One of the most notorious radicals in recent American history has put his money behind a slate of Democratic lawmakers.
Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground, has donated over $10,000 to at least a dozen Democratic lawmakers since 2020, campaign finance records show. The Weather Underground has been described by the FBI, as well as legacy news organizations such as the New York Times, as a domestic terrorist organization.
After the Washington Examiner contacted the office of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) about Ayers’s donation to her, Cortez Masto donated the amount of his campaign contribution to charity.
“Bill Ayers is a domestic terrorist,” a spokeswoman for Cortez Masto, who received $250 from Ayers in 2022, told the Washington Examiner. “The Senator wants nothing to do with him and has donated the equivalent amount of his past small-dollar donations to charity.”
Between 1969 and 1977, the Weathermen and the Weather Underground carried out a string of successful bombings, targeting high-profile targets such as the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, and planned, but failed, to detonate bombs that would have killed police officers and members of the armed forces. Motivating their bombings was opposition to the Vietnam War and a desire to rectify anti-black racism in the United States.
Other Democrats who took cash from Ayers and were reached by the Washington Examiner were less eager to disavow the former Weatherman. Among them are some of the most prominent progressive lawmakers in the country.
Over the years, Ayers has, through his campaign contributions, shown a particular affinity for “the Squad,” an informal caucus of progressive Democratic lawmakers featuring left-wing firebrands such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). Each of these women has received financial support from Ayers.
Omar, for instance, has accepted roughly $4,500 from Ayers since 2020. Over the same period, Ocasio-Cortez received roughly $500, Pressley took roughly $600, and Tlaib received $1,000 — $250 of which was donated as recently as August 2025. Additionally, Ayers made $500 in contributions to the Squad Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee benefiting the group of legislators.
Ayers has made his ideological alignment with lawmakers such as Tlaib and Omar clear not just through his campaign contributions but through his statements as well.
“When [former President Joe] Biden loses to the fascist in 2024, you can count on the establishment Democrats to blame Rashida Tlaib and the progressives — and they will be wrong,” Ayers wrote in November 2023, referring to President Donald Trump as the “fascist.” “The Democrats are doing this to themselves: enabling every move Israel makes with knee-jerk predictability; fanning a cold war in Asia; engaging a proxy war in Europe; and most despicably, embracing a pre-announced genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
Ayers has repeatedly compared contemporary protests against Israel’s military operations in Gaza — protests that have attracted strong support from members of the Squad — to his activism against the Vietnam War.
“It’s not that history repeats itself, but the contradictions have not gone away,” Ayers said in an August 2024 interview regarding the pro-Palestinian protests. “White supremacy abides. War and empire and genocide abide. And we have to stand up against them. Our task today is very similar. We have to end this system of oppression.”
Ayers has also made contributions to lawmakers with more centrist reputations.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), a top target for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterm elections, accepted $100 from Ayers in 2020. Ossoff’s colleague, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), received nearly $400 from Ayers in 2022.
The formerly progressive Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who has adopted a far more centrist posture after winning his seat in the Senate during the 2022 elections, received $250 from Ayers that year. Fellow centrists Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) also accepted $250 from Ayers in 2022.
Each of the 2022 races where Ayers made donations was seen as key to Democrats retaining control of the Senate that year. The former militant’s giving history suggests that, despite his claimed aversion to the mainstream Democratic Party, he’s happy to open his checkbook to keep them in power.
Ayers’s alleged affiliation with then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was a major story during the 2008 presidential campaign. While legacy news outlets found that the two didn’t have a close relationship, Ayers admitted after the 2012 election that the president had held a fundraiser in his living room, that they were “friendly” with one another, and that their wives had been coworkers.
While Ayers has, later in his life, stated that the Weathermen did not intend to inflict “lethal harm” and “took pains never intentionally to injure or kill anyone,” journalists, historians, and even former Weathermen have challenged that claim.
“The myth, and this was always Bill Ayers’ line, is that the Weather never set out to kill people, and it’s not true — we did,” former Weatherman Howie Machtinger told Vanity Fair correspondent Bryan Burrough in an interview for his 2015 book. “You know, policemen were fair game.”
A Weatherman cadre who claims to have taken part in a bombing of a Berkeley police complex told Burrough that they had sought to “maximize deaths” with the explosion, stressing the police officers were “fair game.”
“Weatherman in the first three months of 1970 was, by any reasonable measure, a band intent on committing radical violence, not only against property but against people as well,” historian Arthur Eckstein wrote of the group.
Mark Rudd, a founding member of the Weathermen, has also rebutted Ayers’s claims of non-violence. Recalling a 1969 meeting, Rudd says that Bernardine Dohrn, now Ayers’s wife, advocated for mimicking the Cuban revolution by “working clandestinely” on an “armed struggle.”
“In our hearts, I think what all of us wanted to be were Black Panthers,” Cathy Wilkerson, who made bombs for the Weather Underground, is quoted as saying in Burrough’s book. “And it was no secret what the Panthers wanted to do, which was what the Black Liberation Army did later, and that’s kill policemen. It’s all they wanted to do.”
The desire to inflict violence upon police, as described by Ayers’s fellow former Weatherman, is hardly surprising given the group’s early activities, its founding document, and Ayers’s own reported statements.
“We’re also going to make it clear that when a pig gets iced, that’s a good thing, and that everyone who considers himself a revolutionary should be armed, should own a gun,” Ayers said, according to Burrough, in the lead up to the Weathermen’s first major act: the Days of Rage.
The Days of Rage was a series of riots organized by the Weathermen in 1969, where left-wing activists clashed violently with law enforcement and engaged in mass vandalism and property destruction. Such violence was not without warning, as “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” the organization’s founding manifesto, called for armed “self-defense” operations against police officers and other representatives of the state.
Larry Grathwohl, a former Weatherman who served as an informant for the FBI, claims that Ayers ordered the bombs to be planted at a Detroit police precinct and a charity associated with the department during operating hours. The bombs were found and defused before they could detonate.
Grathwohl recounted that Ayers seemed unbothered by the likelihood that people could die as a result of his actions.
Though Ayers claims to have had no part in attempts to carry out lethal violence, he is quoted as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs,” in a 2001 New York Times interview. He later claimed he was misquoted.
Ayers managed to avoid conviction for his terror-related activities because the FBI utilized illegal tactics in gathering evidence against him, prompting prosecutors to request that charges against him related to bombings be dropped.
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The Washington Examiner cross-referenced Ayers’ address as it appears in campaign finance filings with property records to confirm that the donations in question came from the Weather Underground co-founder and not an individual who happens to share his name.
Ayers did not respond to a request for comment. Every lawmaker who took money from Ayers was reached by the Washington Examiner.
