From Steve Sailer’s comments section:
* Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough is a thorough examination of the now largely forgotten leftwing terror that afflicted the nation in the early 1970s. As retired FBI agent Max Noel put it, “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over 1,900 domestic bombings in the United States.”
What is most interesting to me is not the riots, bombings, bank robberies and assassinations of that period, but that the perpetrators got away with little or no punishment, due to the Leftist control of so many institutions, a situation that has gotten much, much worse. During the 1970s, Weatherman terrorists who were being hunted by the FBI were being financially supported and sheltered by the National Lawyers’ Guild. The Puerto Rican terrorist group, the FALN, responsible for numerous bombings including the bombing of Wall Street’s Fraunces Tavern on Wall Street that killed four and wounded 40, was supported by the Episcopal Church.
When the most prominent terrorists turned themselves in or were arrested, they got a slap on the wrist or eventual clemency. Bill Ayers went scott free. Cathy Wilkerson did a year. Bernardine Dohrn got three years probation and a $1500 fine. President Clinton gave clemency to 14 imprisoned FALN terrorists. President Obama commuted the sentence of FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera.
Afterward, they were taken care of by leftist institutions. Bernardine Dohrn was a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than 20 years. Eleanor Stein, arrested in 1981, got a law degree in 1986 and became an administrative law judge. Radical attorney Michael Kennedy, a key player in keeping the Weather Underground alive, was special advisor to the President of the UN General Assembly.
During last summer’s riots, we learned that arrested Antifa rioters were released on bail the following morning, courtesy of the radical National Lawyers’ Guild. In a video, an Antifa rioter showed how he had its hotline written in Sharpie on his forearm. (Can you imagine a Reactionary Lawyers’ Guild that actively assisted rightwing agitators and criminals being allowed to exist?) The Minnesota Freedom Fund is endowed with with $35 million dollars to bail out left wing rioters. Kamala Harris tweeted support for it.
This is a key difference between the consequences of being a rightwing protestor and a leftwing protestor. The law comes down on rightwingers like a ton of bricks. Recall the two Proud Boys sentenced to four years in prison each for a street scuffle with Antifa in NYC in which no one was injured and their opponents refused to identify themselves or press charges. The DA used an obscure law to bring charges against them. The January 6 protestors are being treated extraordinarily harshly, hunted down by the FBI if they so much as entered the Capitol (sometimes even if they didn’t) and held without bail. Meanwhile, the FBI appears to have as little interest in Antifa as it does in the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. White House Resident Joe Biden absurdly called the January 6 riot at the Capitol the worst threat to our democracy since the Civil War, ignoring such leftwing violence as the 1950 attack in the House chamber and the assassination attempt on President Truman.
Clearly, the Powers that Be more-or-less condone leftwing violence, but will not tolerate even a moderate reaction to it from the right. Googling reviews of Burrough’s book, I see that most leave out the really shocking part of the story, the institutional complicity in the violence, and many even excuse it as an appropriate response to the Vietnam War and racism.
