Demonic (27 page)

• Ayers’s wife, Ohrnstein/Dohrn, called for revolutionary war in the United States, praised the Manson family, laughed about a paralyzed DA, said “Bring the Revolution home, kill your parents—that’s where it’s at,” and participated in the bombing of the Pentagon. She is a professor at Northwestern University’s Children and Justice Center.

• Mark Rudd, also a Weatherman leader, who led the student strike at Columbia University, taught at a community college in New Mexico until retiring in 2007.

• Angela Davis, former Black Panther, was the legal owner of the guns the Panthers used to blow off the head of Marin County judge Harold Haley in an attempt to free Davis’s boyfriend, George Jackson. Today she is a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

• Eleanor Raskin was involved in all the Weathermen’s lunacy, from the Days of Rage to the Greenwich Village townhouse bombing. She now teaches at Albany Law School.

• Mike Klonsky was National Chairman of SDS in 1968, during the violent riots at the Democratic National Convention, and founded the Maoist October League, which later adopted the catchy name “The Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).” In 1977, he was an honored guest of the Communist Chinese government, where he comically vowed to “topple the U.S. imperialist ruling class” and told the Chinese “we are determined as well to make a contribution to the worldwide struggle against the two superpowers.” The Chinese enjoyed his presentation because they don’t speak English.

Today, Klonsky is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. When Barack Obama was doling out various foundation grants, he funneled nearly $2 million to Klonsky and Bill Ayers. Klonsky was also on President Clinton’s Advisory Council of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence.

• David Hilliard, the Black Panthers’ “Field Marshal,” did not do anything as threatening as ask to see a president’s birth certificate, but he did stand in front of a quarter million people and scream, “Later for Richard Milhous Nixon, the motherfucker! … Because Richard Nixon is an evil man! … Fuck that motherfucking man! We will kill Richard Nixon!”
⁴⁷

Hilliard has taught at Merritt College, Laney College, New College, and the University of New Mexico.
⁴⁸

• Susan Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army,
and
The Family. She conspired to kill cops, blow up buildings, and stage an armed robbery of the Brinks truck in Nanuet, New York. Sentenced to fifty-eight years in prison for felony murder and possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives, Rosenberg was released from prison by President Clinton on his last day in office.

Just a few years later, Rosenberg was offered a teaching position at Hamilton College, despite having absolutely no qualifications to teach—with only a master’s degree in writing she got through a correspondence course in prison.

In addition to springing various Weathermen from prison, President Clinton also pardoned sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists who had set off more than a hundred bombs in New York and Chicago in the seventies and eighties, killing a half dozen people and injuring more than seventy. They hadn’t even asked for pardons.

If Charles Manson’s followers hadn’t killed Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, Clinton would have pardoned him, too, and he’d probably be teaching at Northwestern University.

And yet we still have to hear it asked: Why did this group of privileged kids declare war on their own government? Perhaps the next batch of glowing articles, books, and movies will get to the bottom of that brainteaser. If only liberal elites had treated these social climbers a little bit less like Jennifer Aniston and a little bit more like Mel Gibson, nine children in Nyack, New York, might have grown up with their fathers.

With embarrassing bravado, Bill Ayers told his fellow Weathermen, “It’s not a comfortable life, it’s not just a dollar move, it’s standing up in the face of the enemy, and risking your life and risking everything for that struggle.”
⁴⁹

Of course it was a dollar move. Like no-name rock bands and comedians staging “benefits” ostensibly for left-wing causes, but actually to benefit themselves, student radicals declaring “war” on Amerikkka had found a surefire path to celebrity. Ted Gold was making note for his memoir before blowing himself up in the townhouse. For some people, nothing is more important than fame. The Weather Underground
was the sixties version of
The Jersey Shore
—except Obama doesn’t know Snooki. Let’s see these brave dissidents, allegedly willing to risk “everything,” try to get through one day in the life of non-elite-approved Sarah Palin, Scooter Libby, Mark Fuhrman, Linda Tripp, Clarence Thomas, Dan Quayle, Ken Starr, Karl Rove, Carrie Prejean, Michele Bachmann, or Katherine Harris, to name a few people liberals would run over with their cars and laugh about it.

A century earlier, Fyodor Dostoyevsky captured the identical sickness in 1860s Russia in his novel
The Demons
, depicting the corrosive effect of the French Revolution’s ideas on Russian society. After so many years of peace and calm, the older generation couldn’t imagine that anything could possibly go wrong with the conscienceless children they had raised. Exhibiting the mad narcissism of the liberal intellectual set, the fashionable people in
The Demons
are constantly entertaining deranged revolutionaries at the town’s most desirable social events. One character, a failed Russian novelist, toys with nihilistic anarchists to feed his own ego, flattering them as the only generation to speak truth boldly, while boasting about his own atheism.

The Demons
was as prescient a warning regarding the disaster about to befall Russia as Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
was about that cataclysm. On the eve of the French Revolution, Burke cautioned that “criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.” He said the moment one capitulates to the idea that mayhem and murder are justified for the greater good, the greater good is forgotten and mayhem and murder become ends in themselves, until only violence can “satiate their insatiable appetites.”
⁵⁰

Beginning in the 1960s, American liberals were unable to stop flirting with mob violence. Like Dostoyevsky’s unsuccessful author, they embraced sociopathic malcontents because it made them feel hip and young. Today, the angry rabble is simply another faction of the Democratic mainstream. As Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield has said, the sixties bequeathed us radicals who are “neither so outrageous nor so violent as at first. The poison has worked its way into our soul, the effects becoming less visible to us as they become more ordinary.”
⁵¹

TEN
CIVIL RIGHTS AND
THE MOB:

GEORGE WALLACE, BULL
CONNOR, ORVAL FAUBUS,
AND OTHER DEMOCRATS

I
t was the Democratic Party that ginned up the racist mob against blacks and it is the Democratic Party ginning every new mob today—ironically, all portraying themselves as the equivalent of the Freedom Riders. With real civil rights secure—try to find a restaurant that won’t serve a black person—modern civil rights laws benefit only the mob, not the victims of the mob, as American blacks had been. Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of ObamaCare as racists.

Democrats have gone from demagoguing white (trash) voters with claims that Republicans are the party of blacks, to demagoguing black voters telling them Republicans are the party of racists. Any mob in a storm.

The liberal fairy tale that Southern bigots simply switched parties, from Democrat to Republican, is exactly wrong. What happened is: The Democrats switched mobs. Democrats will champion any group
of hooligans in order to attain power. As Michael Barone said of the vicious segregationist (and Democrat) George Wallace, he was “a man who really didn’t believe in anything—a political opportunist who used opposition to integration to try and get himself ahead.”
¹

This is why the Democrats are able to transition so seamlessly from defending Bull Connor racists to defending Black Panthers, hippies, yippies, Weathermen, feminists, Bush derangement syndrome liberals,
Moveon.org
, and every other indignant, angry mob.

Every segregationist who ever served in the Senate was a Democrat and remained a Democrat except one. Even Strom Thurmond—the only one who later became a Republican—remained a Democrat for eighteen years after running for president as a Dixiecrat. There’s a reason they were not called the “Dixiecans.”

Democratic senators Ernest Hollings, Richard Russell, and Sam Ervin all voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all remained Democrats for the rest of their lives.
²
Al Gore’s father, Albert Gore, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; both he and his son remained lifelong Democrats. J. William Fulbright voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he remained a Democrat and became the political mentor to Bill Clinton. Senator Robert “Sheets” Byrd voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he remained a senior statesman in the Democratic Party until his dying day.

A curious sleight of hand is required to hide from the children the fact that all the segregationists in the Senate were Democrats. In history books, such as Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, the segregationists are not called “Democrats.” They’re called “Southerners.”
³

Except it wasn’t just “Southerners” voting against civil rights. Not every senator who opposed black civil rights was a Southerner, but every one was a Democrat. In addition to the Southern Democrats who voted against putting the 1957 civil rights bill on the Senate calendar, for example, there were five Democrats from nowhere near the South: Democratic senator Wayne Morse of Oregon—a favorite target of Senator Joe McCarthy—Democratic senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, Democratic senator James Murray of Montana, Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Democratic senator Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming.
⁴

According to Caro, the Western Democrats traded their votes on civil rights for a dam authorization on the Idaho-Oregon border.
⁵
That’s how dear black civil rights were to liberals—they traded them away for a dam.

While Democrats are the party of the mob, Republicans are the party of calm order, willing to breach the peace only when it comes to great transgressions against humanity—slavery, abortion, and terrorism.

Republican president Abraham Lincoln fought a Civil War and sacrificed 600,000 American lives to preserve the union, rallying the union with the principle that all men are created equal. The Democrats favored allowing slavery in the territories, and the Whigs were pro-choice on slavery—rejecting extremist rhetoric on both sides. The Republican Party was founded for the express purpose of opposing slavery.

After the Civil War, it was Republicans who passed the Thirteenth Amendment, granting slaves their freedom; the Fourteenth Amendment, granting them citizenship; and Fifteenth Amendment, giving them the right to vote. It was Republicans who sent federal troops to the Democratic South to enforce the hard-won rights of the freed slaves.

Then, as now, the Democrats favored the hooligans. The Ku Klux Klan was originally formed as a terrorist group to attack Republicans who had come to the Democratic South after the Civil War to help enforce legal equality for freed slaves.

It was—again—Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867, both signed into law by Republican president Ulysses S. Grant. Under the “living Constitution,” the Supreme Court upheld fraudulent “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks in the 1896 case
Plessy v. Ferguson
.

Republicans kept introducing federal civil rights bills and Democrats kept blocking them—a bill to protect black voters in the South in 1890; antilynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938; and anti–poll tax bills in 1942, 1944, and 1946.

With a lock on the racist mob vote, Democratic politicians won elections and promptly resegregated the entire South with Jim Crow laws. In 1913, Progressive Democrat president Woodrow Wilson even instituted segregation in Washington, D.C., bringing Jim Crow to the federal workforce. Wilson summarily dismissed black officials from
their federal jobs in the South and in D.C. “Segregation is not a humiliation,” Wilson explained to a black delegation that came to the White House to complain, “but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” During Wilson’s first term, Booker T. Washington went to Washington, D.C., and reported, “I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”
⁶

President Wilson’s racist policies were fully supported by Democrats in Congress, and angrily denounced by Republicans.

Much as elected Democrats promote deranged documentarian Michael Moore today, Wilson hailed the virulently racist, pro-KKK movie
Birth of a Nation
as “writing history with lightning,” saying his only regret was that “it is all so terribly true.” Wilson even held a special showing of
Birth of a Nation
at the White House for cabinet members and members of Congress. (By contrast, President Reagan showed Dr. Bernard Nathanson’s anti-abortion documentary,
Silent Scream
, in his White House.)