What do Bill Ayers and Van Jones Have in Common? Stormy Weather, of Course!

By Brenda J. Elliott, co-author of The Manchurian President

Cross posted from RBO


Unfortunately, this is another circular story and I will do my best to lead you from A to Z as painlessly as possible.

Perhaps you will recall Trevor Loudon’s April 2009 post, Weather Alert: Obama’s Green Jobs Czar Linked to Former Terrorist Supporters, which launched the long campaign that ran over the summer to expose Van Jones for the extreme radical that he is.

In that article, Loudon wrote about Jon and Nancy Frappier, Weatherman supporters in the late 60s, and their connection to Van Jones. Loudon speculated that Diana Frappier, who co-founded the Ella Baker Center with Jones, was their daughter.

Here’s what Loudon wrote more than a year ago:

    According to the FBI’s Weather Underground file [Nancy Frappier] was associated with many WUO members and her car was parked outside the Weathermen’s December 1969 “War Council” at Flint Michigan. In 1971 the FBI also observed Jennifer Dohrn visiting Frappier’s home in San Francisco.

    The FBI also suspected that Nancy Frappier travelled to Cuba in February 1970.

    Today Nancy Frappier works in health services in the Bay Area. Both Diana and Nancy Frappier donate to the Berkeley YMCA.

    Jon (John) Frappier was also close to the Weathermen. Frappier’s FBI profile claims that he was arrested during the Weathermen’s “Days of Rage” rioting in October 1969 in Chicago and that he was also issued with a traffic ticket near the 1969 Michigan “War Council.”

    The FBI also alleged that Frappier travelled to Guatemala in 1966 with future Weather Underground member (and Bill Ayers’s late girlfriend) Diana Oughton. The pair were accused of trying to contact Guatemalan guerilla’s for the Students for a Democratic Society Radical Education Project.

This is a lot of information. Hopefully, in what follows, I will be filling in a lot of blanks. Many thanks to DO for pointing me in the right direction.

There is a decades-old connection between the Frappier family and Bill Ayers.

Indeed, in the mid 60s, living at home with her parents Jon and Nancy Frappier was their daughter Diana Frappier, a student, according to former Weatherman Cathy Wilkerson in her 2007 book, Flying close to the sun.

In 1965, after Bill Ayers had been involved in and was arrested at an October 15 anti Vietnam War action, he joined the local SDS chapter. Within a few weeks Ayers began teaching at the Children’s Community School in Ann Arbor, Ben Jarovsky wrote in November 1990 in the Chicago Reader. Within a year Ayers was running the school.

The following year, in 1966, Diana Oughton moved from Philadelphia to Ann Arbor to go to school at the University of Michigan and complete a Master’s Degree in teaching. Wilkerson writes that, in 1963, after she graduated from Bryn Mawr, Oughton went to Guatemala with VISTA. After she returned, in 1965, she went to work in Philadelphia in the Office of Economic Opportunity, part of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” program.

CORRECTION: Page 398 of “Flying Close to the Sun”: Ougthon went to Guatemale with the American Friends Service Committee’s VISA (Voluntary International Service Assignments) program, not VISTA.

David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks article on the American Friends Service Committee informs that the AFSC “Supported the Vietnamese Communists, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, and the PLO.”

After moving to Ann Arbor, Oughton went to work at the Community School, where she met Bill Ayers and they fell in love. Wilkerson writes that Ayers and Oughton rented an attic apartment in the home of Jon and Nancy Frappier.

The same year, in 1966, Oughton joined the local SDS chapter. Although Cathy Wilkerson writes this was in summer 1969, the earlier date is most likely correct.

In his 1995 book, Sixties Radicals, Then and Now: Candid Conversations With Those Who Shaped the Era, Ron Chepesiuk writes that Ayers left the Community School in 1968 to work for SDS full time.

Former SDSer David P. Hamilton writes that Ayers quit. Another source says the school ran out of funding and had to shut down.

Hamilton also writes that, in 1968, the main people running the Michigan Regional SDS operation were Ayers and Oughton. Wilkerson adds that they were the leading members of the Detroit Collective.

Hamilton had left graduate school at the University of Texas and moved to Michigan to work for the Radical Education Project (REP) in Ann Arbor. REP, founded by Tom Hayden, was responsible for “electing, printing and distributing literature to be used by SDS chapters.”

Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall quote from a 1970 FBI memorandum in The COINTELPRO papers: documents from the FBI’s secret wars against dissent, page 212, that REP was a “full time publishing outfit of the New Left; through whose auspices numerous virulent revolutionary documents reach the Left.”


It is also of note that, in 1966, an SDS-connected REP list of seven areas for study includes a now-familiar theme:

    Agents Of Change—study of organizations, their leadership, structure and factions; emphasis on university as source of ideas and strategies for change.

Hamilton writes that REP and the Michigan Regional SDS, run by Ayers and Oughton, shared the same office. In 1966, at least one REP letter shows the mailing address as 510 E. William, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The Weatherman’s final “War Council” — presided over by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, and John Jacobs — met for four days beginning December 27 at Flint, Michigan. The Weatherman called for an “armed struggle” and the decision was made to go underground to carry out a more violent agenda, Ben Jarovsky writes.

A December 6, 1969 article in Fire on the War Council states (reprinted in a Ramparts Press book, Weatherman, edited in 1970 by Harold Jacobs, on page 339) was most prophetic:

    For us in the mother country, blowing up property also needs some blowing of minds. […] The highest acts of armed struggle, of course, do the most damage to the Man.

On Christmas Day 1969, Diana Oughton visited her family in Dwight, Illinois. This was the last time they were to see her before she, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins were killed in a Weatherman bomb factory explosion March 6, 1970, in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse owned by Cathy Wilkerson’s parents.

Now we can backtrack a bit to tie a few things together before moving on.

It is not surprising that the Frappier vehicles would have been noticed parked outside of the December 1969 Flint “War Council” meeting. The Frappiers were most likely well acquainted with several SDS/Weatherman members by then, including Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton.

It is also not surprising that Nancy or Diana Frappier and Diana Oughton may have attempted to make contact with Guatemalans in 1966, given Oughton’s two-years of experience as a VISTA worker in that country and the fact that Oughton was recently returned.

It is likewise unsurprising, given the relationship with SDS/Weatherman, that Nancy Frappier, or even Diana Frappier, may have gone to Cuba in 1970 with the Venceremos Brigade.

Lastly, it is not surprising, given the fact that the Frappier family may well have had many members of SDS/Weatherman visiting their attic tenants, Ayers and Oughton, that they had developed a relationship with them, including Bernardine and Jennifer Dohrn.

All that settled, we can now move on, or back as it may be, to Diana Frappier’s connections with admitted communist radical STORM leader, Van Jones, with whom she co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996.

At Green for All, another organization she co-founded with Jones, Frappier is listed as Director of Finance and Administration.

It is this latter association that makes the following most interesting when you think about it.

Why would a real estate firm, one involved in real estate and construction, called Frappier Realty have as its business address 344 40th Street, Oakland, California? This is the same address the real estate office shared with the Ella Baker Center, as recently as July 25, 2009. What does one have to do with the other?

Even the San Francisco Association of Realtors links to the 344 40th Street, Oakland address. When you click on the link for Diana Frappier – Frappier Realty, you arrive at the Ella Baker Center website. Why?

Even more interesting, why would said real estate firm list the following as contacts? Compare these names to members of the current Ella Baker Center staff and board members.

    . Policy Director for Reclaim the Future – Ian Kim
    . Media Director – Belinda Griswold
    . Director, Communications – Ben Wyskida
    . Director of Information Technology – Hayes Morehouse
    . Operations Director – Shemika Skipworth
    . Art and Media Director – Alli Chagi-Starr
    . MEDIA Relations Manager – Abel Habtegeorgis
    . Media Relations Manager – Eric Arnold
    . Realtor – Diana Frappier (aka Diana Tamara Frappier, Esq.)
    . Youth Program Coordinator – Venus Rodriguez
    . Activist – Van Jones (aka Anthony Kapel Jones, Esq.)
    . Attorney – Sheiba Waheed (aka Sumayyah Waheed uses the Ella Baker Center as her professional address )

Does this make any sense? Would it make any sense if you are a “nonprofit” pushing for mega federal dollars devoted to “greening up” real estate — and you’re in the business of selling real estate?

So, we started out with Trevor Loudon’s information on former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones. We jumped aboard the Wayback Machine to the 60s, only to end up in 21st Century Oakland and a nonprofit/real estate/law firm run by Diana T. Frappier, daughter of, possibly friends of, Weatherman radicals — who’s partnered with yet another far-left radical.

Also, we have Bill Ayers, Diana Oughton, and Tom Hayden, author of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the SDS manifesto, tied together in the same office shared by the Michigan Regional SDS operation and the Hayden-founded REP.

This is the same Tom Hayden that headed the 70s’ Campaign for Economic Democracy, the parent organization to Students for Economic Democracy, its campus arm. The CED/SED was a sponsor of the anti apartheid rally at which Barack Obama gave his first political speech while a student at Occidental College. It is the same Tom Hayden who co-founded the 2008 presidential campaign advocacy group, Progressives for Obama, and the same Tom Hayden who is an advisory board member of the left-of-left-leaning Progressive Democrats of America and a member of the editorial board for leftist The Nation, the voice of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Carl Davidson (who is tied to Barack Obama via the New Party, the socialist political organization to which Obama turned in 1995 when he was running for the Illinois State Senate), Tom Hayden, and many other former SDSers continue their decades-long ties in Movement for a Democratic Society, the revived support group for today’s generation of the new SDS — which supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

And let’s not forget that Bill Ayers and Van Jones have another former Weatherman in common — Jeff Jones. Jones, now the head of Jeff Jones Strategies and director of the New York branch of the Apollo Alliance, was not just a member of Weatherman. Jones was one of its co-founders in 1969 along with Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dorhn, and Mark Rudd.

Phil Kerpen wrote September 9, 2009 in the New York Post:

    Jeff Jones was a domestic terrorist in the late ’60s and a fugitive from justice throughout the ’70s — yet now he’s a leader of an influential, taxpayer-funded group.

    Jones was a fugitive from justice for 11 years. His own account at his Web site says: “As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son.”

    […] And Jones is still proud of his terrorist activities — saying as recently as 2004: “To this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to try to do.”

    Now, Jones is back to revolutionary organizing — but with taxpayers footing the bill. He’s the director of the Apollo Alliance’s New York affiliate and a consultant to the national group.

That would be the same Apollo Alliance on whose board Van Jones once served.
It is the same Apollo Alliance whose Oakland, California, branch and Green Collar Jobs Campaign was run by Van Jones in partnership with the Ella Baker Center.

Only in Obamerica can any of this make sense.

Update July 19: Danishova comments at Trevor Loudon’s New Zeal blog:

    An exception to the addresses being the same – the California State Bar lists Diana Frappier’s address as: 1611 Telegraph Ave Ste 600, Oakland, CA 94612 [right]. But if you Google that address you come to this website “Charity Blossom dot org”, which oh so coincidentally has a ton of leftist “non-profits” located in the same building. I’d also be interested to know the I.R.S. rules about co-mingling “real estate” with non-profit activism.

Thanks to Danishova’s sleuthing we have another connection.

First of all, the 1611 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA, address is home to many nonprofits.

Then we have the following, which appears at the bottom of a pledge page for none other than the Van Jones-Diana Frappier-founded Green For All. Note the logos for Green for All, Center for American Progress, and the Apollo Alliance all prominently displayed, with the contact address 1611 Telegraph Ave Ste 600, Oakland, CA 94612. Also note the email address: greenjobspledge@greenforall.org.

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5 thoughts on “What do Bill Ayers and Van Jones Have in Common? Stormy Weather, of Course!

  1. We all need to email a link to this web site to every American we know. Everyone should have the opportunity to find out the truth about Obama and those he places in positions of power in his administration.

  2. This article along with all the Obama Files are well worth reading. It's truly amazing how everything involves Obama one way or another. All roads lead back to Obama.

  3. A very good article; it's too bad that the vast majority of Americans don't care about this– they would rather be watching the Simpsons.
    What is the name of the artist who created that marvelous piece for this article?

  4. An exception to the addresses being the same – the California State Bar lists Diana Frappier's address as: 1611 Telegraph Ave Ste 600, Oakland, CA 94612. But if you Google that address you come to this website "Charity Blossom dot org", which oh so coincidentally has a ton of leftist "non-profits" located in the same building. I'd also be interested to know the I.R.S. rules about co-mingling "real estate" with non-profit activism.

  5. This is a very good story, well researched. The writer forgot to mention the Tom Hayden is the former husband of Actress Jane Fonda and is the father of actor Troy Garity.

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