Breaking History - When Students Become Terrorists (From the Honestly Archives)

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

*This episode originally ran on September 7, 2024 on Honestly with Bari Weiss*  After Oct. 7, 2023—when Hamas attacked Israel— students at colleges across America etched themselves into infamy with the most dramatic campus protests in a generation. In preparation for the 2024 fall semester, some major universities—from NYU to UCLA—have implemented new rules and decided to enforce old ones to protect Jewish students from activists who had declared sections of campus no-go zones for Zionists. Universities that turn a blind eye to the Tentifada phenomenon now risk violating federal statute.  Nonetheless, the chaos appears to be returning. At Temple University, protesters marched in solidarity with Palestinian “resistance against their colonizers.” Last week, a man attacked a group of Jewish students with a glass bottle on the University of Pittsburgh campus outside the school’s “Cathedral of Learning.” Meanwhile at the University of Michigan, four agitators were arrested during a “die-in.” So clearly the danger is not yet over entirely for campuses, even though some of the steam may be leaving the movement. The Democratic National Convention, for example, was supposed to be the exclamation mark of rage, but the protests barely registered as a tussle.  But history teaches us that it takes only a few student true believers to make quite a mess once they decide that boycotts and sit-ins aren’t making a difference.  Eli Lake looks at America’s history with Ivy League domestic terrorists. More than 50 years ago, campus unrest also spilled into the streets and moved off the grid as a small and lethal group of radicals called the Weather Underground took the plunge from protest to resistance. But the Weather Underground railed against the establishment. Today’s campus protesters are supported by it. Call them. . . the Weather Overground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Air Transat presents two friends traveling in Europe for the first time and feeling some pretty big emotions. This coffee is so good. How do they make it so rich and tasty? Those paintings we saw today weren't prints. They were the actual paintings. I have never seen tomatoes like this. How are they so red? With flight deals starting at just $589, it's time for you to see what Europe has to offer. Don't worry, you can handle it. Visit airtransat.com for details. Conditions apply. Air Transat. Travel moves us. Last year, at colleges across America, students etched themselves into history.

Or infamy, with the most dramatic campus protests in a generation. It's a final revolution! It's a final revolution! As the fall semester begins, some major universities, from NYU to UCLA, have implemented new rules and decided to enforce old ones to protect Jewish students from activists that declared sections of campus no-go zones for Zionists. On Monday, UC President Michael Drake directed chancellors of all 10 schools to strictly enforce established rules when it comes to demonstrations.

That includes banning encampments, protests that block pathways, and mass war to shield identities. Universities that turn a blind eye to the Tentafada phenomenon now risk violating federal statute. Nonetheless, the chaos appears to be returning. We are here with the Palestinian people and their resistance against their colonizers. At Temple University,

protesters marched in solidarity with Palestinian resistance against their colonizers. The attack happened here, outside Pitt's largest landmark, the Cathedral of Learning. As students returned to class at the University of Pittsburgh, a man attacked a group of Jewish students with a bottle. Their concern just one week into the school year. Meanwhile, at the University of Michigan, four agitators were arrested during a die-in. So clearly, the danger is not yet over entirely for campuses, even though some of the steam may be leaving the 10 to FADA movement.

After all, the Democratic Convention was supposed to be the exclamation mark of rage punctuating a year of protest. But the plan for tens of thousands to descend on Chicago and disrupt the proceedings barely registered as a tussle. The city was expecting and preparing for 20 to 25,000 protesters over the course of the week, but CPD estimates what we actually saw was much fewer than that.

Where did they go? It would be a mistake to think the poor turnout of the river to the sea crowd at the Democratic Convention means their campaign has fizzled. The revolutionary instinct of far left movements do not require a critical mass. Indeed, if the past is any guide, it only takes a few committed partisans to do quite a bit of damage.

And often, that damage becomes clear only many years later. I would say in the current environment, the longer the war in Gaza, the longer the unrest in the Middle East continues, the greater the fertile ground for an escalation or expansion of protests. This is Bruce Hoffman, a Brookings Institute scholar and one of the world's most influential experts on domestic terrorism. Already, we're seeing in the social media of many of these protest organizations that are legitimately exercising their First Amendment rights outright explicit calls for escalation, for provoking repression, which is, of course, one of the tried and true tactics of terrorists everywhere.

They will use that as a context of violence being inflicted on them to thereby justify an escalation of their violence. History teaches that a few student true believers can make quite a mess once they decide that boycotts and sit-ins aren't making a difference. From the underground, that radical left-wing group, the Weathermen, has claimed responsibility for yesterday's dynamiting of a statue of a Chicago policeman. My name is Eli Lake, and in this special episode of Honestly, we are looking at a worst-case scenario. How far will the tentaphonic crowd go?

How far can they go? Well, more than 50 years ago, campus unrest spilled into the streets and moved off the grid. The average is now 20 bombings a week. Occasionally, far-right extremists are responsible, but leftists and radicals are most often to blame. As a small and lethal group of radicals took the plunge from protest to resistance.

The story of America's Ivy League domestic terrorists, the Weathermen, and whether today's radicals will follow their lead after the break. We'll be right back. located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. This is Bernadine Dorn. A former cheerleader with a law degree, declaring guerrilla war on America with a K. We are not just attacking targets. We are bringing a pitiful, helpless giant to its knees. We invite Key and Nixon and Agnew to travel in this country. Come to the high schools and campuses.

But guard your planes. Guard your colleges. Guard your banks. Guard your children. Guard your doors. America's worst nightmare. And she was the driving force behind the Weathermen. Between 1969 and 1974, this small gang of violent intellectuals

bombed police stations, courthouses, and the Pentagon. They changed their identity, dyed their hair, and lived off the grid, all to destroy the country they hated. The Weathermen's leaders did not rise from poverty or want. Most came from good families and attended the best schools, Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, and the University of Chicago. They included Dorn and her now-husband, Bill Ayers, a scruffy organizer and saboteur at the time,

Mark Rudd, the star of Columbia's student uprising in 1968, and John Jacobs, an amphetamine-addicted theorist of revolution who went by J.J. They were celebrity student leaders in the 1960s, disgusted with the Vietnam War, a war their generation was conscripted to fight. In their eyes, this great crime made America irredeemable. Demonstrations and marches were not going to cut it. America needed a second revolution by any means necessary.

What leads a person to put down their placard and pick up a gun? This is what fascinates me, the plunge from protest to resistance. The West German terrorist, Ulrike Meinhof, defined the process as follows. Protest is when I say

I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. When resisting the evil of a system that had plotted, funded, and abided, what they saw as a genocide in Vietnam, the weathermen believed anything, sabotage, bombings, bank robberies, even murder, was acceptable. And in this respect, they sought to put an end to an America they did not like. The Weathermen were born in a country staring into the abyss. The Vietnam War raged through the 1960s, as did massive student demonstrations. In 1968, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King

broke the country's heart and spirit. By 1969, the residual optimism of the counterculture, well, it was demolished by Charles Manson's death cult and the stabbings at a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont. In this maelstrom, student politics were a big deal, big enough even for student political organizations to have their own conventions. In 1969, the Socialist SDS,

or the Students for a Democratic Society, held theirs. This was the prime mover of the student protests in the 1960s. Its convention mattered, and was even covered by broadcast television. Is there a communist faction making a big power play for SDS at this point? Is there any communists back here? Now, this convention turned out to be a pivotal moment for the American left. Inside raged a battle for control between radical factions. The traditional Marxist, known as progressive labor,

wanted to focus the student movement on empowering workers to seize the means of production. And then there was the new wave, which was comprised of the future leaders of the weathermen, whose politics is best summed up as black liberation at home, third world revolution abroad. We will build a revolutionary youth movement capable of actively engaging in the war against the imperialists. We will escalate our attacks until imperialism is defeated in Vietnam. This fall, in Chicago, at the time the conspiracy trials begin, we will lead massive demonstrations against the war in support of the Black Panther Party and in solidarity with all political

prisoners, including U.E.P. Newton and the aid under attack for last summer's righteous demonstrations. When they declared themselves the new leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society, they were known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement. It was a hostile takeover. They purged their opposition, took control of the headquarters, the petty cash fund, and the printing press. Within a few months, the new leaders the petty cash fund, and the printing press. Within a few months, the new leaders of SDS would officially become the weathermen. They took their name from the Bob Dylan lyric, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Keep a clean nose, wash a clean clothes.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. In their mind, the wind was blowing quite obviously towards total revolution. In theory, the Weathermen were led by a collective. But in reality, the driving force was Bernadine Dorn. Beautiful, angry, and crazy. She embodied the combination of sex appeal and revolutionary politics that attracted liberal elites like moths to flame in this era, a phenomenon Tom Wolfe would mock later as radical chic.

J. Edgar Hoover dubbed her la passionera of the lunatic left. She would wear a pin in those early days that read, cunnilingus is cool, Palacio is fun. In June of 1969, Dorn led a delegation to Cuba, where she was feted as one of the leaders of the great student upheavals of 68 and 69. She posed for adoring profiles in Cuban magazines and met with a delegation of the Viet Cong, who presented her and her comrades with rings forged from the steel of downed U.S. aircraft. Once they returned to the States, the Weathermen fanned out across America

and set up collectives in major cities, Chicago, Seattle, Cleveland, New York. The focus of the summer was to recruit young people for an event that would announce the Weathermen on the world stage, an organized riot known to history as the Days of Rage. We're building a revolutionary movement that will fight the internal army, which is the police force. Yes, more physical contact if that's necessary. Whatever it takes, we'll do, by any means possible.

The Days of Rage were meant to be four days of mayhem in Chicago, a deliberate escalation from the marches of the late 1960s. The radicals were not just preparing for angry cops swinging billy clubs. They were arming themselves to initiate the conflict. They pledged to, quote, bring the war home. And they needed an army of kids to do it. One recruitment tactic was to send crazed activists to run through the halls of local high schools screaming about the Vietnam War. In August, in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Brian Burroughs writes in his fine history

of domestic terrorism in the 1970s, Days of Rage,ote, A group of weatherwomen took over a classroom at Macomb Community College during exams and lectured the 30 or so confused students on the evils of racism and imperialism. When the teacher called the police, the weatherwomen were arrested. A month later, in Pittsburgh, 26 weatherwomen stormed the halls of South Hills High School,

tossing leaflets, waving a North Vietnamese flag, and when this didn't sufficiently engage male students, lifting their skirts and exposing their breasts. Once again, most of the weatherwomen ended up in jail. End quote. Outside of schools, recruitment was just as challenging. They had ambitions to recruit young toughs they called greasers from blue-collar neighborhoods. They marched into factory towns, extolling the virtues of revolution,

waving that North Vietnamese flag and chanting, Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win. It went as well as one might expect. The first action was the bombing of a statue of a police officer to commemorate the cops who perished in clashes with labor activists in 1886. The group promises more attacks on the establishment around the entire country starting next week. The blast shattered 100 nearby windows in downtown Chicago. Miraculously, no one was killed. Two days later, a few hundred angry weathermen arrived at Lincoln Park

from across the country in football helmets, gas masks, and goggles. They packed crude weapons, blackjacks, baseball bats, and other clubs useful for smashing windows. There were far fewer than they had expected, but those that showed were ready to rumble. People of Chicago last night witnessed an outrage against the community. Those who were arrested and charged for taking part in the attacks and destruction last night and again this morning were between the ages of 18 and

25. And I'd like to emphasize this, they are not kids. That was Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley describing what happened when marauding weathermen left the park and streamed into his city's posh Gold Coast neighborhood. And while they did manage to break a lot of glass, by any other measure, it was a failure. The Weathermen had spent months recruiting what they had hoped would be thousands of youth to descend on Chicago. Instead, they ended up with a few hundred.

What's more, their fellow radicals thought this was a terrible idea. Even the Black Panthers, whom the Weathermen adored, distanced themselves from this violent futility. Here is Fred Hampton, a Panther leader in Chicago. We believe that the Weathermen action is anarchistic, opportunistic, individualistic, it's chauvinistic, it's custodistic, and that's the bad part about it. It's custodistic in that its leaders take people into situations where the people can be massacred, and they call that revolution. And it's nothing but child's play.

It's folly. We think these people may be sincere, but they're misguided, they're muddleheads, and they're scatterbrains. It's a strange world. These were Ivy League kids, acting so violently that they were getting told off by the Black Panthers. How did this ever happen?

Mark Rudd summed it up best many years later in the documentary The Weather Underground. We wanted to become communist cadre, completely committed to the revolution. A bunch of rich kids turning themselves into an armed American insurgency

sounds laughable. But at the time, radical change was sweeping through the First and Third Worlds. Algeria and Kenya fought their way out of colonial rule not even a decade earlier. In Paris, general strikes brought the country to a standstill in the summer of 1968. In West Germany, radicals began setting department stores and publishing houses ablaze. Meanwhile, the murder in 1968 of both Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King begged the question, what now for America? If you lived through all of that, it's easy to see how the answer may clearly be armed struggle. The weathermen were undeterred by their failures at the days of rage.

Last night was the beginning for us. The ruling class in their gold-coated decadence will walk their streets a little less secure tonight. If they hadn't dug it before, they'd better dig it now. They are the enemy. They were part of a global revolution, and just because some of their allies didn't know which way the wind was blowing, didn't mean they were wrong. After the days of rage, many of the weather leaders, like Mark Rudd, were bailed out of jail and went on the run, becoming fugitives. A new leadership emerged, known as the Front Four. This included Bernadine Dorn,

Jim Jones, J.J., and Terry Robbins, a short sociopath obsessed with explosives. It was at this point that the Weathermen began to resemble less of a political movement and more of a cult. They controlled their members' private lives by initiating the Smash Monogamy Initiative, which instructed the members to end their relationships and engage in orgies. They controlled their inner lives too, subjecting members to grueling all-night interrogations and psychological torture. Using techniques taken from Stalin's regime, members were verbally abused for hours by their fellow comrades,

accused of being traitors and worse. The goal was to break down an individual's personality, leaving them only as an instrument of the organization. The term for this at the time was criticism self-criticism, but we would know it today as struggle sessions. A hierarchy had clearly formed. While most members were largely subjected to terrible living conditions, sleeping outdoors for months in city parks or in the worst urban slums, like in most cults,

the leaders lived far better than the rank and file. The West Coast leadership in the early 1970s, to just give one example, Bernadine Dorn, Bill Ayers, and Jim Jones, lived for a period inside a gated modern four-bedroom in Tiburon, a pricey suburb of San Francisco. One former weather cadre told Brian Barrows that during a visit to the Tiburon house, he opened the refrigerator and saw a stick of butter. Butter! he exclaimed several years later. I couldn't afford a piece of bread, and they had butter! In the final weeks of 1969, they held what Brian

Burroughs would call the Pep Rally from Hell in a rundown dance hall in Flint, Michigan, with shotgun holes in the door. It was known as the Wargasm. The place was decked out in posters of their heroes, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-Tung, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver. Above the stage, they hung a giant six-foot cardboard machine gun. During the day, they practiced karate and did calisthenics. In the evening, they sat through speech after speech on the glories of killing police officers and violent revolution. Mark Rudd's excellent memoir, Underground, explained what went down at the wargasm.

There were crazy discussions at Flint over whether killing white babies was inherently revolutionary, since all white people are the enemy. Out of this bizarre thinking came Bernadine's infamous speech praising Charles Manson and his gang's murder of actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and the LaBiancas. Dig it, she exclaimed. First they killed those pigs,

then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild. We instantly adopted, as Weathers saluted, four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate's belly. The message was that we shit on all your conventional values, you murderers of black revolutionaries and Vietnamese babies.

There were no limits now to our politics of transgression. Nearly 30 years later, Dorn would claim that she was being facetious in her remarks about Manson. It was a joke, you see. But Rudd clearly took her seriously. Dorn in this period was humorless, terrifying, and filled with venom. Her notoriety depended on her audience taking her literally. Resist is what I am, what I don't like. Resist the banks because they got the credit. Resist the state because they got the guns.

Resist the cops because they're going to get it. After Flynn, the Weather Underground began its reign of terror. Well, in a sense. The truth is that they were so amateurish that their campaign of bombings didn't result in the body counts of other terrorist organizations in this period, like the Red Army Faction or the IRA, this relative lack of killings has proven helpful

to those looking to retrospectively brand weather as a nonviolent movement. In Bill Ayers' memoir, Fugitive Days, he paints weather as fundamentally opposed to killing civilians, and, well, that's simply not true. In the months following the wargasm in 1970, the Weathermen were murderous. In March, Weathermen placed dynamite bombs

at a busy Detroit police station and the city's police officers' association. They were found before detonation because of an FBI informant, but the intention at that point was to kill. In Berkeley, a former weather associate told authorities that the weathermen were responsible for a nail bomb at the Park Police Station that in fact did kill two policemen. That was in February of 1970, but this case has never been prosecuted.

In New York City, a weatherwoman named Kathy Wilkerson, graduate of Andover Academy and Swarthmore College, set up shop in her father's Greenwich Village townhouse, which her comrades soon turned into a bomb factory. The plan was to place a massive explosive device at a dance for non-commissioned officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Had the plan worked, hundreds of young GIs would have perished. But these terrorists were literally hoisted on their own batard. On March 6, 1970, a faulty timer detonated

as they were assembling their bombs, killing Terry Robbins, a leader of the New York tribe of weathermen, and two other comrades, Diana Alton and Ted Gold. Kathy and another weatherwoman, Kathy Bodine, managed to escape and went on the run. After the townhouse disaster, the weathermen began to rethink their plans and settled on a new strategy. No more killing. From now on, their bombs would be exploding press releases,

what the left calls the propaganda of the deed. An operative would call in a bomb threat at a politically symbolic building, exploding press releases, what the left calls the propaganda of the deed. An operative would call in a bomb threat at a politically symbolic building, a university weapons lab, the Pentagon, or a courthouse, usually late in the evening. And then there would be an explosion. No casualties. Here's an example of Weathers' bombing of the U.S. Capitol in March 1971. At 1 o'clock this morning, the switchboard at the Capitol received a phone call. A man's voice said a bomb would go off in the building in half an hour.

At 1.30 in the morning, it did, in a small unmarked restroom on the ground floor of the Senate side, next to a barbershop and near several small offices, including one committee hearing room. The Weather Underground would remain active in some form until the late 70s. They would work to break out LSD evangelist Timothy Leary from a minimum security prison in California in 1970.

They would continue to issue their exploding press releases. By 1974, though, Weather began to fear they were losing relevance and attempted to rebrand with a new initiative called Prairie Fire, named for a saying of Mao Zedong, a single spark can spark a prairie fire. Well, it turned out America wasn't ready for Maoism, and the group split and then fizzled out. A federal grand jury in Detroit today charged the 13 top leaders of the Weathermen with plotting to bomb public buildings in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Berkeley, California.

Unsurprisingly, the FBI became obsessed with the Weathermen after the townhouse explosion. After all, they were domestic terrorists who openly declared war on the American government and went on publicity tours to Cuba. J. Edgar Hoover himself declared the group public enemy number one. But the FBI's obsession would end up being its downfall and the Weathermen's stroke of luck. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,

the FBI was in many ways a law unto itself. It illegally surveilled hundreds of people and groups it deemed a threat to the state. And so, when it saw threat as clear as the weatherman, the Bureau began spying on the group. And not only their group, also their friends and family, without ever getting permission from a judge or a U.S. attorney. Well, this law-breaking and corner-cutting

would cost the FBI dearly. Concerned that their criminal surveillance would be revealed by a trial, the Justice Department did the unthinkable. They pulled back their prosecutions of the Weathermen. In order to save their skins, they let the bombers get away. In 1980, the FBI's senior leaders who authorized the taps and bugs of the Weathermen were convicted themselves of violating the constitutional rights of their targets. Donald Strickland, one of the FBI agents who actually pursued weather in those days,

summed up his frustration in an interview with Barrows for his book. Quote, 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 weathermen scumbags end up being the fucking Robin Hoods? It was quite the reversal. A few weeks after FBI senior leaders were convicted by a jury of their peers, Dorn and Ayers turned themselves in.

They held a press conference and stated their continued commitment to radical change. Resistance by every means necessary is happening and will continue to happen within the United States as well as around the world. And I remain committed to the struggle ahead. Some comrades in the underground held a dinner party for them to mark the occasion. Quote, it was gourmet food, fine wines, first growth Bordeaux. Flanagan said several years later. And then they go off to Chicago,

and the feds were desperate for them to turn themselves in. Bernadine had to pay a fine, and she paid it with a check. Priceless. The fact that the FBI's own law-breaking would help the Weathermen escape justice is a key part of the Weathermen story. They did get away with it. Imagine the ferocity of the prosecution that would greet an Islamist

or Nazi terror organization in the U.S. today. It's crazy to think, in that light, that the Weather Underground, who plotted nail bombings and organized an urban rampage, would for the most part be able to slip back into society. But that is exactly what happened. We should say that Bernadine Dorn did go down for a moment. She served a seven-month prison sentence at a women's prison in New York City. In 1982, she granted an interview from the Slammer to Phil

Donahue with her soon-to-be husband, Bill Ayers, by her side. So we have then from you your own future commitment to this country and to actively participating in the political affairs of it. Absolutely. We don't, however, we cannot, however, end this interview with a declaration from both of you that under no circumstances ever again would you ever, ever engage in a political action such as a, for example, a bombing. Dorn wasn't in prison for orchestrating the days of rage, though, or running an organization that sought to murder cops and soldiers at one point. No, she was there for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. In 1981, her comrades, David Gilbert and Kathy Bodine,

tried to rob an armored truck along with a black revolutionary sect known as The Family. In classic Weatherman style, the heist went wrong. Two cops and a security guard were killed, and Gilbert and Bodine served lengthy jail sentences. Bernadine Dorn did seven months for not ratting out her comrades. This was all the jail time she'd ever do. She and Ayers also ended up raising Gilbert and Bodine's child, Chessa Bodine.

Fundamentally, what's changed in this country, I think, in the last 12 years, is the hearts and minds of people. And you're excluded. That's what's changed. So you wouldn't found anything there? No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying saying that. I'm saying I think that the structure of the system has not changed at all.

What's changed is that there is a legacy now, a sense of people, of dignity, of pride, of a notion that people can be better and of a notion that a movement can happen that can actually explode people's creative possibilities instead of diminish people, instead of make people powerless. That's what's changed. The system has not changed at all. Most of the weathermen paid no real price for their days as fugitives and terrorists. Instead, they went on to have second careers within the system they once sought to destroy. After her brief stint in the slammer, Bernadine Dorn, once La Pasionera of the Lunatic Left, was hired by the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin.

Though she was denied entry to the New York and Illinois bar, she went on to a second career as a law professor at Northwestern University. She serves on an advisory board for Human Rights Watch on the Rights of Children and founded a special committee of the American Bar Association dealing with children's rights and litigation, a distinguished career by any measure. And she's hardly the only one. Mark Rudd, who has expressed contrition for his underground days,

teaches math at a community college in New Mexico. Leonard Handelsman, a member of the Weather Collective in Cleveland, Ohio, went on to teach psychiatry at Duke University. Eleanor Stein rose to become an administrative law judge for New York State. Susan Rosenberg, who ended up serving 15 years in federal prison for stockpiling 750 pounds of explosives and was suspected of playing a role in the Nyack robbery, had a second career in nonprofits. In 2001, she was pardoned by Bill Clinton. Bill Ayers, who in his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, wrote of himself, guilty as hell, free as a bird, it's a great country. Well, he went on to become a professor

of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He would go on to serve on the board of the Woods Foundation, which makes education grants. He would serve on that board with a local state legislator and a law professor you may have heard of. This has been their primary focus. So let's get the record straight. Barack Obama. Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago. Forty years ago, when I was eight years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago, he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan's former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.

Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of the Chicago Tribune. It's a fascinating second act, a true moment of white privilege, perhaps. These avowed enemies of the state were welcomed back into the very institutions they had subverted.

And that is the arc of the weather underground. It poses quite a challenge, doesn't it? What does it mean when a society gives unrepentant insurgents a second chance? And what does it tell us about the institutions accommodating a former underground? So let's go back to the question that we asked at the top of this episode. What is the worst-case scenario for the student protests turning radical? The FBI is investigating after two Jewish students were attacked on Pitts Campus late last night. Police say the attacker used a glass bottle to hit them in what's believed to be a targeted attack.

Raise your hands if you're all the same! E.P.S.S.S.S.A.K.! I.O.F. they're all the same! Raise your hands if you're a Zionist! Raise your hands if you're a Zionist! This is your chance to get out! This is your chance to get out! Eleven months ago, the mass slaughter of Jews in Israel prompted demonstrations on behalf of the perpetrators of that crime halfway around the world. An open letter from Harvard-Palestine solidarity groups began with these words,

We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. It went on to warn that, quote, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel's violence. That was on October 8th, before Israel had even retaliated. And it still boggles the mind. At the moment that the world learned of this orgy of Jewish blood, 31 Harvard student organizations signed on to a letter that blamed a pogrom on its victims.

And this is as Israel was still counting its dead. It's not dissimilar to Bernadine Doran praising the Manson murders or the solidarity campus leftists in the late 1960s displayed for the army killing American GIs in Vietnam. The Harvard student organizations on October 8th were not anti-war. They were on the other side. In another sense, though, the universities today are very different from the 60s. Back then, the faculty and the administration

were largely horrified by the radical turn of the students. Today, many of the professors and deans at these universities are marching right alongside them. They were able to breathe for the first time in years. It was exhilarating. It was exhilarating. It was energizing. And if they weren't exhilarated

by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated. We had professors teaching inside the illegal encampment, creating basically a hostile teaching environment for Jewish and Israeli students

who wanted to attend class but couldn't because they weren't let in. Here is Columbia University professor Shai Davidei, who rang the alarm about the pro-Hamas demonstrations on his campus last fall. We have professors like Catherine Frank, who before the students violently took over Hamilton Hall, said that they will support the students taking over the libraries. We have Professor Joseph Mossad showing up,

who on October 8th called the massacre awesome, said that it inspires in him jubilation. We have professors canceling classes so our students can go and participate in the protest. It's so deeply embedded. One of those professors at Columbia who has been an outspoken defender of the encampments is Rashid Khalidi. In the dedication to his 2004 book, Attacking American Foreign Policy in the Middle East, he thanks Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn personally. Quote, first chronologically and in other ways comes Bill Ayers. He persuaded me a little over a year ago that I should write this book.

Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some of the writing for this project. Now, let's be realistic. It's not 1969 anymore. If a small faction of the most radical Hamas sympathizers in America decided to arm themselves for revolution, while they would face far greater challenges than the weathermen ever did. Back then, domestic terrorists could buy dynamite over the counter in several states. They could pay their utilities with cash,

and they could vanish into an underground which barely exists in the era of digital surveillance. We're in a different world of terrorism. Here's Bruce Hoffman again. It hasn't been organization or groups. It's been radicalized individuals who may not have any contact with any organization, who themselves have become frustrated and take it upon themselves to carry out individual acts of violence in service to a broader ideology. Timothy McVeigh didn't belong to any organization. He wasn't following anyone's orders.

He wasn't part of a command and control structure. As FBI Director Christopher Wray repeatedly says, the threat is from lone individuals that are difficult to track. But is the threat of a few lone wolves the worst thing that can happen? I'm not so sure. Whether opposed the ruling elite,

today's radicals are funded by them. Consider Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the organizations that organized encampments at universities last semester. They call for the destruction of the Jewish state and insist that the murder of 1,200 innocent Israeli men, women, and babies is, quote, resistance. They employ the language and occasionally the flags of Hamas. They also have received significant funding from pillars of the American establishment.

This includes the Tides Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, according to an investigation earlier this year from Politico. Or let's look at Students for Justice in Palestine, the other big national organization that organized many of the encampments and protests on campus last year.

The organization has raised tens of thousands of dollars managed by mainstream financial institutions like Morgan Stanley Global Impact Fund and the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gifts Fund. What's more, a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine from the 2000s, Maher Batar, is today a senior official on President Biden's National Security Council in charge of coordinating defense and intelligence policy. The People's Forum, a group that organized some of the first street demonstrations

to praise Hamas in New York after October 7th, well, it's funded by an American tech mogul who now lives in China named Roy Singham. Finally, remember Chesa Bodine, the biological son of David Gilbert and Kathy Bodine, who was raised by Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayers? In 2020, he won election to become San Francisco's district attorney and soon stopped prosecuting most crimes in the city. He lost a recall ballot initiative in 2022. Finally, there's Susan Rosenberg,

the woman who stockpiled explosives and was pardoned by President Clinton. In her second act, she rose to a leadership role on the charity that funded Black Lives Matter. A day after October 7th, the group's Chicago chapter posted, and eventually erased, on social media an image of a man in a paraglider, an homage to the Hamas murderers who turned a peace concert in southern Israel into an abattoir. And in this respect, it's worth asking, are we living through the worst-case scenario? Not bombings and domestic terrorism, but something shocking nonetheless. Museums,

newspapers, universities, charitable foundations, and law schools operating in concert with the revolutionaries on campus. In other words, the danger today is no longer subterranean. It's the weather over ground. This is Eli Lake for the Free Press. You've been listening to Honestly. And if you like this podcast and want to support this kind of work, there's only one way to do it. Subscribe at thefp.com.