The Weather Underground

Sam Green, Bill Siegel. | 92 minutes. <br>The Free History Project.

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Though it has been years in the making, the timing of this documentary portrait of the Weathermen — college students who spent the ’70s planting bombs and plotting revolution — is uncanny. Watch the film, and it’s impossible not to wonder what response the Weather- men’s bombs might provoke today.

The documentary traces the Weathermen’s violent opposition to the Vietnam War — starting with breaking shop windows in Chicago in 1969 and escalating to the bombing of a U.S. Capitol lavatory in 1971. Aided by a superb array of archival news footage and present-day interviews with former Weathermen and one of the FBI agents who pursued them, the film captures the symbiotic relationship of the right- and left-wing political zealotry of the Vietnam era. The violence and racism of that war spurred the activists to splinter from the Students for a Democratic Society. But, equally true, the government and the media used the Weathermen’s strikes to discredit the entire antiwar movement.

With the fall of Saigon in 1975, the militants ran out of ammunition, so to speak, and their numbers dwindled. The film concludes with ’80s images of one-time radical Jane Fonda leading the nation in a recuperative workout, and the sight of former Weathermen member Brian Flanagan winning $20,000 on Jeopardy. You don’t need a weatherman to know that only the most bizarre act of nature could change the prevailing winds today.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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