[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2013/11/Untitled.jpg)Bill Ayers’s latest “memoir,” Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident, like all his writings, is not worth reading, except to keep up with the lies he is spreading.
Ayers, like his 1960s terrorist comrades, counts on the ignorance, gullibility, and tender emotions of the youth. Given the way the history of the 1960s is taught today, young people just might believe the Weatherman terrorist’s claims of being censored and persecuted, and a victim of a McCarthy-ite witch hunt. He even likens himself to Galileo.
In the Bill Ayers ego, Galileo was right about the solar system, and Bill Ayers was right about the Vietnam War. It was a genocidal war, and Bill Ayers represented the resistance.
In Ayers’ world, Sarah Palin and John McCain (a “war criminal” for having served in Vietnam) led the witch hunt against him during the 2008 presidential campaign. He claims that Sarah Palin’s supporters chanted “Kill him” in response to her charges that Obama was “palling around with a terrorist.” Ayers felt like
“Goldstein from George Orwell’s _1984_—the public enemy projected onto a large screen in the ritual ‘two minutes hate’ scene when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing, chanting ‘Kill him!’”
This, of course, is false, but Ayers does not feel the need to provide evidence.
Ayers goes out of his way to try to diminish the late Larry Grathwohl, who employed strategies learned in Vietnam to survive infiltrating the Weather Underground. A suspected infiltrator had been beaten to within an inch of his life by the Weatherman terrorists. Ayers calls Grathwohl, “a paid police informant who hung around SDS briefly back in the day,” but was “dragging himself out of retirement and rebooting his career as a right-wing warrior” in 2008, addressing St. Mary’s College, in a “nationally organized” campaign to “demonize and blacklist” Ayers. Ayers alleges that Grathwohl spread a “double fiction”: that he had once been an “’FBI agent and that he had infiltrated the Weather Underground. Neither was true.”
The facts: Grathwohl never claimed to be an FBI agent; he was an FBI informant. There is a public record and no denying that Grathwohl infiltrated the Weather Underground. He testified before the U.S. Senate and several grand juries, and wrote a book about his experience. Grathwohl talked to San Francisco police in 2009 about a statement Ayers made to him implicating Dohrn in the bombing death of Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell. The case is still open.
Ayers claims that the police, whom he called pigs and tried to kill back in the day, are now his friends. Having cleared the record through a coffee shop conversation with Ayers, the Chicago cops have, according to Ayers, started a book club to discuss his memoir, Fugitive Days.
Ayers is particularly skilled at lying by omission and diversion. He spends a considerable amount of space discussing his encounter with a blogger at the Ronald Reagan Airport in 2009, and “confessing” that he did indeed write Obama’s memoirs. What he fails to mention, though, is his purpose for being in Washington, and it was to share the stage at an education conference with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Under Secretary Martha Kanter, and a representative from Achieve, the group that designed the federal Common Core standards.
In memoir #2, Ayers claims to have never participated in bombings – with bombs that were ever intended to harm or kill anyone. Richard Elrod, the city attorney paralyzed in the Days of Rage riot led by Ayers, is forgotten. Instead, Ayers would have readers believe that he has been a fully committed teacher and family man, a liberated husband who brought his sons to meet wifey Bernardine Dohrn during her lunch hour.
This may fly for a fully indoctrinated college freshman, but those of us who slogged through Fugitive Days might see a contradiction, like when Ayers in several passages describes details about the days that bombs were set:
“Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing.”
But then again Ayers is careful to say that this is a memoir, not a history. And the opening line of Fugitive Days is “Memory is a motherf–ker.”
Bill Ayers, the trickster, taunts “catch me if you can,” as he prepares to schmooze the latest group at a public college or festival, crying censorship whenever anyone objects to student and tax funds being used to host a terrorist and quack professor.
Ayers sees himself as an “unlikely academic at a research university” (indeed), someone respected by the academic community, jetting from one public lecture, dissertation committee, teacher workshop, and academic conference, to another. But then, beginning in 2008, Ayers complains that he was being disinvited as a result of pressure from right-wing zealots.
At the University of Wyoming he was disinvited in 2010 from giving two lectures, one pompously titled, “Trudge Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action.”
Along came his heroine, student Meg Lanker (now Meg Lanker-Simons). Ayers presents her as “a fighter on every level”:
“I’m going to sue the university in federal court,” she told me during our first conversation. “And I’m claiming that it’s my free speech that’s been violated—I have the right to speak to anyone I want to, and right now I want to speak to you.” She was young and unafraid, smart and sassy, her dreams being rapidly made and used—no fear, no regret. I liked her immediately.
It gets funnier, because Bill Ayers then writes, “Meg’s approach struck me as brilliant—students (and not I) were indeed the injured party.”
Someone forgot to mention, however, that the “young and unafraid, smart and sassy” Meg Lanker was charged with and admitted to making false threats of sexual assault against herself by posting a comment that said she would become a “good Republican b**tch” in retaliation for running her “liberal mouth.” This was reported in the Laramie Boomerang on April 30, 2013. It was reported again on May 3—five months before the release of Ayers’s book—in the pages of the Huffington Post. Furthermore, this was another “hate” hoax that disturbed liberals like to promote, especially on college campuses.
Ayers quotes anonymous emails at length–with no proof that they were ever sent. Alas, perhaps there is a commonality between the obviously disturbed Ms. Lanker-Simons and the professor.
Consider this purple passage about the Republican “thugs” who had prevented Ayers from spreading his goodness to University of Wyoming students:
We should stand together and refuse to accede to these kinds of pressures to demonize and mostly to suppress students’ right to freely engage in open dialogue. After all, a public university is not the personal fiefdom or the political clubhouse of the governor, and donors can’t be permitted to call the shots when it comes to the content or conduct of academic matters. We should not allow ourselves to collapse in fear if a howling mob gathers at the gates with flaming torches in hand; in fact, that’s when standing up and pushing back become absolutely necessary. I wouldn’t force myself on the university, of course, but I felt that canceling would be terribly unfair to the faculty and students who had invited me, and would send a big message that bullying works. It would be the equivalent of a book burning, and would be one more step down the slippery slope of giving up on the precious ideal of a free university in a free society… .
And on and on. You get the idea: Bill Ayers glorifies himself. It is up to those of us who know the truth to continue exposing the deceitful narrative on which his personal mythology has been built.
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