Why care about Ayers?

Some people say that writing a series of columns about 1960s revolutionaries is a waste of time. They say that radicals like Bill Ayers weren’t that popular to begin with and are completely irrelevant by now.

On the first point, I certainly agree. There’s no reason to think that Ayers had popular support for his revolution back in 1969 when he was preaching the triumph of “world communism” from his SDS pulpit. He was and is out of the mainstream, with little likelihood to convince people to support him and his desire to overthrow the U.S. government.

But when you say he is irrelevant, that’s where I draw the line. How can he be irrelevant when the revolution he sought so earnestly has come about?

If Ayers is irrelevant, then so is Barack Obama. If Ayers is irrelevant, then so is Hillary Clinton. If Ayers is irrelevant, then so are dozens of top-level players and consultants in and out of the Obama administration such as Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Valerie Jarrett, Carol Browner and Ron Bloom. All of those people — Obama, Clinton and the rest — have ties to radical organizations either dating to the 1960s such as SDS or Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation or to later socialist organizations that shared the goal of dismantling American society and rebuilding it as a socialist state. You merely need to read their own words to see that none of this is secret. The evidence is all over the Internet. Their hatred for “bourgeois” America is transparent, visceral and unmistakable.

Indeed, the whole point of quoting extensively from Ayers’ own writings for the past several weeks has been to establish the remarkable parallels between the revolution he and his contemporaries envisioned and what has actually taken place. Their stated goal as members of Students for a Democratic Society, and later the Weather Underground, was “the destruction of U.S. imperialism” and ultimately the imposition of a new socialist state that would dictate the “control and ... use of the wealth of the Empire for the people of the whole world.”

You would have to be severely lacking a sense of irony not to appreciate the fact that while America has not yet fully committed to its newfound role as leader of the socialist world, we have nonetheless embraced liberating Libya and other Third World countries from their imperialist oppressors, using our “ill-gotten” wealth to bail out Europe not to mention Africa and Asia — and of course creating a welfare state that provides housing and health care for all, and even tuition breaks for illegal aliens!

Indeed, with everything going so far left so fast, one has to imagine that the unrepentant revolutionary Bill Ayers could finally echo the words of Michelle Obama just a few years ago when she said: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.”

I guess it’s no accident that the Obamas should come up in a column about Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn. After all, they seem to share some of the same hopes and aspirations.

Forget about the actual personal and political connections between Obama and Ayers. Forget about the meeting in 1995 at Ayers’ home in Chicago where Obama launched his political career. Forget about Obama’s role as president and board member of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge non-profit that was started in 1995 by Ayers to promote education “reform.” Forget about the fact that they served together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty foundation that promoted welfare “reform” and redistribution of wealth. Forget about the fact that, in “The Manchurian Candidate,” author Aaron Klein documents that Obama and Ayers worked together as early as 1988 when Obama was invited to join the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools that was created by Ayers’ wealthy industrialist father, Thomas Ayers.

Forget about all that, if you can. Because it’s irrelevant whether they actually conspired together. What matters is not how they worked together, but how they have long shared a common dream and were part of the same network for social justice in Chicago — from the 1980s until at least 2002 — whose goal was to “fundamentally transform” America.

Nor do you have to go back to the dark ages of the 1980s to find evidence that President Obama has a common agenda with communist Bill Ayers and socialist Saul Alinsky. You just need to read his speech last week in Denver, where he justified raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for programs for the poor. He said “we’re not doing this to punish success,” but “those of us who have done well should pay our fair share” to keep the nation strong. In other words, taxing the rich is a patriotic duty in order to accomplish Obama’s goal of redistribution of wealth.

You shouldn’t be surprised. President Obama said much the same thing when he was still a candidate in 2008 talking to Joe the Plumber on the campaign trail:

“It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too… My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off ... if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

That “spreading the wealth around” thing — I may be mistaken, but I think it’s the same as what Bill Ayers called the “control and ... use of the wealth of the Empire for the people of the whole world.” Another word for that, by the way, is socialism, which is why it is pointless to criticize me or anyone else for suggesting that President Obama is a socialist.

It’s funny how words have a way of pinning people down. Can’t really get away from them once you have uttered them. That goes for Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his ridiculous comment that people who are against giving benefits to illegal immigrants are “heartless” just as much as it does to Obama for wanting to “spread the wealth around.”

It is also a beautiful, lovely coincidence that just as I was preparing to write this column, another liberal Democrat — this one running for Congress in Massachusetts — used virtually the same rhetoric as Barack Obama to characterize her desire to take from the rich and give to the poor.

Elizabeth Warren is a Harvard law professor who worked for President Obama not too long ago trying to protect us poor little consumers from those evil millionaires on Wall Street we keep hearing about. Now she is trying to unseat Scott Brown and take back “the Kennedy seat” for liberals.

On Sept. 21, she was talking to a house full of supporters and said this:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You don’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look. You built a factory and turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

I bet you didn’t know that was the social contract you had signed on to when you were born in the United States of America, did you? But Bill Ayers knew it, and so did Barack Obama. It’s all the same theory of “social justice.”

I doubt that Elizabeth Warren has ever worked with Bill Ayers (like President Obama did) or studied with Saul Alinsky (like Hillary Clinton did) but she is nonetheless a product of 1960s radicalism and one more proof that Ayers and Co. may have lost a skirmish or two, but they won the revolution.

And yet the magical mystery media manages to make the whole mess disappear just as quick as you can say Jeremiah Wright. Nothing to see here. Move along!