Meeting the Weatherman
AirTrain meet cute
“Are you registered to vote in San Francisco?”
I don’t respond; I’m pretending I didn’t hear him. I’m at the end of a cross-country journey. A cranky traveler at the best of times, I suspect I’m suffering a covid relapse, have just cut a much-anticipated trip short, and am just one - hopefully uneventful - AirTrain ride from my car and then my bed. I’m not in the mood to chat. I’m really not in the mood to talk politics.
He boarded the air train with his brother. Two affable middle-aged guys just landed in SF, here to celebrate the retirement of a third brother. I know this because they have already chatted up a Scottish man visiting from San Diego.
While Brother One shares family history with his new Scottish friend, Brother Two continues to pick at my politics.
“Excuse me, are you registered to vote in San Francisco?” He’s just a bit louder and more insistent this time. He’s two feet away, and it’s impossible to pretend I can’t hear.
“Yes.” Not true, I realize as I say it. During the pandemic, I moved out of the city and re-registered. But before I can correct myself, he jumps in with what is clearly a personally important political pitch:
“Vote No on H.”
Chesa Boudin is San Francisco’s District Attorney, and Prop H would remove him from office. Something about this constellation of information - the name they’ve shared with his new Scottish friend, the support for Chesa Boudin - tickles the back of my brain. But I can’t quite grab the forming thought.
Still, Brother Two now has my attention. While every major newspaper in the city supports Boudin, the average person on the street is not politicking to save him. I’m surprised to find a genuine vocal supporter of Chesa Boudin among the plebeians on the AirTrain. The travel fog is starting to clear in my head, and I’m curious why this Chicago-based person is so invested in Chesa Boudin.
“Are you a big fan of Chesa?”
He blinks. “Yes. He’s my son!”
And it suddenly all clicks into place.
“You’re Bill Ayers”.
More blinking. “Yes”.
“You’re the…” what’s a nice way to say terrorist? “…um, activist”?
Yes, it turns out, he is that same Bill Ayers.
Weather Underground Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers who adopted 14 month old Chesa Boudin when his parents went to prison for a 1981 armored car robbery that resulted in the death of two police officers and an armed guard. Husband of fellow infamous Weather Underground leader and former FBI ten most wanted fugitive Bernadine Dohrn.
I’m hanging with Bill Ayers on the AirTrain. My first impression: I’m surprised at his youthfulness. I confirmed his age before writing this - Bill Ayers is 77 years old. But he looks and sounds 60. He’s casually dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, mask firmly in place. (During the short train ride he lectured his brother for not wearing a mask and standing too close to their new Scottish friend). He’s tan, and his right forearm and wrist are covered with a tattoo I can’t make out. He’s chatty. Engaging.
Radical activist stories pepper my childhood, but in a very different way than I imagine they did for Chesa. My father served as a San Francisco police officer from the late 60s to the mid-90s. The radical activists were not the heroes in my house.
My dad’s first assignment in 1968 was to draw fire from suspected Black Panther gunmen in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point Projects. The projects sat on a hill above the a Naval Shipyard, and someone was shooting at the guards manning the entrance gates from the projects. The goal of the operation was to pinpoint where the gunfire was coming from so officers could find and arrest the shooter(s). So fresh faced, wearing his neatly pressed uniform and driving a black and white, Dad took on his first assignment: Be bait.
Six months before I was born, Angel Davis was acquitted of kidnapping, murder and conspiracy charges stemming from an attempted kidnapping at the Marin County Courthouse. In October of the same year, while Angela Davis was on the run, the same courthouse was bombed in response to the previous incident. The Weather Underground would later claim responsibility. The courthouse is a Frank Lloyd Wright curiosity nestled in the hillside along highway 101 in San Rafael. As a child, we passed the courthouse every time we made our way to and from the city. The conversation always shifted to these events, including the latest on who had been captured and who was still on the run.
These are the stories I grew up on. As a child, I vaguely understood that activist groups had political goals. They wanted to stop the Vietnam War or fight discrimination. But also, they wanted to kill my dad. Or at a minimum, would be okay if he died in the aftermath of one of their “actions”. Our family had a lot of discussions about how the ends don’t always justify the means, especially when it comes to violence. We should all have more discussions about ends and means.
Bill Ayers himself has played coy when asked about his connections to bombings. In a New York Times interview notably published on September 11, 2001, Ayers vacillated; he seemed to proudly claim responsibility and then deny it.
I certainly didn’t ask him about his activist past. Instead we chatted about the recall process. Unsurprisingly, he thinks it’s undemocratic and a waste of money. I think if Boudin is recalled, it’s because the public is fed up and they’re pulling one of the few democratic levers they perceive as still available to them. I uncharacteristically kept this opinion to myself. Chesa is his son, after all.
Ayers expanded on the support for Chesa Boudin from public officials, newspapers and celebrities. He wanted to know if I was a Golden State Warriors fan. (I am). Did I know that coach Steve Kerr supports Chesa? (I didn’t, and I couldn’t find any independent confirmation ). According to Bill Ayers, when Steve Kerr played for the Chicago Bulls in the 90s, his mother would come to visit. Steve and his mother would dine with a friend - an academic - and someone who was also a good friend of Bill Ayers. Bill remembers dining many times with the Kerrs and has been a Steve Kerr fan ever since.
When the train pulls up to the rental car stop, Ayers stands up to leave and tells me that he plans to inform Chesa that he met a woman on the train and she is mulling over his voting advice. He grabs his wheelie suitcase and nimbly exits the train at a fast clip. He is seriously spry for 77. I immediately pick up the phone and called my dad. He’s used to my weird stories. I’m the kid that finds herself in some uniquely San Francisco head scratching situations, like the time I learned my new home was built on Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan property and it led to my dog landing a role as a lion in a quirky movie, but that’s a story for another time…
Dad and I reminisce a bit about his time on the force, how the Park Station bombing and resulting death of Sergeant Brian McDonnell shook the police department. That bombing is yet another one rumored to have been planted by the Weather Underground. He asks what Bill Ayers is doing now, and is gracious when I tell him Bill is retired but still teaches writing in prisons, “Well the people that do that kind of work have a calling”. I don’t disagree.
Eventually this will be just another quirky story about the time I met Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground on the SFO AirTrain. It does feel eerie and timely with the imminent recall vote of his son.
Dad’s stories are great, but I learned so much about 60s and 70s radicals reading Bryan Burrough’s wonderful book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. It should be assigned reading in American History classes.
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males? What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, with Globohomo diversity brigades going door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution