Hi everyone, I'm Zade Ares Dorn and I am so excited to share with you the first episode of my new

podcast, Mother Country Radicals, a family history of the weather underground. This show is the

true story of how my parents, Bill Ares and Bernadine Dorn transformed themselves from peace

activists into violent revolutionaries, how they teamed up with black militant groups,

to rob banks, fight racism, and help build a revolution. I hope you enjoy hearing my family's

story. To find more episodes, be sure to follow Mother Country Radicals on Odyssey or wherever

you get your podcasts. Okay, now let's get into that episode. Enjoy.

In May 1970, Los Angeles radio station KPFK received an anonymous phone call,

leading them to a cassette tape hidden in a public phone booth. It begins like this.

Hello, this is Bernadine Dorn. I'm going to read a declaration of a state of war.

This is the first communication from the weatherman underground.

Bernadine Dorn is my mother. She's recording this tape when she's just 28 years old,

surrounded by a few friends in a safe house in San Francisco, a one-room apartment they've

rented using a fake ID. The place is crowded, and most of the people in the room are even younger

than she is. Student activists and grad school dropouts in their early to mid-20s.

There's a device the size of a lunch box set up in the middle of a table, an old school tape

cassette player with a red record button. All over the world, people fighting American imperialism

look to America's youth to use our strategic position behind Amirais to join forces in the

description of the empire. Kids now the lines are drawn. Revolution is touching all of our lives.

They've written this statement together over a bunch of sleepless nights on a stolen typewriter.

Revisions marked in pan and re-typed over and over to get it right.

It's a collaborative effort, a group project, but they all understand as the leader of the organization,

...