I'm currently reading The Big Dance: The Untold Story of Weatherman Kathy Boudin and the Terrorist Family that Committed the Brink's Robbery Murders by John Casetllucci. There's much to learn about Antifa and Black Lives Matter by studying some of their ideological and even inspirational forbears.

In order to break down the allure of The Weathermen faction for people such as Kathy Boudin (whose son Chesa Boudin is San Francisco district attorney), Castellucci quotes Ayers, who raised Chesa while Boudin and Chesa's father were in prison for the Brink's robbery murders. "We have one task, and that's to make ourselves into tools of the revolution ... We have to be willing to fight people and fight things in ourselves, and fight things in all white Americans -- white privilege, racism, male supremacy -- in order to build a revolutionary movement."

What Ayers said half a century ago sounds like the agenda of Antifa and Black Lives Matter today; It sounds like the agenda of District Attorney Boudin, too. But it also sounds like what we learn in our universities, what we hear from the media, what social media bombards us with, what we read in emails and ads from corporate America, and on and on.  

Castellucci elaborates:

What this meant in practice was that would-be Weathermen had to overcome hang-ups about sex, drugs, and violence. They had to commit violent acts to prove their revolutionary manhood, engage in homosexuality and sex orgies to show they were uninhibited by bourgeois morality, use psychedelic drugs to demonstrate they were not afraid of having their minds blown, and "smash monogamy" so no member of the group would be tied to a spouse or lover and so Weather collectives would be "strong and tough."

Never mind the what the Weathermen did. I can think of no description of what life in the American mainstream is like, very much including those who do not themselves partake. Smashed morality a la The Weathermen is the ever-present backdrop of everyone's existence. 

Overcoming "hang-ups" about sex, drugs and violence? Check. From early age, American children, and for generations by now, are steadily exposed to sex, drugs and violence in our twisted "arts." Sure, there are repressive and reactionary parents who dare to intercede but the best we can reallyhope for is innoculation, not protection. Homosexuality and sex orgies? Check. (What else is college for?) Drugs? Check. (What else is school for?) 

Written in the mid-1980s, Castellucci's vision is necessarily blind to what the really brazen future holds: homosexual marriage, trannie story-hour, gender "choice" and other Marxist attacks on what it is to try to be a normal human being. Even so, the implications are clear: If The Weathermen once forced their own transformation onto a society that existed in opposition to them, that society did not withstand the assault. In other words, just because these punk terrorists failed in the violent phase of their revolution doesn't mean they did not succeed. We are all Weathermen now.

Castellucci continues.

...the real motives [behind these demands] were self-righteousness and shame. The Weathermen were so ashamed of their bourgeois backgrounds, they felt they had to renounce their privileges. They were so self-righteous about this renunciation that they rejected as phony any radical who did less. To belong to the Weathermen was to become one of the elect or enlightened.

Fifty years later, some of us (many of us?) watch aghast as as millions of "bourgeois" Americans seem to acquiesce to, if not revel in a self-righteous shame whipped up not only by violent cell leaders but by leading politicians, Big Media, corporate America. We are being bludgeoned to join with or submit to this same "elect" of the "enlightened" -- as defined by Weathermen terrorists -- who now dominate the public square and social mainstream; to admit to imaginary crimes of "privilege," and to seek absolution in our own extinction.

The Weathermen and their ilk, notwithstanding aggressive communist allies abroad, notwithstanding decades of "boring from within" by their ideological and often familial forbears at home, couldn't overthrow this country by violence. They all, however, could and did subvert it from within.