Reliving the Left-Wing Terrorism of the 1970s

In many ways, it feels like we are reliving the 1970s, with the awful difference that Jimmy Carter has been re-elected. This story stimulates a sick sort of nostalgia; a hung over feeling, even though New Year’s Eve hasn’t even started yet:

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

If it were a Greenwich Village town house and the explosives went off before they could be confiscated by the cops, it would be a dead ringer for 1970.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.

People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.

I would say so, yes.

Cops found the stash in the couple’s West Ninth Street home Saturday when they went there to look for Gliedman, 27, who was wanted for alleged credit-card theft.

That’s the modern way to finance the revolution, apparently–much easier than robbing banks or Brink’s trucks.

A detective discovered a plastic container with seven grams of a white chemical powder called HMTD, which is so powerful, cops evacuated several nearby buildings.

Police also found a flare launcher, which is a commercial replica of a grenade launcher; a modified 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun; ammo; and nine high-capacity rifle magazines, the sources said.

Cops also allegedly uncovered papers about creating homemade booby traps, improvised submachine guns, and various handwritten notebooks containing chemical formulas.

The perps, needless to say, are not working-class heroes:

Gliedman, who grew up on Park Avenue, graduated from Dalton in 2002. Her dad, Dr. Paul Gliedman, is director of radiation oncology at Beth Israel Hospital, Brooklyn Division. …

Greene attended Harvard as an undergraduate and did his graduate work at the university’s Kennedy School of Government.

Of course he did! You can fill in your own commentary; if they were Tea Partiers, etc. It’s really too easy.

But the main sense I get is of a sort of perverted Groundhog Day, as we find ourselves living through one phenomenon after another that decades ago, we thought were gone for good.

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