A Cautionary Tale on the Dangers of Radical Movements and Ideologies

Jonah Raskin

April 17, 2026

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Cover art for the book Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn

I love Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, and want radicals, revolutionaries and renegades everywhere to dive into it and discover its treasures, from the brilliant title to the exhilarating ending and with remarkable stops in-between.

On July 26, 1982,  the 23^rd anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, a young mother wrote to her young son to tell him, “When you meet new people, grown-ups, you must say hello and look at them.” She added—as though to say it wasn’t only a matter of good manners—“it is a way of respecting people and being part of the human community.” That letter might not seem unusual. My own mother expressed the same sentiments to me when I was a boy. But the July 26th letter was unusual.

It was written by Bernardine Dohrn, who was behind bars, having been held in contempt of court for failing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating radicals. Bernardine wrote the letter to Zayd, the older of her two sons, who was named after Zayd Shakur, the Minister of Information for the Bronx Black Panther Party, shot and killed in 1973 by New Jersey cops.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was only four years old in 1982 but he was already a veteran of the Weather Underground, the clandestine organization whose members mostly evaded capture by the FBI for a decade and who planted and set off bombs in the US Capitol, the Pentagon, the headquarters of ITT and police stations from coast to coast.

In case you don’t remember or perhaps never knew, Zayd’s parents had been charismatic stars of Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) who helped to forge Revolutionary Youth Movement  (RYM) I, which morphed into Weatherman and then into the Weather Underground.

In his new profoundly personal and yet intensely political memoir, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, Zayd offers a history of what’s been called the “Long Sixties,” the era of sex, drugs, rock and rebellion that began in 1955 and that came to an end in 1975 when the “American War,” as the Vietnamese call it, came to an end.

At the same time, Zayd presents a narrative about his own biological family, their friends and allies and that includes a complex portrait of his parents, Bernardine and Bill, who aimed to make a revolution in “Babylon,” as the Panthers called the US, who also wanted to live life to the fullest, and squeeze joy from every moment.

The title for Zayd’s book, which might well be called explosive, comes from a song by the Jefferson Airplane, the rock band that Bill befriended and that their lyricist Paul Kantner reciprocated with songs like “Diana,” an anthem for Weatherwoman Diana Oughton who died in a bomb blast in an Manhattan apartment building in March 1970 that also ended the lives of Teddy Gold and Terry Robbins. The full title for the song includes the words, “hideous” and “obscenity,” which don’t exactly fit Weatherman or the Weather Underground, though some actions bordered on the obscene.

I don’t accept all of Zayd’s accounts of the underground, especially his account of what was called in code “The Big Top.” I lived in the Weather “safe house” on Amity Street in Brooklyn in 1971. I watched the fugitive who made the explosive devices that went off in the Capitol.

I saw him connect wires safely. I saw the team get into their red Volvo with the bomb and set off for Washington, D.C. I heard the story of what happened next – the failure of the bomb to go off and the return of the team who added a small booster bomb that triggered the first big bomb. Kathy Boudin was not involved, though Zayd suggests that she was. After all these years, I still won’t name names.

When Zayd asked Bernardine about The Big Top, she said,  “I’m not going to tell you who put it there, and I’m not going to tell you who worked on it.” That is the Bernardine I knew. She kept secrets while Billy shared them. If Zayd had asked me about The Big Top I’d have told him everything I knew. I also watched a fugitive burn in the fireplace of the apartment on Amity Street the wrappers for the sticks of dynamite used in the explosion.

But I would echo Zayd’s assertion that “the first few years in the underground would wind up being some of the weirdest, wildest and most fun parts of my parents’ story.” They were the most fun part of my Weather Underground years when I hung with Bernadine and Bill and Jeff Jones and my wife Eleanor.

Teachers now, as in the past, often urge students to “write what you know.” Zayd has taken that advice to heart and made it his credo. He probably knows more about the Weather Underground than anyone else alive today. He’s heard almost all of the stories, done the research, sorted the evidence and made sense of it all. His mother, now 84, was recently diagnosed with dementia and, is as she has said, “on the road to Alzheimer’s.” Her memories of her years underground are frayed. Bill’s memory is selective; ditto for most of the members of the organization who have, in the interest of survival, intentionally erased memories. Some matters are best forgotten.

Zayd lived the underground life as a child and as a boy. He understands its goals, dreams and machinations better than anyone I know. His father explained to him that going underground was a “state of mind.” He added that it’s what exists “on the fringe,” and that there are right-wing as well as left-wing undergrounds.   That’s good to know and remember. No political faction or organization owns the underground. Zayd has interviewed everyone who could be interviewed, read almost all of the books and articles on the subject and thought deeply about it for more than a decade. More than ten years ago, he wrote and produced a brilliant eleven-part podcast about his parents and their comrades titled Mother Country Radicals, with the subtitle “A Family History of the Weather Underground,” produced by Crooked Media.

That podcast anticipated some of the same material contained in Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, though it’s not as in-depth and doesn’t have what might accurately be called the “soul searching” of the book. There isn’t an action, a gesture or a political statement by Weatherman and the Weather Underground that Zayd doesn’t interrogate. He accepts nothing at face value and always goes behind the scenes.

But if he seems eminently suited to write about mother country radicals, he’s also very much an odd man for the job. “I could never quite reconcile my own resistance to a mass movement with my radical upbringing,” he writes. “I’ve always preferred solitude to the crowd.” With that attitude, there would be no crowds and no revolutions in history.

A few pages on, Zayd expresses what might be called heresy in some radical circles: “too many revolutions have led to repressive regimes.” And he offers a quotation from Frederick Nietzsche who said, “Beware when fighting monsters, lest you become a monster.” In these pages, SDS firebrand and Weatherman, Terry Robbins, appears as a young idealist who became a monster.

That’s how I knew him.

Probably the words that appear more often than any other words in this book are “contradiction” and “contradictions.” Zayd sees them, along with paradoxes and ambivalences, almost everywhere he looks: in himself, in his family and in the revolution itself. His awareness of contradictions makes him a perfect author for the perilous story he tells.

The last 100 pages of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young can be rough going. They were for me. Zayd describes the implosion in the Weather Underground, the rise of an internal ideological sect that denounced Bernardine and Bill, followed by Bernardine’s denunciation of herself that included a confession about her “counterrevolutionary actions.” Her comrade, Kathy Boudin, told her, “If you go above ground, you’re a racist.” Ouch. That must have hurt. In the fallout, the Ayers- Dohrn family cracked up and was nearly destroyed.

It’s painful to read how Bernardine’s ideological foes broke her down; painful to read that she agreed to denounce herself and her friends and in words on the page. In hindsight, she observed, “It makes me sick that I wrote that.” Her worst enemy wasn’t Hoover and the FBI but her so-called revolutionary sisters. So Zayd’s book is a cautionary tale about the dangers of movements and ideologies, though it’s also a plug for honorable family ties and legacies.

I knew Zayd before he knew me. That was in the late 1970s, before his parents surfaced, and when they visited me in Sonoma County and we went swimming and sunbathing at a neighbor’s pool. When Bill changed Zayd’s diaper, I asked him if he liked it. “I love it,” he said. Zayd wasn’t always sure that his father loved him unconditionally.

At times, Bill seemed to love the revolution more than he loved his own flesh and blood. That sounds like my Ukrainian-born socialist grandfather, Aaron, who, it was said by his own children, would rather take the shirt off his own back and give it to a stranger than clothe my mother and her sister. Ah, yes, contradictions! Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them.

Please, please do read Zayd’s exciting, thoughtful book, which explores the undergrounds, both Black and white, of the Long Sixties, and that explores the terrible beauty of the revolutionary movement that rose and fell and that will rise again. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground will occupy a special space in my library and in my heart.  Thanks, Zayd for writing a book that tells the truths that need to be told.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

There Is Nothing New About Trump’s Economic Populism – OpEd

Trump’s policies are not guided by a coherent philosophy; they form a transactional strategy that draws on tactics employed by earlier Republican leaders. All this makes clear that such interventionism is a legacy of the GOP itself—rather than an aberration within the American right—as many analysts wrongly claim.

April 16, 2026 
By MISES
By Lorenzo Cianti


The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision invalidating Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs, followed almost immediately by the President’s response reinstating and increasing them, reminds us once again how rapidly American politics evolves. Yet, in some cases, it pays to recognize that certain underlying threads in government policy remain constant, regardless of the period or the leaders in charge.

Too often, so-called “experts” weigh in on current events without any real command of economic history. Consider the outrage among prominent Republicans over Trump’s bombastic campaign promises and what his detractors see as troubling moves after returning to office.

In a December 2025 op-ed for The New York Times, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney contended that tariffs “burden lower- and middle-income families,” pointing to analyses showing they act as a regressive tax that hits the poorest Americans hardest. Still, in the same piece, he echoed progressive rhetoric by calling for higher taxes on the rich, himself included. We have no intention of defending Trump here, but one neglected aspect deserves attention.

For decades, a persistent myth has held that the Reagan-era GOP heralded an age of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism, nudging the entire ideological spectrum toward pro-free trade, business-friendly positions. It thus became natural to portray Trump as an outlier in the Republican fold—an irritating, heterodox chapter in the story of a party that, on the surface at least, has long championed individual liberty and small government. The truth, however, is far more nuanced than the dominant narrative would have us believe.

To debunk this simplistic notion, we must dissect the most salient aspects of Trump’s platform and compare them with the GOP’s historical record.

Protectionism

Protectionism stands as the policy Trump touts most proudly, so much so that he has proclaimed himself “Tariff Man.” He went further still, calling “tariff” the most beautiful word in the English language.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Republican Party emerged in the mid-1850s by inheriting Henry Clay’s “American System,” which formed the cornerstone of the Whigs’ agenda: leveraging the federal government to stabilize finance, protect and foster domestic industry, and build national infrastructure.

Whigs and early Republicans both favored higher tariffs not only to generate federal revenue, but also to safeguard and promote US manufacturers, with the goal of developing a more diversified, industrializing economy. As Lew Rockwell aptly noted in the introduction to Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto:


The Civil War, in addition to its unprecedented bloodshed and devastation, was used by the triumphal and virtually one–party Republican regime to drive through its statist, formerly Whig, program: national governmental power, protective tariff, subsidies to big business, inflationary paper money, resumed control of the federal government over banking, large–scale internal improvements, high excise taxes, and, during the war, conscription and an income tax.

The US House of Representatives passed the Morrill Tariff on the eve of Lincoln’s presidency. The measure sharply raised tariff rates on dutiable imports and widened the protectionist scope of federal policy. A subsequent adjustment soon pushed rates even higher.

The 1890 McKinley Tariff, named after then-Representative William McKinley, established the highest average tariff level in US history up to that time, with some rates surpassing 100 percent. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, enacted under Warren Harding, produced substantial increases in a decade defined by isolationism and protectionist sentiment.

Yet it was the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, signed into law by Herbert Hoover, that delivered the most dramatic escalation of duties in American history to that point. This infamous measure lifted average tariff rates to approximately 60 percent—up from the Fordney-McCumber level of 38 percent—in an effort to shield domestic employment. The result was a cascade of retaliatory tariffs from trading partners around the world.


The Smoot-Hawley Act was a classic example of beggar–thy–neighbor policy, in which one country pursues its own national advantage at the direct expense of others. This zero-sum logic parallels the rationale behind Trump’s tariffs, as the following chart illustrates:

Source: PIIE, US Global Investors

Price Controls

On December 19, 2025, Trump announced nine new agreements with major pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug prices for American patients, bringing them in line with the lowest prices paid in other developed countries (known as most-favored-nation, or MFN, pricing). These voluntary deals lower costs for Medicaid programs and certain direct–to–consumer sales, building on earlier MFN efforts from his administration.

The best-known historical precedent came on August 15, 1971, when Richard Nixon declared a 90-day freeze on wages and prices as part of his New Economic Policy. That move aimed to combat runaway inflation and avert a currency crisis amid the collapse of the Bretton Woods system.

It was the first peacetime imposition of mandatory wage and price controls in US history, initially winning broad public support but then proving disastrous. Driven by stagflation and fears of a gold drain after the dollar’s convertibility ended, the inflation rate had climbed above 12 percent by 1974.

The program evolved through multiple phases, including the establishment of the Pay Board and Price Commission to oversee allowable increases. Artificially-suppressed prices quickly led to widespread shortages, most notably in gasoline and steel, with long lines at pumps and rationing conditions. Businesses, unable to cover costs, reduced output, cut quality, or were forced to shut down.

The controls disrupted market signals, prevented economic calculation, and failed to curb long–term inflation, contributing to distortions that lingered for years. Why should we believe similar interventions today would produce different results?

Tax Cuts

Through the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), Trump’s first term delivered the most significant federal tax overhaul since the 1980s.

This mirrors Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act—which phased in a 25 percent across-the-board cut in individual rates (top marginal from 70 percent to 50 percent), accelerated depreciation, and inflation indexing—and the 1986 Tax Reform Act, which simplified brackets and dropped the top rate to 28 percent, but left overall revenue roughly intact due to offsets.

As Rothbard asserted in his critique of Reaganomics, these cuts were illusory and temporary in practice, offset by bracket creep, rising payroll taxes, stealth increases, and massive spending growth that ballooned the federal deficit without structural restraint. Although any tax cut should be welcome, in both cases, these were easily reversible measures that drove deficits higher because they were not accompanied by cuts to public spending and government departments.

Government Spending

The Republican embrace of expansive government spending under the banner of “compassionate conservatism” reached new heights during George W. Bush’s presidency.

In 2003, Bush signed Medicare Part D—a massive new entitlement program providing prescription drug benefits to seniors—with initial costs estimated at $400 billion over ten years, later revised upward to $534 billion. The voluntary benefit, administered through private insurers, represented a major expansion of federal involvement in healthcare, adding trillions to long-term liabilities without corresponding offsets.

Similarly, in October 2008, Bush enacted the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, authorizing $700 billion (then capped at $475 billion) to bail out financial institutions by purchasing troubled assets, ultimately disbursing $443 billion with a net cost of $31 billion after recoveries.

These interventions underscored the GOP’s willingness to deploy federal resources during crises and foreshadow Trump’s own big-spending tendencies. Bush’s 2008 Economic Stimulus Act also provided $152 billion in rebate checks to over 130 million households, aimed at boosting spending amid the financial crisis.

That approach finds a counterpart in Trump’s 2020 CARES Act—a $2 trillion package that included $1,200 direct payments per adult as part of broader relief, though on a vastly larger scale (12 percent of GDP in 2020 versus 1 percent in 2008). Both initiatives sought rapid economic stimulus but prioritized short-term aid over fiscal restraint.

Conclusion

Trump’s policies are not guided by a coherent philosophy; they form a transactional strategy that draws on tactics employed by earlier Republican leaders. They are best understood as a somewhat disorganized, contradictory blend of neo-mercantilism, national populism, and old-school protectionism, rooted in the Whig program and traditional Republicanism.

Trumpism combines higher tariffs abroad with “fewer regulations” at home, folding in Nixon’s price controls, Reagan’s tax cuts, and Bush’s expansionary policies. All this makes clear that such interventionism is a legacy of the GOP itself—rather than an aberration within the American right—as many analysts wrongly claim.

About the author:

 Lorenzo Cianti is a student of Political Science and International Relations at Roma Tre University. Passionate about Austrian Economics and political philosophy, he is a regular contributor to L’Opinione delle Libertà—Italy’s oldest continuously published newspaper—and to the online magazine Atlantico Quotidiano. He was a finalist in the 2026 Kenneth Garschina Undergraduate Student Essay Contest for the essay “The Chainsaw Revolution: Javier Milei’s Rothbardian Assault on Argentine Collectivism.”

Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute

The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, the Mises Institute seeks a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. The Mises Institute encourages critical historical research, and stands against political correctness.

American Muslims Don’t Need to Defend Our Existence

Farrah Hassen

April 13, 2026

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Photograph Source: Ted Eytan – CC BY-SA 2.0

The journey of my prayer rug reflects my own as a Muslim American. It has seen a lot, and despite its fraying fringes, remains resilient as ever.

Praying five times each day is one of the pillars of Islam. Each prayer includes recitations from the Qur’an.

My blue and gold prayer rug was a childhood gift from my late maternal grandmother, or nana as we called her, who brought it from Saudi Arabia. I still remember praying by her side. She taught me to read the Qur’an and would lovingly correct my Arabic.

Wherever I’ve been, I’ve prayed on that same rug. In a world that often leaves me feeling unmoored, my faith anchors me. It’s a sentiment so many Muslims and other people of faith in this country share.

The right to freely practice my religion is enshrined in our Constitution under the First Amendment. It protects this right for allpeople to practice any faith, or none at all, and prohibits our government from establishing an official religion.

You would think members of Congress, who swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, would know this. Yet many continue to attack the faith of millions of Muslim Americans, including their own constituents.

Some have invoked “sharia” — which refers to the various rules Muslims follow, like prayer guidance — to preposterously claim that Muslims are trying to “replace” the Constitution.  Islamic learning institutions — like the summer school where I first learned the Arabic alphabet in my youth — are a growing target.

When the Islamic Academy in Alabama tried to relocate from the Birmingham suburb of Homewood to a larger building in nearby Hoover, a local Islamophobic campaign ensued, resulting in Hoover city officials voting against the relocation late last year. In response, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said, “Islamic Indoctrination Centers have NO PLACE in our state.”

Would Tuberville have denigrated Catholic schools, Protestant youth groups, or Jewish summer camps this way?

Unfortunately, Tuberville is hardly alone. Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) recently compared Muslims to dogs and has labeled Muslim officials like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “terrorists.”

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) declared this March that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” That’s not only hateful but ignorant. Among the first Muslims in the U.S. were enslaved West Africans who helped build this country. Despite significant obstacles, many preserved their Islamic faith and were guided by it in their struggle for liberation.

Since then, Fine and Ogles have only doubled down on their bigotry. In a March post on X, Fine wrote “We need more Islamophobia, not less,” while Ogles said Muslims “all have to go back.” Virtually no high profile Republicans have condemned this hateful rhetoric.

This racist fearmongering is a tried and true tactic — a cheap deflection from these leaders’ own failure to respond to their constituents’ actual needs, like affordable housing, health care, and groceries.

But it’s also more than that. The more Muslims are dehumanized, the easier it is for politicians to justify their endless, costly, and immoral wars on Muslim-majority countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iran, and the genocide in Gaza. Like clockwork, each new bombing abroad fuels more anti-Muslim racism and violence against my community at home.

Already, Islamophobic social media posts have proliferated since the war on Iran began. The NYPD recently foiled an assassination attempt against Muslim and Palestinian American activist Nerdeen Kiswani. And according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, anti-Muslim discrimination complaints in the U.S. have reached record highs.

Muslims don’t need to defend our existence. It’s the racists and religious bigots who don’t belong in Congress — or anywhere in a free society.

But while hateful politicians spew division, I see more people in this country refusing to do the same. Instead, multi-faith coalitions are uniting around real threats: war, billionaires controlling our economy, the climate emergency, and the alarming erosion of the constitutional rights we hold so dear, including the freedom of religion.

Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.