Offline with Jon Favreau - Breaking the Cycle of Political Violence

Episode Date: May 23, 2026

Does political violence ever help a social cause? Zayd Ayers Dohrn, playwright and host of Crooked's "Mother Country Radicals," joins Offline to discuss the complicated legacy of radical activism in America. In his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, Zayd dives even deeper into the morally ambiguous decisions made by his parents...two founding members of the notorious Weather Underground. He and Jon contemplate what activist actions lead to mass alienation vs. adoption of ideals, why a generation of Americans gravitated towards political violence in the 1970s...and why it's happening again today.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast, episode title, and episode date.

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or a sort of they believe in some kind of change, even when they're disillusioned by some of the tactics of their parents, some of the fallout for their own families. Almost every one of them became an artist or an activist or a social worker or a poet, somebody who feels like they are trying in their small way to change the world, to make things better. None of them that I know of became armed revolutionaries. I think it wasn't the time for it in the sense of a historical context. And I think many of us were disillusioned by some of the things we saw growing up. But all that said, one thing you can't say about my parents or many members of those undergrounds is that they were hypocrites. I think most of us feel like for all our parents'

flaws and contradictions, they are idealists, they believe in what they say, and what they believe is fundamentally the right thing. Anti-racism, anti-war, struggle for a better world. Those are things that I think we all still believe in. I'm John Favro, and you just heard from today's guest, Zaid Ayers-Dorn. Most of you will remember Zade as the host of mother country radicals. One of my favorite limited series we've produced here at Cricket Media. It's a story about his parents, two founders of the Weather Underground, who plotted to overthrow the United States government. It's an incredible series, one that reckons with the impact of radical revolutionaries who choose armed resistance,

not just the impact on the world they're trying to change, but on their families, especially their children. Zaid is out with the new memoir, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young that dives deeper into his own experience as the child of revolutionaries, someone who spent his early years on the run with his fugitive parents

desperately trying to avoid capture by the FBI. I wanted to have him on to talk about what he learned, especially in light of the moment we're in right now, a time when political violence is on the rise and radicals on both ends of the political spectrum are speaking more favorably about armed resistance. Zade's account of his childhood makes it pretty clear

that choosing the path of armed resistance caused his family and the families of other revolutionaries immense suffering. I think it also offers some lessons for those of us involved in politics today who desperately want to avoid such violence and suffering again. You'll hear our conversation in just a bit,

but first, the tick tickets for CricketCon 2026 are now on sale for everyone. So come hang with us November 5th through 7th in Washington, D.C for live shows, panels, meetups, lots more. Friends of the Pod get a subscriber-only price and a bunch more perks that we're going to be rolling out, plus all the regular year-round benefits that subscribers always get, like ad-free shows. So get tickets to CrookedCon and all the info you need at crookedcon.com. We can't wait to see you there.

Cricketcon.com for more details, including how to become. a friend of the pod subscriber. All right, here's Zade Ayers-Dorn. Zaid, welcome to Offline, and welcome back to Crooked. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. For people who don't know, we worked together in 2022, before that, on your fantastic series, Mother Country Radicals. You now have a new book out, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young,

that dives even deeper into your childhood, which you spent on the run from the FBI with your parents, the Radical Revolutionaries, Bernardine Dorn, and Bill Ayers. What questions were you looking to answer when you started this project? Totally. Well, a couple of things happened after Mother Country Radicals came out. I mean, I really thought when we made that series that it was everything I wanted to say about that time and that period and about my parents. But a couple really interesting things happened. One thing was that I had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI when we started working on Mother Country Radicals seven years ago.

they fought me and fought me on, you know, in fact, the first response from the FBI was we have something like 2,800 boxes of files on Bernadine Dorn, and it's going to take at least 12 years to process them. You'll have to pay for all the photocopying, et cetera. So we had to narrow it down, narrow it down. Eventually, they did produce 7,000 pages of new documents, but that was after the podcast had already come out. So suddenly I had all this new material. Also, once the series came out, people started reaching out to me and sending me new. things. I got a bunch of letters that my mom had written when I was a baby. I had some people reach out and say, you know, I didn't want to be interviewed before, but now that I've heard the series, I want to talk to you and tell you some secrets. So it kind of like the story grew for me. And I realized that there were some things that I hadn't talked about, some things that I thought were important. And of course, we wound up with another Trump administration in a new era of authoritarianism. And I just thought it was, it was interesting moment to revisit that story. Yeah, oddly enough, and maybe sadly enough, the timing for this story continues to be better and better as the years progress.

The book opens with you when you were almost four years old, trained in counter surveillance as an almost four-year-old, telling a kind elderly couple at Burger King, we're going to Chicago for my mom to turn herself in. We made a deal with the FBI so I can go to school. How much should you actually understand about what your parents were, what they were doing, who they were at the time? Yeah. Yeah, that story has become a big joke in my family. I still get teased for almost blowing our cover when I was three or four years old. But the truth is, they never lied to me when I was a kid. I mean, there were, as I discovered writing the book, I guess what you'd call lies of omission. I didn't know everything. But my parents were always very open,

even when I was three or four about the fact that we were outlaws, the fact that the FBI was chasing us. In fact, they explained it in ways that like a kid would understand. We had watched the animated Disney Robin Hood. They were like, you know, we're kind of like that. We're outlaws. We're stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. Or we're like the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars and we, you know, are fighting an evil empire. And so we have to be careful about what we do.

So I understood, but of course I didn't exactly understand. I mean, a three and four-year-old can't, doesn't know what the FBI is or what it means to have his parents be underground revolutionaries. So, of course, as I grew up, my understanding evolved. I had to figure it out. I had to go to other places other than my parents to try to like understand the context of what was really going on. What age were you? And was there a specific moment when it started clicking that the story you had known in childhood was something. different and darker and maybe a little more fraught with with danger.

I think it was a multi-step process. I think, you know, we turned ourselves in when I was about four years old. My mother went to prison when I was about six years old. That was certainly a dark chapter for our family in terms of trying to understand what that meant, why they were keeping her and everything like that. But, of course, I was still very young. So there was a lot I didn't understand. I think like a lot of kids, kind of high school and adolescence was a period when

I started to dig deeper, want to read for myself, like the books that have been written about my parents, the news coverage that had been written at the time. But, you know, honestly, it wasn't until we made Mother Country Radicals that I, like, bothered to really dig in and be like, I want to understand A to Z about this story. I think, I mean, one of the things I tell people and they don't believe is that, like, most kids, it all felt pretty normal for me growing up. I mean, I never thought until I was like in my 20s or 30s, I never thought to say, wow, that was really strange what happened to us as kids.

You know, I just grew up with it. It was my normal. You write that one of the tenets of your childhood faith was that your parents would unequivocally protect you, that you and your brother were their first priority. Because that childhood faith, you know, that they would always protect you, that you came first, survived what you now know and found out about what they did. and when they did it? It has definitely been complicated.

Has it survived? I think I still believe that my parents wanted to protect me. I still believe that they loved me. I still believe that on some level, I was at the center of their minds about their hopes and dreams for the future. But I think probably a lot of kids realized later in life that their parents had secret priorities, other commitments that preceded them, and that therefore, competed with their parents' allegiance to their children. For me, it's definitely been a process of

realizing not only were my parents deeply, deeply committed to their cause, fighting the war, fighting racism, no matter what the costs, that they had made those promises long before I was born, long before they even thought about having children. So for them, even though they were now parents, even though their priorities had changed when some of their former comrades, especially black comrades in the black underground, like in the Black Liberation Army, came back to them and said, you know, we really need your help now. It was almost impossible for my parents to say no. So has my faith in them been shaken?

It hasn't been shaken because I always knew that they had these deep commitments. It has certainly been complicated to learn that those commitments sometimes came at the cost of risking our family's safety. You write about this and talked about this in other country radicals, but your adopted brother, Chesa Bodine, was 14 months old, left with a babysitter the day his parents went out and never came home. Three people died in the robbery that his parents were part of, two officers in a guard, his mother, Kathy. Boudin was eventually paroled, and you read about this. Years later, she ended up caring for your daughter at 14 months, which was the exact age. Chesa was when she left him.

And she told you she'd look at your daughter and think, how could I have done that? What was it like to watch the person who lost her own child that way become a person that you just trusted with yours? It was a journey. And you know, John, as a father yourself, like when you have a young child, all your priorities are shifting in this dramatic way. And you can't help but think when you hear a story like that, when you hear that somebody left there 14, 16-month-old child with a babysitter and went out to rob a bank, if you have an infant or an infant or a toddler yourself, you can't help but think that's insane. Like, that sounds just crazy. How could you do something like that? And so it was strange because I knew Kathy very well.

She was like a second mother to me growing up, even though she was in prison. And I loved her and I trusted her, but she had done this unthinkable thing, you know, decades earlier before I had my children before I was even conscious of it. So I had to kind of reckon with that and think about these big questions of like, can somebody change and what had those decades in prison done for her and to her? And my wife and I talked about it a lot. And we did decide that she ended up being the best caretaker for our daughter because she was so devoted, so committed. She was kind of a grandmother at that point, and she, you know, she had changed a lot. So yeah, I think for me, I don't know if I could have written this story or written about my family story until I was a

father myself, until I was old enough to have some perspective on what those kinds of decisions mean. What do you think the change was and what caused the change? Is it sort of distance from the time when they were all in the weather underground? Was it, um, thinking through the strategies and the political philosophy they had at the time. Was it spending time in prison? Like, what do you think sort of has, and I'm sure it's different for every person you interviewed, but what's your, what was your general sense from, from talking to your parents, Kathy, and a lot of the other, of their other former comrades? Well, I think one thing I try to write about in the book is, if there's one guiding question in the book, it's kind of what

make somebody a radical or a revolutionary? Like what radicalizes somebody in that way? What convinces somebody that it's not enough to, you know, protest or to write articles or to demonstrate or to register people to vote, but that they have to do more? And I think it became clear to me, working on the book and knowing all these people, as long as I've known them, that they had really gone down this road of radicalization in a way that had its own momentum and its own imperative. And by the time, Kathy and David made that choice to, you know, to leave their kid behind and go out and rob a bank on behalf of the Black Liberation Army, I think they had really convinced themselves that there were no other choices. They had been in this kind of cocoon, this echo chamber for quite a long time.

And I think that sense of imperative, that sense of always pushing each other to go further and to do more had driven people quite crazy in a certain way. So I think if you're questioning, is what changes somebody out of that. I do think there's a process of deprogramming. I also think age and wisdom, you know, Kathy had a long time in prison to think about what she had done and a lot of regrets and a lot of reparations to be made. And she spent a long time, to her great credit, you know, thinking about what she could have done differently, what she wished she'd done differently, and trying to make amends

for some of her choices. Yeah. It's funny. I think about this all the time now. that I am a father and, you know, my eldest is five going on six. And I've even caught myself because when he's like, oh, you know, you watch TV and even kids TV, it's like there's the bad guys and the good guys. And so they so, and he knows enough about Donald Trump now.

And he's like, oh, Trump is, Trump is bad, right? Trump's a bad person. And even me, I'm like trying to catch myself. And I'm like, well, I don't know that anyone is good or bad. people do good and bad things and they can do both. And I do think figuring that out is important, not just when you're talking about people that we would all say are bad people, but that people who make mistakes and do bad things can come back from it, you know?

Absolutely. And obviously somebody like Trump tests our empathy and our ability to see that. But I agree with you. I mean, it's incumbent upon all of us as thinking people and as empathetic people to look at people's most difficult choices. I mean, my brother, Chesa, who's, you know, been a public defender for much of his career, will say, you know, one of the things about defending people accused of crimes, it's not so much that they're innocent, that they didn't do the thing. It's usually more like this was one of the worst days of their lives and one of the worst choices they made. And so how do you

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Your father, Bill Ayers, his whole account of sort of the leap to violence is the way he explains it is like a widening circle of empathy so that, you know, Vietnamese kids at the time, because the Vietnam War was going on, he said that Vietnamese kids matter as much as the kids in his classroom.

That's a more, I would say, generous explanation that makes the violence or the choice of, you know, arm resistance sound like merely like compassion taken too far. Do you buy that? Like, is that the whole story or do you think that's the most generous version of it? Well, so here's the argument that that you're talking about is that like we can all imagine circumstances where we would do almost anything to protect somebody who was threatened. Right. So again, as fathers ourselves, we can imagine. that we would basically do anything, risk our lives to save our own kids. Right? So then I guess the question is, let's say you widen the circle of empathy a little bit. You say, what about your neighbors? What about the other people in your village? And, of course, people throughout history have laid down their lives, picked up arms to defend their village.

Then you say, what about the borders of the country? And many people in this country would say, even many people on the right would say, yes, to defend our country, we should be willing to do anything, to, you know, to fight, to die. I think what my dad would say is when the Vietnam War was happening, he thought that there was a genocide being perpetrated in his name by his country. And thousands of people were being killed senselessly. And many of them were innocent women and children and innocent citizens and old people. And, you know, they were hearing things like the massacre at Milai and they were hearing about babies being napalmed. So that can, if you start to think of those people as,

members of your human community, it can drive you quite crazy. And I say that in both directions. I say I can understand it because why shouldn't that drive us crazy if people are being senselessly killed by our own government? On the other hand, I think if it drives you crazy and you lose your capacity to make moral judgments or to, you know, stop yourself before you cross your own lines of rationality or morality, that can be a very dangerous thing as well. It's such a fascinating line. It's a fascinating question of where people draw the line and why and how, right? Because you could see, even if you extend that circle of empathy to, you know, there's a massacre happening in Vietnam, well, yes, if there's something you can do directly to stop the killing of the kids in Vietnam or people in Vietnam, then you could get yourself there.

But to get yourself to the point where you're like, well, if I plant a bond. in the Pentagon or I or bomb a townhouse or do any of the other actions, then this will slow down a government that is ordering this and that. I mean, that just, that is a place that a lot of, that most people don't go. Absolutely. And I do that. I think it's both a fascinating sort of philosophy thought experiment and actually a really relevant question for our own moment, you know, because you think about, I mean, of course, the example, my parents often drawn is John Brown and the fight against slavery and the people, you know, or even Nat Turner or something like if people who are willing to take up arms to fight against slavery, I think many of us can understand that intuitively. Or even the,

you know, the armed partisans and underground under Nazi occupied France, right? Of course they should be fighting back against fascism. And you can draw your lines. You could say, well, they certainly shouldn't target civilians and so on. And I think that's valid. But I think most of us would say, if things get bad enough, if the crimes being perpetrated are bad enough, if the government oppression and authoritarianism has gotten bad enough, people not only can, but probably should, resist it with whatever means they have. So then it becomes this very complicated line of, like, I don't believe that our country is Nazi Germany. You know, I think we still have a semi-functioning democratic process that people can participate in, and there are other ways to go about

enacting change. But then I think about other lines, I think about, well, what about, you know, Dr. Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement? He had a strategy of nonviolence, which I admire tremendously, but they were also facing a situation where they were not allowed to participate in the democratic process in very meaningful ways. So you have to find new ways of trying to enact change. And I think that's what we're all dealing with right now is what is the best way to resist and what is the best way to make a better few people. Yeah, I'm also fascinated by even within a given social and political movement, the psychology that makes some activists choose violence and others choose nonviolence. So with your parents, and you write about this in the book, sort of the FBI killing Fred Hampton, leader of the Black Panthers at the time, is the tipping point for your parents and a lot of the weather underground folks.

but there were just as many activists in the same movement who reacted to that murder by saying, we have to stick with nonviolence. Did you get a better sense from your interviews of the thinking that led your parents and others to cross the Rubicon and maybe others that they knew at the time to decide not to? I did, absolutely. And I interviewed people on both sides of that divide. And I think I can empathize with both sides of that divide. I think, you know, for white activists in particular, there was this sense of, from my

my parents, the solidarity with the Black Panthers was fundamental to their political struggle and their self-identity, right? They saw themselves fundamentally as white student activists willing to sacrifice to help the black freedom struggle. And my mom actually, when she was helping run SDS, Students for Democratic Society, one of her first acts as a new leader of that group was to join Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition of Activist Groups. wanted to be a white ally, what we would now call an ally, what they called comrades,

to the Black Freedom Struggle. And she and Fred became friends, and they worked together, and they helped each other. And they shared information, and they shared a printing press in Chicago. So they were actively kind of engaged in this strategy of, I mean, at that time, I would say it was nonviolent, although it was confrontational. I mean, of course, the Panthers were carrying guns. And they were not nonviolent in the way Dr. King was nonviolent, but they were not, bombing buildings or attacking police officers. And then the United States government, the FBI and the

Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton. I mean, they literally had an informant drug him with a sedative, and while he was sleeping, they came to his apartment and started shooting through the door. And then after they shot him with his pregnant girlfriend lying next to him, they came in, saw that he was still breathing and shot him again at point-blank range. So you need to kind of understand that to set the scene for what activists at the time thought was happening. I mean, you think about all of us now watching ice raids, watching the National Guard being deployed or whatever, and then you think watching a repressive authoritarian government come in and just murder an activist in cold blood. I think a lot of people felt at that time, well, we are in Nazi Germany. Like the gloves are

off and the government is going to go around and assassinate leaders who threaten them, right? So there was this divide, as you say. Some people said, okay, well, that's terrifying, but we have to push forward with this strategy of mass movement, mass mobilization, and nonviolence. And that I think is a sensible decision, even in the face of that kind of terror. And some people decided, no, we have to make a clandestine revolutionary force that can fight back against this terror on its own terms. And that's the path my parents took. So these are, and so far we've been talking about sort of like the moral and ethical dimensions of these questions. and debates and you know what each individual decides about morality is based in their environment, who they are, religious belief. Religion, yeah. Right? A whole bunch goes into it.

These are also questions of political strategy for people in a movement. And I wonder, like, when you look at the political left today, do you see any evidence that your parents and the weather underground actually had a lasting impact on sort of the thought and strategy and sort of the way that, or even the critique that the left has of systemic racism, of American imperialism, et cetera. Yeah. I think, I mean, I would say there's a dual legacy here, right? And the people who are very critical of the Weather Underground, many of whom I've talked to,

would say something like the Weather Underground helped factionalize the left, divide the left, and in their embrace of violence, turned a lot of people against the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. you know, normies, people who were sort of on the sidelines, but couldn't possibly stomach bombing the Pentagon, for example, right? So in that analysis, the Weather Underground hurt the movement by splitting apart large organizations and by driving away more moderate members of the coalition. And I think there is some truth to that. But I think there's also an element where some of the legacy of the radical movements of the 60s, not just the Weather Underground, the Panthers and other groups, the young lords, is the thing. this idea of radical racial solidarity, the critique of police violence that we saw re-errupt after

George Floyd's murder very much originated with the Panthers and the Weather Underground and a sort of a new understanding of what the police were being used to do in this country against marginalized groups. I think also that period, not the Weather Underground specifically, but that period of radical activism led to what we now think of as like the new waves of feminism, of queer liberation, of anti-colonial thinking. So yes, the legacy is complicated, but I think that in a lot of ways that the defining legacy was oppose the Vietnam War with everything we have and try to fight for black liberation at any cost. And I think those legacies are still with us. In fact, there's so much

still with us that now a lot of people claim they were always against the war and would have done anything to stop the war and that they were always against racism and were, you know, for solidarity with black people. But at the time, those were very, uh, unpopular and rare qualities in white activists. In the book, Mark Rudd, who was a leader of students for a Democratic society, SDS, until they split into the more militant faction, the weather underground, calls the SDS split the single greatest mistake I've made in my life a historical crime. Do you think the violence cost the movement more than it ever won?

I think that the violence is not one thing. It's not a monolith. So, I mean, I think there were moments that where they crossed. a different Rubicon that really did cost the movement and cost the individuals involved. And, well, one example, after my parents, and we talked about this, after my parents turned themselves in, after we surfaced some members of the movement, including Kathy and David, and some former members of the Black Liberation Army took part in this bank robbery, the Brinks robbery, that killed three men to security guards and a police officer.

Now, not only was that a moral tragedy from the perspective of, you know, killing men who were just out there doing their jobs, orphaning children, widowing wives. It also destroyed what was left of the movement at that time. So that was a Rubicon that unquestionably in retrospect, it was counterproductive and morally catastrophic. But when you say the violence, if that stretches all the way back to, you know, the Panthers taking up guns, to firebombing police cars, to blowing up the Haymarket statue before the days of rage. I don't know. I think those actually were moments when the larger movement was

galvanized by a sense of we have to do more. I'll tell you one funny example. When the weather underground bombed the State Department, Nixon's State Department, Kissinger's State Department, you know, this was a bomb that went off in an empty bathroom, a warning call beforehand to make sure nobody got hurt. And of course, Nixon and Kissinger were outraged by this, but they were dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Vietnam every day at that point. The next day, there were something like 2,000 bomb threats against government buildings all across the country. Those were not whether underground bomb threats. Those were just copycats, people who saw the State Department get bombed and thought, yeah, I'm that against the war also. I also think we should be doing that.

So I don't think that that kind of thing necessarily cost the movement. I think that was a moment when It actually expressed a collective rage that people had about what the government was doing. Your mother at one point compares the moment when a more militant faction of the weather underground turned on her later in the movement, I believe it was in the late 70s. And she compared it to, quote, what's happening right now in the movement, where right and everybody else is wrong. It's horrible, isn't it? Loaded sentence coming from her. It is.

It is. And I was struck by it. Yeah. What did you make of it? You know, it was interesting because, of course, my mother on some level, she's associated with some of the deepest factional splits that happened in the movement at that time. Most notably, when she split SDS, which at the time was the largest student protest organization in the country, she split in half to follow the leadership of the Black Panthers and formed weathermen. And a lot of people still think of that as a, like including Mark Rudd, think of that as a terrible decision because it split this larger movement. My mother doesn't regret that. She thinks that following the kind of vanguard of the Black Freedom Movement was what they should have been doing and that that was the right idea. But factionalism, as you know, John, is like one of the long-time Achilles heels of leftist progressive movements, right? This idea that like we're going to pursue ideological purity at all costs, we're going to pursue identity over collective solidarity and, you know, break ourselves into smaller and smaller groups of more and more committed activists. And you do see that happening today. And whatever you want to call it, you know, cancel culture or sort of purity tests or call out culture, it's destructive to movements.

And even my mom sees that, you know, she sees it now. She sees that when a collective struggle with everybody trying to fight for a better world becomes an internal struggle where everybody's turning on themselves over increasingly, petty disputes, that can't be the way forward for progressive movement. Offline is brought you by HIMS. If you want to know what's really worth your time when it comes to losing weight, skip the guesswork and get weight loss by HIMS. HIMS offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications that now includes the Wigovie pill at its lowest price ever and the Wagovi Pen, plus lifestyle tips to support you along the way.

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And see Supergirl, only in theaters June 26. How do you think the fact that all of this is being mediated by the internet, social media today, has changed some of these dynamics from your parents' sake. Because I will say when we were talking earlier and you mentioned how you're in this sort of information environment and you kind of egg each other on in these groups to become more and more radical and it's this echo chamber. It did make me think, I was like, well, I like to blame the internet for this today. But back then, I guess it didn't take a bunch of like online groups and algorithms and all that to radicalize people. They radicalized each other just by being in close contact. That was my takeaway as well. I mean, I do think there's, I'm sure we could find ways that the internet supercharges and kind of like spreads the spores of that kind of militancy and radicalization and internal infighting.

further than it used to. But you're exactly right that in their own analog pre-internet way, the dynamics were very similar, the same kind of like, you know, mutually reinforced information environment, the same kind of process of radicalization where you're only listening to the most militant, hardcore voices and nobody who's arguing a counterargument or who's advocating moderation is listened to. In fact, they're expelled from the group and canceled and not allowed to be part of that discussion. So, yeah, I think these dynamics were happening long before the internet, and unfortunately, I think they'll be happening for quite some time to come.

What does your mom think of the movement right now? What are her thoughts on sort of current leftist social and political movements? I mean, I think she's like all of us watching kind of the political situation unfold, sometimes with disgust and horror and sometimes with a certain measure of inspiration. I know, for example, she was incredibly impressed and delighted by the resistance in Minneapolis when the ice raids were happening and the kind of not only the very visible sacrifice of people like Alex Prady and Renee Good, but the sort of organizing for a kind of ad hoc resistance movement where people were literally developing communication networks and mutual solidarity societies and figuring out how they could know when ice raids were happening. and how they could resist those. That was interesting and impressive because you could see ordinary people suddenly realizing, like, we have to get smarter and get more hardcore and we have to figure out how to resist not just online

and not just in the democratic political process as a kind of, if you define that narrowly as the voting booth, but in the larger sense of like direct action, political participation. And so yeah, I think she was inspired by that kind of thing. I remember having conversations with you during the production of mother country radicals about January 6th and the Black Lives Matter protests, which were mostly peaceful, but just the general rise of political violence at the time. Since then, we've seen the assassination of a health care CEO of Charlie Kirk, multiple attempts on Donald Trump.

And, you know, each time, as there have been throughout history, you know, there's a small but vocal contingent on the left that either celebrates or glorifies or seemingly justifies the violence or at least makes the case for armed resistance based on moments throughout history, like the period that you've chronicled. And I wonder, like, what do you make of that? And what do you think, what do your parents make of that? Yeah, I don't know what my parents make of that specifically. But I think, well, what I would say about it is, spent a lot of time in the book, as I said, thinking about what radicalizes people. And one thing that I think should be very familiar to listeners today is my parents and their friends spent the

entire 1960s resisting nonviolently, right? I mean, most of them, by 1968, they had spent their entire adult lives. And by adult, I mean, their adolescents and their early 20s, they had spent trying to organize against the next administration, against the Vietnam. war against, you know, the Justice Department, the out-of-control Justice Department, and white southern vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan, all the things that were happening at the time, all the visible signs of injustice in this country. And they had organized protests and sit-ins and die-ins and all these things, and nothing seemed to be working. Things were getting worse, right? And I do think that what I see happening, and this is not a justification,

it's just kind of an explanation, is young people, especially, who feel, increasingly disenfranchised by the political process and who feel that their efforts are in vain and that the world is sliding down a terrifying precipice, that is a recipe for radicalization. And I think, again, I don't justify violence, especially against, you know, innocent people. But I think when you build a political system where people don't feel heard and where they feel like they have no options, you are you are creating an environment that is going to encourage that kind of justification of violence. So I think that's a cautionary tale for the left, but I think it's a cautionary tale for the government, too, because I think there's a sense in this administration of like these are isolated, lone wolf things happening,

and we should just crack down even harder. But the environment is such that you're just creating this cycle of radicalization. Yeah, the cycle part is right because it is, there's a very thin line. sometimes it's not even visible between seeking to understand why radicalization occurs and violence occurs or the justification of violence happens. And you can explain it a way in a way that, you know, I think makes sense to people. And then it's, okay, well, this is the environment. This is the government that is doing this. This are the policies. This is what's leading to this. And yet people have agency. And you want to make sure that everyone always remembers that we have

agency. And then it's like, how if we could talk to those people, I would want to encourage that kind of agency and moral reckoning. But you know, it's it, you think about school shooters or something, right? And it's like, of course, morally unacceptable and despicable. But like if, if every time there's a school shooting, all we say is, well, that person shouldn't have done that. Right. And they should have been, you know, that's just not, it's not a useful policy prescription. Like, we need to address some of the root causes as well. Yeah. And I think talking about, I mean, I'm now thinking about I had this, got a little too much attention, but I had this conversation with Hassan Piker on Ponce of America.

And, you know, when he said, you know, Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel, I was like, okay, well, this is not, I do not agree with that. And, you know, my point was just from a pure political perspective, and this goes back to sort of the, in a different way, but there's parallels with, did the weather underground achieve more than it than it hurt the movement? And it's like, you know, do we think that the

Palestinian people are better off because of what Hamas did? Do we know why Hamas has chosen the path of armed resistance? Yeah, you can get to the point where you understand that. But do we think that was good for never mind Israel and you know, the rest of the world, but just the Palestinian people themselves? And I wonder

if sometimes I try to do the, maybe the political case is better to persuade people if the moral case isn't going to persuade people, but it is a, it's, it's hard to separate the understanding how it happens with encouraging change in a way that is not going down that path to violence. Absolutely. It's hard to separate. And it's especially hard to separate, you know, when you're dealing in soundbites and when arguments are reduced to their barest essentials. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote the book, I don't expect the kind of arguments I make in the book

to be distilled either in good faith or effectively in a single sound bite, right? Because I do think these issues are complicated. But I think the analogy is an interesting one. I also think you think about the violence of the Israeli government over the last couple of years, but over the last many decades. And, you know, again, it's not a justification. It's more of a sense of when you look back at the history of the weather underground, what they were seeing was an ongoing oppression and an ongoing genesis.

carried out by their own government, violence funded by their parents and their own tax dollars. And a lot of them eventually decided, like, this cannot go on in our names. We cannot live in a society in a country that is murdering innocent people overseas. And I think you see that with young people today. So is that a justification of violence? I don't think it is at all. I think it's more of just a factual statement that if you, for decades, oppress a people and use government violence to commit atrocities, and then the only violence

you're willing to critique is the violence that comes as a result of that, that feels unbalanced to me. You know, I think if you're going to be seriously nonviolent, you have to be openly, you know, opposing the violence of a government like Israel's. In the easier way or the way that it gets talked about in a more simplistic way, is is, you know, along lines of race and ethnicity and religion and nationality. But, you know, like you said, there's Israelis who are horrified about what their own government is doing, just like there are Americans right now horrified by what just like there were Americans in the 60s. I mean, yeah, do you think about how if people outside America are looking at us at which they are

and saying, well, those people are responsible for the choices of their government. That's a horrifying thought. And so, of course, it's not all Israelis, you know, and certainly not all Jews around the country or the globe. It's a specific, hard, right government that has pursued fundamentally self-destructive as well as immoral policies. You mentioned at the end of the book that your 17-year-old daughter got hate mail and calls for her expulsion from school because she published a piece in the school newspaper about Luigi Mangione. Your daughter, Dalyan's art school classmates, asked why she'd want to memorialize, terrorists, both of them are now wrestling with this legacy the way that you and your brothers did. What do you actually want them to take from the book and what do you hope they leave behind?

Well, so it's funny. I mean, the book is the legacy that I'm hoping I can pass on to them in the sense that it's my attempt to digest this very complicated story and distill it for them in a way that is comprehensible. Of course, they love their grandparents. I love my parents. And I want them to understand, you know, how their grandparents became the people they became. I mean, I spend quite a bit of time in the book describing my mother's coming of age, you know,

and that incredible path from sort of high school, straight A, student, first person in her family ever to go to college, you know, white suburban kid, believing in the American dream, all the way to FBI's 10 most wanted fugitive and most dangerous woman in America. and how does that happen? I want my kids to understand that their grandparents weren't always those people and kind of how that that path happened. Also, that they are quite extraordinary people in their way, that they made choices that were very difficult, sometimes choices I don't agree with, but that fundamentally there's a couple things that I think that we can, that we, and that certainly my children can certainly take from this story. One is this central insight of the absolute responsibility of white people in America to stand up for racial justice and how rarely that happens even now and how important it is that all of us attempt to do that. The second thing is

just the idea of that that change is possible and that radical imagination is still a necessity and that only young people can really bring that. I mean, most of us by the time we get to our age, even, we are starting to accommodate ourselves to the world as it is. And the great thing about young people is that they look around at the world that they've inherited and they instinctively think, well, what do I want the world to be? And I think that's a really useful starting point for them and for all of us. This year's best picture winner, one battle after another, loosely based off violent is also about the child of revolutionaries. I thought about you and mother country radicals when the movie first came out and I saw it. It does seem to strike a more optimistic note

about radical activism and families involved in that? And I wonder, is someone who is that child? How does that optimism hit with you? It's funny, yeah. I mean, so one battle after another is literally, I mean, Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, have been very open about the fact that it was inspired

by the weather underground. And Tiana Taylor, who played perfidia, Beverly Hills, has talked about how her character was inspired by Asada Shakur. So it's very much a fictionalized version of this story. And of course, updated to a different time period and it's a historical in all sorts of ways. But it is this story or it's a version of this story. I think you're right that it strikes an optimistic note, or at least the note that I took from it is a note I'm very sympathetic to or familiar with,

which is the next generation is going to have to take that complicated, slightly failed revolutionary mess that their parents left them and try to make something better. I mean, to me, the ending of that movie is about, like, young. people going off to the barricades again and hopefully doing a better job than their flawed parents and grandparents did before them. Yeah. I'm sure you know, John, that the title of one battle after another was taken from a statement from the weather underground following the days of rage when they said from here on in, it's one battle after another with white youth joining the black people and the streets and fighting

the police. You frame revolution as a contronym. Radical change versus a body coming right. back around to where it began. After writing the whole thing, which one do you actually believe in? I believe, I hate to say I believe in both. I believe that history is cyclical

and that times of wild, radical change inspire backlash. I think we're very much living right now through a period of backlash, backlash against racial progress, backlash against gender progress. And so I don't believe with Marx or even with Dr. King that there's like a constant bend towards justice or a kind of a historical

progress that is inevitable. I think we have to fight for each bit of historical progress we get. And I think that there will always be setbacks. But I don't believe that it's cyclical in the sense that we're always going to come back to where we began. I believe that we can make progress. I believe we have made progress. One of the things about writing this book is that it made me realize as bad as things

are right now in this country, they absolutely have been worse. And the kind of the absolutely out of control Justice Department of the 1960s and 1970s, we would be appalled by what was happening. You know, I mean, terrible things are happening right now, but they were actually murdering people. They were actually, they were breaking the law in a million ways that were clear at the time. and the oppression of black people at that time was militarized and explicit in a way that we can barely comprehend even a generation later.

So I say that to say, as bad as things are right now, we have made progress. I think we will continue to make progress. I believe in revolution in the sense of constant progress of both humanity and of this country. I've always been struck

since we've known each other how hopeful you seem as someone who has been through what you've been through since you were a child on the run, and it feels like you could have easily gone in a direction of either feeling very cynical about politics and everything in a way that you wanted to just detach from it or a direction maybe like your parents went and believing that only sort of radical revolution, armed resistance is the only path. what do you think has made you sort of have the outlook that you do today?

I don't know all the factors, but I will say that I interviewed for the book and for the podcast a bunch of kids in similar situations. Of course, my brother Chesa, but also Kukuya Shakur, the daughter of Asada Shakur, Ty Jones, the son of Eleanor Stein

and Jeff Jones, other weathermen. And one thing I kept finding over and over is that almost all of the kids, of the weathermen and of the Black Panthers have a kind of an optimism to them or a sort of, they believe in some kind of change, even when they're disillusioned by some of the tactics of their parents, some of the fallout for their own families.

Almost every one of them became an artist or an activist or a social worker or a poet, somebody who feels like they are trying in their small way to change the world, to make things better. Very few of them, none of them that I know of, became armed revolutionaries. I think it wasn't the time for it in the sense of a historical context. And I think many of us were disillusioned by some of the things we saw growing up. But all that said, one thing you can't say about my parents or many members of those undergrounds

is that they were hypocrites. They were not hypocrites. They believed deeply in what they were doing. And I think teenagers react against hypocrisy more than anything else. The rebellions you see against people's parents tend to be when they are not who they say they are, when their ideals don't match their actions. And I think most of us feel like for all our parents' flaws and contradictions, they are idealists, they believe in what they say, and what they believe is fundamentally the right thing, anti-racism, anti-war, struggle for a better world. Those are things that I think we all still believe in.

Yeah, and certainly things that we'd want our children to believe about us. Absolutely. Zaid Doran, thank you so much, as always, for chatting. And the book is Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young. Everyone, go check it out. It's a fantastic book, and it'll really make you think. So thanks for writing it. Thank you, John. I appreciate it.

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