was massive.

As retired FBI agent Max Noel told Burroughs, speaking about the Weathermen-led bombing campaign¹⁹: "People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States. People don't want to listen to that. They can't believe it. One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace."

The Other Terrorists

While the Weather Underground terrorists generally avoided intentional killings in their bombing campaign, the other groups in “the Movement” didn’t. Particularly, the Black Liberation Army (BLA), which operated primarily in NYC over the 1970s, was intentionally murderous and remained committed to that end far longer than the Weathermen.

The BLA, like the original goals of the Weathermen, has been covered up by history. The police officers at the time, killed in their dozens by BLA gunmen, knew it to be real. But the media and politicians, terrified by the optics of an underground group of black urban guerrillas murdering whites at will, insisted it wasn’t. The media preferred to focus on the relatively less murderous Weathermen, as the optics of that were better.²⁰

But the BLA was real, and it was the culmination of where the various groups before it—whether Grossman’s little band, the poseur Panthers, or the Weathermen—were spiritually headed. It was the only real urban guerrilla group America has ever seen:

In fact, the Black Liberation Army was a credible group of violent urban guerrillas, the first and only black underground of its kind in U.S. history. In one sense the BLA was a cluster of deadly acorns that rolled free when the mighty oak of the Black Panther Party fell and shattered; it was a splinter group of the Panthers, much as Weatherman split off from SDS. In another sense, it was the logical culmination of the Black Power movement: After years of black "revolutionaries" calling for armed attacks against the police and federal government, one group, the BLA, finally followed through.

What made the BLA different wasn’t just its willingness to engage in direct violence. It was also different in that it had a larger focus. It didn’t care just about Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, or domestic equity. It turned the black struggle against the largely white government into one with geographic implications (the BLA members all took African names, for example), and presented its struggle as a means by which America could be violently decolonized in the same manner the African world was being forcibly decolonized. It even tried globalizing its terrorist struggle by attacking the Rhodesian government officials in New York, an attack that went poorly thanks to the Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs.²¹

But still, the primary differentiating factor for the BLA was that it stuck to its campaign of violence until all of its members were dead or captured, and so created tensions between the police and the regime. The cops wanted to defend themselves with as much deadly force as they could muster. The government was worried about equity and racial optics, with NYC Mayor Lindsay (a truly execrable individual²²) preferring dead cops to an admission that the BLA was a serious threat to public order, with all the implications of that for America’s racial issues:

From the beginning, however, this was the NYPD's case, which presented Mayor John Lindsay with a set of delicate problems. Presidential primaries began in a scant ten months, and many believed Lindsay wanted to run again, as he eventually did. Lindsay's image as a candidate, however, was built on a reputation for having kept New York's bubbling racial stew from boiling over.

Talk of a black conspiracy to kill policemen struck directly at his prospects, not that it mattered to police-union officials. "We're in a war," Edward J. Kiernan, the head of the union, growled to a group of reporters. "It's open season on cops in this city. I refuse to stand by and permit my men to be gunned down while the Lindsay administration does nothing to protect them. Accordingly, I am instructing them to secure their own shotguns and carry them on patrol at all times."

"You think that'll make a difference?" a reporter asked. "I dunno," Kiernan said. "But we'll do whatever is necessary. If we have to patrol this city in tanks, that's what we'll do. This is war." Black leaders, fearing police reprisals, denounced these and similar "[police] calls for shotgun justice," in the words of Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton. City Hall did everything possible to tamp down racial tensions.

Eventually, the police managed to kill or capture most of the BLA. Though not before the BLA managed to kill over a dozen police officers and wound many more, creating the justified impression that the police were sacrificial pawns in the government’s game of racial unity. Cops were unnecessarily slaughtered by the BLA so that America could get a heavier dose of “equity,” and we’re still living with the consequences.

The Movement Ends

Much more violence was in store for America. A Puerto Rican terrorist group called the FALN²³ shook NYC to its foundations with a massive bombing campaign, including an attack that killed four bankers at a restaurant called Fraunces Tavern.²⁴ Similarly, the United Freedom Front robbed banks, bombed buildings, and otherwise wreaked havoc across the northeast into the early ‘80s as the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst and robbed banks from 1973-5.²⁵ Their actions were horrible, and the consequences of their murderous sprees of self-indulgent play-acting at being guerrillas were dire.

But by the late-70s, the counterculture warriors and urban terrorists had both spent themselves and succeeded in destroying civilized society, though without achieving the revolution they claimed to want. All they had wrought was destruction.

Such could be best seen in New York City, where Mayor Lindsay’s campaign of “battering the battering ram” against white Americans²⁶ had mixed with the toxic stew of bombings, terrorism, and disorder to destroy most of the city. It was covered in graffiti, filthy, ridden with violent crime, and crushed by stifling taxation.

So, next to no one cared about “the Movement” anymore. Bombings and terror had become unexceptional, if still deadly and destructive:

Out in the streets, no one cared. Inflation was rising, cocaine and other drugs were rampant, crime was out of control; on the radar of an American's daily worries in 1977, the FALN registered not at all. Among workaday Americans, few gave a whit about Puerto Rico, much less its independence.

Bombs had been exploding in the United States for a decade now and would probably be exploding for decades more: Who cared whether they were planted by crazy Puerto Ricans, crazy blacks, crazy hippies, or crazy aliens from outer space? They were just bombs, a new fact of American life.

Nowhere was this sense of resignation more evident than in New York, a city that seemed to be entering its death throes. Gotham's financial crisis had devolved into a new ring of urban hell. When police went on strike, someone posted a sign near LaGuardia Airport that read, WELCOME TO FEAR CITY. Every night fires burned out of control in the Bronx. On July 13 the city suffered a massive blackout, leading to widespread looting. Yet even then all anyone wanted to talk about was the crazed murderer stalking young lovers in the outer boroughs—the "44 Caliber Killer," some called him, others "Son of Sam." In the early hours of Sunday, July 31, he opened fire on a couple necking on a quiet Brooklyn street, killing the girl, his sixth murder victim.

The revolution never came, but they turned the ‘70s into the most hellish decade Americans have known, all the same.

Radical Chic and White Liberal Support for Domestic Terror

Much of what made the situation in the ‘70s so dire and all-encompassing was that it wasn’t just a handful of terrorists who were involved.

While the BLA, Weathermen, and other groups were never more than a hundred strong at most, they were supported by a vast army of urban liberals. The white and Jewish leftists in every American city of note supported them, meaning they had not just guns and bombs, but money and public prestige on their side. As Burrough notes:

The legal odyssey of Lumumba Shakur and the rest of Panther 21 falls outside the narrative of this book. All told, their mass trial lasted more than eight months, from September 1970 to May 1971; at the time, it was the longest and most expensive trial in New York history. "The 21" became a cause célebre for the city's white radicals, as well as many wealthy liberals. The legendary Park Avenue party thrown by the composer Leonard Bernstein—which inspired writer Tom Wolfe to coin the term "radical chic" —was a fund-raiser for the 21; the most prominent Panther in attendance (and the centerpiece of Wolfe's article) was Field Marshal Don Cox, who, while little remembered today, would go on to become a guiding force behind the BLA. Celebrities adored the New York Panthers; when Shakur's slender, intellectual brother, Zayd, was arrested, his bail was posted by none other than Jane Fonda.

That white, liberal support for the black terrorists remained intact even as the unstable black terrorists started murdering each other and others.²⁷

So, this was no one-time race riot, crime spree, or anything of that sort. It was a concerted terror campaign that received a great deal of outright support and buy-in from the “woke” bourgeoisie. The lawyers, academics, functionaries, media personalities, authors, and people of that sort were on the side of murderous black terrorists and communist radicals, and openly so. Of course, they were never punished for aiding and abetting domestic terrorists.

That, in turn, meant that the murderers and criminals received the effective blessing of the state. The FBI, for example, was so hamstrung by civil rights lawyers that it was left unable to investigate the FALN even as that group carried out hundreds of murderous bombings across New York City:

From the beginning, the Fraunces Tavern investigation—and the broader probe of the FALN—was hamstrung by the strange new rules of policing in the mid-1970s. Until 1972 the NYPD, like the FBI, had maintained extensive files on all manner of Puerto Rican radical groups. But after complaints from left-wing civil rights groups, many files, along with scores of files on similar radicals, had been destroyed. "We haven't done any surveillance of Puerto Rican political groups in several years," one detective griped to the New York Times. "We've been forbidden from even attending meetings as observers."

The same sort of lawfare tactics against the FBI were used to protect the Weathermen. The FBI’s leading men were indicted and attacked by the pond scum in the evil Carter Administration,²⁸ all for having used unconventional tactics in tracking down the Weathermen terrorists, at the same time as those terrorists were let off without a slap on the wrist by the FBI. They had murdered Americans, bombed buildings, aided criminals, and gotten away with it:

The excruciating irony that Bernardine Dohrn, the most-wanted underground figure of the era, could walk away virtually scot-free just weeks after two of her top FBI pursuers had been convicted of crimes against her was not lost on anyone involved. "The Weather Underground had done like a hundred bombings, and she was never prosecuted for one of them," recalls Lou Vizi, the FALN investigator. "That's amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. You know who got prosecuted? Us. The FBI."

"What really galls me," says Don Strickland of Squad 47, "is we did all this stuff, risking our lives every day, putting our lives on the line. And we end up being the villains! And these Weatherman scumbags end up being the fucking Robin Hoods!"

That would have been impossible without the “radical chic” element of the situation that Tom Wolfe noticed. Except for reactionary elements, primarily in the Southeast and the targeted banking sector, the professional class was on the side of the communist revolutionaries. It used its influence, whether in court, the media, or the halls of legislative power, to ensure they never faced real consequences for their actions unless shot in the act.

The Terrorists Never Faced Justice

This was not just a problem at the time, as the FBI tried to round up the terrorists. It remained true even as the dust settled and Reagan entered office: Weathermen turned themselves in throughout the 80s and faced no consequences, much as cop-killing BLA members managed to get their sentences overturned. Describing how some of their lives turned out, Burrough notes:

Most veterans of the BLA melted into obscurity. Among the few to attract publicity in later years was Dhoruba bin-Wahad. After his first two trials ended in a hung jury and a mistrial, he was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for his alleged involvement in the shootings of patrolmen Curry and Binetti in 1971. In 1975 he sued to overturn his conviction, arguing that the government hadn't shared all it knew about his case. His litigation forced the FBI to divulge thousands of pages of documents about its notorious COINTELPRO harassment campaign, enough evidence that a judge finally freed bin-Wahad in 1990. After living for a time in West Africa, he resides today outside Atlanta. He turned seventy in 2015. Eldridge Cleaver died in 1998. Donald Cox died in 2013.

…

Several Weather alumni have risen to respected positions in their professions with very few knowing what they did in the 1970s. After attending law school, Paul Bradley, the pseudonym for one of Dohrn's right-hand men, went on to a twenty-five-year career at one of the nation's most prominent law firms. Today he lives in the Bay Area, where he advises a small start-up company or two; no one outside his family and other alumni has any clue that he spent years placing bombs in San Francisco-area buildings. Leonard Handelsman, a Weatherman in the Cleveland collective, went on to a distinguished career in psychiatry, becoming a full professor at Duke University, where he was medical director of the Duke Addictions Program. According to his longtime friend Howard Machtinger, who gave a eulogy when Handelsman died in 2005, no one outside his family knew of his life in the underground. Obituaries celebrated him only as a noted psychiatrist. Another Weatherman mentioned in this book became an accountant at a Big Four accounting firm in Vancouver. Today he is retired and active in local charities; he is not named here because of legal concerns. Another alumnus heads a children's charity in Ohio, where an Internet biography indicates he has been appointed by three governors to sit on state task forces.

Bernardine Dohrn has been a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than twenty years. She has been active in efforts to reform the Chicago public schools and in international human rights activities. She has never disavowed her years as a Weatherman.

…

Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein were finally arrested in Yonkers, New York, in 1981 after the FBI received a tip on their whereabouts during the Brink's investigations. Jones received probation on old explosives charges and became an environmental writer and activist in upstate New York, where he and Stein live today. Stein received a law degree from Queens College in 1986 and is today an administrative law judge with the New York State Public Service Commission. Michael Kennedy, who represented certain of Weather's leaders, is today one of the most prominent attorneys in New York.

A cop-killer got off scot free. Cleaver was a murderous criminal who wrote about raping white women; he faced no consequences. The Weather Underground members never faced any real consequences from their murderous, destructive bombings. Clinton pardoned the FALN bombers. On and on it goes: leftist terror in the name of race communism was made effectively legal by the presidents of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

We Now Face a Similar Terror Threat

America now lives on the precipice of a similar terror regime. Yes, the widescale bombings have not yet begun. Yes, the crime situation is not as bad: our civilization feels like it is just starting to fall apart, not like it is already in the gutter à la 1979.

But that should not distract from the fact that much the same problem is now here.

For one, the leftist political terror is back. Steve Scalise was shot. Transgenders are shooting up schools, murdering as many Christians as they can. BLM terrorized inner cities and murdered cops.²⁹ Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and President Trump came a literal hair’s breadth from dying at the hands of a deranged leftist. Leftist terror is not yet back at its mid-’70s peak, but it is rising in prevalence and is increasingly deadly.

Vestigial Weathermen Influence

Further, the same wastes of carbon who filled out the Weather Underground ranks in the ‘70s remain influential in America, and their children and acolytes are even more powerful.

Take Barack Hussein Obama. As a rising star of black racialist politics in Chicago, he was supported by…you guessed it, former Weathermen terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two of the most instrumental individuals in its bombing campaign.³⁰ Obama said he likes to “share ideas” with the former communist terrorists.³¹

Or academia. Bernardine Dohrn became a Clinical Associate Professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Bill Ayers became a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Kathy Boudin, who helped murder two police officers, was the co-founder and co-director of Columbia's Center for Justice and also a scholar-in-residence at the New York University School of Law. “Higher education” in America has been irrecoverably tainted by those terrorists and others like them, not to mention the Barack Obama-types who learned from them.

Then there are the outgrowths of politics and academia: NGOs. Much like everything else, the unpunished former Weathermen have managed to use NGOs to achieve the communist revolution they first attempted via bombing. For example, the Wren Collective³² is a collection of wealthy and influential leftists that has managed to push soft-on-crime DAs and officials on nearly all of the top cities in America, turning them all into 1970s NYC-style crime-ridden hellholes. One of its most important leaders? Chesa Boudin, soft-on-crime San Francisco DA. Both of his parents were in the Weather Underground.³³ He and his friends have managed to achieve what the Weathermen never could.

Hang Them

One of Reagan’s great sins was that he didn’t hang the Weathermen, BLA/Black Panther survivors, or any of the others. They were a murderous rabble, a collection of terrorists who committed unspeakably evil crimes, from rape to murder, and many of them could have been executed. None of them were, and few even faced moderate consequences.

We now exist in the world created by that abdication of duty. The left learned that it can get away with murder, literally. It was taught that it can not only release criminals out on the street who go on to do mayhem, but can itself commit murder or terrorist acts and get away with them. The murderers faced no real punishment, in most cases, and so the lesson was learned that killers can get away with it if they frame their terrorist acts as pushing the leftist cause along.

Hence the cheering and gloating over Charlie Kirk’s death while calling for more such actions. Those doing so think there will be no consequences. They think they will get away with this terror and future such attacks and never face even prison time for it, much less the gallows. They think they can kill you and get away with it.

Not only that, but they have, like “the Movement,” built up a vast complex that lets them get away with murder. The Weathermen, Black Liberation Army, Black Panthers, and others were aided by a network of champagne socialist donors, sympathetic media figures, and leftie lawyers who helped keep them out of prison and underground. Similarly, the modern foot soldiers of the left are supported by a vast NGO and media complex.

This means that when the foot soldiers in the frontline units—Antifa, John Brown Gun Clubs, “Redneck Revolt,” BLM, etc—get caught doing something abhorrent and/or illegal, such as the recent attacks on ICE, they have a vast base to fall back on. The tech platforms—Reddit and Bluesky in particular—let them communicate, share tactics, and plan attacks, and the mainstream media organizations provide them with rhetorical cover that minimizes their heinous actions, as we’ve seen with Charlie Kirk. The champagne socialist owners of those platforms and others then pour millions upon millions of dollars into NGOs, non-profit law firms, and “civil rights” groups like the ADL and SPLC that then work to keep the odious malefactors out of jail, free to commit more terror.³⁴ On and on the cycle goes, it’s one vast network protecting both terroristic revolutionaries and outright criminals, like the Charlotte murderer.³⁵

Much as there should have been no reasoning with “the Movement” and its terrorists, there is no possible reasoning with such people.³⁶ There is no acceptable middle ground between being murdered and not being murdered. At the very least, those involved, from the politicians and media figures who have cheered this on to the leftist militias like Antifa and the John Brown Gun Clubs (notice how they too reference John Brown to legitimize their anti-white violence) and their funders should be prosecuted and jailed. If they are not, the violence and subversion will continue.

As John Carter noted, RICO is certainly applicable here,³⁷ as is 50 U.S.C. §§ 841–844. The latter would allow Trump to break up the Democratic Party and most of the NGOs and non-profits that support it.³⁸ That would likely lead to more unrest, at the hands of the left, which would be an opportunity for even sharper reprisals.

Whatever the specific laws and methods used, the basic fact is this: this cannot go on. The left is a terrorist rabble. They got away with bombing us for a decade, Reagan lacked the will to hold them accountable, and now they’re doing it again. That must be crushed, and all of them involved with it must be crushed as well, or else you will end up like one of the BLA or Weathermen’s victims, dead because the leftist regime sided with terrorists.

And make no mistake, they do want to kill you. That is why they name themselves after the murderous terrorist John Brown. That’s why they love surviving Weathermen like Bill Ayers. That’s why millions of them are cheering on Charlie’s death. That is why the surviving terrorists from the 70s say their current goal is inspiring youngsters to act like them:

One of the few positive legacies of the underground struggle, some of its adherents argue, is the example its leading figures set for young radical activists today, such as those in the "Occupy" movement. Young radicals today may not agree with, or be able to make sense of, the idea of protest bombings, but many clearly admire the passion and extreme commitment people like Bill Ayers devoted to trying to change America for the better. Ayers, who remains perhaps the most visible veteran of the underground struggle, is today an active author and lecturer; at bookstores and shopping malls young activists line up to get him to sign their books. The irony is lost on few of his peers. Ray Levasseur, who has completed his own memoir, wryly notes that articles he publishes on the Internet receive exponentially more exposure than any of the communiqués he issued after his many bombings.

There can be no compromise with that. They want us dead, and must be treated like it.

Days of Rage as a Book: A Review

I’ll keep this short because this article has been long:

Days of Rage is a very good book, and you need to read it. Burrough articulates well what violence the American left engaged in, and provides a resource that is without peer if you want to understand the communist revolution we underwent in the 70s. The research is fabulous, the writing is quite good, and the level of detail is just enough to shed light on exactly what went on without being tedious. Further, he does a good job of making it a story rather than a dry textbook.

That said, Burrough is something of a liberal, and it comes through. He can’t help but repeatedly claim that they were right in thinking America “racist,” frame various longtime felons-turned terrorists as victims of the system, and gets post-colonial details wrong (namely his comments about the Rhodesian government killing random black protesters, which is just untrue). Somehow, this book didn’t turn him into a reactionary, which is surprising, given how awful all of the leftists in it are.

But that occasional flaw in framing aside, Days of Rage is superb, and you need to read it to understand where America is headed now that one of the most important conservatives has been assassinated in cold blood.³⁹

If you found value in this article, please consider liking it using the button below, and upgrading to become a paid subscriber. That subscriber revenue supports the project and aids my attempts to share these important stories, and what they mean for you.

1. Noted by Mark Hemingway here: https://x.com/Heminator/status/1966116426051104875

2. What I mean by race communist:

3. This phrase was coined by Tom Wolfe, who also described the Mau Mau nature of the urban elements aided and abetted by the city governments, particularly in New York. Martymade covers that well here:

Sunday Night Story Time: Mau Mau'ing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society

5.

6. It likely wasn’t the CIA, as its resident apparatchik was more hostile to vestiges of colonialism than communism:

7. As he tells it:

Coming four months after Castro's visit, Lumumba's death at the hands of a white Belgian firing squad prompted unprecedented outrage among New York's new black nationalists. Harlem's Amsterdam News termed it an "international lynching" carried out "on the altar of white supremacy." On February 15, 1961, crowds of angry black nationalists stormed the United Nations, igniting melees with guards and days of protests. One group of demonstrators told reporters that Negroes were henceforth to be called "Afro-Americans."

"Who died for the black man?" someone yelled.

"Lumumba!"

"Who died for freedom?"

"Lumumba!"

This was something altogether new in America…

8. As Burrough tells it:

An Oakland policeman stopped Newton's car; Seale and others were with him. At first Newton politely showed his driver's license and answered the officer's questions; he had his M1 rifle in clear view, Seale his 9mm. In short order three more patrol cars arrived. A crowd began to form. Up and down the street, people poked their heads from apartment windows. When an officer asked to see the guns, Newton refused. "Get away from the car," Newton said. "We don't want you around the car, and that's all there is to it."

"Who in the hell do you think you are?" the officer demanded.

"Who in the hell do you think you are," Newton replied.

At that point, Newton emerged from the car and loudly chambered a round in his rifle. When police tried to shoo away the growing crowd, Newton shouted for everyone to stay put, that they were within their rights to observe what was happening on a public street.
"What are you going to do with that gun?" an officer asked.

"What are you going to do with your gun?" Newton replied. "Because if you shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I'm going to shoot back at you, swine."

The byplay continued like this for several long minutes. Each time Newton challenged the police, onlookers would clap and yell, "You know where it's at or "Dig it!" Newton, it was clear, was acting out the fantasy of every black youth on the street. And, amazingly, he got away with it. The police retired without making any arrests.

9. Burrough notes:

At Ramparts, Cleaver became an instant celebrity, by far the most prominent black radical in the Bay Area. Angry, sometimes funny, and frequently sexual, his letters and articles portrayed Cleaver as a kind of cross between Malcolm and Barry White, an angry, charismatic lover man with his own revolutionary spin on hoary black stereotypes. Cleaver viewed blacks as sexual supermen, envied by whites and too often rejected by uppity black women.

And, like Huey Newton, he argued that the most genuine "revolutionaries" were those who were most oppressed: black prison inmates and gangbangers— an idea that appealed strongly to white radicals yearning for a taste of black authenticity. Unlike Stokely Carmichael, Cleaver embraced white radicals, who adored him. They flocked to Black House, a kind of Black Power salon Cleaver co-founded, where he held court with every Movement figure who visited San Francisco. Cleaver's rise would be capped in 1968, when his letters and Ramparts articles were packaged into a memoir, Soul on Ice, an international bestseller that sold more than two million copies in just two years. Critics hailed Cleaver as a powerful new literary talent, a symbol of black political and sexual repression. The New York Times named Soul on Ice one of the ten best books of 1968.

10. Noted in Days of Rage, but also the book passage is here if you want to read it: https://x.com/zelinarxy/status/1965635668610285587

11. Burrough, describing this situation, notes:

If SDS was a focus of police harassment, the Chicago Panthers were approaching open war with the police. Their derelict offices were regularly raided, their members stopped and frisked on an hourly basis. The Weathermen idolized the Panthers, but the relationship fast deteriorated. "The Panthers were in a stage of total madness," recalls Lerner. "As those months went on, as they became more paranoid and more crazy, they kind of took it out on us. To them our offices were much bigger, much nicer than theirs, we had lots of equipment, and cars, and the printing press. It rapidly developed into this rip-off relationship. That was emotionally horrible. You couldn't dare question it politically. It was completely insane." Tensions climaxed when a group of Panthers stormed the SDS office, jammed a gun into a girl's face, beat up the SDS printers Ron Fliegelman, and ransacked the office, making off with typewriters and other equipment. Afterward, Bernardine Dohn and others went to the Panther offices to complain, Lerner recalls, "and were basically kicked down the stairs."

12. Burrough notes:

In the first days after Flint the Weatherman leadership began transitioning the group from a band of brainy protesters into something the country had never seen before: a true combat force determined to launch guerrilla warfare in the streets of America. They were the intellectual vanguard, they believed, and the Movement would follow them into bloody revolution, just as Castro had done in Cuba.

13. He notes:

Weatherman's multiyear bombing campaign has been misunderstood in fundamental ways. To cite just one canard, for much of its life, Weatherman's attacks were the work not of a hundred or more underground radicals, as was widely assumed, but of a core group of barely a dozen people; almost all its bombs, in fact, were built by the same capable young man: its bomb "guru." Nor, contrary to myth, did Weatherman's leaders, especially its best-known alumni, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, operate from grinding poverty or ghetto anonymity: For much of their time underground, Dohrn and Ayers lived in a cozy California beach bungalow, while the group's East Coast leaders lived in a comfortable vacation rental in New York's Catskill Mountains. Of far greater significance is widespread confusion over what Weatherman set out to do. Its alumni have crafted an image of the group as benign urban guerrillas who never intended to hurt a soul, their only goal to damage symbols of American power: empty courthouses and university buildings, a Pentagon bathroom, the U.S. Capitol. This is what Weatherman eventually became. But it began as something else, something murderous, and was obliged to soften its tactics only after they proved unsustainable.

14. The Flint meeting described: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground#Flint_War_Council

15. There are “John Brown Gun Clubs” all over America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound_John_Brown_Gun_Club

16. Burrough notes:

No one would remember that they had tried to kill policemen. "Weather's history," Rudd wrote, "had been conveniently cleaned." A myth was born. "The myth, and this is always Bill Ayers's line, is that Weather never set out to kill people, and it's not true—we did," says Howie Machtinger. "You know, policemen were fair game. What Terry was gonna do, while it was over our line, it wasn't that far over our line, not like everyone said later. I mean, he wasn't on a different planet from where we were."

17. This article is very toned down, but for the broad outlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground#Declaration_of_war

18. Burrough notes, of the trial:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_21

19. Here’s what the FBI has to say about their bombings: https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground-bombings#:~:text=By%20the%20next%20year%2C%20the,%2C%20New%20York%2C%20in%201981.

20. As Burrough notes:

More than forty years later, a handful of historians are still asking the same question-"handful" being a generous characterization of the few obscure academic papers and police procedurals that constitute all known publications on the Black Liberation Army, known as the BLA. The paucity of literature is a reflection of the deep confusion and ambivalence the BLA engendered in its heyday. Many policemen, along with BLA members themselves, considered the group a murderous black counterpart to the Weathermen. Mainstream politicians, afraid of alienating black voters, played down this talk entirely. Following suit, most of the white-dominated press dismissed the BLA as a ragtag collection of street thugs. To the press, at least, poorly educated, self-proclaimed black guerrillas who murdered policemen were not credible revolutionaries, But self-proclaimed white guerrillas from good schools who bombed vacant buildings were.

21. As Burrough tells it:

In short order the Cleveland cell grew in size to nine, as McCreary tracked down three soldiers who had lost their way, including Twymon Meyers, whom he stumbled across one night in the Last Village, and a new recruit, Henrym"Sha Sha" Brown. In Cleveland they quickly went to work on an audacious plan that had originated with Cleaver and Don Cox in Algeria. Black guerrillas had launched a civil war in the South African country of Zimbabwe, and the white-led government had responded with a string of indiscriminate killings. Cleaver suggested that the Cleveland cell attempt to storm the Zimbabwean Consulate in New York.

"We wanted to make a signature statement in New York, something that would get us noticed internationally," says McCreary. "So we scouted out (the consulate; it was off Park Avenue in the Fifties. We went in. We could see it was gonna be too much trouble. Too much traffic, it just didn't work out. So we found out [the diplomats] all lived in homes on Long Island, like in a compound. The place was guarded by these huge dogs, Rhodesian ridgebacks. So we go out there to poison these dogs, and needless to say, it didn't work . . ."

22. One of the best posts on what Lindsay did:

Battering the battering ram

23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuerzas_Armadas_de_Liberaci%C3%B3n_Nacional_Puertorrique%C3%B1a

24. Described here: https://www.state.gov/remembering-the-fraunces-tavern-bombing-and-the-cuban-regimes-continued-support-of-terrorists

25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army

26. Battering the battering ram

27. To those white radicals who had rallied to the Panther 21's defense, the sudden outbreak of violence was deeply unsettling. One of those caught in the political cross-currents was a twenty-three-year-old volunteer on the 21's defense committee named Silvia Baraldini. She was an expatriate Italian businessman's daughter who had grown up in Washington, D.C., and radicalized at the University of Wisconsin; in the next dozen years Baraldini would go on to one of the more colorful careers of any underground figure. "Suddenly, you know, all these Panthers we knew were killing each other," she remembers. "None of us, the whites I mean, had any clue what was really going on."

28. Carter is a truly execrable individual:

29. Don’t forget the Dallas shooting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers

30. https://www.npr.org/2008/10/06/95442902/obamas-links-to-ex-radical-examined

31. https://www.npr.org/2008/10/06/95442902/obamas-links-to-ex-radical-examined

32. https://x.com/ParkerThayer/status/1965538683052003577

33. https://nypost.com/2022/05/14/what-chesa-boudin-learned-from-weather-underground-mom/

34. My friend Pine Baron describes this well here: https://x.com/SpiritofPines/status/1966515004519350329

35. Described well by my friend Yuri Here:

How To Ignite a Firestorm on the Right - "Got That White Girl"

36. Crossing a Line

37. Peace Has Been Murdered, and Dialogue Was Shot In the Throat

38. A brief description of what its implementation would mean is discussed here: https://x.com/grok/status/1965883411073241294

39. The Day That Civil Discourse Died