The Real Ayers Issue

“La educación es revolución!” Bill Ayers, the former Weatherman terrorist who is Barack Obama’s friend and “education reform” collaborator, was opening the World Education Forum in Venezuela. It was just two years ago, November 2006. As a beaming Hugo Chávez looked on, Ayers roused a throng of “invited guests, comrades,” touting the world’s classrooms as the frontline for the Left’s anti-American revolution.

Ayers has never made a secret of the fact that he is not just a man of the Left but a revolutionary. The revolution in the classroom, he repeatedly and defiantly maintains, is the same revolution he has served for 40 years, the same revolution that inspired him to bomb the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and other American targets beginning in the late Sixties. On this day in Caracas, he gushed with praise for Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution and . . . the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela.” Against capitalism-which, he said, “promotes racism and materialism” and “turn[s] people into consumers, not citizens”-he contrasted Chávez’s police state: a “beacon to the world.”

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.

Featured Tags

Presidential Election

“La educación es revolución!” Bill Ayers, the former Weatherman terrorist who is Barack Obama’s friend and “education reform” collaborator, was opening the World Education Forum in Venezuela. It was just two years ago, November 2006. As a beaming Hugo Chávez looked on, Ayers roused a throng of “invited guests, comrades,” touting the world’s classrooms as the frontline for the Left’s anti-American revolution.

Ayers has never made a secret of the fact that he is not just a man of the Left but a revolutionary. The revolution in the classroom, he repeatedly and defiantly maintains, is the same revolution he has served for 40 years, the same revolution that inspired him to bomb the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and other American targets beginning in the late Sixties. On this day in Caracas, he gushed with praise for Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution and . . . the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela.” Against capitalism-which, he said, “promotes racism and materialism” and “turn[s] people into consumers, not citizens”-he contrasted Chávez’s police state: a “beacon to the world.”

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.