Is Chicago Media Hiding Real Radicalism in Chicago?

Sun-Times reporter Tom Schuba shills for the radical left as Democratic Convention approaches

Sun-Times reporter Tom Schuba shills for the radical left as Democratic Convention approaches

As the Democratic convention draws closer, Chicago media outlets like the Sun-Times and WBEZ have intensified another monumental campaign of deceit.

This latest campaign is aimed at transforming Chicago police officers into political radicals while protecting the truly extremists the Chicago media has faithfully served for decades. Toward that effort, Tom Schuba and the Sun-Times have taken a break from pushing bogus exoneration stories to devoting a collection of articles about cops being right-wing zealots, ominously entitled “Extremism in the Ranks.”

It’s as if Schuba believes people who were once blue-collar workers in various jobs or recent college graduates are suddenly and mysteriously transformed into right-wing maniacs when they join the police department, who in truth don’t long adhere in the oath of constitutional policing when they graduate from the academy. And, of course, fellow officers protect them.

It is a silly, stupid, and adolescent imagination that can push such a story over and over in long articles claiming to be “investigative journalism,” a central reason why Schuba and the mainstream media is held in such contempt by contemporary Americans, fed up with not only what they make up as news, but the monumental, crucial stories they chronically hide.

But for Schuba and the rest of the Chicago media, turning cops into right-wing storm troopers is a necessary, however absurd, trope for a media that has nothing of any real substance to say, a media lost in the mirrors of its own doomed ideology and the fabrications invented to keep it alive.

History is a particular burden for Schuba and the Sun-Times. To maintain their fictions, compelling history is glossed over or completely ignored. But history may never be more important than it is now as the Democratic National Convention approaches and the real threats to the city and country take shape.

One key period was the early 1970s when Bernardine Dohrn, a founding member of a terrorist group called the Weather Underground, was on the run. She was hiding out in the San Francisco area while listed on the FBI’s Most Wanted as a suspect in several bombings. The FBI had uncovered a great deal of evidence that Dohrn and her group had worked closely with communist countries to overthrow the American republic.

Here are a few compelling quotes from Dohrn’s radical past.

“I consider myself a revolutionary Communist,” Dohrn announced in the late ’60s.

About her movement:

“We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men . . . deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.”

“Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.”

Here’s what Dorhn said about the Charles Manson murders. “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

In those years on the run, life in hiding wasn’t all that bad. Dohrn had regular company. The graduate of the University of Chicago Law School turned terrorist bomber had frequent visits from her friends back home in Chicago. Two of those visitors, according to author Bryan Burrough in a 2015 Vanity Fair article entitled “Meet the Weather Underground’s Bomb Guru,” was a couple from Chicago, attorney Dennis Cunningham and his wife, Mona.

Here’s a lively sentence from the article about the connection between the Cunninghams and Dohrn.

“Cunningham was a key conduit for the money that paid the [WU] leadership’s living expenses. He adored Dohrn and considered her one of the most talented minds he had ever encountered.’

Cunningham was a “conduit” for funding the leadership of Weather Underground while they were in hiding? Who was this Cunningham and what Chicago law firm did work for?

The People’s Law Office, a Chicago firm comprised of attorneys with associations not just to the Weather Underground, but to a host of violent revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN.

Here’s what the PLO said about Cunningham in a tribute shortly after he passed away.

“In Chicago, Dennis also represented numerous leaders and members of the SDS-Weathermen, and Rising Up Angry, and later provided counsel to arrested FALN members and Palestinian liberation hero Rasmea Odeh. One of the most famous of those clients, Bernardine Dohrn, eloquently linked Dennis’ acting background to his unique lawyering skills . . .”

Though the PLO has become a key player in the anti-police movement in Chicago—most notably the wrongful conviction movement originating with their claims that former Chicago police commander Jon Burge and a host of former detectives who worked under him tortured confessions from African American suspects—few in the city know about the connections of the PLO law firm to revolutionary groups, connections that might in another era or another city cast doubt on the law firm’s steady claims of police misconduct.

“Journalists” like Tom Schuba are a central reason why the public doesn’t know about the connections.

One reason most Chicagoans don’t know about the radical origins of Dohrn is that the most radical movements from the late ’60s and ’70s honed a strategy in their war on the “system” that relied extensively on the abdication of the media from the tenets of fair journalism to disguised activism by reporters enamored of the movement. It was a fundamental shift in the American media from a press corps that saw itself as the watchdog of the republic to its antagonist.

Can anyone say Tom Schuba?

So just how extreme were Dohrn and the WU members? In the same Vanity Fair article, Burrough describes a meeting that took place in 1969 during what he calls the “last major public gathering” of the WU group. It was here that the group discussed their willingness to kill people. Anyone in particular the WU wanted to kill? You bet, according to Burrough: the police.

Burrough:

“The decision to attack policemen was an unspoken act of solidarity with the group whose approval mattered most to Weatherman leadership: movement blacks, especially the Black Panthers, who reserved a special hatred for urban police. ‘In our hearts, I think what all of us wanted to be were Black Panthers,’ [WU member] Cathy Wilkerson recalls. ‘And it was no secret what the Panthers wanted to do, which is what the Black Liberation Army did later, and that’s kill policemen. It’s all they wanted to do.’”

And so they unleashed unprecedented violence against the police. In February 1970, the WU placed two bombs in the parking lot of the Berkeley police complex in California, injuring several cops. Another fatal bombing of a San Francisco police department, believed by many former FBI agents to have been carried out by Dohrn, took the life of one sergeant and maimed several others.

But that’s not the end of the story about the Cunninghams and Dohrn, according to Burrough.  While Dohrn was in hiding in San Francisco, she and her WU brethren were still plotting bombings. Scouting potential bombing locations was becoming more difficult because pictures of WU members were plastered on FBI Most Wanted lists and police were looking for them, according to Burrough. Dohrn and Dennis Cunningham’s wife, Mona, struck on an idea: Police were less likely to notice a woman with children in tow, so Mona and Dohrn decided to use the Cunningham children as cover for Dohrn’s bomb-scouting activities, according to Burrough:

“No beat cop, they reasoned, would suspect a family with kids out for an evening stroll. It was a brilliant idea; the only problem was, no one in Weather had children. A handful of supporters did, however, and this was how one of Dohrn’s friends, the Chicago attorney Dennis Cunningham, saw his family drawn into clandestineness.”

Drawn into clandestineness. Interesting.

You get the picture now? A few cops who checked out groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are, according to a media clown like Tom Schuba, examples of “Extremism in the Ranks,” calling for article after article painting the police as political radicals.

After Dohrn and many of her WU brethren escaped criminal charges through criminalizing the FBI, which itself resorted to extreme surveillance measures of the WU to protect the public from the grave threat the FBI believed WU and other Marxists groups posed to the public, Dohrn returned to the law. No joke. Because of her criminal past she could not actually practice law.

No problem. She got hired by one of Chicago’s radical base camps called Northwestern University, whose law department and journalism school seem to have become factories for a political philosophy Dohrn would covet and pass on to the many disaffected upper-middle-class youths who blindly migrate each year to college campuses.

Many of the WU members ended up in universities as well, corrupting . . . oops, teaching the youths. Consider that Dohrn graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and then taught at Northwestern law school. Aren’t both those college campuses hotbeds of protests and police attacks eerily similar to the ones from Dohrn’s early days?

It took decades, but the 1970s radicals successfully got a foothold in both law schools and journalism schools.

While these accounts of the distant ’60s and ’70s radicalism may seem like opaque ancient history, they are, in fact, crucial to understanding the current dire condition of the country and to weigh what is at stake in the upcoming Democratic National Convention. For the likes of Dohrn, the WU, and their comrades, the upcoming Democratic National Convention is symbolic. At the infamous 1968 convention, these radicals got it handed to them by the Chicago police, many of whom were Vietnam vets. So angry were the rioters, Bill Ayers, Dohrn’s husband and fellow WU member, scoured the country plotting a revenge attack on the cops a year after the ’68 convention, an event called the Days of Rage.

It didn’t go over too well, but the WU and their brethren never forget. They have been steadily moving into the power centers of the city ever since, willing, with a straight face, to decry supposed political radicals in the police department while an unrepentant terrorist bomber gets hired at one of the most prestigious universities in the country.

And right now Dohrn and her ancient friends are riding high. Their fellow exoneration attorneys have reaped untold wealth from a city council and county settling lawsuits against police officers rather than backing the police in the courts, complete with the release of Jackie Wilson from his convictions for a 1982 double murder of police officers. Top elected officials like Brandon Johnson and Kimberly Foxx are far more the allies of these radicals than their antagonists, and they have little to fear from the woke Department of Justice headed by Merrick Garland.

Has their day finally arrived?

Who knows, but storm clouds are certainly forming.

One organization whose members will likely be attending the DNC is called the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Who is the Freedom Road Socialist Organization?

“Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is a national organization of revolutionaries fighting for socialism in the United States,” their website announces. “FRSO is recruiting and building towards the creation of a new Communist Party based on Marxism-Leninism. This is necessary to lead the way to socialism and liberation.”

In one of the articles by their media publication called Fight Back, the author celebrated a recent May Day protest in Chicago as a kind of prelude to the DNC.

“After the rally, the coalition marched to the United Center, where the DNC will be held,” the article stated.  “As the march moved past the United Center, the energy grew as the chants, ‘If we don’t get no justice, they don’t get no peace . . . a sign of things to come.’”

Sound familiar?

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House.  For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.