Megyn Kelly, in a recent 2-part interview on Fox News,  encountered the same insouciance I experienced asking Bill Ayers how he justifies the damage and deaths he caused as leader of the Weather Underground domestic terror gang in the 1970s.

It was during a dog and pony event in Washington, DC in 2006, set up by Ayers to rekindle interest in his 2001 book Fugitive Days that, unfortunately for Ayers, the New York Times reviewed on the front page of the Arts section September 11.  It didn’t help his cause that he was quoted in a lift-out, “we didn’t do enough,” referring to bombings of public buildings. New Yorkers were not amused reading about Ayers depicted as a romantic revolutionary as the World Trade Center burned. What they saw around  them was a fiery and murderous tribute to his legacy by a new breed of terrorist.

Ayers deftly employs double talk, evasion and self-justification to elude questions, as he did with me when I asked him his opinion of America, the country he set out to destroy, after he and his partner in crime Bernadine Dohrn were not prosecuted after turning themselves in to authorities in 1980. His answer was to introduce an FBI agent who investigated the Weather Underground and came to admire their tradecraft. The agent also explained that indictments against Ayers and Dohrn were quaffed due to the 1972 US Supreme Court “Keith” decision throwing out cases for questionable wiretap violations  (In an odd twist, the directive not to prosecute Ayers and Dohrn was delivered by FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, later to be identified as Deep Throat.

Ayers, of interest to a wider audience due to his association with Barack Obama, has become even more adept at avoiding direct questions at age 70. And Kelly was unable to frame questions that may have elicited useful responses. She is a lawyer, and made the mistake of interviewing Ayers as if he were on trial for crimes gone unpunished for over 40 years. She seemingly relied on staff research and summaries rather than her own reading, enabling Ayers to justify his actions while throwing little grenades of activist sloganeering: For example, that he was only involved in property damage and not murder; that his actions are inflated by the rhetoric of the times and the media (even inserting a dig at the New York Times); Chicago police use torture routinely today; a lot of good people were on the FBI “Ten Most Wanted” list; grand juries are police state procedures that “over-reach”; and the constant refrain that what he and his cohorts did paled in comparison to “the 6000 killed a week during the Vietnam War,” as if killing innocent Americans at home would stop killings in the war.

Megyn Kelly was not able to rattle Ayers for his past crimes nor bring to light just how he influenced Obama, with Ayers stating he does not talk to the President with whom he disagrees on several issues.  Kelly and the Fox news producers also failed to bring Ayers to justice ex post facto for sedition and terrorism, nor shed light on his activities today as one of the architects of the indoctrination of young people in the classroom.  

The only way to rid our society of Ayers is to ignore him, an approach Fox News did not understand. Instead, he was able to re-connect with the radical Left and burnish his escutcheon in the eyes of history, even providing an opportunity for him to brandish his revolutionary flare, stating he would take up arms again if provoked by the nation he hates -- the country that allowed him to be “guilty as hell, and free as a bird.”                             

Bernie Reeves is Editor & Publisher, Founder, www.raleighspyconference.com