Radically chic political violence

America's forgotten terrorism epidemic

In his famous 1970 essay ‘Radical Chic’, Tom Wolfe described the scene as members of the Black Panther Party attended a party hosted by Leonard Bernstein at his Park Avenue apartment, there to be fawned over and served canapés.

‘Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons … The butler will bring them their drinks … Deny it if you wish to, but such are the pensées métaphysiques that rush through one’s head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York.’

Wolfe liked to lampoon the tendency of fashionable bohemians and socialites to valorise extremists so long as their cause was fashionable and likely to épater la bourgeoisie. The Panthers preached race war and in their vigilantism escalated from self-defence to fatal ambushes of police officers, but on the other hand, they were quite cool.

More destructive still were their white allies, well-educated radicals who deluded themselves into thinking that America was a new Third Reich, and who were thrilled by the prospect of violence and insensitive to the victims they would create. Terrorism became so common that, as Bryan Burrough wrote in Days of Rage, ‘During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly five a day.’

Even with political assassinations on the rise in the US in the 2020s, the youthful violence of the babyboomers was far worse – and far more indulged. Indeed, not only has this dark chapter been largely forgotten, but those implicated have been rehabilitated, celebrated... even idolised.

Three months ago Cambridge University awarded an honorary doctorate to Angela Davis, describing ‘the political activist, philosopher and author’ as ‘a Distinguished Professor Emerita from the University of California… a radical feminist thinker and prominent civil rights campaigner who was an active member of the Communist Party and champion of the prison abolition movement. She is a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights.’

That is one way of describing her.

A rather different picture is painted in Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution, an account by the conservative activist of the radical ideas that became mainstream in our own age.

Raised by political parents in an area of Birmingham, Alabama that had seen black families burned out, Davis had always felt the lure of activism but in adolescence abandoned what she saw as ‘Booker T. Washington syndrome’, by which she meant the ‘prevailing myth’ that black progress came through individual initiative.

She joined the Black Panther Party but, frustrated by the infighting, turned to the Moscow-backed Communist Party USA. By the end of the 1960s, Davis had also begun campaigning for imprisoned black radicals, including one, George Jackson, who she regularly corresponded with. In order to help his cause, she became friendly with George’s brother Jonathan, and that’s when things started going beyond activism:

In 1968 and 1969, Davis had purchased a .38-caliber automatic pistol and an M-1 carbine rifle, and then, accompanied by Jonathan in the spring and summer of 1970, purchased another M-1 carbine and 150 rounds of ammunition. Finally, on August 5, Davis and Jonathan visited George at San Quentin, then went to a pawnshop in San Francisco and paid cash for a 12-gauge shotgun and a box of shells. The word “revolution” was no longer a metaphor. They were preparing for war.

Two days later, on August 7, 1970, these guns became a part of history. Jonathan Jackson rose from his seat in the gallery of the Marin County Hall of Justice, pulled the Browning .38 pistol out of a satchel, threw it to one of the defendants, then pulled the M-1 carbine from his trench coat and yelled to the astonished crowd: “Freeze!”

Three San Quentin inmates and political radicals -­ James McClain, Ruchell Magee, and William Christmas -­ were in court that day regarding McClain’s alleged stabbing of a prison guard. After Jackson told the on-lookers to “freeze,” the men sprang into action. McClain held the pistol to the head of Judge Harold Haley, Magee freed Christmas from the holding pen, and they lashed together the deputy district attorney and three female jurors with piano wire, taking them as hostages. Jackson then produced the 12-gauge shotgun and the men taped it under the judge’s chin. They briefly contemplated taking an infant hostage, but relented after the mother began screaming, “No, don’t take my baby!”

The hostage-takers made a series of demands, including the release of Jackson and some other prisoners, but as their van exited the perimeter there followed an exchange of bullets with San Quentin prison guards. Four men were killed - Jackson, McClain, Christmas and Judge Haley, shot dead by one of the hostage-takers using a gun purchased by Davis.

Davis was arrested, and initially kept on remand, where she became a cause célèbre among a number of celebrities including – of course – John and Yoko. At her subsequent trial Davis was found not guilty of kidnapping, murder and conspiracy, and, Rufo writes:

The courthouse erupted in cheers. One juror flashed the Black Power salute to the audience outside the courtroom and told reporters: “I did it because I wanted to show I felt an identity with the oppressed people in the crowd. All through the trial, they thought we were just a white, middle- class jury. I wanted to express my sympathy with their struggle.” Later that evening, a majority of the jurors attended a rock-and-roll festival in celebration of Davis’s acquittal.

Four men were dead and one of the hostages had been paralyzed from the waist down,’ Rufo wrote: ‘but revolutionary justice had been served. Angela Davis had put American society on trial - and won.

Davis became a star in the Soviet Union, where schoolchildren were made to send her letters of support. ‘In our country, literally for one whole year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis,’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalled bitterly, something many of us who remember 2020 might empathise with. Going on a publicity tour of the Soviet Union in 1972, she praised the country for its treatment of minorities, although there was awkwardness when some Czech dissidents asked her to speak up on behalf of political prisoners in that country. Her reply: ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.’ That year she was also a guest of East Germany, where she laid flowers at the memorial of a border guard killed by someone trying to flee.

She was no less lauded by American progressives. In 1972, Rufo writes, Davis was invited to give a lecture at California State University in Fullerton, where she told the story of Emily Butler, a black woman who had murdered her boss over an office argument.

‘But for Angela Davis, the culprit was not Butler, who had emptied the revolver into her supervisor, but the society that had left her no choice but to kill. “We have to realize that Emily Butler is not guilty,” Davis told the cheering students. “It is racism that pulled that trigger. Racism. And if anybody needs to be indicted and imprisoned, it’s the reincarnation of racism himself, Richard Nixon.”’

Davis finally left the Communist Party in 1991, and since then has become a keen supporter of prison abolitionism while giving her support to various individuals who find themselves in trouble with the authorities.

Davis was cleared by a jury, but I somehow doubt that a Right-wing activist who had bought a gun used in a murder, and who was an active supporter of their country’s number one enemy, would be celebrated in the same way. Indeed, Davis’s close association with a man who blew a judge’s head off has not prevented the West’s academic and culture elite from fawning over her.

On top of her Cambridge doctorate, various honours have been bestowed, including The American Book Award, a doctorate from Université Paris-Nanterre in France, an honour from The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and membership of the National Women’s Hall of Fame,

Angela Davis Day was proclaimed by Atlanta City Council in 2023, and the previous year the wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom celebrated Davis in a TikTok video called ‘5 Golden State trailblazers to celebrate this Women’s History Month.’ There are at least a dozen murals celebrating Davis, including one in Brighton. (Of course it’s Brighton.)

But even actually convicted terrorists find their way back to respectability if their violence is done for some idealistic, noble cause. Burrough chronicled the activities of the extremist Weather Underground movement, responsible for bombing 25 government buildings, including the Capitol and Pentagon, during a chaotic reign of low-level terror.

Kathy Boudin, one of the original Weathermen, was sentenced to 20 years-to-life after taking part in the notorious Brinks truck robbery in 1981 in which two police officers, Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and security guard Peter Paige, were killed. Released in 2003, ten years later she was teaching at Colombia university as a professor in social work, and also founded the Center for Justice, a group dedicated to reducing the prison population.

When Boudin died in 2022, a Guardian obituary written by leading barrister Dame Helena Kennedy described how ‘The decisions that she came to regret came out of a passion for justice — against racism in the US, by demonstrating in favour of civil rights, and against imperialism abroad, as represented by the Vietnam war.’

Boudin’s husband and fellow Weatherman David Gilbert also went to jail after the Brinks robbery, leaving their son Chesa to be raised by former comrades Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who by then were out of the business. Ayers had a decade earlier spent time on the run after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, along with two other conspirators, were killed trying to make bombs in her Greenwich Village town house in 1970. While escaping from the law, and still active in planting bombs, Ayers married Dohrn, then on the FBI’s most wanted list and described by J. Edgar Hoover as ‘the most dangerous woman in America’.

Rufo described Dohrn as ‘the most charismatic Weather Underground leader’, but reading accounts of her activism is to enter into a Once Upon A Time In Hollywood world of dangerous, crazy hippies.

At a 1969 Weatherman meeting in Flint, Michigan, she

celebrated the serial killer Charles Manson, the cult leader who had recently butchered the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four of her friends. “Dig it!” Dohrn 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!”

In Flint, the Weathermen confronted one another in all-night, Mao-inspired criticism/self-criticism sessions, confronting their racial privilege, their sexual inhibitions, and their commitment to the revolution. They engaged in macabre thought experiments and contemplated the question of whether it was “the duty of every good revolutionary to kill all newborn white babies,” who would otherwise “grow up to be part of an oppressive racial establishment.”

Eventually, with their failure to inspire a revolution in America, ‘the Weathermen made their final pivot: they would slowly come out of hiding and re-enter the bourgeois world. They were tired of living as fugitives, wanted to start families, and desired the simple comforts of a middle-class life. Beginning in 1977, the Weathermen gradually negotiated their surrender and came out of the shadows. To their surprise, only one Weatherman, Cathy Wilkerson, served any prison time - just eleven months - for the string of bombings. Ayers had charges against him dropped. Dohrn, Rudd, and others escaped with sentences of probation for various misdemeanors.’ Compared to the Black Panthers, and perhaps rather proving the radical left’s whole argument about race, they were treated in a remarkably lenient manner.

The group had by now fallen out: Dohrn and Ayers wanted to surrender, while Boudin and Gilbert refused to give up and their bank job would be a last hurrah for the extreme left.

Ayers was not only rehabilitated but ended up as a mentor for his neighbour Barack Obama and helped the future president’s career. Rufo writes that ’The two men had a close working relationship centered around the community at the University of Chicago, and shared much the same worldview, despite the fact the Obama campaign lied about the nature of their relationship. In fact, books have been written about how Obama lied and obscured his past radicalism, and the media were enthusiastically complicit in helping him.’

During the year of Obama’s election Cass Sunstein, a law professor and author, reflected on the presence of Ayers and Dohrn in their Chicago neighbourhood: ‘I feel very uncomfortable with their past, but neither of them is thought of as horrible types now - so far as most of us know, they are legitimate members of the community.’ I understand his discomfort; I just doubt that an unrepentant right-wing terrorist would be regarded as a ‘legitimate member of the community’ anywhere.

After the publication of Ayers’ memoirs in the early 2000s The New York Times ran a sympathetic profile, which ends with a poem about hope. and in which the former Weatherman reflected that ‘I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough’. This was published, with unfortunate timing, on September 11, 2001.

It was not just Ayers; Rufo notes that many former terrorists went on to have impressive and influential careers.

The Weathermen, in spite of their participation in political terror campaigns, found a welcome home in the academy, too. Dohrn, who had promised to “lead white kids into armed revolution,” became a professor at Northwestern. Ayers, who had laid bombs at the Pentagon and the US Capitol, became a professor at the University of Illinois.

In total, approximately half of the most active Weathermen managed to secure positions in the education field, from prestigious appointments at Duke, Fordham, and Columbia to more modest sinecures in the public school systems of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, where the old revolutionary cells had been most prominent.’

In 2019 Boudin and Gilbert’s son Chesa Boudin became San Francisco District Attorney on a platform of letting criminals out of jail and decriminalising minor offences. The results were… as expected. He was recalled by voter petition before the end of his term.

The Weathermen were forgiven their role in destruction and death because their hearts were in the right place, but even sexual crime could be overlooked if the cause was cool enough. Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party leader, was lauded in progressive circles despite boasting about rape in his bestselling memoir, Soul on Ice (‘brilliant and revealing’ – the New York Times). He wrote how ‘Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.’

In his essay, Wolfe observed that the extremism of the Panthers did not deter its admirers in the intelligentsia, but quite the opposite:

The main thing was that the Panthers were the legitimate vanguard of the black struggle for liberation - among the culturati whom Leonard Bernstein could be expected to know and respect, this was not a point of debate, it was an axiom. The chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic, The New York Review of Books, regularly cast Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver as the Simón Bolívar and José Martí of the black ghettos. On August 24, 1967, The New York Review of Books paid homage to the summer urban riot season by printing a diagram for the making of a Molotov cocktail on its front page. In fact, the journal was sometimes referred to good-naturedly as The Parlour Panther, with the -our spelling of Parlour being an allusion to its concurrent motif of Anglophilia.

Cleaver’s life trajectory turned out to be the strangest of all. As his 1998 obituary recalled, he ‘metamorphosed into variously a born-again Christian, a follower of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a Mormon, a crack cocaine addict, a designer of men’s trousers featuring a codpiece and even, finally, a Republican.’ At last, something that might get him cancelled.

The tendency to valorise violence if carried out for fashionable causes is not new, and goes back to the 19^th century at least. Plenty of western intellectuals justified communist atrocities as being for the greater good. Today we see crowds cheering alleged murderer Luigi Mangione. A considerable minority of young progressives in the US support political violence.

It is true that much of this is bravado by the ‘physically weak, the mentally fragile, the beneficiaries of a stable society they proclaim the wish to overturn’, as Aris Roussinos described them. As with the radicals of the late 1960s, many people are living out a fantasy that they are fighting fascism, even as every violent act by the Left raises the risk and popularity of right-wing authoritarianism. Because communists were so influential in writing the post-war moral narrative of the Third Reich, the vital role of the extreme left in creating its conditions has been ignored.

There is also a somewhat Late Tsarist tendency among younger American leftists to revel in political violence, echoing the millenarian atmosphere once found in that other great multicultural continental empire, where a generation of eternal students felt that their educational advancement had not been matched by improvements in financial or social status.

Perhaps the difference today is that the revolutionaries have already won. That is certainly Rufo’s argument:

When Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver laid out the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, they demanded affirmative action, universal basic income, racialist ideology in schools, an expansive welfare state, and that the black criminal, once derided as part of “the scum layer of society,” become the new moral center.

Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael had created the concept of “institutional racism.” Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver had popularized the concept of the “white power structure.” Angela Davis popularized the phrases “police brutality,” “social inequities,” “disproportionate representation,” and “prison-industrial complex.” Her mentor Herbert Aptheker coined the term “anti-racism.” Over the decades, this language escaped from the pages of the Black Panther newsletter and the BLA communiqué and legitimized itself through the organs of prestige knowledge-formation.

So the terrorism is forgotten because the terrorists of the late 60s and early 70s were victorious. As social psychologist Keith Campbell observed in a recent substack post, ‘They don’t show much of the violence of those decades in movies because the violent side won - some even became professors. Instead we see the psychedelic music and good times.’ Still, the music was good - we can all ‘dig’ that.