In an 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, there were 2,500 domestic bombings on US soil – an astonishing rate of almost five per day.
For many Americans, that fact is shocking. In today’s popular imagination, the politics of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered as a largely innocent expression of youthful idealism: Woodstock, long-haired hippies, flowers, peace signs and tie-dyed shirts.
But that was not the feeling of most Americans who actually lived at that time. In 1968, in the wake of urban riots and increasingly violent campus unrest, a Gallup poll found that as many as four in five Americans believed that law and order in the US had broken down.
A protester reacts as law enforcement officers deploy smoke grenades to disperse people gathering outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters in Portland, Oregon, October 5, 2025. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
The truth is that the left-wing radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s was far more violent – and sometimes even more deadly – than the modern narrative suggests. It is whitewashed today, largely because the radicals themselves (along with their allies and fellow travelers) have captured the very mainstream liberal institutions that shape our popular memory.
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This rehabilitation of the radicals of the 1960s is particularly astonishing in light of the enormous violence they inflicted on America. As Bryan Burrough wrote in the prologue to his seminal history, “Days of Rage”:
“[T]Hey, smuggle bombs into skyscrapers and federal buildings and detonate them from coast to coast. They’re striking at the Pentagon, at the U.S. Capitol, at a Boston courthouse, at dozens of multinational corporations, at a Wall Street restaurant full of lunch spots. People die. They rob dozens of banks, launch attacks on National Guard arsenals and kill police officers in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta. There are deadly shootings and daring prison escapes, illegal government break-ins and a scandal in Washington. This was a piece of America during the tumultuous 1970s.”
At the center of this violence was the Weather Underground, a revolutionary left-wing group that declared a “declaration of war” against the US government in 1970. Within a short time, the group began an unprecedented campaign of bombings, specifically targeting key symbols of American national life. On March 1, 1971, they detonated a bomb on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol; in May 1972 they bombed the Pentagon; and in January 1975 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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These were not easy hippie demonstrators. The Weathermen were determined, violent militants. In March 1970, three members of the group died in a Greenwich Village townhouse while building a bomb intended for a military ball at Fort Dix – an Army base in New Jersey where dozens of NCOs were said to be present with their loved ones. Police recovered 57 sticks of dynamite, completed bombs, detonators and timing devices from the rubble. The only reason there were no mass casualties is that the device detonated prematurely.
And yet, despite it all, the Weather Underground’s leaders went on to work at law firms, major nonprofits, and Ivy League universities. In time, they would even launch the political career of a future American president.
A Weather Underground militant, Kathy Boudin, served 23 years in prison for her role in a 1981 Brink’s truck robbery in New York in which her accomplices executed two police officers and a security guard in cold blood. She was granted parole in 2003; in 2013, she was an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a Scholar-in-residence at NYU Law School.
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Kathy’s son, Chesa Boudin, was elected San Francisco’s far-left district attorney in 2019, backed by the financial support of George Soros.
While his mother was in prison, Chesa was adopted and raised by Weather Underground co-founders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2008, he was elected vice president for curriculum studies at the American Educational Research Association. Dohrn joined the elite law firm Sidley & Austin and was later hired as a professor at Northwestern Law School – where she taught for more than twenty years.
Barack Obama’s first campaign event, which launched him for the Illinois Senate in 1995, took place in Ayers and Dohrn’s living room.
The uncomfortable truth is that left-wing radicals lost the war on the streets, but their worldview won the war for America’s elite institutions with far more consequences. The New Left of the 1960s did not disappear into oblivion. It took over the country’s systems of education, law, philanthropy, media and mass culture.
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Today, the descendants of groups like the Weather Underground can be seen on the streets of cities like Portland and Chicago, throwing Molotov cocktails at police and federal agents. (Often with the support of the institutions their predecessors conquered.) In more ways than one, we live in the world that the 1960s created.
America is at a tipping point. We’ve endured years of left-wing riots, assaults, bombings, and a series of assassination attempts that culminated in the murder of Charlie Kirk.
But it’s not 1970 anymore. In fact, it’s not even 2020 yet.
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In the less than a year that President Donald Trump has been in office, his administration — working with its Republican allies in Congress — has dismantled DEI bureaucracies, cracked down on left-wing ideologues in public schools and higher education, and cut off the flow of federal taxpayer dollars that have funded the left-wing NGO-industrial complex for decades. Right now they are preparing for unprecedented (but long overdue) action against the left-wing terrorists and militants in our streets.
The radicals of the 1960s failed to overthrow America by force, so they tried to conquer the country from within. If the left’s “long march through the institutions” was the defining political project of the past fifty years, the right’s task in the years ahead must be to take those institutions back to America. Finally that task has begun.
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