“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” a line from Bob Dylan, inspired a radical, Maoist off-shoot of Students for a Democratic Society at the end of the 1960s. Led by SDS activists Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, the Weathermen were to the student movement what Black Power represented to SNCC, radicalizing and then rejecting major aspects of civil rights and New Left ideology.

Stock phrases like “kill the pig” and “kicking ass” captured some disaffected with the Vietnam War and “corporate capitalism,” though they remained relatively few. The Weathermen eventually turned to urban guerilla methods and, as efforts at robbery and kidnapping made them fugitives, tended to separate themselves in clandestine organizations, akin to cults. In the 1980s and 1990s, several former Weathermen who had created new identities were arrested or turned themselves in to the police, recalling the more radical 1960s counterculture to the public mind.