What is that spirit that we recognize and can build on? What is that spirit that we want to connect to … that spirit of rebellion? The spirit of resistance ... the spirit of insurgency! It’s that spirit we should be talking about.

—Bill Ayers, 2007, on the occasion of the 40-year anniversary of the Weather Underground

Perhaps his wife, Bernadine Dohrn expressed that “spirit” best in a public warning at the zenith of the Weather Underground’s influence:

Now we are everywhere and next week families and tribes will attack the enemy around the country. We’re not just attacking targets; we’re bringing the pitiful, helpless giant (the USA) to its knees. Guard your planes … guard your colleges … guard your banks … guard your children … guard your doors.

This election long ago ceased to be a partisan battle between Republicans and Democrats. It really isn’t a contest over big and small government, higher or lower taxes, or even abortion and homosexual rights.

Somewhere along the way while most of us were enjoying our precious freedoms, taking kids to soccer, ordering pizza and listening to our iPods, there was another group of people who were at work to destroy America. Even as they enjoyed with us its benefits, they schemed and planned and, moment by moment, inch by inch gained a footing and we never realized the ground was shifting.

You could say the groundwork was laid in the ’50s when radicals who were often synonymous with communists made a concerted attempt to destroy America through infiltration of media, government and labor unions. Top secret documents were leaked to the Soviets which resulted in the charge of treason for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. America believed in punishing its traitors then and they paid with their lives.

The children of the ’60s, raised in postwar prosperity on the “don’t discipline” philosophy of the wildly popular Dr. Benjamin Spock, were fertile young plants for leftist fodder. Throwing off all constraints, they embraced “free love,” unbridled drug use and turned with a vengeance on the parents whose system of values they had come from. Their indulgent refusal to embrace rules, coupled with legitimate simmering emotions of the black community over cruelty and discrimination, created the “perfect storm” of protest and violence—one group rejecting any restraint, the other rebelling from too much of it.

Surely the protest methods were as different as the participants. Hippies were often little more than clueless spoiled brats dulled by drugs, but others were serious radicals who preyed upon trouble and agitated it with the stated purpose of revolution. They wanted to overthrow the government of the United States of America. The black movement was characterized on the one hand by the high-minded non-violence of Dr. Martin Luther King, and on the other by the violent anger of the Black Panthers. The hate-filled factions of each, black and white, found each other and together nearly shipwrecked the country and undermined the Vietnam War. It was success for the rebellion in part … but not completely.

As those frustrated radicals came of age, they realized they would have to game the system, and improve their plans to accomplish their goals. They got advanced degrees and begin to fill colleges and universities. They slowly infiltrated the professional organizations of almost every major field of endeavor—education, medicine, retired citizens and unions. Gradually, these professional associations began to use their members’ money to fund leftist causes. Leftist leaders spoke for their membership as if they had the right. And perception became reality for the members. Then they did what all socialist regimes have done … they radicalized public school. They virtually eliminated the American story from history, removed civics, dumbed down math and science and English with outcome-based education. It became more important that kids had the right “thinking” on social and environmental issues than that they understood the academic disciplines. They took over law school faculties, co-opted many mainline Christian denominations—like Methodists and Presbyterians—and subtly replaced the teachings of scripture on man’s need for redemption with emphases on social justice and helping the poor. Man could now obtain his own redemption without any inconvenient mention of sin or moral behavior. Continued...