One standard for them, another for us — this is ‘forgiveness asymmetry’
Left-wing terrorism is back. Tesla dealerships and charging stations are the targets of a firebombing campaign, quietly supported by opponents of the current administration and their inability to accept political defeat.
While the White House has declared these arsons to be domestic terrorism, the opposition is in no rush to condemn the attacks. Indeed, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) even framed them as legitimate protest, with zero pushback from his CNN interviewer.
The old ruling class and its left-wing allies will forgive, rehabilitate, and even idolize perpetrators of the worst kinds of political violence.
We shouldn’t be surprised. This sort of thing has happened many times before.
Luigi Mangione, facing life behind bars for the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is considered a folk hero by many on the left. Legacy media, Democrats, and even some Republicans declared their sympathy for the motivations of staggeringly violent Black Lives Matter riots in 2020.
A few months after the “Summer of Love,” those same people framed the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as an unforgivable “insurrection” against democracy.
It’s all a symptom of what I call “forgiveness asymmetry.”
On the right, many conservatives will enthusiastically purge people who are nominally on their own side, often over mere words — offensive jokes, remarks, and fringe viewpoints.
Meanwhile, the old ruling class and its left-wing allies will forgive, rehabilitate, and even idolize perpetrators of the worst kinds of political violence.
Consider the wave of left-wing terrorism that swept across America in the 1970s and 1980s. In those years, a variety of far-left organizations carried out thousands of bombings, armed robberies, prison breaks, and shoot-outs across the country. These included the killing of police officers, plane hijackings, and the bombing of government buildings.
Despite the widespread death and destruction, many Americans are completely unaware that it happened. Given the partisan slant of the education system, it’s unlikely that you heard about it in a high school history class. You’re also unlikely to have heard about it in college, especially if you attended a campus where the former terrorists were awarded professorships.
Professorships. But first, the history.
When terror was commonplace
As Vanity Fair correspondent Bryan Burrough recounts in his 2015 book, “Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” left-wing political violence was routine 50 years ago:
"People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States," notes a retired FBI agent, Max Noel. "People don't want to listen to that. They can't believe it. One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.”
The violence emerged from the political froth of the 1960s student movement, when a radical faction of the far-left protesters decided that sit-ins and placards were not enough to achieve revolutionary change. New methods — violent methods — would be necessary.
The most famous terrorist faction was the Weather Underground, which carried out a string of bombings in the 1970s. Its targets included the Pentagon, the State Department, and a Chicago memorial for fallen police officers. The Weathermen praised the Manson family murders and debated the ethics of killing white babies to avoid bringing more “oppressors” into the world.
The Weather Underground last rose to public attention in 2008 due to then-candidate Barack Obama’s palling around with its co-founders, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. It’s the only time I can remember leftist terrorism breaking into the national news cycle, and it only happened because Republicans forced the issue. It’s not as if legacy media wanted to talk about it.
There were many other groups that are now largely forgotten. There was the May 19th Communist Organization, which bombed government buildings and conducted bank robberies in the 1980s. There was also the Black Liberation Army, which murdered numerous police officers and even hijacked a passenger aircraft in the 1970s. And there was the United Freedom Front, which bombed at least 20 corporate and government buildings in the same decade.
These disparate groups shared a common ideology, born from the radical left-wing politics of the 1960s. It was a potent cocktail of communism, “anti-imperialism” (though not necessarily anti-Soviet imperialism), black liberation, and women’s liberation — the forerunners of what we now call wokeness.
Isn’t it funny that the same people who brushed this decade-long insurgency under the historical rug want us to be mad about one day of trespassing on Jan. 6, 2021?
M19CO, for example, was so named because May 19 was the birthday of both Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X. In its public statements, the Weather Underground promised to “lead white kids into armed revolution” on behalf of black people, against “capitalists” and “imperialism.” The UFF said its bombings were motivated by “racist imperialism in South Africa.”
When we think of wokeness today, we think of black Vikings on TV and transgender activists in Bud Light ads. In the 1970s, it would have conjured images of pipe bombs and police shoot-outs.
The terrorist wave set a trend of targeting high-profile targets. Leftist terrorists bombed the U.S. Capitol building — twice. They bombed the State Department. They bombed police stations, prisons, and banks. The target was always the U.S. government and Western corporations. Corporations, cops, and America itself were the enemy. As stated in a variety of public declarations, their goal was the violent destruction of the racist, capitalist, imperialist United States.
Isn’t it funny that the same people who brushed this decade-long insurgency under the historical rug want us to be mad about one day of trespassing on Jan. 6, 2021?
From terrorists to professors
What’s remarkable about the 1970s terrorism is how quickly its perpetrators were forgiven. Ayers and Dohrn, the pair who started it all, barely suffered any consequences. The FBI investigation of Ayers coincided with public revelations about the bureau's use of illegal wiretaps and warrantless property searches. When it emerged that these tactics were used against the Weather Underground, charges against Ayers were dropped. He never spent a day in jail.
Over the following decades, Columbia University accepted Ayers into its grad school, the University of Illinois awarded him a professorship, and the American Educational Research Association appointed him its vice president for curriculum studies.
School curricula. For your kids.
Dohrn received little more than a slap on the wrist. When she turned herself in to the authorities in 1980, she received a $1,500 fine and three years’ probation. Had she not refused to testify against fellow terrorist Susan Rosenberg, she would have served no time in jail. In the end, she was behind bars for a mere seven months.
A few years later, Dohrn was hired by the prestigious multinational law firm Sidley Austin, even though she had never practiced law before. Asked about this hiring decision, the head of the firm (a pal of her father-in-law) casually remarked, “We often hire friends.” Despite failing to obtain a law license — over lack of contrition for her past actions — she remined at the company for years. The alumni of the FBI’s Most Wanted List, who never showed much contrition in later years, also ended up teaching America’s youth as a law professor at Northwestern University.
And then there’s Susan Rosenberg. A member of M19CO, Rosenberg was an accomplice in one of the most notorious acts of that era’s terrorist wave: the 1981 Brink’s robbery, in which members of M19CO and the Black Liberation Army stole $1.6 million in cash from an armored truck, killing one of its guards and wounding another. Tracked down by police, the robbers killed two officers and wounded another.
Rosenberg did suffer consequences for the Brink’s murders, as well as her role in the 1981 U.S. Senate bombing. Arrested in 1984, she was sentenced to 58 years in prison but only served 16 of them behind bars. Bill Clinton pardoned her on his final day in office in 2001. Kathy Boudin, another participant in the robbery, was paroled soon after.
Yes, the left shamelessly rehabilitated its terrorists and cop-killers. But what can we learn from it?
What did they do later, you ask? Rosenberg, whose M19CO organization also broke serial cop-killer Assata Shakur out of prison in 1979, joined the board of directors of the Thousand Currents Foundation. The foundation played a leading role in getting Black Lives Matter off the ground. The same Black Lives Matter that sparked a season of rioting and violence in the summer of 2020. Those riots left 25 people dead and caused roughly $2 billion in property damage, proving that 1970s ideology is still more than capable of causing death and destruction.
As for Kathy Boudin, Columbia University granted her an adjunct professorship, because who's gonna stop them? Former left-wing terrorists get to be university professors and teach America’s kids. Those are the rules.
Speaking of Kathy Boudin, have you heard of her son, Chesa? He is the now-former district attorney of San Francisco, recalled from office in 2022 because his policy of letting repeat criminals out of jail was too much even for that notoriously progressive city. The scion of terrorists and bank robbers was, for a harrowing moment, in charge of the law.
Both of Chesa’s parents were incarcerated for their role in the deadly 1981 Brink’s robbery, but that didn’t spare him the fate of being raised by militants. The pair who stepped up to be his guardians were none other than Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
The radical upbringing went as expected. Chesa may not share the tactics of his parents and guardians, but boy does he share their radicalism. Before he set his sights on freeing every felon in the Bay Area, Boudin worked for the socialist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, translating the regime’s propaganda into English.
Should we even be talking about Chesa? It’s wrong to tie children to the crimes of their parents, isn’t it? Of course it is — unless their parents are right-wing critics of Islam. Then, even if they’re completely apolitical themselves, they get doxxed by Taylor Lorenz and run out of their jobs.
Ah yes, the asymmetry of it all.
Forgiveness asymmetry laid bare
This brings us to the final, most essential point. It’s all very well to point and sputter. Yes, the left shamelessly rehabilitated its terrorists and cop-killers. But what can we learn from it?
The first is a warning from history. The radical left has no problem with violence. Leftists celebrated the murder of United Healthcare’s CEO. They celebrated the riots of 2020, even though dozens were killed. They celebrated the terrorism of the 1970s and ’80s and worked tirelessly to rehabilitate its perpetrators.
As a recent Pirate Wires story demonstrated, many on the left have no problem with terrorism if it’s used for a “good” cause. There are no principled restrictions on tactics, only targets.
But don’t take my word for it. Read Bill Ayers:
I’m no tactician, but I know that tactics are neutral in themselves — Nazi soldiers blowing up a bridge in occupied France to stop an Allied advance is despicable; partisans blowing up the bridge to prevent the Nazis from overwhelming a village and slaughtering its inhabitants is both defensible and righteous. So it is with insurrections: the goals and purposes matter. January 6, 2021 was a white supremacist insurrection against state power — part of a long American tradition that includes the secessionist insurrection of 1861, the uprising by the White League seeking to overthrow the biracial Reconstruction government of Louisiana in 1894, the violent toppling of the government in Wilmington North Carolina in 1898, and more. Each of these insurrections was in naked defense of white power. By contrast, the Haitian and Cuban revolutions, for example, were emancipatory insurrections designed to move human society forward.
The second thing to consider is how do we respond to these attitudes, which are apparently widespread in politics, the legacy media, and elite academic institutions?
As a bare minimum, we can stop playing their games.
Here’s a thought experiment: Consider the worst kind of right-wing behavior that might be uncovered about someone. Maybe the person dropped the N-word on a livestream. Maybe the person was a member of the Proud Boys or was arrested on Jan. 6, or dabbled in the alt-right in 2016. Maybe the person said something like “normalize Indian hate.”
Of course, it’s fine to disagree with all that. But before you jump behind a campaign to destroy their careers, consider the following: Is it as bad as blowing up government buildings? Is it as bad as murdering cops? Is it as bad as trying to overthrow the United States and replace it with a “decolonized” communist dystopia?
No?
Then I hope you’ll join me in disavowing cancel culture as we’ve come to know it. As Elon Musk said when he rehired DOGE staffer Marko Elez despite his unequivocally racist posts, “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
The thing about unequivocally racist posts is that they’re not bombs and they’re not bullets. And in a world where Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Kathy Boudin get to be college professors, Marko Elezabsolutely gets to be a DOGE staffer. After that, who knows? Maybe we can get him tenure somewhere.
Editor’s note: This article has been adapted from a post that appeared originally on X (formerly Twitter).
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