The Radical Left's Trump Envy

During Bill Ayers's pre-debate book talk at one of D.C.'s chain of progressive salons Busboys and Poets, I briefly feared for my life. The unrepentant terrorist seemed to look right at me—a cardigan-clad reactionary in the third row—when he said, "I get bothered by a lot of right wing trolls who follow me around in different venues and places."

It turned out this was just his lead-in to a story about a piece of mail he'd received, a bumper sticker: "Bill Ayers And His Wife Should Be In Jail," it read. Well…

Together with his wife Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers spent the late '60s and early '70s as a treasonous terrorist and founder of the Weather Underground. The lovely couple bombed the Capitol and the Pentagon and led three impressionable comrades to their untimely deaths—all to further a violent but variously understood anti-government agenda. They never did demolish the national infrastructure and hurl the blindly consumerist American people into anarchy. (In the 1980s, Ayers turned his attention to deprogramming capitalist propaganda from public schools and became a progressive pedagogist in Chicago, where he befriended the Obamas.)

And now in a tragic turn for Weather Underground alumni, the appetite for destruction and attitude of insurgency, that raw pseudo-political id, has wandered over into the political mainstream for the first time in living memory. But in the person of the Republican nominee for president, who just happens to be a Babbitt on steroids (or on something anyway).

Debates, these comrades contend, are "toxic" and the elections "a farce." (The system, you might say, is "rigged.") Owner of Busboys and Poets Andy Shallal, two-time mayoral candidate and fond Ayers associate, pulled together a panel after the debate for the room full of Jill Stein supporters and Sanders-loving Clinton converts who'd gathered to watch the cagematch together. Shallal and peacenik panelist Medea Benjamin of the anti-war women's group CODEPINK praised Trump's positions on trade—"We have to acknowledge that on that issue he is better," Benjamin said.