EPISODE 637： CHRONICLES OF THE REVOLUTION — BLOOD ON THE STREETS
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Summary
In this special edition of our chronicles of the 1960s, Jack and Blake take a deep dive into the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. They discuss the many myths and misconceptions about the events of the Civil Rights Movement.
Transcript
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This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
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A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
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This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Human Events Special Edition.
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We've been running through these chronicles of the revolution.
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If you're watching them in order, we had one called Blood on the Snow, the Russian Revolution.
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And the reason we talk about the 60s as a revolution certainly was, if you talk to the left,
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Yet on the right, for some reason, we don't question this.
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We just kind of go along with everything we're taught about this era.
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They cover up the lies that were told about this era.
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And so to help dispel some of those myths about what really is, and there's something that
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I think the left does have right about the 1960s, is that it did fundamentally change the
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And we go through a lot of these fundamental changes in this era.
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And so to help me dispel all of these myths and set some of the records straight, we have
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our co-host from ThoughtCrime and our co-host for Chronicles of the Revolution, Blake Neff.
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So, Blake, how is it, let's just set the frame really quickly.
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How is it that people initially learn about the 1960s?
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Yeah, I think this is the most important thing to start with, which is most people our age,
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you know, we were in elementary school in the United States.
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And before you take history or civics or government, we all have this class in elementary school we
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And the way social studies works, this is how it works for me, and it probably works this
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And what you get is in about first grade, probably earlier these days, but I remember it in first
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grade, you get your first children's book on, you know, how did we get modern America?
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And so what you get is you get a children's book on the African-American civil rights movement.
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And what you'll get is you'll get a very, very simple moral fable where for all of America,
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And then we had this Jim Crow where people are discriminated against only on their skin
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And then, like, one person, Martin Luther King Jr., stands up and is like, no, that's bad.
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And he does, he starts these protests, and they're peaceful because he's a very virtuous
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And he gives these speeches that are so inspiring, it changes everyone's mind, but not everyone's
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mind because then some evil racist shoots him dead.
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And you get, this is the narrative you get, and it is a very simple moral fable about, you
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know, right and wrong and the creation of modern America.
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And this is like the first moral stuff, like the very first moral tale you get that is embedded
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in actual American history that you get as a child.
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And this is what you then slowly have expanded out over the course of growing up.
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Which, by the way, to interject real quickly, because we get that so young, it also sort
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of, you know, it casts a pallor over everything else you learn about America's founding because
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you were told that, okay, yes, we had this founding and we had the Declaration and the
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But, you know, we were still bad right up until the 1960s.
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Until the 60s, everything that happened was bad.
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And we obviously see that play out in the iconoclasm that's currently going on in the
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United States, where they will tear down basically anything of any American leader that came before
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It embeds a very simple moral framework for viewing relatively recent American history.
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And it also means if you learn anything more about it, it's being built onto this structure
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that is fundamentally, this is the most straightforward moral good that has happened in American history.
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And so anything that else is attached to it that is also by extension good.
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It takes something that is actually an enormously complex event, and in many ways, a clearly bad
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event, and it dresses it up as something that was extremely moral, extremely necessary.
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And I think most important of all, extremely irreversible.
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And especially these days, conservatives are becoming more aware that if they kind of want
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to undo wokeness or undo this sort of permanent revolution that exists in American history,
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you actually have to go back to things that happened in the 1960s and seriously consider revising
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And you can't do that if you're still locked into viewing it as this sacred moral crusade.
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And we're going to get into why it's more complex, but I do want to have the caveat
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that it's not like segregation was good, and it's not like everything that you hear about
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it is false, but it always ends up missing a lot of nuance.
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One of the most obvious ways that's the case is Martin Luther King Jr. gets praised for being
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a peaceful activist, and he did promote peaceful activism.
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But what they always end up glossing over is actually in the mid-60s and late-60s, civil
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There are very severe riots in many of America's major cities.
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And on a scale that the ramifications of it, if we saw it happening in another country, we
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Like, there's a massive riot in Newark, New Jersey, and tens of thousands of people, based
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on skin color, leave Newark because they don't feel that it's safe to live there anymore.
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And, you know, nowadays it happens in Gaza, and you have the United Nations pass resolutions
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But it's like a totally forgotten thing in American history that this took place.
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The murder rate absolutely explodes in the U.S.
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Which, by the way, to be clear, we did actually just have Jack Cashel here on the program.
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A couple weeks ago, if people want to pull that episode, where we specifically talked
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I actually have a quick list here of the riots of the 1960s, the ghetto riots that people talk
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And this is, as you say, following the assassination of Martin Luther King.
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And you do have, by the way, many governors at the time and mayors coming in and using
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police to, Ronald Reagan actually was a governor who came in and used police force to put down
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some of these riots and some of these uprisings.
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And again, you know, we're told it's kind of like the same thing that we went through
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in 2020 with the mostly peaceful protests, where we're told that violence was only on
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the side of the police or vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse.
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However, because of social media and because we have independent media now, we can actually
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And, you know, another myth is this is one that's very popular on the right is we've
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heavily mythologized the I have a dream speech, you know, judge my children by not the color
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of their skin, but the content of their character and so on.
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And it's not a bad speech and it's not bad rhetoric to celebrate it.
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As far as things that you could celebrate that were being said in that era, that's a
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But what is a myth is the idea that this is what they were fighting for in the 60s, actually,
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or even that this is actually what Martin Luther King was fighting for, for the most part.
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Because what we have a more confrontation of these days is basically immediately as the
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civil rights revolution is unfolding, it goes almost instantly from we want equal opportunity
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to what we actually want is equality of outcome.
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So almost from the moment that the 1964 Civil Rights Act passes, even though the act says
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you can't discriminate based on race, the federal government steps in under activist pressure
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from liberal activist groups and they say, oh, yeah, actually, you know, it says you can't
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But what it actually means is you have to discriminate based on race because you have to do affirmative
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action to offset, you know, this other discrimination that is invisible but is happening.
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And, you know, we get disparate impact by the early 70s.
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Disparate impact is a legal doctrine created by the Supreme Court that if any policy at any
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company or any institution has an unequal outcome based on race or sex or national origin
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or all these other categories, if they produce any sort of unequal outcome versus what would
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be predicted by overall population, then we can assume that it is discriminatory.
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Well, as some geniuses have finally started to point out, everything has a disparate impact
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And this has been what is looming over America for half a century since that we have this magical
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law that says you can't discriminate except you're required to discriminate sometimes.
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And only government bureaucrats can decide one way or another.
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And this is obviously not what you're learning in first grade.
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And it's just sort of it's created this sort of double think that is mandatory in American
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life because you're supposed to affirm that we've made all these advances that take us away
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And yet you look at the laws that we enact and the policies we enact at universities or
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at employers, and they just scream at you, actually, you know, the opposite.
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Just today, when the day we're recording this, the mayor of Boston tried to organize a Christmas
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party where she only invited non-white elected members of the city government, no white people
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And it just felt like this has to be the apotheosis of the left-wing civil rights revolution,
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So we see this in terms of the, and really, as you say, the racial disparity.
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So Jefferson has the line, of course, in the declaration about created equal and those phrases
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But I think the problem is, is that for folks who, let's just say, if you're not of a certain
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IQ point and you can't understand the difference between created equal, as in you have equal
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rights, you have equal standing, you have equal legitimacy as a human being, that doesn't mean
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It's one of the last places where we do have some semblance of meritocracy and, of course,
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disparate income or disparate outcomes, because that's the point of sports.
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And this is also why sports have become such a social experimentation field for the left
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with trans, but also with pushing various left-wing causes, because, of course, they also understand
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that it flies in the face of their philosophical theories.
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And so they don't actually understand the difference of equality before the law and equality of
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It very much goes against their innermost values.
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I think it actually hurts a lot of people on the right, too.
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We have a very powerful desire to we want the world to be the saccharine place where it's
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if everyone is given equal opportunity, naturally, it would produce equal outcomes.
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I think if you put a gun to all of our heads, we would all admit this is not true.
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But it's very easy when you're making public policy to just to just wish cast and just want
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And over time, this has grown stronger and stronger in American life.
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And it just has caused an enormous amount of self-destructive behavior.
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And the 60s is, in many ways, the first pass at this, that they want to abolish Jim Crow.
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You shouldn't have laws that discriminate based on race.
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And then they essentially are angry that it doesn't immediately lead to absolute equality
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And so they very instantly start demanding special treatment of all sorts.
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What happens on university campuses is really telling and very much a foreshadowing of what
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we see later, in the late 60s, you start getting the first of these campus occupations.
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And compared to today, it's actually remarkably radical what they get away with.
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At my own alma mater at Dartmouth, there was a building, a Cutter Hall, and a group of,
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I would say, I almost said BLM radicals, but it's like Black Panther type radicals.
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I don't know if they were literally the Black Panthers, but some sort of Black radical group.
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They occupy Cutter Hall, and they rename it the El-Hajj Al-Malik Al-Shabazz Center.
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And they just occupy it for months on end, maybe even like a year plus.
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And the administration just won't kick them out.
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And then their demands are, we want to get a Black Studies department, which none of these
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You didn't have Black Studies or Asian Studies or LGBT Studies, any of these studies things,
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And suddenly, they start doing all of these occupations of campus buildings that are going
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on for months on end and are essentially just commandeering huge swaths of public space
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and making these demands that, oh, you have to make academic departments that reflect
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And at the time, you have academics who say, we shouldn't do this because what we're going
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to get is fake departments that produce fake scholarship, and these people are going to
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be taking these classes because they're the only ones they can pass.
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They'll get ghettoized into these academic subfields that are the only thing they can succeed
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We just need to give them a little leg up and let them fit in better.
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And now, here we are a half century later, every school has two or three or ten of these
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And if you're an affirmative action admit to these schools, you're not going to do well
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So instead, you end up taking these classes, and you basically just go do politics full
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And then, you know, 50 years later, or 30 years later, you become the president of Harvard
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And so, Blake, let's go back to how this all started, because a lot of the driving forces
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of this are not, you know, and Prusa Fahs points out, they're not the actual, as they
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It's not people of color that are driving this.
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It's white people, and predominantly the hippies.
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And so the rise of the hippie and the influence of the hippie is something that really starts
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in the 1960s, this movement, which also leads to a sexual revolution that's going on at the
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same time as the political revolution, the racial revolution.
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Yeah, well, it is, it's a tremendously, it's an era that feels like it has limitless possibilities.
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It's everything, you know, we all have to make the okay boomer joke, and it really is
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fitting, because at every phase of the boomers' lives...
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I want to not make it, I want to get away from it, but we have to.
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We have to confront the boomer question, which is, if you're a boomer, every step of their
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lives, they've been the biggest and most important demographic group in America, and
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so they've always been the group treated most favorably politically.
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So when the boomers are in their 20s, everything in American life is oriented towards boosting
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This is when we have a huge expansion of college availability.
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The 60s is the first generation where, really, if you want to go to college, you're pretty
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You either can afford it because the tuition is cheap, and so you work, you know, the infamous
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boomer, you know, I worked one summer job and paid for my year of tuition, or, you know,
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You could, or your parents, you know, were able to help you out somewhat, because, again,
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So you have this massive expansion of the availability of college education.
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You also have, you know, the sexual revolution was probably inevitable because now you have
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The birth control hits, the massive expansion of economic opportunity after World War II,
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this huge demographic group coming online, they're coming of age, electronic music is
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And then Woodstock, right, becomes Woodstock, you know, designer drugs are starting to come
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But everything is there, and so it's just, it's an environment that feeds on itself,
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Everything is new, everything's in doubt, everything is possible, and this, that...
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And also you have the universities, and way more people are going to universities, and
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then as now, universities were always these incubation pools for radicalism, and what
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the expansion of universities really matters for...
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Anything goes, you know, anything goes, I think, is...
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Because, again, as you say, the moral tyranny that's applied to, that's applied to America,
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right, America's founding, then gets applied to sort of the, just really a Christian moral
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code, which had been very strong throughout the 1950s, throughout the 1940s, I mean, just
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all the way through the United States, up until this point, and then everything...
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Which, by the way, is because of the deification of the 1960s, this is also why we see the demonization
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They must demonize it, because, of course, this must be a fascist era ruled by the patriarchy,
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and, you know, you see so much of left-wing media, and really mainstream media, putting
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But, you know, the other thing I was going to throw out, that, you know, you see the trajectory
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It, you know, people say, well, how do we get to OnlyFans?
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How do we get all these things in just such a short time?
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And I keep telling people, it just really goes back to the 1960s.
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You know, you want to tell the truth about Woodstock?
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You want to tell the truth about the Free Love Movement?
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There's just as much rape at Woodstock 69 as there was in Woodstock 99.
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Another thing that's important to hit on the expansion of colleges is we think of campuses
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You've always had a lot of political radicals at campuses.
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And a phenomenon that matters a lot is you have a huge expansion of overall, of the size
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of universities, the number of universities, the, you know, the number of faculty at universities.
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And, you know, university studies are a great way to dodge the draft at this time.
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And so you get this perfect storm where universities are expanding just as you have an
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also a growing number of left-leaning individuals who are inclined to go into academia.
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And so famously these days, if you get a PhD, the job market is terrible, especially if, you
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know, you're white and you're just not, you know, you're a lower class of person.
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But back then, you know, you could get a PhD and get a job in these universities and you'd
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have tenure and you'd be able to sit there until you're 80 years old.
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They also, at the same time, the Supreme Court came in and, or not yet, the Supreme Court
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had not yet ruled that mandatory retirement ages for professors were illegal.
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But in the 50s and 60s, you were turning 60 and being turned out of these universities
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So all these people are able to get jobs in academia and then they get lifetime tenure.
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And then the Supreme Court says they can never be forced to retire.
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And it's like, oh, shocker, now our universities are all uniformly super giga left-wing.
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And then these days you have smug left-wingers who are like, whoa, they're all liberal because
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only smart people, smart people are all liberals.
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And so that's like the genesis of this universities as a permanent factory of wokeness is, okay,
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they were built in the 60s that way and these people are never going to change.
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And then the draft, because you've got, you know, at the same time going on, you've
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The Vietnam War really ramps up under LBJ after, who is concurrently pushing the civil
00:22:39.140
So the draft, of course, gives them something to rail against while they're on these college
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campuses, even though if they're in college, they're not actually subject to the draft
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You see, of course, MLK's assassination later, RFK's assassination later.
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So when people do talk about the turbulent 60s, I mean, they're not joking.
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And you have this group of people that are, again, as I said before, they're coming of age
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So on one hand, it's like the moral superstructures, right?
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The moral superstructures of all of society are being torn down, right, as they're being
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told they can have anything they want, they can do anything they want, and they are essentially
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And they always will justify it as, okay, well, we were, you know, these days, it'll
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be common to admit there were excesses to this era, but the justification is always, well,
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Like, you know, boomers taking credit for the civil rights movement.
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And one of the most important myths of this is that the 60s was the civil rights movement.
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The civil rights movement is a thing that goes on for decades.
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It's in the 1920s, you know, the big cause is we should have a national lynching ban.
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And it's basically symbolic to demand this because murdering people was already illegal.
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And it sort of worked in the sense that lynching over time went away.
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You do not have extrajudicial killings of black people in the 40s like you do in the 10s
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Like, the famous Brown versus Board of Education decision, it came after about half the country
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had already just abolished school segregation on their own.
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And in California, California famously, you know, we all know about Jackie Robinson integrating
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But what's less well known is the biggest reason, like, the reason the NFL integrates is they want
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And California already has a bunch of laws against segregation.
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And they say, we won't let a team move here if they're in a segregated league.
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And this was happening in all these places over time, gradually.
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And by the end of the 50s, it had largely been complete outside of, like, hardline places
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And it gets rewritten in this way as America was this super ultra-racist country everywhere
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until the 60s radicals came up with the idea of not being a crappy person, as people on
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Reddit would say with slightly more swear words.
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And they used this to take advantage of changes.
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They, like, they'll take credit for changes that were happening anyway and use this to justify
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This was on my one appearance on Joy Reid on MSNBC all the way back in 2016.
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This is exactly what I challenged her on because she claimed that the entire legacy of the Civil
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Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act was Democrats and that it was LBJ.
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And I started trying to explain some of this to her and even pointed out that LBJ, when
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he was a congressman and later a senator, was completely against civil rights.
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It was only after he took up the mantle becoming president that he was able to do, you know,
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that he really just, you know, kind of glommed onto it.
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And it's really what it is, is it's when you can see the drive get sick because the push
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for equal treatment under the law is a good thing.
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You want people to be treated equally under the law, to not be reduced to their skin color.
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And it's the 60s where we get away from this, where we start saying, instead of treating
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you as an equal person, we're going to categorize you as, you know, a member of this race.
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This is when we start getting the Census Bureau erecting these weird racial categories that
00:26:41.760
Like, what is the actual commonality between someone from the Dominican Republic who is of
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African ancestry and then a person from Argentina who's of Italian ancestry and a person from
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Mexico who is Amerindian in ancestry and then a person from Spain who, you know, looks like
00:27:04.500
Which, by the way, my joke with that is always go up to a Puerto Rican and call him Mexican,
00:27:09.760
Yeah, like, so the only commonality between them is they all, you know, speak Spanish.
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And then, but the Census Bureau, entirely because of the civil rights revolution, like the modern
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civil rights law revolution of the 70s, comes on and says, oh, well, we're going to create
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a single category for all these people for essentially the purposes of allowing them to agitate for
00:27:34.000
And you start getting weirder and weirder versions of this.
00:27:37.460
For example, in the past, people of the Indian subcontinent, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis,
00:27:45.740
And then they essentially campaigned to get themselves switched to being considered Asian.
00:27:51.400
And the reason for this is basically just that, well, if we're considered Asian, we can
00:27:56.080
apply for special government grants that are for disadvantaged minorities.
00:28:00.080
And they're still eligible for this, even though Indian Americans have the highest income of
00:28:06.240
You also see this in the fact that we predominantly start seeing now with black Americans, we now
00:28:13.300
start seeing recent immigrants leapfrogging actual African Americans that are descended from
00:28:19.720
people who lived through these eras that you're describing or who lived under slavery.
00:28:24.300
We see recent immigrants or the children of recent immigrants just totally leapfrogging them
00:28:28.780
using these pathways that were set up for for for, you know, these, quote unquote, historical
00:28:34.680
injustices that they did not live under and that they were not subject to with, you know,
00:28:40.880
case of point, you know, you have conflict Kamala Harris and Barack Obama.
00:28:47.800
Like there will be black activist groups on campuses who will agitate and then they will
00:28:52.800
say, you know, we want these giveaways from the administration.
00:28:56.460
But the benefits should go to ADOS, as they call them, A-D-O-S, American Descendants of
00:29:04.960
Because they point out somewhat reasonable, I think, that I think it's reasonable to say
00:29:10.040
there is some hangover from slavery that hurts them.
00:29:12.840
And OK, if this is going to be our justification for things, they should be the ones who benefit
00:29:17.860
And the funny thing is, is the reason they can't is because as part of all of the legal
00:29:23.000
constructs we built up to justify all of the modern segregation and discrimination we
00:29:28.440
do, the official explanation was that we can't you can't do affirmative action for like
00:29:39.000
That's just what the Supreme Court came up with.
00:29:42.900
No one was talking about diversity is our strength in the 60s.
00:29:46.140
It's just a guy at the Supreme Court says that diversity is why you can do affirmative
00:29:51.560
And as a result, suddenly everyone thinks diversity is great.
00:29:55.140
It's always what I would say the unifying theme since the 60s is you'll get recurring cases
00:30:00.900
of people have to find some excuse to justify discrimination based on basic traits, sex, race,
00:30:11.020
And they come up with an excuse and suddenly that excuse goes everywhere.
00:30:14.860
And we keep doing this over and over rather than accept the harder truth, which is we
00:30:24.160
And we should accept that this might create macro outcomes that make us feel uncomfortable.
00:30:45.660
We're always talking about the fake news and the bad, but we have guys and these are the
00:30:51.420
The stuff that was happening in 2020 with George Floyd greatly resembled stuff that was going
00:30:59.440
on in the 60s where you have violent turmoil in the cities, but you even have it in the
00:31:05.120
We're on like our third or fourth pass of this by now.
00:31:09.360
We keep having these like soft cultural revolutions off from the 90s, the 60s, the 80s,
00:31:14.320
the 90s now, and what's interesting is that you don't really hear most of the sort of
00:31:19.320
anti-woke, anti-CRT crusaders talk about these things.
00:31:24.360
They'll try to kind of stand up each piece of DEI or CRT or whatever the specific line
00:31:35.240
But they sort of try to work, and I found this, and I'm not going to single anybody out
00:31:39.200
here, but I found that they try to do so within the framework still of the 1960s without just
00:31:53.200
It's a lot like what we said with the Spanish Civil War the other day, where they always
00:31:56.220
have to talk about this conflict because it's the one they lost, and so they can pretend
00:32:03.060
But it's sort of like this here, where we're perpetually in the 1960s, and they act like
00:32:08.440
they're opposing the same man as always, because to do otherwise would have to confront the
00:32:13.480
fact that actually the left has run entire cities and entire states for the entire duration
00:32:21.120
of a human lifetime at this point, and has often made no progress or literally gone backwards.
00:32:26.960
This will come up with education reform all the time.
00:32:29.480
You'll have to hear, yeah, we need to do this new education reform proposal because we have
00:32:34.220
to overcome systemic racism in the school system.
00:32:37.380
Bro, you guys have been running the public schools in Los Angeles, in New York City, in
00:32:45.880
There have been no Republicans doing anything of importance in any major American city in
00:32:52.740
decades, and they just invent an entirely new reality.
00:32:57.740
It's sort of like feminism, where they'll do this in silly ways.
00:33:01.780
Like, do you remember when that Captain Marvel movie came out about five or six years ago?
00:33:07.620
Yeah, and Disney lied about how many tickets were sold for it, and then the next movie Marvel
00:33:16.800
Like, this movie is important because it's a movie, it's a blockbuster movie that stars a
00:33:22.800
woman, and no one's made a movie that shows girls can be heroes before.
00:33:26.620
And, like, you just, at that point, Wonder Woman had been made two years before, and they
00:33:36.120
And then, of course, you could go back decades.
00:33:40.940
And I remember catching people, another Ridley Scott, by the way, but I remember catching
00:33:45.680
people with Black Panther, and then saying this was the first Marvel movie to star a black
00:33:57.120
There was even a TV series, all of which preceded the Black Panther film, but they wanted to
00:34:01.820
get into their marketing, and so they had to twist it around.
00:34:04.720
Well, it's the first one in the current iteration of the...
00:34:09.760
And it's, they want to continue to run this narrative.
00:34:18.040
If you want a great book that captures the feel of all this, and I didn't bring it with
00:34:24.520
me, unfortunately, but there's a great book by Thomas Wolfe, one of the great writers
00:34:27.960
of the 20th century, and it's called The Bonfire of the Vanities, and it's a lot of things.
00:34:36.240
It's basically about New York in the 80s, but the core thrust of the book is this investment
00:34:40.720
banker accidentally sort of hits a, you know, an honor student in the Bronx.
00:34:48.540
They literally joke about this, calling him an honor student.
00:34:53.980
He hits this honor student, sends him into the hospital in a coma, and it starts off this
00:34:57.820
massive Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin-type freak out of the public.
00:35:07.440
There's this Al Sharpton-type figure, who is amazing because Al Sharpton was not a public
00:35:14.520
Wolfe writes Al Sharpton into existence before Al Sharpton exists.
00:35:20.640
A lot of it, by the way, because the enemy is this sort of like waspy, successful individual.
00:35:28.060
I've been making the argument that Donald Trump is kind of like living through this in his
00:35:32.540
New York trials, particularly in the fraud trial, that it's sort of like, no, you've
00:35:37.060
become a target for so many of these people, like Letitia James here, to build up one, that
00:35:45.560
It's just so telling that this book is now 35 years old at this point.
00:35:48.780
And yet, if you read it, it feels so much like what we were going through in the late
00:35:53.420
2000s and then through the George Floyd moment.
00:35:57.860
So this stuff is, it's not that it happens always, but it's very cyclical.
00:36:02.880
We go through the same processes over and over again.
00:36:05.660
It rises and falls like the tides or like a wave that you'll get this surge of left-wing
00:36:12.820
stuff where they'll kind of act like no one's ever tried to create equality before.
00:36:17.920
And then now we have this idea and it's totally going to work.
00:36:25.000
And then they come back and they're like, we have to do this because, you know, everything's
00:36:28.340
been under the control of the man the whole time.
00:36:30.700
And we're going to, we're going to be the first people who decide racism's bad.
00:36:35.860
And then the template for that is set in the sixties, which is why it's totally set.
00:36:40.160
And then the sixties, it's like counterculture, counterculture, counterculture, do whatever
00:36:44.820
Free love, free drugs, free everything, tear down all the moral superstructures, set Chesterton's
00:36:53.100
And then this, this kind of culminates one of the things that I think people have said
00:37:00.060
I know there's a lot of conspiracy theories about this, but the Manson murders and the
00:37:04.520
Manson situation really at the end of the 1960s happens in 1969, these brutal killings
00:37:11.900
where it's Charles Manson attempting to spark a race war that's been led to through this hippie
00:37:20.080
movement through this free association, free love, free everything kind of situation.
00:37:25.260
And that I think that may be, I'm not going to say it breaks the spell, but I think, as
00:37:29.840
you say, that really is one of the shocking moments that just sort of brings a lot of people
00:37:34.000
in the 1960s and then ends that iteration of it because it sort of breaks the spell and
00:37:42.840
Sharon Tate, you know, was a, you know, aspiring actress, Roman Polanski, by the way, is involved
00:37:48.760
who comes up later in a number of other situations.
00:37:52.580
And so you, you, you usually get it where it runs to great excess and then it runs directly
00:38:02.180
I think it can get overblown because what'll happen is they always want to rewrite history
00:38:06.420
that this was super popular and then thereby they can say, Oh, but then this thing happened
00:38:11.800
But really what it was is just, okay, in 1968, it felt like America was absolutely disintegrating.
00:38:26.020
There's huge riots in a ton of American cities.
00:38:32.100
It feels like the whole country is ripping itself apart.
00:38:34.940
And it turns out like politically what happens then.
00:38:43.480
So this is always, I've always gone back to try to tie this together.
00:38:47.180
And Nixon gets elected on essentially the plea to, you know, screw the hippies and law and
00:38:52.080
And he's imperfect at this as, you know, we'll get used to with other Republican
00:39:04.420
Which, by the way, and then an even bigger landslide in 1972.
00:39:08.740
But Richard Nixon, regardless of what happens, he's the first template for the modern Republican
00:39:14.320
If you look at how Eisenhower is treated by the country, it's just not relatable today.
00:39:22.620
Nixon is essentially the first Republican, and every Republican since has been the same
00:39:33.380
They just hate they being, you know, the establishment left, the university left, the media left.
00:39:43.240
If you ever want to feel kind of a cringe sense, you know, Hunter S. Thompson, famous boomer
00:39:50.500
He, when Nixon died in 1993, Hunter S. Thompson writes an obituary for him.
00:40:00.400
And I read it a couple of years ago because I was writing an essay on Nixon.
00:40:04.380
And it struck me, Hunter S. Thompson was a Reddit user, and he died before Reddit was
00:40:13.420
But it literally reads like the unhinged screed that a Reddit user would post after someone
00:40:19.660
For the folks in our audience, and by the way, disclaimer of yes, no, no, obviously we're
00:40:27.300
Steve Bannon, if you're listening, we don't include you in this number.
00:40:30.580
We don't include the folks that woke out of this.
00:40:33.320
But we're talking about the people who participated in this counterculture who were predominantly
00:40:41.000
And, you know, I talk about millennials all the time.
00:40:43.760
But when you mentioned this, when you mentioned this, this setup of a Reddit user, just real
00:40:52.280
quick, I know we're towards the end of the episode here.
00:40:54.040
What you mentioned before, what do you mean by a Reddit user?
00:40:58.480
So Reddit is popular for all older people out there.
00:41:04.500
It's a popular, it's a very mainstream website.
00:41:08.920
You can have subforms called subreddits on a million different topics.
00:41:13.920
I call it social media for people who hate social media.
00:41:16.600
There's news, there's religion, there's the NFL, there's knitting, there'll be breakaway
00:41:27.360
There was famously during the 2016 election, there was the Donald.
00:41:30.360
It was one of the earliest Donald Trump fan pages.
00:41:36.000
And it's, it very much represents the zeitgeist of what you'd maybe call normie millennials.
00:41:43.420
And it has this very, it's, it encourages a type of personality where like, if you're
00:41:50.860
the type of person who your personality is, you know, quoting famous movie lines and just
00:41:56.280
imitating other people because you think it's funny and you get this sort of like fake personality
00:42:05.440
So, you know, rather than, man, I'm trying to think, what would be like the best example
00:42:11.260
Well, I guess I'm trying to say like someone, it's, it's, you're completely pedantic.
00:42:14.900
You, you want to engage in arguments all the time, yet you're also at the same time, incredibly
00:42:20.700
obtuse, generally lack self-awareness, generally are not someone who goes outside very much.
00:42:28.640
And if anybody wants to really go in down this, and I don't want to feel like you're
00:42:31.620
the point too much, because we are running out of time, but just go, go, go into a Google
00:42:36.460
search or brave search, DuckDuckGo and type Reddit meetup.
00:42:42.660
These are like the, the full on troglodytes of the internet.
00:42:46.100
But Blake, we're, we're coming to the end of at least the first four installments of
00:42:52.300
We might have more, you know, we might be able to do some more of these.
00:42:55.400
I think people were going to like them, but some of the themes that I wanted to reflect
00:42:59.800
on that we've seen here is that we, we find economic, we find that economics drives these
00:43:06.140
It, it can be economic disparity, but in some time, in one case, at least of the 1960s,
00:43:11.360
it's actually economic abundance, which drives a lot of the, a lot of the social worries, which
00:43:16.200
is definitely, definitely something to, for a lot of people to understand that you get the
00:43:20.880
excesses here because of the abundance of economics.
00:43:27.680
And I guess another one is just the, the smashing of, of former cultures, right?
00:43:33.340
The sma, whatever came before must be destroyed.
00:43:35.760
I mean, obviously that is the definition of a revolution, but people understand this has
00:43:40.440
It has to do with institutional codes, has to do with law itself.
00:43:43.820
And then again, in many of these cases, and really one of the themes, and certainly we
00:43:48.240
picked the revolutions here, um, but it's this theme of equality.
00:43:55.580
And if you are not being equal, then the government will come in and force you to be equal.
00:44:02.340
I really like that point about economic abundance because it's really what we've been dependent
00:44:06.700
on ever since that we can afford, America has been so rich for so long that we've been
00:44:13.680
able to afford these huge delusions that the trillions of dollars we're spending on this
00:44:19.260
program, that's going to achieve equality through, you know, we're going to reform the schools
00:44:23.480
or we're going to change the welfare system, or we're going to, you know, have these entirely
00:44:28.480
fake jobs that we've created at these private companies that don't have any strict demands on
00:44:34.260
people that we've been so wealthy for so long that we can just throw unlimited money at,
00:44:40.040
you know, these new initiatives that will be what will finally cure what ails us.
00:44:44.140
And in poorer societies, you just have more constrained resources.
00:44:48.660
And so things get very, like they get more violent and more vicious more quickly because
00:44:52.520
there actually is not a lot of surplus to go around.
00:44:55.240
Whereas, uh, you know, Chris Caldwell's book, the age of entitlement of the reason he called
00:45:00.820
it that was, he says, the way America solved the social upheaval of the sixties was we just
00:45:06.720
decided to spend our way out of it. We'll just give the activists all of what they want, but we
00:45:11.580
also won't raise taxes because we can borrow money basically forever. And, you know, boomers
00:45:17.740
will get rich, Gen X will get rich, and, you know, the complainers will still get their slice of
00:45:23.500
tribute and everyone will be fine because we just have unlimited money. And I think the way you
00:45:27.780
could see this system, we mentioned it's cyclical, but the way it will finally start to come apart is
00:45:31.500
we might be running out of the money to do this. Like we're, we're setting aside too much national
00:45:36.540
wealth to keep what is essentially a sham system going.
00:45:40.720
Well, and this has been, you know, for, for the, uh, the war room fans out there, we know this is
00:45:45.740
something that Steve Bannon harps on regularly that we simply cannot continue the borrowing. Um, of
00:45:52.580
course, this is the very issue that directly leads to Speaker McCarthy's ouster, uh, by the,
00:45:59.080
um, you know, you call it the MAGA wing, the Gates wing of the party, uh, really has to do with these
00:46:03.580
debt ceiling fights. And it has to do with this idea that we can't just keep spending our way into
00:46:08.100
whatever we want. And it also is something by the way, that just, it, you know, we talk about the,
00:46:12.440
um, you know, weak men create, uh, create bad times meme, but it's, it's something where,
00:46:18.680
you know, we've allowed ourselves the luxury of having these, um, you know, luxury ideas as
00:46:24.240
Charlie calls them on his show that, you know, we can run around and waste time talking about
00:46:29.220
these ridiculous things because we don't have to worry as much about the basic necessities,
00:46:33.600
but it turns out Blake that a lot of the basic necessities, the infrastructure, the systems in
00:46:38.600
this country, the complex systems are suddenly beginning to collapse because we've basically
00:46:44.340
left them in a state of disrepair. Yep. Uh, you can afford to be delusional for a very long time,
00:46:52.100
especially if you're a global superpower, but you, you can't be delusional and fake forever. And I
00:46:57.700
think that is a lesson that America is learning now. And I think it's actually a reason you start
00:47:02.580
seeing it crumbling, like, you know, affirmative action on these college campuses. It was, it was one
00:47:08.340
thing to just pass people who are totally unqualified for jobs or degrees when they're 10% of the people
00:47:15.280
that you're doing this for. But when it's half of everyone, more than half, you actually are just
00:47:21.240
badly warping your society to keep a delusion going. And, you know, eventually you can actually just blow
00:47:28.480
up your country doing this. And I think it will be a white pill as it were, if we managed to pull
00:47:33.560
ourselves back from the abyss before we go hurtling over it. Well, I think it's exactly right. And so I hope
00:47:39.300
that everybody enjoyed watching this series Chronicles of the Revolution. I had fun doing it. Blake feels
00:47:44.680
it feels like you had some fun doing it there, huh? Oh, it was a blast. It was a blast. Yeah, this is great
00:47:49.560
because, you know, as we sit here, it's Christmas time, we're in the holidays, you know, we want to go and
00:47:54.980
teach people about some of the topics that we don't get the normal bandwidth, we don't have the normal
00:48:01.060
bandwidth to get into things, especially like this episode right here, the 1960s blood on the
00:48:08.880
streets, the revolution that did reshape America. And yet we in the conservative movement, we don't
00:48:15.300
talk about it, or we're scared of talking about it, or for whatever reason, we find it easier to just
00:48:21.580
kind of go along with it rather than fight back. We need to stop. We need to understand that a lot of
00:48:27.700
these bad ideas came from that age of access, that age of entitlement, and that age of blood
00:48:34.320
on the streets. This has been Jack Posobiec. My co-host has been Blake Neff. You can't find him
00:48:39.280
anywhere because the man eschews social media. So you will not be following Blake Neff. But of course,
00:48:45.060
here at humanevents.com, make sure you subscribe, like, follow to the podcast, share this out with all
00:48:50.700
of your friends and ladies and gentlemen. As always, you have my permission to lay a short.