The 4 Most Outrageous Lies in Robert Redford’s New Pro-Terrorist Movie

In The Company You Keep, Robert Redford stars in as well as directs a story of an ex-Weather Underground radical who has been living quietly as a public-interest lawyer in upstate New York for more than 30 years. His true identity is discovered by an annoying reporter (Shia LaBeouf) after the apprehension of one of his co-conspirators (Susan Sarandon), who was one of four terrorists who robbed a bank and murdered several security guards in the process.

Redford, that noted “liberal activist,” shows where his sympathies truly are. This is a movie that argues:

1. The Weathermen were fighting for peace.

The Company You Keep begins with a montage of real news clips (and a fake one) edited together to tell the story that the Weather Underground grew out of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society and that its activities were meant to end the Vietnam War by “bringing the war home.” Nonsense. The Weathermen loved war and wanted more of it. They were a murderous group of Black Power and Marxist revolutionaries bent on the violent overthrow of the United States. After the 1970 accidental explosion that killed several terrorists who blew themselves up with their own bombs in a downtown New York City townhouse, the true intent of the bombs was revealed: They were meant to be used to blow up a library on the campus of Columbia University. Not exactly a military target.

2. Terrorism is a noble, romantic calling.

Throughout the film, but particularly in a sentimental scene in which the Redford character meets an old comrade (Richard Jenkins) who is now a professor at the University of Michigan, the Weathermen are portrayed as legendary figures who may have gone slightly too far but were driven by idealism. Redford even tells the young reporter played by LaBeouf that he’s such a smart guy that “30 years ago, you would have joined the Movement.” As if terrorism ever drew the best and brightest.

3. The press is hostile to left-wing radicals.

The Shia LaBeouf figure, a gung-ho young reporter for the Albany paper, is meant to stand in for all the nasty journalists who have tormented groups like the Weathermen and associated ’60s radicals like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Kathy Boudin over the years. Redford’s character Jim Grant upbraids the reporter, sarcastically, as being “fair and balanced.” Except these terrorists have gotten nothing but love from the media, academia, and fashionable leftists such as Barack and Michelle Obama, who have been friends with Ayers and his wife Dohrn for many years and have gotten a free pass on the matter from the entire mainstream media. Let us not ever forget the notoriously sympathetic article about Ayers (who said “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough”) that ran in the New York Times the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

4. There is a legitimate debate over whether what the Weathermen did was right.

The film maintains a “scrupulously ethical balance in contemplating domestic terrorism,” noted the New York Times, which got that much right. Yes, this is one of those moral-equivalence movies that says terrorist violence is justified in the U.S. because the U.S. is a horrible country. The character played by Susan Sarandon is obviously based on Kathy Boudin, who was present at the Weathermen’s townhouse explosion in 1970 and, 11 years later, participated in the Brink’s bank robbery in Nanuet, New York, during which her gang murdered a security guard and two policemen. (The Vietnam War, of course, had been over for years, which gives the lie to the film’s claim that the Southeast Asia conflict was anything but a pretext for the terrorist network.)

In the film’s centerpiece segment, Sarandon’s character bewitches LaBeouf by explaining her actions (which she doesn’t regret) as a legitimate response to a U.S. government that “murdered millions of people.” She insists: “We made mistakes but we were right,” and the film portrays her much more sympathetically than the journalist investigating the story. She cites the My Lai massacre, local police’s opposition to the Selma civil rights march, Kent State, and Jackson State as examples. But the U.S. government, of course, did not commit or condone murder in any of these incidents, and the Weathermen’s decade-long violent spree was nothing but sheer savagery. Sarandon’s answer, and the movie’s? Look no farther than this classic line: “Yeah, well, dissent could be dicey.”

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Additional coverage at PJ Media of Robert Redford’s film:

Rick Richman: Film Review: The Company You Keep

Ron Radosh: A Hollywood and Academic Rehab for Black Panther Revolutionaries and New Left Terrorists

Mary Grabar: Your Money: Redford’s Glorified Murderers, or Hero Who Stopped Them?

Oleg Atbashian: Larry Grathwohl, Hero

Ed Driscoll: Two Redfords In One

Good point.

We are so chained by our habits that came as a result of Television programs and the many movies there.

The habit of entertaining our self night and day.

People before TV were readers. Some still are, but it is a few compared to before the advent of television.

Monies spent by the government are wasted in huge amounts. We get no positive results for half or more of the total spent. Some are pocketing fortunes. The people/taxpayers get no accounting of billions, excuse me trillions of dollars.

Stupid of us to allow it.

How far we have fallen.

America was the land of milk and honey with opportunity and liberty for those willing to risk and work hard, based on being a Christian nation, and God blessing America with a hedge. MO.

Amazing really.

The indoctrination assault knows no bounds.

We watched the latest episode of Blue Bloods the other night.

Seems a pretty college age girl is strangled.
She comes from a devout Catholics family.

The love of her life, unrequited, is a young Muslim man. The Muslim has a virulent Muslim older brother.
Of course the virulent brother is suspected but no...

Turns out the virulent bro was accosted by some rednecks when he was 12. Right after 9/11. Scarred for life.

And the father of the girl killed her.

So in the episode we have a complete role reversal .
We/ the US created the virulent and the father committed the honor killing.

Made me want to forget a show that we have liked for a couple years.

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