Domestic Terror in the USA

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Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure. I’ll say this much for righty terrorist Eric Rudolph: the sonofabitch was caught dumpster-diving in a rare break from hiding in the woods. During his fugitive days, Weatherman’s Bill Ayers was on a nice houseboat paid for by radical lawyers.
Most ’70s of the bombings were done as protest actions. Unlike today’s jihadists, ’70s underground didn’t try to max body count. And ’70s papers didn’t really give a shit. A Puerto Rican group bombed 2 theaters in the Bronx, injuring eleven, in 1970. NYT gave it 6 paragraphs.

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Cleaver, born in Arkansas, moved to California, attained his fame based on two things: 1) he was a rapist and 2) he could write. Leftists have this weird thing about deifying criminals who can write. Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbot being the most famous example. In Cleaver’s case, he viewed the rape of white women by a black dude like himself as a revolutionary act.

Cleaver wrote to a radical attorney, impressed her, and seduced her; she secured his release & promptly set him up with a gig at RAMPARTS. White radicals fell hard for Eldridge Cleaver. This became an trend, part of a couple of uneasy dichotomies that you see a bunch of.
Example #1: Huey Newton, Malcolm X used the idea of violent resistance mainly as a recruiting tool. Eldridge Cleaver believed that shit.
Example #2: Some white leftists (like SLA) worship black revolutionaries, crave their leadership. Others (like the Weathermen) want to lead.
Cleaver hooked up with the Black Panthers, so we’ll see him again when we talk about them. For now, let’s look at Weatherman.

The Weathermen (technically, the name of the group was Weatherman, singular) came out of a group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SDS was a college organization with a bunch of campus chapters. That meant existing machinery that worked, and membership numbers. A fantastic resource, if you want to mine it to build a guerrilla movement.

SDS started radicalizing in ’66. By ’67, Burrough notes, an SDS leader is saying in the New York Times, “We are working to build a guerilla force in an urban environment.” He backed down quickly, but the genie was out. And then 1968 happened, and things went completely batshit.

>>128005301
Because it was "liberals" doing it so it's either okay for them to do it (noble cause bs) or it isn't worth bringing up because.....progressives.

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They believed the revolution was imminent. BELIEVED IT. Like Alex Jones’s audience believes in chemtrails. That level. Absolute, apocalyptic. The SDS got angrier and angrier, and wound up doing an occupation at Columbia University, which got attention. At the same time, they read up on the foco theory of Che’s buddy Regis Debray: that small guerrilla groups could overthrow the US.
If you think this sounds completely insane and crazy, you’re absolutely right. But think about it this way: who’s in SDS leadership?
SDS leadership is disproportionately well-off Jewish kids at elite universities. The kind of people who create Facebook.
Well, in 1968 you can’t go to the Bay Area & create a killer app, so if you want to disrupt stuff you literally have to start a revolution. And that’s the equation: Paranoid fervor of chemtrail-sniffers + Silicon Valley’s faith in its ability to change the world = the Weather Underground.
When it shakes out, two of the big SDS movers and shakers are John “JJ” Jacobs and Bernadine Dorne. Their goal: to take over SDS entirely. Because, remember, organization is critical. SDS is a nationwide organization. And college campuses are receptive to radical messages.
How receptive? In fall of 1968, there were 41 bombings and arson cases on college campuses. We’re not talking letters under doors or vandalism, here. We’re talking about Molotov cocktails setting shit on fire. Here’s how radical SDS was: Burrough notes that Weatherman’s opponents for leadership in SDS elections were “Progressive Labor,” who were literal Maoists. To distinguish themselves, Weatherman called for white radicals to live like John Brown: ie, to kill the enemies of black liberty.
The election was nuts; Weatherman literally expelled their opponents from the party before the vote, so SDS split. But Weatherman occupied the national office, which meant they could evaluate SDS members as potential recruits.

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The FBI was up SDS’s ass, and Weatherman’s. They harassed the core cadre. Beat them. Threatened them. This does not dissuade revolutionaries. Weatherman started doing crazy stuff with SDS: street brawls, public nudity, sexual orgies, ordering established couples to break up. If you think it sounds like a cult, you’re right. This is literally cult indoctrination stuff. They were remaking people, seeking the hardest of hardcore.
The Black Panthers, erstwhile allies, thought Weatherman was nuts. But Weatherman, despite pro-black rhetoric, didn’t care. (Weatherman’s pro-black rhetoric was mainly Phariseeism, done to win acclaim from other whites. Basically, they’re Tim Wise.)
Just to skim through some of the stuff Burroughs addresses: Weatherman’s Bernadine Dohrn goes to Cuba, meets a North Vietnamese delegation, and literally discusses forming an American VC (!!!). Weatherman-controlled SDS chapters around the country are taking over classrooms, running through schools yelling, promoting Days of Rage. As commies, Weatherman is into in fomenting revolt among the working class. Their problem, they keep discovering, is that working class wants to beat the shit out of them.
But Weatherman kept molding their people. They did Maoist “criticism/self-criticism” sessions, lambasting people for weaknesses. If you think the Maoist self-criticism technique sounds like it bears a resemblance to privilege workshops, you’re not wrong. But Weatherman went farther.
They planned to get thousands of people in a massive protest: October 8, 1969, the Days of Rage. But only a couple hundred showed up, so they decided to turn being small into an asset. Weatherman abolished SDS, and went underground.
At about the time they were doing this, the Chicago police stormed Fred Hampton’s apartment and shot him to death in his sleep. Bernardine Dohrn’s reaction to Hampton’s murder included (infamously) praise for the Manson family murder of Sharon Tate.

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It’s about this point where you would think even the most dedicated of hard leftists would realize that things are going off the rails.
But Weatherman is locked in, and getting increasingly insular and cultish. Eventually, there are maybe 150 Weathermen left out of all of SDS. And now they turn to a new organization: the underground, which offered (among other things) a market for new identities. If you’re thinking “hey, I bet that market has something to do with Vietnam-era draft dodgers,” spot-on. They established covers.
And then they started bombing.
Bill Ayers claimed that Weatherman never meant to hurt anyone; this is absolutely a lie. Their first bombing (which they never officially claimed, but which members admitted to Burrough) was a police shift change in Berkeley. Weatherman remains the prime suspect in a police station bombing in the Haight that killed a police officer, though they deny this. In 1970, Weatherman planned to kill a bunch of people at a dance at Fort Dix… but instead blew up their own NYC safehouse in a work accident.
This up-close encounter with death made Weatherman realize they had no stomach for it, and they decided to not try to kill people anymore. (Okay, they did try to kidnap a Rockefeller, but they fucked that up and couldn’t find their victim. Because they were shit.)
Weatherman is facing a few problems at this point: 1) they’re on the run 2) flower children are now dominant in the movement, not hard left 3) people are less supportive of bombings after a postdoc was killed by a Wisconsin car bombing of a university math building that did army research 4) as Burrough very amusingly points out, Americans had decided they actually liked the counterculture in parts: they liked the music and the fashion and a lot of them discovered they liked weed; what they didn’t care about were the radical politics — i.e., literally the only thing Weatherman was trying to sell them.

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So Weatherman tried to suck up to the flower children by helping Timothy Leary (doing 10 years for 2 joints) escape from prison and to Algiers. They thought about freeing Huey Newton, but Leary was in minimum security and Newton was in max and WELP (Newton was free soon, anyway).
But none of it mattered. Nobody cared.
Weatherman had fucked themselves. They’d abandoned the Black Panthers, who now looked down on them. They were leading nobody. They could have made a difference with the organization of SDS, but they’d set it on fire to build Weatherman. And now they’d decided they weren’t going to kill people any more.
So if you’re a radical who’s willing to kill, but decide you won’t… what does that leave? How long can you keep bombing bathrooms until it gets boring? Well, Weatherman is about to find out. Enter the long suck.
A reminder: during this period Weatherman is being hunted by the FBI. So how are they staying fed, sheltered, alive? Part of it is fake I.D.s. The other part of Weatherman staying alive and free is: they are being funded and supported by the National Lawyers’ Guild.
I just want to emphasize this: radical lawyers are literally giving fugitive domestic terrorists who are still bombing money and support.
And it’s harder for hippies to sneak bombs into places. What’s great cover? Parents with children. Weatherman used radical lawyers’ kids. Dohrn actually convinced a radical lawyer’s wife to leave her husband and take the kids and go under with the Weather Underground.
Weatherman bombed the Pentagon in ’72, but by 1974, they’re fighting among themselves, arguing about feminism (hence their name change to Weather Underground). And this is where Weather Underground becomes incredibly relevant to 2016 again: because they decided to re-enter mainstream politics. To do this, they decided, they would take over the radical left, and use that as wedge/entry point to change society.

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This was the plan: 1) Publish a manifesto (Prairie Fire) 2) Make an aboveground group, the Prairie Fire Distribution Committee — not Weather! oh, no! not Weather! — no, just people who admired Weather 3) Turn the PFDC into a permanent group, the PF Organizing Committee 4) Hold a PFOC conference to unite the entire radical left under PFOC 5) Weather’s people deals with their legal issues, then officially take PFOC over, ta-dah!
Weather prints Prairie Fire themselves, distributes thousands of copies to radical organizations and bookstores, does bombings to promote it. This is, Burrough notes, a pretty impressive achievement just in terms of logistics, especially considering they’re on the run from the FBI.
Everything goes smoothly in Weather’s plan until the PFOC conference happens, which looks stunningly like what we’re seeing emerge in today’s Democratic party politics. The white leftist elites (Weather) are stunned to discover that the diverse radicals (black, American Indian, Puerto Rican) they’ve imagined leading actually have opinions of their own, and perfectly rational desires for their own power, and no desire to be ruled by Weather’s upper-crust radicals.
One of Burrough’s Weather interviewees notes that she was very upset and rattled to continually be called racist. This was before white leftists started to unpack their invisible knapsacks and bewail their whiteness as original sin. She couldn’t grasp it.
In the end, Weather was ignominously expelled from their own conference by a Communist who had been one of their former members. (Said Commie later got arrested himself by the Feds when he tried to start a bombing campaign of his own).

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Meanwhile, the DOJ, searching FBI files in response to an unrelated civil rights lawsuit, found evidence of black bag jobs and illegal wiretapping against Weather Underground. So at the end of all this, who faces legal trouble? Not Weather. The FBI. Not big trouble, mind. The FBI guys got fined for the black bag jobs against Weatherman. They served no jail time, and President Reagan pardoned them in April 1981.
In the end, the Weather’s fugitives turned themselves in with little trouble. To give you an idea: Bill Ayers was scott-free. Cathy Wilkerson did a year. Bernardine Dohrn got three years probation and a $1500 fine. The radical lawyers, accessories to Weather’s bombings? Nada. Zip. Zero.
They did pretty well afterwards. Bernardine Dohrn was a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than twenty years. Another Weatherman, Eleanor Stein, was arrested on the run in 1981; she got a law degree in 1986 and became an administrative law judge. Radical attorney Michael Kennedy, who did more than any to keep Weather alive, has been special advisor to President of the UN General Assembly. And, of course, Barack Obama, twice President of the United States, started his political career in Bill Ayers’s living room.
This is the difference between the hard Left & hard Right: you can be a violent leftist radical and go on to live a pretty kickass life. This is especially true if you’re a leftist of the credentialed class: Ph.D. or J.D.

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The big three takeaways for me about Weatherman, when it comes to political violence in America as we might see it in 2016:

1.Radicalism can come from anywhere. The Weathermen weren’t oppressed, or poor, or anything like that. They were hard leftists. That’s it.
2.Sustained political violence is dependent on the willing cooperation of admirers and accomplices. The Left has these. The Right does not.
3.Not a violent issue, but a political one: ethnic issues involving access to power can both empower and derail radical movements.
Moving from the white Leftists to the black revolutionaries, let’s talk for a second about George Jackson. Massive criminal history, seriously violent dude: his own father actually testified against his parole. Jackson was in Soledad prison in 1970 when a fight between white and black inmates broke out in the yard. With no warning, a white guard ended the fight by shooting three black prisoners dead. In retaliation, George Jackson and two other inmates murdered a guard by throwing him off the tier. They became known as the Soledad Three.
Fay Stender, who’d defended Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton, also defended Jackson. She got the radical community backing his freedom and published a book of his letters. So George Jackson got famous.
This is where radical professor Angela Davis comes in. Davis, if you don’t know, is so dedicated to communism that she literally got her Ph.D. behind the Iron Curtain. From a moral perspective, that’s a little like somebody getting a Ph.D. in old South Africa specifically because they dig apartheid.
On August 5, 1970, Davis had a long meeting with George Jackson in prison. After her meeting with George Jackson, Davis bought Jackson’s little brother Jonathan, still in high school, a shotgun. Two days later, Jonathan took hostages in a courtroom and demanded the release of the Soledad Three.

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Jonathan killed the judge before being killed himself. Two other hostages were badly wounded. As for George, on August 21, 1971, somebody — prison officials held it was Jackson’s lawyer — gave him a gun. Jackson took seven hostages before he was killed by snipers while trying to escape prison. Five of the hostages were found dead in his cell.
Jackson wasn’t the only black radical of the period to meet a violent end. The contrast in the fates of 70’s black radicals and white radicals is pretty stark. A lot of white radicals came out okay. A lot of black radicals came out dead.
But Angela Davis did great. She’s had a successful career and remains celebrated. Arrested for her part in Jonathan’s plot, Davis was acquitted, and became a radical icon.
I think an underappreciated factor in Angela Davis doing so well afterward is her position as part of the credentialed class. Like the Weathermen — and unlike most black radicals — Angela Davis had access to Institutions.
Institutions are one of two major assets that the Left has and the Right lacks. The other is Shock Troops.
Institutions are organizations the Left controls that operate for the benefit of the Left’s people. The Right doesn’t really have these. As an example, there are occasional hard right lawyers, but so far as I know there is no such thing as the Reactionary Lawyers’ Guild.
The other thing that the Left has that the Right doesn’t are Shock Troops: un-shameable actors.
Institutions and Shock Troops are important resources for the Left. They work together. The Left’s Institutions accept, cater to, train, and/or employ its people, including Shock Troops. And, in the cases of several Weathermen (and Davis), give them cushy jobs in their Shock-Troop retirement.
What happens when you have Shock Troops, but no, or few, or short-lived Institutions? That’s the story of black radicalism in the USA.

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Burrough’s Days of Rage provides a quite good overview of several parts of black radicalism. We’ll review three groups here: BLA, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Family. (There’s also a little mention of the NWLF, who aren’t a black radical movement but fit in timewise with the SLA.)
Odd fact: in 2016 we saw a lot of news stories about police being targeted for murder, including a spectacular attack in Dallas…and I didn’t seen a single news article mentioning the Black Liberation Army. That’s how forgotten this stuff is!
The short answer to “Who were the BLA?” is “they were a splinter group of the Panthers.” The longer answer requires a little bit of backstory.
In January, 1969, 23 Black Panthers attempted a combination of bombing and sniper attacks on police and at a board of education office. As in a lot of these cases involving radical groups plotting violence, two of the Panthers in question turned out to be undercover NYPD. The actual Panthers involved became known as the Panther 21.
The Panther 21 were found not guilty after an 8-month trial — pretty impressive, because while the undercover cops gave them two fake bombs the Panthers also got real dynamite from another source, so their third bomb actually went off! With the informants and acquittal, in some ways it’s similar to the Malheur Occupation thing, only with an actual murder plot attached.
But can you imagine if a famous conservative like, I dunno, Gary Sinise had tried to raise money for the Malheur Occupation dudes? Okay, well, exactly that happened, but it was Leonard Bernstein raising money for the Panther 21, who actually tried to murder people! Tom Wolfe wrote a ((classic article)) about Bernstein’s party and the period’s radical chic.

((archive.is/HetZp))

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The main reason Burrough discusses the Panther 21 episode: it showcases a growing problem for the Black Panthers. Namely, for a good number of their members, the Black Panthers are not nearly militant enough. And there are a LOT of Panthers at this point. When Huey Newton gets out of prison in 1970, he finds a Black Panther Party that’s grown bigger than his ability to run. Meanwhile, Eldridge Cleaver (remember him?), who’s been running stuff with Huey inside, has set himself up in Algiers with, I shit you not, a nice stipend and an actual embassy paid for by the Algerian government, which I guess really means by the Russians. (The Panthers didn’t have their embassy long. It was gone by the fall of ’72, probably bc some Soviet beancounter said WHAT.)
As you can imagine, at this point Newton and Cleaver absolutely loathed each other, so clearly the smart thing for the party to do was have a phone call between them Live. On. Television. On a local San Francisco talk show.
Sadly, this is not on YouTube.
The TV chat went as well as you’d expect, which means it ended with Cleaver and Newton literally expelling each other from the party. The factionalism was so bad that a Cleaverite Panther was murdered by a Newtonite. The Black Panthers expected a civil war.
If you’re going to have a war, it makes sense to organize for one. So a NY Panther named Dhoruba Moore organizes the Black Liberation Army. One of Moore’s BLA recruits is a young woman named Joanne Chesimard, later known as Assata Shakur. Another is a fellow named Sekou Odinga.
But the Panther civil war never actually happens. And then cops stop three Panthers on the street, it turns into a shootout, and a Panther is killed. The Panthers are understandably enraged, and — wouldn’t you know it? Dhoruba Moore has his new wing of hitters just sitting there.

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So the BLA shrugs: eh, forget the civil war; let’s go kill some cops.
In May 1971, BLA started going out shooting cops in NYC. Two cops were killed with a submachine gun fired from a car. Then two more were brutally short down in the street (Burrough gives the details; they are horrifically graphic). Moore’s group claimed both killings. In truth, a copycat Panther group killed the second two.
The challenge for the BLA is that, while Weatherman has radical lawyers willing to fund and abet them, the BLA, like most radical groups, does not. So the BLA takes to robbery to secure funding. Founder Dhoruba Moore is arrested in one of these attempts, but the BLA keeps rolling.
Eldridge Cleaver, BTW, is totally down with this mayhem. But he does not want to coordinate it. Cleaver’s instruction calls for autonomous cells. In theory: autonomous BLA cells cannot be rolled up wholesale by the cops. In practice: none of the cells know what the other is doing. This leads to batshit crazy things like two BLA cells trying to rob the same bank at the same time.
The point of the robbery, though, let’s not forget, was to enable BLA to better kill cops. BLA used robbery money to establish training camps down South. They killed cops there, too. Within nine months of start-up, BLA had attacked ten cops, killing seven, in four different states. Not a furious pace, but steady.
Chesimard’s cell was finally arrested in 1971, after a massive car chase and gunfight in South Carolina. They were caught with a gun that belonged to one of the murdered cops.
So, of course, they were back walking the streets in NYC by fall ’72.
Yeah: in 1971, you could get in a gunfight with cops, shoot a cop, be carrying a gun stolen during a different state’s double cop murder — and get out of prison in less than a year!
Ever wonder why the American public got behind the idea of mandatory minimums and stiff sentences? The Seventies. The Seventies are why!

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As BLA attacks continued, a lone wolf perp in New Orleans, a black radical named Mark Essex, shot 19 people, killing 9, 5 of them cops. Then NYC saw two BLA attacks on cops in 53 hours, and people started thinking that there was a nationwide conspiracy. (It wasn’t that huge.)
In 1973, Chesimard was shot and captured following a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in which a policeman was killed. Not much later, the police finally landed an informant, and after a few stakeouts and gunfights they arrested or killed BLA’s shooters. Sekou Odinga got away. But that’s basically the end of the BLA. Except…
Except this flurry of activity and press has all the radicals who weren’t involved thinking, “Dang, I missed out!” And guess where there’s been a ton of radicalization? In U.S. prisons!
Weatherman had tried to rally the working class. No luck. They weren’t into being radicalized. But black prisoners really, really were.
And white radicals — many the kind who’d be really into privilege confession today — started getting into the idea of black leadership. I mean: really into the idea of black leadership. To the point of fetishizing it. Fetishizing black convicts, especially.
I told you this gets crazy, right? Well, here’s a little taste of the stuff Burrough gets into. Check this out:
In 1972, a group called Venceremos, from the Bay Area, literally broke out a black convict named Ronald Beaty during a prison transport so he could train them in guerrilla tactics and lead a revolution.

That was their actual plan. That was their entire actual plan.

((WE WUZ ORGANIZERS AN SHEIT))