If, like me, you frequent The Drudge Report, then perhaps you too have sometimes concluded that the acts of radicals are the norm and that America is all but official done. Pat Buchanan administers a corrective:
According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” “During an 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”
No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.
It’s not too late to stay frosty.
Things that We have Heard and Known 
Five bombs a day! I knew it was bad, but I never knew it was that bad!
Note that pretty much all those bombs were placed by Left Wing terrorists like Obama’s old pal, Bill Ayers, yet the terms “Left Wing terrorist”, or even “Left Wing extremist” are almost never written or uttered. by in any news outlet.
Why not?
Because Bill Ayers and his buddies became college professors. We all received our “education” – directly or indirectly – from Bill Ayers and friends.
@Oscar
I was blown away by that fact too. Get it? Blown away? I kill me.
Get it? I kill… oh forget it.
Seriously, over 2500 in only 18 months is…crazy? Crazy doesn’t seem to cover it. Why did we tolerate that?
@Cane Caldo
Interesting question, and something I hadn’t considered before you asked it. My initial take is that we tolerated it because we were existentially threatened by an outside force (cold war). It makes me wonder, with that existential threat gone, is the US now more prone to coming apart?
“Seriously, over 2500 in only 18 months is…crazy? Crazy doesn’t seem to cover it. Why did we tolerate that?”
Well “we” (meaning the MSM, academia, pop culture, etc.) would tolerate the same thing now if Antifa was doing it. Someone sends real ricin packages to Trump & other Republicans? No news there. The crazy MAGA bomber sends completely worthless “pipe bombs”? Front page news for days…
@ Dalrock
I’m not so sure. The people perpetrating the bombings were mostly Communists (like Bill Ayers’ Weathermen). Many of them had direct contact with the Soviet Union, or indirect contact through the Communist Party USA.
In other words, the terrorism of the ’60s and ’70s was part of the existential threat presented by Communism, but it wasn’t treated that way, which is strange.
@Oscar
Good point, and it ties in with what MKT said about America’s storytellers.
Which brings us back to my question: Why did we tolerate that? Why do we tolerate it?
Part of the answer is Women’s Suffrage. Democratically-elected governments fear the feels-bad backlash generated by the perception of a harsh old government cracking down on the “little guy” even though he is a wicked destroyer. That perception is played up by the sympathetic MSM and the infantile academics (the storytellers).
@Oscar
Right. But that is what gave them leverage. The right felt like it had to put up with the violence and acting out to keep the country together. The left knew the right was more afraid of the outside threat than they were. It gave the left leverage over the right.
Half the right is too individualistic to care if leftists bomb liberal cities.
Why did we tolerate it? To quote Mark Twain:
“This funeral stopped the further growth of one thing—the petition to the Governor for Injun Joe’s pardon. The petition had been largely signed; many tearful and eloquent meetings had been held, and a committee of sappy women been appointed to go in deep mourning and wail around the governor, and implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty under foot. Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon-petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky water-works.”
Oh yeah, the 80s changed a lot.
We tolerated it, because we birthed it. Seriously, I read a fascinating article, which I wish I could find, that showed official government funding for truly insane leftist organizations. Guys were getting convicted, not just arrested, for murdering cops and were getting back out on the street 18 months later.
It was basically state sponsored in a lot of ways. The thing that was different is that America was still foundationally pretty healthy. Kind of like how a young man can booze hard and more or less turn out ok in ways that an old man usually can’t.
But no the sixties and the seventies were the wild west. NYC was having something like over a hundred firearm discharges a day,possibly much more, luckily a lot of bad shots. When riots happened, according to old cop memoirs I’ve read, they would be fishing bodies out of the river for days as people used it as a time to settle scores, even cops.
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