Campaign records show Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground, has given more than $10,000 to at least a dozen Democratic lawmakers since 2020, and most recipients have stayed silent after the donations were exposed.

Campaign finance records, cross-referenced by reporting, indicate Bill Ayers has funneled over $10,000 to multiple Democratic members of Congress since 2020. After the disclosure, only one senator publicly moved to offset those contributions by donating the same amount to charity.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s office responded directly and a spokeswoman said, “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.” That reaction stands alone amid a lot of silence.

It’s fair to point out the sums are modest, but principle matters more than a few hundred dollars. Voters expect their representatives to call out extremism, not shrug when a confessed bomber is on their donor rolls.

Here are the reported recipients and the amounts they received from Ayers since 2020:

• 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. Those figures are small in isolation, but they reveal a pattern: an admitted radical has quietly supported an array of sitting Democrats.

For anyone who needs a reminder, Ayers co-founded the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground, the radical group behind bombings and terror plots between 1969 and 1977. The FBI and legacy news organizations including the New York Times have described the Weather Underground as a domestic terrorist organization.

Ayers avoided prosecution not because he was cleared of wrongdoing, but because prosecutors cited illegal FBI tactics in evidence gathering, prompting dropped charges. The legal outcome was about procedure, not innocence.

“I don’t regret setting bombs.”

He later said he had been misquoted, but public records and interviews leave that claim in doubt. His own past statements and those of former comrades paint a darker picture than his later denials.

Former members have described an organization willing to use violence and to target police. Howie Machtinger, a former Weatherman, told a reporter:

“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 candid account of intent:

“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.”

Other accounts from former members and historians echoed the willingness to inflict harm, not merely destroy property. One former Weatherman told an author they sought to “maximize deaths” and treated police as “fair game,” while a historian wrote that the group was intent on committing radical violence against people as well as property.

Decades later Ayers has continued to speak in ways that link his past to present causes and to reject the idea that violence was a mistake. In public interviews he has compared contemporary protest movements to the activism of the Vietnam era and framed resistance in sweeping moral terms.

He has also weighed in on politics with blunt language. In November 2023 he said,

“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.”

Reports have quoted him making even harsher remarks to crowds in the past, including a passage attributed by an author that said “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.” Those are not the words of someone quietly repenting.

The political double standard is obvious: the left demands Republicans disavow anyone only vaguely controversial, yet few Democrats have publicly condemned or returned money from a donor who once embraced violent tactics. One office reacted; many others did not.

Candidates facing tough races should expect scrutiny over donor ties, and voters deserve clarity about who funds their representatives. Silence in the face of these revelations looks like convenience, not principle, and that matters in the court of public opinion.