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
TEN
CIVIL RIGHTS AND
THE MOB:
GEORGE WALLACE, BULL
CONNOR, ORVAL FAUBUS,
AND OTHER DEMOCRATS
It was the Democratic Party that ginned up the racist mob against blacks and it is the Democratic Party ginning every new mob today—ironically, all portraying themselves as the equivalent of the Freedom Riders. With real civil rights secure—try to find a restaurant that won’t serve a black person—modern civil rights laws benefit only the mob, not the victims of the mob, as American blacks had been. Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of ObamaCare as racists.
Democrats have gone from demagoguing white (trash) voters with claims that Republicans are the party of blacks, to demagoguing black voters telling them Republicans are the party of racists. Any mob in a storm.
The liberal fairy tale that Southern bigots simply switched parties, from Democrat to Republican, is exactly wrong. What happened is: The Democrats switched mobs. Democrats will champion any group of hooligans in order to attain power. As Michael Barone said of the vicious segregationist (and Democrat) George Wallace, he was “a man who really didn’t believe in anything—a political opportunist who used opposition to integration to try and get himself ahead.”1
This is why the Democrats are able to transition so seamlessly from defending Bull Connor racists to defending Black Panthers, hippies, yippies, Weathermen, feminists, Bush derangement syndrome liberals, Moveon.org, and every other indignant, angry mob.
Every segregationist who ever served in the Senate was a Democrat and remained a Democrat except one. Even Strom Thurmond—the only one who later became a Republican—remained a Democrat for eighteen years after running for president as a Dixiecrat. There’s a reason they were not called the “Dixiecans.”
Democratic senators Ernest Hollings, Richard Russell, and Sam Ervin all voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all remained Democrats for the rest of their lives.2 Al Gore’s father, Albert Gore, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; both he and his son remained lifelong Democrats. J. William Fulbright voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he remained a Democrat and became the political mentor to Bill Clinton. Senator Robert “Sheets” Byrd voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he remained a senior statesman in the Democratic Party until his dying day.
A curious sleight of hand is required to hide from the children the fact that all the segregationists in the Senate were Democrats. In history books, such as Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, the segregationists are not called “Democrats.” They’re called “Southerners.”3
Except it wasn’t just “Southerners” voting against civil rights. Not every senator who opposed black civil rights was a Southerner, but every one was a Democrat. In addition to the Southern Democrats who voted against putting the 1957 civil rights bill on the Senate calendar, for example, there were five Democrats from nowhere near the South: Democratic senator Wayne Morse of Oregon—a favorite target of Senator Joe McCarthy—Democratic senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, Democratic senator James Murray of Montana, Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Democratic senator Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming.4
A
ccording to Caro, the Western Democrats traded their votes on civil rights for a dam authorization on the Idaho-Oregon border.5 That’s how dear black civil rights were to liberals—they traded them away for a dam.
While Democrats are the party of the mob, Republicans are the party of calm order, willing to breach the peace only when it comes to great transgressions against humanity—slavery, abortion, and terrorism.
Republican president Abraham Lincoln fought a Civil War and sacrificed 600,000 American lives to preserve the union, rallying the union with the principle that all men are created equal. The Democrats favored allowing slavery in the territories, and the Whigs were pro-choice on slavery—rejecting extremist rhetoric on both sides. The Republican Party was founded for the express purpose of opposing slavery.
After the Civil War, it was Republicans who passed the Thirteenth Amendment, granting slaves their freedom; the Fourteenth Amendment, granting them citizenship; and Fifteenth Amendment, giving them the right to vote. It was Republicans who sent federal troops to the Democratic South to enforce the hard-won rights of the freed slaves.
Then, as now, the Democrats favored the hooligans. The Ku Klux Klan was originally formed as a terrorist group to attack Republicans who had come to the Democratic South after the Civil War to help enforce legal equality for freed slaves.
It was—again—Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867, both signed into law by Republican president Ulysses S. Grant. Under the “living Constitution,” the Supreme Court upheld fraudulent “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson.
Republicans kept introducing federal civil rights bills and Democrats kept blocking them—a bill to protect black voters in the South in 1890; antilynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938; and anti–poll tax bills in 1942, 1944, and 1946.