September 27, 2025

CELEBRATING A COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONARY COP-KILLER WHO WAS BROKEN OUT OF PRISON AND THEN FLED TO CUBA IS JUST SOMETHING TEACHERS UNIONS DO FOR THE CHILDREN:

Related (From Ed): Meanwhile, the London Telegraph has 830 “unexpectedly” glowing words on “Sara Jane Moore, attempted assassin of Gerald Ford who campaigned for fellow prisoners’ rights,” who died at age 95 on Monday:

Remarkably, it was the second attempt on the US president’s life that month. On September 5 Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of the Charles Manson cult, had aimed a pistol at Ford at point-blank range at a rally in Sacramento. Officials had disarmed her before a shot was fired. Both women spent more than 30 years in prison, with Moore paroled in 2007 and Fromme securing her own release in 2009.

While reports at the time of Sara Jane Moore’s arrest and sentencing focused on her “ordinariness” of her life as a suburban mother and housewife, subsequent revelations painted a more complex picture. She herself gave conflicting accounts of the thinking behind her actions on September 22.

Early on she claimed to be motivated by anger against the government and the Marxist ideology of her radical friends. She saw her actions as “a protest against the system” which, had they been successful, “could have triggered a revolution in the country”. “I’m not sorry I tried,” she said at her sentencing in federal court. Thirty years later, however, she expressed some measure of regret to a US television network, saying: “I am very happy I did not succeed. I know now that I was wrong to try.”

In 2024 she was the sole interviewee on a documentary about her life, Suburban Fury (she had agreed with the filmmaker, Robinson Devor, that no one else would appear on camera). Insisting once again that she was not insane, she gave a strikingly matter-of-fact account of her early life, from her time in the Women’s Army Corps to her dive into revolutionary politics. Uninterested in introspection, at times hostile to the interviewing process, she proved a frustrating and fascinating subject.

Devor intercut her testimony with archival footage illustrating the protest movements of the day: tensions arising from the Vietnam war, racial and economic discrimination, and the political fall-out from the Watergate scandal. The events of September 1975 continue to reverberate across America today, with political violence once again the subject of fevered discussion in the wake of the two attempts on the life of President Donald Trump, and the murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier this month.

Nixon had pursued a policy of massively scaling up the amount of South Vietnamese soldiers, and thus greatly reducing the number of American troops in Vietnam. He had expanded LBJ’s affirmative action program for minorities. Ford was a liberal Republican and as a congressman for a quarter of a century, a go-along to get-along RINO. Curiously though, NBC’s nascent Saturday Night Live viewed him as the antichrist, as did Moore and Fromme.  What could have fueled their rage? In 2022, Glenn wrote of “Nixon’s Revenge:”

It is difficult for people accustomed to today’s media environment to appreciate what a monoculture the media was back then, in that pre-Internet, pre-Cable, pre-Limbaugh era. The press still pretended to be neutral and objective, and was determined enough to maintain that pretense that it would at times even actually be so. There were more limits to what the ruling class was willing to tolerate, in terms of peculation and revealed dishonesty among its own, than there are today. There was in some ways more tolerance for opposing views, with people like William F. Buckley and Billy Graham receiving respectful hearings on mainstream programs in a way that would be impossible today.

But ultimately, that tolerance—and even the ruling class self-policing—was the product of deep-seated security in power. The liberal establishment of that era, which had crushed Sen. Barry Goldwater’s campaign like a bug, saw no one who might challenge it.

This is why Nixon’s election was so traumatic for them. Like Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, the election of a Republican seemed somehow fundamentally wrong. Republicans in Congress could do things, and could even occasionally snatch a short-lived majority. But after four Roosevelt inaugurations, and a string of Democratic presidents interrupted only by Dwight Eisenhower, who could have had the nomination of either party and who showed no inclination to interfere with the post-New Deal federal gravy train, the presumption was that the Executive and the bureaucracy would stay essentially Democratic forever.

Then, Nixon. Not the Camelot-redux hoped for with Bobby Kennedy, or even the party-establishment regime promised by Hubert Humphrey, but Nixon. A man from a small college instead of the Ivy League, a sometimes-awkward introvert, a fervent anti-communist when anti-communism was seen as declassé, Nixon was very much not our kind, dear.

 Plus ça change.

Posted at 1:40 pm by Stephen Green