The Dark History Behind America's New Wave of Political Violence | The Deep

You might think we're witnessing the most violent period of domestic political terrorism in American history. I did, until I learned about the 1970s. Sure, I'd learned about Vietnam protests, inflation, and bell-bottoms, but our high school history books really memory-hold the worst parts. Between 1970 and 1979, America suffered over 1,400 terrorist incidents that That killed 184 people, injured hundreds more, and caused millions of dollars in damage.

By 1975, bombs were going off at a rate of 50 to 60 per year, ramping up to nearly 100 attacks annually by 1979. Targets included the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, LaGuardia Airport, police stations, banks, and corporate offices. Looking back on those days, a Nixon aide remarked, If you didn't experience it back then, you would have no idea how close we were as a country to revolution. But it's been mostly forgotten. Why? Because the terrorists regrouped, rebranded, and won the long game.

What we're seeing today isn't something new. It's the same movement. The bombers of the 1970s became the architects of today's permissioned... They call the 1970s the revolution that failed. It turns out, they're wrong. And here's why what's coming could be worse.

In the early 1970s, bomb attacks and gunfights became a regular part of America's political landscape. The Weather Underground became the most famous of over a dozen subversive groups during that time, and its name became synonymous with violent revolutionary aspirations.

The Underground was a spinoff of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, a white youth protest group that arose in the 1960s A decade also marked by profound political unrest and the high-profile assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Their heroes weren't George Washington or even Nathan Hale. They worshipped Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. As anti-war and civil rights activism intensified with the escalation of the Vietnam conflict, the SDS went beyond calling for reforms.

It embraced a sweeping rejection of what they saw as the failed American experiment. America wasn't a flawed democracy, but an imperialist system fundamentally rooted in exploitation abroad and racial oppression at home. This shift marked a decisive move toward Marxist analysis and strategies. Society was increasingly understood through the lens of oppressor and oppressed classes. With American institutions, government, universities, law enforcement, cast as instruments of domination. Whether underground leaders like Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dorn, and Jim Mellon rejected traditional protest as complicit and ineffective.

Influenced by thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, they believed that peaceful protest functioned as a safety valve, preserving evil systems rather than transforming them. From 1969 through the late 1970s, they launched what they called offensives and days of rage aimed at police and symbols of American power. They released a declaration of a state of war in May 1970, vowing violent action against American imperialism. After detonating a bomb at the New York City police headquarters in June, they declared, the time is now. Political power grows out of a gun, a molotov, a riot, a commune, and from the soul of the people.

By 1975, the group claimed responsibility for over 25 bombings, including the State Department and the Pentagon. Other groups pushed even further. Puerto Rican nationalist organizations like the FALN launched bombing campaigns in major cities. The 1975 Francis Tavern bombing killed four and injured 50. That same year, a bomb at LaGuardia Airport killed 11 and wounded 75, one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. soil before 9-11. The Symbionese Liberation Army, a small revolutionary group, kidnapped Patty Hearst and many of them later died in a massive shootout with Los Angeles police involving over 400 officers.

The 1977 Hanafi Muslim hostage crisis in Washington, D.C. ...saw 134 hostages taken across multiple buildings. This wasn't American politics. It was Marxist revolution. For his book, Days of Rage, Brian Burrow interviewed former militants. One former militant told him, you have to understand, the underground, it became a cult. Weather, it was a cult. The SLA, the 60s drove them all crazy, all of us. All they did was listen to their own people, their own opinions. By 74, 75, when the war was over, you should have said, you know, what the F?

The revolution isn't happening. But they were crazy. The cult of violence was a true moral inversion. At one weather underground meeting, Bernadine Dorn even praised Charles Manson. A fellow weatherman remembered, she heaped praise on the wild-eyed Charles Manson for his cult's murders, including that of Sharon Tate. After Vietnam de-escalated, however, even leaders like Dorn were forced to realize that the underground's violent tactics were too small to be effective, and too radical for the broader public to swallow.

The only way to continue the revolution was to moderate their strategy. The weather underground itself split up, with Ayers, Jones, and Dorn turning to above-ground community organizing. Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, they said in their new manifesto, Prairie Fire. In spite of their past, most of the Weather Underground leadership avoided prison and received minimal penalties.

Prosecutions collapsed after the exposure of illegal FBI counterintelligence tactics. The Weathermen didn't disappear. They reappeared inside the system. Once on the FBI's most wanted list, Dorn became a law professor at Northwestern University, continuing to oppose the American capitalist system. Bill Ayers, who helped lead the group's bombing campaign, went on to become a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, writing books on pedagogy and school reform, and advising soon-to-be Senator Barack Obama. On September 11, 2001, Ayers told the New York Times, I don't regret setting bombs.

I feel we didn't do enough. Dorn and Ayers, while serving short prison sentences, sat down with Phil Donahue in a 1982 interview. Both were unrepentant. Not going along. With great crimes committed by this government, that that was brought home by the anti-war movement by a wide variety of reasons to our parents' generation, I think is fairly widely acknowledged and respected. Yes, it is, but you didn't need the bombs to do that. You needed the whole thing to do it. Kathy Boudin, after serving more than two decades in prison for her role in the 1981 Brinks robbery, became a lecturer at Columbia University and a criminal justice reform advocate, focusing on incarceration and re-entry programs.

Mark Rudd, once a national figure in the student uprising and underground movement, resurfaced as a community college math instructor in New Mexico. ...and an avid anti-Trump organizer. And Mike Klonsky, a leading figure in the SDS's revolutionary faction, later became a Chicago-based education activist and radio host, working in public education systems. Not all of them became professors, but they all became respectable, embedded in academia, in law, in nonprofits, in the institutions they once declared illegitimate.

In 1987, Alan Bloom warned in The Closing of the American Mind that the educational system that produced these movements had not corrected course. If anything, it had utterly surrendered. And that's why the story of the crazy 1970s didn't end in the 70s. Instead of taking hostages in government buildings, the radical activists and their associates entrenched themselves in education, the media, and politics. They were welcomed with open arms because American higher ed had already been infected with critical theory from influences like the Frankfurt School and a penchant for the subversive over the conservative.

Liberal and far left faculty members grew from 45 percent in 1969 to nearly 60 percent in 2016-17. With moderates holding steady at about 29% of faculty, and conservatives dwindling to just 11%. What had once been expressed through bombs and manifestos was repackaged in the language of academia, activism, and institutional reform. The underlying narrative of revolution, America is a fundamentally flawed nation, a battlefield between the oppressed and the oppressor, moved into classrooms, non-profits, and public discourse. Over time, that framework filtered down into K-12 education.

In the 2010s, academics like Ibram X. Kendi popularized oppressor-oppressed frameworks among the new generation of educated elites. Queer grievances, structural racism, and white supremacy echoed the language of Che, Marcuse, and Marxist revolutionary ideologies of the 20th century. The Obama presidency saw a sharp decline in race relations.

And a rise in the identity and grievance politics championed by activists like Saul Alinsky. His 1971 Rules for Radicals had mainstreamed violence by rebranding revolution as community organizing. Even as America elected its first black president and embraced cultural revolutions like gay marriage, race and sexual oppression became the new Vietnam.

Revolution was still the goal. Through the 2020s, instead of bombs, the leftist revolution was carried out by large networks of foundations, NGOs, activist organizations, and front groups. The George Soros fortune financed a vast ecosystem of radical anarchists propped up by a respectable army of experts, journalists, and public intellectuals who downplay political violence. It was that army that shamelessly convinced large swaths of American youth that anyone who opposed the revolution was racist, homophobic, or Hitler. In 2020, the unrest simmering below the surface exploded into mostly peaceful protests.

Across the country, riots tied to Black Lives Matter and Antifa turned into the most destructive in modern American history. City blocks went up in flames. In Seattle, activists carved out what they called an autonomous zone with no police and their own rules. The homicide rate in the People's Republic of Chaz surged to levels 50 times higher than Chicago's. Words are not violence, but they do tell us a lot about where the temperature is rising fastest. Between 2021 and 2025, online threats targeting Democrats Increased by 124%, while threats targeting Republicans rose 364%.

Republicans, President Donald Trump in particular, received 33% more violent threats across X, Reddit, Blue Sky, YouTube, and thousands of other forums. So far, it might seem like I'm saying our 1970s problems are our 2020s problems, but it's worse than that. Gen Z revolutionaries are a vastly different crowd from the children of 68.

Whether underground revolutionaries, for the most part, grew up in a high-trust, family-centered culture that today's activists never knew. However violent the 1970s were, America still ran on the fumes of Christian morality and still recoiled at political violence. Today's aging No Kings protesters largely fail to recognize that they have enjoyed freedom and long life Not because they overcame the evil empire, but because American institutions saved them from themselves. They were spared their own most bloody ambitions because the majority of American society rejected them again and again.

The silent majority elected Nixon twice. After a brief and decidedly non-revolutionary Democratic president, the left lost the White House for 12 straight years. The Vietnam War fizzled out, the Iran hostages came home, and the revolution went dormant. The boomers' kids were more interested in work-life balance than revolution. Millennials? Our highest aspiration is financial security. We might elect revolutionaries, but we're not really interested in occupying Wall Street anymore. But with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, something else is going on. We seem to be entering a new era of what Dr.

Robert Pape describes as populist violence. Phil Donahue's interview with Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayers was shocking and repulsive to the majority of Americans. Today, politicians can call their opponents Hitler, and no one blinks. Pundits like Hassan Piker can literally call for murder and ritual disembowelment and get interviewed by the New York Times. The stabilizing influence of Christian morality and our capacity for civil debate have eroded. The sexual revolution has run its full course. Technological revolutions, globalism, economic uncertainty, and rising illiteracy have produced the most anxious, depressed, and atomized generation in human history.

The result? A rising percentage of Americans are sympathetic to violent revolution. A September 2025 YouGov poll found that 42% of self-described liberals in the U.S. are sympathetic to violent revolution. Say political violence is acceptable. Just 9% of conservatives say the same. And 9% is too many. It's 9% too many. But we can't pretend that this is a both sides issue. Another study on political violence found that 56% of self-identifying left-wing respondents thought murdering Donald Trump was justifiable, while 50% said the same of Elon Musk.

That sentiment isn't being driven by a desperate working class. On the contrary, it's coming from the educated classes. According to the Skeptic Research Center's 2025 American Political Perspective Survey, 23% of Americans with a high school diploma agree with the statement, violence is often necessary to create social change. After four years of college, The proportion who find political violence often necessary rises to 26%, and then the numbers explode.

Among those holding graduate or professional degrees, fully 40% agree political violence is often required for social change. America in 2026 is far more vulnerable to a wave of political violence than it was in 1976, precisely because we now face additional factors.

Multiple polls have found that instability defines young Americans' lives. With only 13% saying the country is headed in the right direction, and many indicators pointing to widespread financial, emotional, and social strain. Only 35% believe Americans with opposing political views still want what's best for the country. In the 1970s, the population was still growing and lived in stable households. 85% of children lived with their married biological parents. Today, That number is just 60%. And marriage, the great mellower of revolutionary aspirations, has collapsed with Gen Z.

While 60% of women and 41% of men born in 1960 married before they were 25 years old, today, just 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 have done so. And finally, we face a general sense. That the current system is not functioning, and that the right to vote or participate in public discourse doesn't matter. This isn't a great formula for social stability. In the last two years, the left has produced four would-be assassins of President Trump and two of Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.

It drove and celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It produced Luigi Mangione, who, after shooting an insurance CEO in the back, became a heartthrob celebrated for avenging social murder. Upstream from the latest assassination attempt or school shooting, there is a deep divide between two competing visions of our nation.

Is America good? Or is she evil all the way down? The majority of Americans are still opposed to political violence. They want politicians to fix things like inflation, gas prices, the potholes. But there is a very vocal and very active minority that imagines itself too serious and lofty for such bourgeois concerns. It wants to fundamentally change America. And it's ready to use bullets. It's good to have a sense of certainty about what the world ought to look like and how to get there.

But if you think peaceful means like the democratic order, good faith debate, acts of charity can never get you there, you will adopt increasingly coercive and violent ends. As Christians, we know that we're all sinners, left or right, if we lose hope. We become prone to violence, no matter what our ideology. There have indeed been instances of right-wing political violence, but today, left-wing political violence is on the rise, driven by an ideology of demonization and dehumanization. The new revolutionaries probably wouldn't recognize Bernadine Dorn or Bill Ayers, but they've all heard of Luigi Mangione.

The good news What happens next is that the 1970s did not end, as the Nixon aide had feared, in total revolution. No single event or figure ended the violence. It was a combination of the end of Vietnam, increased law enforcement, and the fact that the radicals fractured and lost momentum internally. The revolutionaries' dreams of finally destroying the capitalist, supremacist, imperialist oppressors were dashed by the passage of time and the realities of human nature. For most Americans, the pull of normalcy and common decency wins over a violent death in the service of the cause every time.

Call it cowardice or conformity, but that silent majority may yet delay or dull the worst of our revolution, too. In the end, however, we will also need heroes if we are to avoid what happened in Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1932. We will need men who fight back, not with bullets or bombs, but with words, virtue, and yes, political wisdom. Men who can write good laws and see that they are applied equally.

And if it comes to it, men who can lay down their lives cheerfully in confidence of final victory. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to The LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.