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• David Hilliard, the Black Panthers’ “Field Marshal,” did not do anything as threatening as ask to see a president’s birth certificate, but he did stand in front of a quarter million people and scream, “Later for Richard Milhous Nixon, the motherfucker! … Because Richard Nixon is an evil man! … Fuck that motherfucking man! We will kill Richard Nixon!”47

Hilliard has taught at Merritt College, Laney College, New College, and the University of New Mexico.48

• Susan Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and The Family. She conspired to kill cops, blow up buildings, and stage an armed robbery of the Brinks truck in Nanuet, New York. Sentenced to fifty-eight years in prison for felony murder and possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives, Rosenberg was released from prison by President Clinton on his last day in office.

Just a few years later, Rosenberg was offered a teaching position at Hamilton College, despite having absolutely no qualifications to teach—with only a master’s degree in writing she got through a correspondence course in prison.

In addition to springing various Weathermen from prison, President Clinton also pardoned sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists who had set off more than a hundred bombs in New York and Chicago in the seventies and eighties, killing a half dozen people and injuring more than seventy. They hadn’t even asked for pardons.

If Charles Manson’s followers hadn’t killed Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, Clinton would have pardoned him, too, and he’d probably be teaching at Northwestern University.

And yet we still have to hear it asked: Why did this group of privileged kids declare war on their own government? Perhaps the next batch of glowing articles, books, and movies will get to the bottom of that brainteaser. If only liberal elites had treated these social climbers a little bit less like Jennifer Aniston and a little bit more like Mel Gibson, nine children in Nyack, New York, might have grown up with their fathers.

With embarrassing bravado, Bill Ayers told his fellow Weathermen, “It’s not a comfortable life, it’s not just a dollar move, it’s standing up in the face of the enemy, and risking your life and risking everything for that struggle.”49

Of course it was a dollar move. Like no-name rock bands and comedians staging “benefits” ostensibly for left-wing causes, but actually to benefit themselves, student radicals declaring “war” on Amerikkka had found a surefire path to celebrity. Ted Gold was making note for his memoir before blowing himself up in the townhouse. For some people, nothing is more important than fame. The Weather Underground was the sixties version of The Jersey Shore—except Obama doesn’t know Snooki. Let’s see these brave dissidents, allegedly willing to risk “everything,” try to get through one day in the life of non-elite-approved Sarah Palin, Scooter Libby, Mark Fuhrman, Linda Tripp, Clarence Thomas, Dan Quayle, Ken Starr, Karl Rove, Carrie Prejean, Michele Bachmann, or Katherine Harris, to name a few people liberals would run over with their cars and laugh about it.

A century earlier, Fyodor Dostoyevsky captured the identical sickness in 1860s Russia in his novel The Demons, depicting the corrosive effect of the French Revolution’s ideas on Russian society. After so many years of peace and calm, the older generation couldn’t imagine that anything could possibly go wrong with the conscienceless children they had raised. Exhibiting the mad narcissism of the liberal intellectual set, the fashionable people in The Demons are constantly entertaining deranged revolutionaries at the town’s most desirable social events. One character, a failed Russian novelist, toys with nihilistic anarchists to feed his own ego, flattering them as the only generation to speak truth boldly, while boasting about his own atheism.

The Demons was as prescient a warning regarding the disaster about to befall Russia as Edmund Burke