The Rehabilitation of New Left Terrorists and the African-American Communist revolutionary Angela Davis-in Film and in our Universities

This week, the rehabilitation of the most extreme of the New Left groups-The Weather Underground-has entered a new stage. Yesterday, The New York Post revealed that convicted felon Kathy Boudin, who was released from jail a decade ago after serving 22 years for her role as getaway driver in the Brinks robbery in Westchester New York in 1981, was given the position of an Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Work. At the same time, Boudin was also given a position held concurrently at New York University, where she was appointed Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence. She recently gave a lecture for that program, on “the politics of parole and re-entry,” something which she obviously knows about.

There are, of course, many candidates with her CV who could have been given both positions, and most of them were not part of a leftist terrorist group whose action resulted in the death of the first African-American police officer in that area, and two other police officers, two of whom  had families that grew up without a father. When she was pulled over, Boudin shouted to the officers whose guns were drawn, “put the gun back.” They put their revolvers in their holsters. At that point, as they went to inspect the back of the closed doors of the van she was driving, her cohorts came out with weapons blazing, killing the two policemen and one other who had joined in pursuit.

Boudin was never repentant. As David Horowitz points out today in NRO, she is a “murderess who betted the cold-blooded massacre of three law-enforcement officers, including the first African-American on the Nyack police force; a woman whose actions left nine children fatherless and who has shown no genuine remorse for that.” Horowitz next points out the following:

Her colleagues Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who organized the terrorist Weather Underground in which Kathy Boudin was a soldier, were not adjunct faculty members like Boudin but full-fledged professors (at Northwestern and the University of Illinois). Ayers, a Columbia graduate, is an iconic figure at Columbia’s Teachers College (a third professional school at Columbia that is an ongoing disgrace) and has edited its series of classroom guides on how to use subjects like Mathematics to teach “social justice” — which, as Ayers understands and articulates it, is indistinguishable from the principles of the Communist gulags that the Cold War disposed of.

Next, this Friday is the premiere of the new film directed by and starring Robert Redford, The Company You Keep, that along with Redford, stars Shia LaBeouf, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Nick Nolte, and many other top rated Hollywood actors. Billed as a thriller, the movie is based loosely on Bill Ayers and the group that held up banks and pulled off the Brinks Robbery.

In a major 90 minute video interview with The New York Times, Redford was asked by Timesman David Carr what his motivation was for making the film. His answer was most revealing. “I was at the time,” Redford acknowledged, “very sympathetic to the Weather Underground, and I thought that their cause was just.” Redford clearly regards them as they themselves claim, as simply militant anti-war activists. Redford then said that despair on their inability to end the war forced  them to move in a new direction, and that “I disagreed with their turn to violence,” which he, like Ayers and Dohrn today, blames on the U.S. government, which they argue on a daily basis unjustly killed and harmed more people than they ever did.

Indeed, in the film itself, the Sarandon character, obviously based on Kathy Boudin, says essentially that—the same rationale that Ayers has given in scores of interviews. Just today, he again proceeded to offer a whitewash of his and the Weather Underground’s record, in a softball interview called “Bill Ayers Uncensored,” that appears on The Daily Beast/Newsweek website.

Ironically, in the very first issue of The Daily Beast, Tina Brown opted to open it with a tough anti-Ayers essay by Paul Berman, who called Ayers “the stupidest man in America, politically speaking; always is, always was.”  To those who claimed he was just an anti-war and civil rights activist, Berman correctly wrote: “But, hey, Prof. Ayers is, in fact, an unrepentant terrorist. As for ‘lunatic leftist,’ why, if this phrase does not apply to Ayers, it applies to no one.” Like Horowitz today, Berman concluded that “The armed left-wing movements of those years claimed to be the champions of black advancement, and yet made a point of destroying the actual black people who were advancing.”

Now, Brown assigned the interview with Ayers to one Marlow Stern, who clearly knows nothing about Ayers, and hence allows him to get away with a complete whitewash of his actual record. The group was created with a formal “Declaration of War” against “Amerikka.” Their goal was to start a race war in the United States, which is why in her famous speech, Dohrn made a hero of Charles Manson. They meant to destroy SDS, and transform it into the basis of a domestic guerilla army, which would “make the Revolution,” as they used to say. They incited the left to engage in this war, and the naïve interviewer allows Ayers to paint his movement in terms other than they claimed it stood for in the 60’s and 70’s. Contrary to what Ayers argues now and Redford believes, they were not part of the anti-war movement. They sought Revolution at home and victory to the Viet-Cong and all revolutionary movements abroad. As David Horowitz points out in as yet an unprinted letter to the editor of The Daily Beast,  and he is perhaps our nation’s leading expert on the New Left, the interviewer allows Ayers to wrap himself around the civil rights movement and the anti-war forces in order to exculpate himself from the crimes of which he was guilty. And as for the claim that they never hurt anyone, there are scores of actual deaths and bombings they took credit for, but for which no one was ever arrested. And as for the others, like the planned Fort Dix bombing in which their leadership blew themselves up in the W.10th street townhouse, it was not for want of trying.

If all the above is not enough, this Friday, at AMC theater chains, a new documentary movie opens about the Communist and Black Panther revolutionary activist, Angela Davis, called “Free Angela Davis and all Political Prisoners.” Directed by filmmaker Shola Lynch, it has the support and financial backing of Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of the actor Will Smith. As the article about it makes very clear, it is out and out Communist propaganda, the kind we have not seen in decades. Once reserved for small leftist outfits like Newsreel, which made scores of Black Panther propaganda films in the 60s, now a major chain sees fit to put out such drivel for mass consumption, in the hope that a new generation- already raised at our colleges and universities in the world of leftist falsehood, will believe the portrait painted in the movie.

Pinkett Smith explains how she got involved and what she knew about Davis beforehand: “Through my family and also once I became really good friends with Tupac Shakur, that’s really when I got pretty educated about the Black Panther movement. Of course, Angela Davis being a very prominent figure during that particular era. So that’s when I became a really big fan.” Now she believes that now “Angela Davis [has] become the figure of freedom and justice not only in our country but around the world,” a belief that she 0bviously believes, but the truth of which is the opposite. She is only regarded as such by the far left in this country, and actually despised by all those who formerly lived in the Communist world of real oppression, under a system which Davis supported and whose repression against dissidents she completely approved.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I had a book review appear about the high school I attended in the 1950’s in New York City, which the editors appropriately titled “Fast Times at Lenin High.” I mention it here because both Angela Davis and Kathy Boudin went to that school, which was in those years staffed almost entirely by teachers who belonged to the American Communist Party or were its fellow travelers, and where any leftist proclivities learned at home were reinforced by the teaching staff.

Now, the kind of warped political education I learned at that institution has become the norm for the culture at large. Even conservatives have proved not immune to it. Yesterday, Robert Redford appeared on Joe Scarborough’s morning TV program, and found that he and his co-host waxed ecstatic about the brilliant film Redford had made, offering not one word of criticism, and accepting his own portrayal of its accuracy.

So this coming week we have had evidence of how our culture is rewarding the worst elements of the far left: New Left revolutionary terrorists who are given jobs, those who are given space in major media to spin their own story dishonestly that is bought by gullible interviewers, and two new movies resurrecting the Weather Underground and a Stalinist hack who believes in “the science of Marxism-Leninism,” as she calls it. I can think of no better ending than to again quote David Horowitz, who writes in his NRO interview, “These are sad times for our country, and the hour is late.”