Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization, has donated over $10,000 to at least a dozen Democratic lawmakers since 2020, according to campaign finance records cross-referenced by the Washington Examiner.

Only one lawmaker acted on the revelation. After the Examiner contacted Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto's office about Ayers's contributions, the Nevada Democrat donated the equivalent amount to charity.

A spokeswoman for Cortez Masto did not mince words: "Bill Ayers is a domestic terrorist. The Senator wants nothing to do with him and has donated the equivalent amount of his past small-dollar donations to charity."

Good for her. Now where is everyone else?

The recipient list

The Examiner reached every lawmaker who took money from Ayers. Beyond Cortez Masto, the silence was universal. Here's who cashed the checks:

• Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN): roughly $4,500 since 2020
• Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI): $1,000, with $250 donated as recently as August 2025
• Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA): roughly $600
• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): roughly $500
• Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA): nearly $400 in 2022
• Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA): $250 in 2022
• Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH): $250 in 2022
• Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ): $250 in 2022
• Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA): $100 in 2020

Ayers also made $500 in contributions to the Squad Victory Fund.

The dollar amounts are small. The principle is not. Every one of these lawmakers operates in a media environment that demands Republicans answer for every fringe figure who has ever bought a bumper sticker. A man the FBI has described as a domestic terrorist is writing checks to sitting members of Congress, and not one of them, save Cortez Masto, under direct media pressure, returned the money or acknowledged the problem.

Who is Bill Ayers?

For anyone too young to remember or too immersed in academia to care, Ayers co-founded the Weathermen, later rebranded as the Weather Underground. Between 1969 and 1977, the group carried out a string of successful bombings targeting the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, and planned but failed to detonate additional devices elsewhere. The FBI and legacy news organizations including the New York Times have described the Weather Underground as a domestic terrorist organization.

Ayers avoided conviction only because the FBI utilized illegal tactics in gathering evidence against him, prompting prosecutors to request that charges related to the bombings be dropped. He walked free not because he was innocent, but because the government's case was tainted.

In a 2001 New York Times interview, Ayers said it plainly: "I don't regret setting bombs."

He later claimed he was misquoted. The record suggests otherwise.

What his own allies said

Ayers has spent decades cultivating the myth that the Weather Underground never intended to harm people. His former comrades have dismantled that fiction with their own words.

Howie Machtinger, a former Weatherman, told Vanity Fair correspondent Bryan Burrough for his 2015 book:

"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. You know, policemen were fair game."

Cathy Wilkerson, who made bombs for the Weather Underground, offered a similar account in Burrough's book:

"In our hearts, I think what all of us wanted to be were Black Panthers. 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."

An unnamed Weatherman cadre who claims to have taken part in a bombing of a Berkeley police complex told Burrough they sought to "maximize deaths" and stressed that police officers were "fair game." Historian Arthur Eckstein wrote of the group: "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."

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."

Larry Grathwohl, a former Weatherman who served as an FBI informant, claims Ayers ordered bombs planted at a Detroit police precinct and a charity associated with the department during operating hours. The bombs were found and defused before detonation. Grathwohl recounted that Ayers seemed unbothered by the likelihood that people could die.

This is the man writing checks to Democratic members of Congress in 2025.

Ayers hasn't changed. He's just gotten older.

If there were any doubt that Ayers views his terrorism as a template rather than a regret, his recent public statements erase it. He has repeatedly compared contemporary protests against Israel's military operations in Gaza to his activism against the Vietnam War. In an August 2024 interview, he framed the connection explicitly: "It's not that history repeats itself, but the contradictions have not gone away. 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."

In November 2023, Ayers blamed Democrats for their own political failures while referring to President Donald Trump as "the fascist":

"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."

He went further, accusing Democrats of "embracing a pre-announced genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza." This is the ideological ecosystem that produced his donations. Ayers isn't quietly supporting mainstream liberalism. He is bankrolling the lawmakers he believes carry forward the revolutionary project he started with pipe bombs in the 1970s.

The double standard is the standard

Consider the political reality. Ayers's alleged affiliation with then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was a major story during the 2008 presidential campaign. After the 2012 election, Ayers admitted that Obama had held a fundraiser in his living room, that they were "friendly," and that their wives had been coworkers. The media treated it as old news the moment it became inconvenient.

Now the same dynamic plays out on a wider scale. A dozen Democratic lawmakers accept money from a man whose own co-conspirators say he wanted to kill police officers. A man who told a crowd, according to Burrough, 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." The Examiner contacted every office. One responded.

Sen. Jon Ossoff, a top Republican target heading into the 2026 midterm elections, took $100 from Ayers in 2020. Sen. John Fetterman, who has adopted a far more centrist posture since winning his seat in 2022, accepted $250 from the same man. Ayers did not respond to a request for comment.

The left has constructed an elaborate infrastructure of guilt by association, one that demands Republicans denounce, disavow, and return funds at the first whiff of controversy. When the donor is a confessed bomber whose comrades say he wanted cops dead, the infrastructure goes quiet. Not one condemnation. Not one returned check. Not one public statement beyond the senator who got caught.

Cortez Masto's spokeswoman called Ayers what he is: a domestic terrorist. The other eleven lawmakers could not summon even that much.