On Aug. 30, 2014, MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner and former White House chef Sam Kass got married at a private wedding north of New York City. It was widely reported at the time that President Obama, a longtime friend of the groom, attended the ceremony with his family. There were two other notable guests, however, whose attendance has been successfully kept secret: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former campus radicals whose loose association with the Obama family over the years has inspired countless Fox News fever-dreams and led to Sarah Palin’s famous accusation that Obama “pal[s] around with terrorists.”
We recently heard that Ayers and Dohrn, both former leaders of the Weather Underground, the militant left-wing group best known for bombing empty government buildings in the 1970s, were also present for the Wagner-Kass celebration at the Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant and event space in Pocantico Hills, New York.
While the fact that Obama was literally partying with former advocates of violent struggle against the U.S. government will no doubt be taken by his critics as further evidence that he hates America, the most interesting thing about the wedding is the shocking proof it offers that—at long last!—Obama truly no longer gives a fuck about keeping up political appearances. It’s unthinkable that the Obama of the 2008 or 2012 campaigns would have been permitted to go anywhere near Ayers or Dohrn, for fear of fueling the unhinged right-wing narrative that he is a radical leftist.
“Unhinged,” eh?
Ayers and Dohrn, who are 70 and 73, were linked to dozens of bombings of evacuated buildings belonging to the U.S. government and financial institutions, and helped design much of the Weathermen’s philosophical framework. The pair went into hiding between 1970 and 1980 after a bomb—allegedly prepared to maim Army soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix—prematurely detonated in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse used by Weathermen to stage guerrilla attacks. Neither were ever charged for their involvement in any specific Weathermen bombing, but Dohrn—who spent three years on the FBI’s Most Wanted list—eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated battery. Ayers went on to become a well-known scholar of education, and Dohrn became a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and co-founded the school’s Children and Family Justice Center.
This is the moment they’ve been waiting for. These last two final, awful years of the Obama administration are going to be hell on earth.
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