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Jan. 21, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:19:51
Radical Establimentarians
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Hey guys, welcome to Left, White, and Right.
I'm your host, Gregory Hood.
I'm here with Chris Roberts.
Today we're going to be talking about Students for a Democratic Society, the Port Huron Statement, 60s radicalism and student organizations generally, and the difference between what they can get away with and the sorts of impositions that are put on us.
And I think when we're talking about SDS, when we talk about the people who started it, the people who were the most radical activists in it, and how they ended up today, Again, this is a theme that we've been calling back to again and again, but sort of the faux radicalism of the so-called revolutionary left.
And that even while they make the most overheated statements, even to the point of saying we're declaring war on the government.
Even to the point of saying that we're going to bring the war home and that we're going to act as guerrillas.
This has no significant barriers to them essentially becoming middle class drones.
Upper middle class drones.
They're eminently respectable.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
And again, the most cowardly college Republican has dealt with more stuff in his life than Bill Ayers has.
I mean, that's just a fact.
Like, none of these people have ever faced, like, real serious opposition in their entire life.
And even when they do put themselves in legal jeopardy, they have a whole arsenal of organizations that have their back.
And, of course, they have their back.
Let's get into some of the history before we draw in big conclusions here.
It's kind of hard not to draw it right off the bat just because these names are so famous because they're all professors now.
Well, basically...
To begin with SDS, we should talk about how it itself grew out of an existing group, the League of Industrial Democracy, which was one of these kind of old left groups, and they had sort of a reading group, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.
This should be familiar to you young conservatives out there, because ISI, I think it was first the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists and then they changed it.
Yeah, then they changed it to its current name now That's kind of the first stop for a lot of conservatives where they send you various books and reading guides and everything else So if you can imagine this is sort of the I mean that that was the deliberate alternative to this socialist thing so they had this sort of youth movement But you had the split between these younger activists who were outraged by the war in Vietnam.
Not necessarily that they were communists, but they were not anti-communists, if that makes sense.
They had no intention of signing up with the Cold War.
They didn't have any of the alignments with the American establishment that a lot of American labor unions had made.
A lot of the labor unions had said basically that if there were communists in the group, we would expel them because we want to be seen as patriotic and aligned with the government and everything else.
Uh, one of the things people forget, uh, Robert F. Kennedy, um, Robert Kennedy, one of his big things was, uh, he was an early supporter of Joe McCarthy.
And one of the things that he did against the Teamsters was hound them to see if there were any communists in the group.
So this entire climate.
It was something that Students for a Democratic Society grew out of, most famously with the Port Huron Statement.
And the Port Huron Statement, 1962, primarily ordered, primarily written by Tom Hayden, talked about this idea of participatory democracy.
And you could almost argue that this was sort of a third way that they were setting up between old school socialism And what they would consider to be imperialist right wing militarism.
Corporate liberalism was was ultimately what they would define the enemy system as.
And I think that what's really interesting when you look at the Port Huron statement is you see this language of freedom and liberation and this idea of the emancipated individual.
And then you contrast where these people are now, and how they are administrating the very systems that they once decried.
And again, it shows the who not what about politics, because when you cut through the Port Huron statement, there's a lot of rhetoric, but then when you get down to it, well, what does it actually mean?
It's essentially society as one giant college campus, which is sort of what we are in today.
I mean, SDS, I would argue, probably for the European friends, I mean, this is sort of the American equivalent to the May 68ers, right?
Yeah, I think that's a perfect analogy.
And it's worth noting that the early days of the SDS, We're, you know, not especially radical.
I mean, they were really motivated by opposing the war in Vietnam, which, agree or disagree, I don't think is a radical position to have opposed that war.
I don't think that that was only something of the fringes.
I think there were a lot of reasonable arguments against it.
And these were middle-class college kids.
You know, in addition to the war in Vietnam, they got caught up in the civil rights movement, and that became another big talking point for them.
But this was kind of, you know, the 60s are sort of like, you know, the massification of society is emerging.
You know, suddenly the middle class is all going to college.
You know, the Baby Boomers are teenagers, and in their 20s, America is incredibly wealthy.
You know, we're making, like, one-fourth of the industrial output of the planet.
And, you know, everything is suddenly really big, and opportunities are everywhere.
And when there are opportunities, people, you know, are going to question standards, right?
And that's really where these middle-class kids were at, where, like, they had everything.
They were living in this really affluent, society, and it was from that position of comfort that they started to really question the morality of, you know, the country they saw.
And that was really the impetus.
And in the early to mid-60s, the SDS did nothing particularly radical.
I mean, they held, you know, little protests, and, you know, they were a left-wing social club on college campuses.
And the reason it really took off was opposition to the Vietnam War, which more and more Americans
came to agree with, to one degree or another.
Famously, Hillary Clinton, who was born into a Republican family and was a Goldwater girl,
she flipped left over opposition to the Vietnam War.
You know, for a lot of people, it just seemed crazy that we were sending our young men out to this foreign, faraway place to die in this war that didn't seem to be of great importance.
And again, that's what I mean when I say the SDS didn't come out of the gate sounding super radical.
Well, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of the so-called civil rights movement in driving these people.
One of the things that's touched on in the Port Huron statement and also in the writings again and again is how, and this goes to the heart of really the American contradiction, where they'll say, well, America presents itself as the force of freedom and equality in the world, but look at the situation in the South.
And therefore we have to solve the situation in the South so we're not upholding a double standard to the world.
And of course, this is the problem because the race, I mean, again, I would go back to what Thomas Jefferson was the one who said, all men are created equal.
But Thomas Jefferson also said that in the book of faith, there's no way that blacks and whites could live under the same government.
It was an insolvable problem.
And To me, SDS saying that we have to solve this problem, that we have to do this as a moral commitment, we also have to do this so America isn't just a blatantly hypocritical country, it sort of shows that Jefferson was ultimately right, because everything was thrown behind solving this problem, but instead of the problem being solved, it just spread beyond the South.
It became The burning ruins of northern cities, you ended up seeing the increasing radicalization about race.
And again, they all like to pretend that somebody else has been in charge of this stuff for 70 years.
Because while you could argue that there was definitely a difference between new left student activists who were opposed to Vietnam, and then people like Lyndon Johnson, who of course were prosecuting the war in Vietnam.
These groups were essentially on the same side when it came to issues like civil rights.
And you could say, oh, Johnson wasn't moving fast enough, or he wasn't radical enough.
So that's exactly what I was going to say, yeah.
The point of disagreement is really one of time frames.
And that is really what came to radicalize so many people in the SDS, is exactly what you just said, of like, yeah, LBJ isn't doing this fast enough, the government isn't doing this fast enough.
From that disagreement over timeframes comes a suspicion that, you know, the center left is moving slowly because they don't really believe in this, because their hearts aren't really in this.
And that suspicion turns into this really kind of partisan paranoia for people who are, you know, for the left of the left.
You see this in, you know, a million issues.
This is a constant.
The left of the left is always accusing The left of center that maybe they're moving slowly because they don't actually want to do this at all.
And this slow movingness is just lip service.
It's just window dressing.
It's not heartfelt.
And that's when you really get these fights between these two factions.
Yeah.
And again, the ultimate enemy is always to the right, which is a big difference between the strategic approach of What we could probably call the left and the approach of the right in this country, whereas the way the left gains credibility is by accusing their enemies of being in line with the far right, secretly being in line with the far right, and the way American conservatives screen credibility in the system is by accusing its enemies of being secretly in league with the far right.
Even the American conservative movement and what it sees its job is as to guard Liberalism.
We need a liberalism that's functional enough that we can defend it from external enemies, but there's not much to be done in terms of opposing the way it manifests at home.
You know, we're not even going to stand at the word history crying stop, as Buckley said.
I mean, at this point, they just kind of cheer it on.
But let's return to the poor Huron statement.
As you point out, I mean, these guys were coming into a time when By the standards of classical Marxism, all the problems should have been solved.
And this is what led to this kind of Kennedy-era expectation that we're beyond politics, that everything is essentially a technocratic problem at this point.
I mean, it even begins, we are bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
Well, that makes it sound like it's not even A big deal.
I mean, if you're in your university housing and it's snowing outside, you might look at uncomfortably to the idea of going outside and having to do something.
I mean, this, this is a, when you start talking about ideas of comfort, I mean, already it's bourgeois already.
It's not, you're talking about very relatively unimportant things, but again, they see it as a firm call to morality and total dedication.
And.
Before even the Cold War, they say first, the permeating and victimizing fact, this is in 1962, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism.
Again, I think we could take that sentence and just flip the meaning and that would be about right for a lot of us white identitarians.
And they, it's only then that they talk about The Cold War.
And the reason they're opposed to the Cold War, initially, is because the presence of the atom bomb means that human extinction is on the table.
So it's not... At least at the beginning, they're not attacking the idea of Soviet communism is an evil.
It's, well, the Cold War is bad because it involves an existential struggle that we really want no part of.
At least that's the reading I take from this and from the larger context of how they operated.
Because again, while there was definitely later on a craze for Maoism and sort of third world revolutionary movements, you never saw the kind of alignment behind the Soviet Union, which was especially interesting because, of course, in Vietnam, the Viet Cong was backed by the Soviet Union, not by China.
And Vietnam and China would later fight a war right after the United States pulled out.
The big problem as far as these younger leftists saw it was.
The concept of anti-communism because it was a way for reactionary forces to sort of organize themselves and oppose what they saw as progressive social things.
And I think that.
It's not, and I think this is where a lot of people just kind of get off on sort of a boomer track where they say like, well, you know, these guys were communists and they were socialists and they were this, that, and the other thing.
But we've seen that these activists, both then and now, could operate quite comfortably in American consumer society, even as they denounced it as somehow dehumanizing.
Even as they said, it doesn't solve the problems of what it is to be free.
I mean, this is where you get this whole concept of participatory democracy, where people are going to have a say in how they're governed and everything else.
But then when you actually cut through all the rhetoric and say, well, what what do you actually mean by this?
You just get more rhetoric.
But there's no there's no end game here.
And we talked recently about Marcuse and how he couldn't even define What the end state was that we had to be willing to sacrifice everything for.
And Marcuse, when we talked about his influence on the new left, this is the new left.
And while it's very easy to see what they're against, and we'll argue that when you cut behind all of it, essentially what they're really against more than anything else is just white people.
What they're actually for is much harder to define, and that's why a lot of these people—Hayden went on to be in the California State Legislature, Dorn—Bernadine Dorn, and Bill Ayers.
Slow down here.
I think you're kind of skipping ahead.
Well, Hayden was the primary author of the Port Huron Statement.
Sure, but the splintering of the SDS is worth talking about.
and kind of, the spinning of the SDS is worth talking about.
I mean, because it starts, I mean, we talked about how it started,
but as the 1960s sort of heat up, the SDS becomes more and more radical,
where you, you know, in the early days, they're thinking about, you know, civil rights
and ending Jim Crow, ending the war in Vietnam, all these sorts of things.
Well, that was in the early 60s.
By 1968, huge swaths of the SDS are talking about abolishing capitalism, and all of this much bigger and much more radical stuff.
And SDS, you know, there's that joke of a big tent does nothing but flap in the wind.
Right.
That is what happened with the SDS.
Opposition to the Vietnam War was no longer enough to unify everybody, because suddenly, by the end of the 60s, there's all of this stuff going on in the world.
There are all of these anti-colonial wars, there are people like Herbert Marcuse who are influencing the intellectual scene in such a major way, etc., etc., etc.
You've got feminism, you've got maybe even the very early days of gay rights, you've got the Black Panthers.
Very little of that was happening in 1960, but just eight years later, all of this is happening.
Different people in the SDS interpreted these things differently, and some agreed with some of it and some agreed with none of it, and so on and so forth.
So the SDS kind of collapses under the strain of essentially There's just too much data input.
There's just too much going on.
And they just couldn't develop a consensus, because this was an enormous nationwide student group.
There's just too many perspectives in it.
And most notoriously, one faction that emerges from it is the Weathermen Underground, which was America's basically foremost left-wing terrorist organization for a time.
They got their name from a Bob Dylan song, just in case anybody, you know, is forgetting that this is 1960s boomer radicals.
There's a lyric in one of Bob Dylan's songs, which is, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
They're saying, you know, the winds of change, the winds of justice, etc.
Uh, and it's the weathermen who start, you know, who start blowing stuff up, like literally.
Yeah, people, people who say that America is more divided now than it ever has been since the Civil War, that political violence is a real problem.
I mean, they really need to take a look at what things were like in the late 60s and early 70s, where you had terrorists bombing American cities and everybody was just sort of like, well, you know, this is just the way things are now.
I mean, it's not it really puts into perspective all the stuff about all the insurrection at the Capitol and we're facing a revolutionary challenge.
It's like this.
This isn't even a blip compared compared to what was happening in this country in the late 60s and early 70s.
And of course, a lot of the people who did this stuff.
You know, essentially got away with it.
Right, so bear with me on that.
So the people who go full terrorist, largely centered around the Weatherman Underground, which later would be renamed as the Weather Underground to be gender neutral, but we'll get into that in a bit.
But it's not even close to the majority of the SDSers who go that route.
Tons of them just end up getting folded into the Democrat Party.
I mean, these are the people Who made George McGovern happen in 1972, right?
They're the ones pushing the Democrat Party way to the left of where it had been in the 1960s.
And that's where somebody like Tom Hayden, he gets involved in politics and becomes sort of an activist journalist.
You know, this is not somebody who is, who is super violent by any means.
And then for some also, you know, the Vietnam War ended and all, you know, the civil rights revolution largely ended.
And plenty of these people also just, you know, went home and just became middle class Democrats.
There's just so many, you know, the SDS has collapsed.
It just goes in so many different directions.
I think what our point is, What's interesting is that even after it fractures, you know, in 1968, 1969, around there, but then after a couple of decades, it's sort of all kind of, they all sort of end up in the same place in an interesting way.
And this is what Greg is talking about with, you know, with the radicals who were in the weather underground and, you know, who were killing cops and, you know, placing bombs in military bases and all of this stuff.
I mean, they had to go underground, as their name might suggest, and they were all underground for the duration of the 70s and most of the 80s.
But then people just sort of American society and the legal system sort of forgot about them or decided that it didn't really care about them.
And they all kind of popped out of the woodwork.
And that's where so many of them become.
College professors, or just public intellectuals, most famously Bill Ayers.
Right.
And meanwhile, and they sort of catch up to all of these people like Tom Hayden, who started, who went the mainstream route in the early days of the SDS falling apart.
And I would argue that focusing so much on Vietnam, as I would say, I mean, that's probably the primary thing that drew Drove, I mean, the student movement, which is a big part why a lot of it withered away once they abolished conscription and had the all-volunteer force.
And a lot of these people, once they no longer had skin in the game, just essentially went home, as you point out.
But it's noteworthy to me that in the Port Huron statement, it was the civil rights movement, not Vietnam, that was mentioned first.
And again, if we get into that document, it doesn't just say the southern problem.
It also talks about the problem of the northern cities.
And furthermore, it says this is the argument you get.
This is It's so cliched, but like we're still hearing it 60 years later where they say something along the lines of, well, the declaration of independence says all men are created equal.
But if you look at American society, like that's not how it actually works.
And therefore like the whole thing is illegitimate, which of course the real answer should be, well, maybe we should scrap that.
Declaration of universal egalitarianism rather than trying to live up to it forever and after Vietnam after that ceases to be a real issue and also because The geopolitics of Vietnam aren't so simplistic as a lot of them pretended I mean again, I would I think it would be a mistake to say that these guys were objectively pro-soviet they weren't but Viet Cong was, and it was the Soviet Union that was supporting Viet Cong and was supporting North Vietnam.
Once that went away, what they come around to having as being the most important thing is race.
And when they reemerge later, a lot of these activists, again, let's bring up two who are extremely important, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn.
Two very well-known activists within SDFs, both associated with the later Weatherman Underground Faction.
I want to... Weather Underground... Weather Underground Faction, right?
Don't use that gendered language.
That's right.
I'm sorry.
Yes, they were pioneers in that too.
They hadn't quite gotten to pronouns yet, but I'm sure they're working on it.
But if you say, okay, well, how did they end up professors of education, right?
Because everything is ultimately about shaping the youth.
And what is the new in that they push?
Well in 2009 from Third World Press, here's Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn and their book is called Race Course Against White Supremacy.
And description white supremacy and its troubling endurance in american life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the united states since its earliest days And that it is still very much with us the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system election processes war policies and education Now this is 2009 This is exactly what we're talking about now, and this is why I think The way they talked about race in the 60s and the way race politics transformed is ultimately more important than opposition to the war.
Because, again, there were a lot of right-wing opponents of the Vietnam War.
I don't know about a lot.
There were so many.
I mean, that's why the Berkshires got purged.
Yeah, yeah, I mean the general society got pushed out of sort of respectable conservatism National Review Magazine William F Buckley they all shunned that crowd for being opposed to Vietnam and there were definitely some people within The SDS who at the very beginning and it's not worth getting too much into the weeds here but there were a lot of people who thought that Well, maybe we can have some sort of a remnant, an alliance with the remnant of the old right, the anti-interventionist old right.
And this is an idea that you'll see crop up occasionally where, oh, we're going to have a populist anti-interventionist movement that unites left and right.
And it never works.
Never, never, never, never.
And it's never going to.
And it's never going to work.
Right.
And the reason it's never going to work is because fundamentally, What people are talking about, whatever the rhetoric is, whatever the discourse is, whatever the excuses are, again, all politics is identity politics.
And what was really driving, I would argue, and you're free to disagree with me on this, you, Chris, but also everybody, I would argue what's really driving the student movement and SDS, even as far back as the Port Huron statement, Is this idea that American society may have solved the key material questions from a Marxist perspective?
And yes, okay, they haven't been spread equally enough, whatever, but it's still succeeding on a level far beyond what Marx would have predicted and certainly doing far better than the Soviet Union was doing.
But there was a real spiritual resentment against white society, that it was morally illegitimate.
And that the society that they had created was something that needed to be overturned, basically for psychological reasons, because it didn't give individual people enough control over their own lives and didn't operate according to certain egalitarian principles.
And you could say, well, this all sounds very vague and it's hard to capture, but that's the essence of the document.
It's a long document.
It's not like the Communist Manifesto where you just okay, he's like outlining his theory of history.
This is what they are.
This is what they want.
This is why it matters at the end of the Port Huron statement.
You still really don't know what this is other than pop psychology phrases to take one excerpt here.
We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.
As a social system, we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation governed by two central aims, that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life, that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.
Well, what does that mean?
We're going to get rid of power and have it rooted in love.
Is there any exercise of power in history that says we're doing this based on hate?
I mean, even some medieval king would say that he's doing these things because he loves his subjects and has some divine commandment from God to take care of them.
Yeah, it's certainly googly-gawk.
Right, that politics be seen positively as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations.
Well again, what does that mean?
And when you hear this kind of vague rhetoric, the reason we started this series basically with James Burnham and The idea of what power relationships really mean, you got to cut through all that and say, well, what, what are they really saying?
What's the real argument of the piece as opposed to the formal meaning to put it in Burnham's terms, when they say something as we're collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations, that is a, what you should really read here is we are willing to reorganize social relations in such a way that we find it acceptable.
We are proposing to manage society in a fundamentally new way, and we are asserting our claim of leadership to be able to do these things.
And this is why I think Burnham's concept of the managerial state is so important, because he says that today's elites derive their power from not just managing technological processes, but managing social relations.
And this is especially important, as Sam Francis argued, when it comes to dictating race relations, that these things have to be managed, that people have to be educated in the right way to do these things, that the state has to have an input, that non-governmental organizations have to have an input, that the schools, above all, have to have an input.
And if we, again, if we go back to the Port Huron statement, it I think quite accurately identifies the university as the critical battleground.
And again, I quote, First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence.
Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes.
Again, it's all about control.
Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge.
Third, the extent to which academic resources presently are used to buttress immoral social practices revealed, first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms wrist.
Two, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool, I think they confessed too much there, reveals itself in the human relations consultants like to the modern corporations.
Who introduced trivial SOPs to give laborers feelings of participation or belonging, both those in scare quotes, while actually diluting them in order to further exploit their labor.
And of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics.
So again, let's take a step back, break this down.
The university is important because it creates The way people understand themselves and their place in their society.
It's where social relations are managed.
It's where people are trained in their argument to be more efficient workers.
And this is a problem because what people really need to be trained to do is emancipated participants in participatory democracy.
What does that actually mean?
Well, if we look at what we've already talked about with the Port Huron statement thus far, and we remember what Herbert Marcuse said last week, where it was, we need to emancipate people, we need to free them from all these regressive social attitudes, we need to censor them to make sure that they're not even exposed to these regressive social attitudes.
But if you ask me, what does this actually mean in the end?
What are we actually getting towards?
I don't have an answer, and it's impossible to even think of one.
There's some shades of that here, too, where we need to break down these institutions that are training people to be just good workers.
We need to break down these attitudes that are training people to think that they have a stake in the way their company is doing.
Instead, they need to be trained to be part of participatory democracy.
What does that mean?
Again, to use a cynical Burnham view of it, As I see it, Chris, feel free to disagree with me here.
I just read this as it means everyone shut up and be reorganized the way we tell you to be reorganized.
I don't think it's any more complicated than that.
And I think it kind of, it's revealed itself both in Europe and the way the, the 68ers took positions in the establishment and then in the United States, the way a lot of SDS people, as you say, just calmly moved into upper middle-class democratic politics.
And spend their days screaming about disinformation on social media.
I mean, to me, I don't think it's an exception or that there were some kind of betrayal of principles where they say, we're all about reason, we're all about creativity, we're all about individualism.
But then it ends up kind of turning into hysterical, neurotic college professors and people who wish they could be college professors.
I think there's a straight line between The Port Huron statement and the beginnings of SDS and what the left is today and perhaps one reason for hope is I think this sort of schoolmarmish spirit is maybe in its death throes because we're now in a position where they can't manage social relations as directly.
One of the things that they talked about early on in SDS was this idea of naming the system and there was a lot of ink spilled about what does it mean?
What exactly are we living under?
What exactly is the enemy?
And ultimately the best answer they came up with I think was Carl Oglesby who was one of the leaders of SDS in the mid-60s.
I think it was 1965.
He said that Based on what another SDS leader said, we need to name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and change it.
By it, he means the system.
What is the system?
And the system was essentially corporate liberalism.
And what he was pointing at here was that the Cold War was not launched by Barry Goldwater.
It was not launched by the quote-unquote far-right.
It was President Truman, mainstream liberal.
President Eisenhower, moderate liberal.
These are his words.
The late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal, in his words.
And then again, I quote, Think of the men who now engineer that war, Vietnam.
Those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead.
Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself, this being Lyndon Johnson.
They are not moral monsters.
They are all honorable men.
They are all liberals.
Now, okay, they are all honorable men.
Shades of Mark Antony's speech over the dead Caesar.
Shakespeare, I get what he's doing there, but there's also a sense in which.
They are at least willing to engage with these people.
They're not moral monsters like presumably Barry Goldwater is.
And.
They.
You also see this same.
Dual game where they appeal to the American founding.
But also say that America is inextricably linked with white supremacy and racism and is therefore bad from the beginning.
So again, the same speech.
All leftists say that all the time.
It's so weird.
I don't get how they don't notice that they do that.
They do notice, but I mean, in a media-dominated society, The attention span is, you know, that of a goldfish.
So earlier this week, I think, uh, I couldn't even force myself to watch it, but speaker Nancy Pelosi said that, you know, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would have tears in their eyes if they were talking about, if they saw like the situation with voting rights in the United States.
And it's just like, yeah, they probably would have tears in their eyes.
Cause they'd think way too many people are allowed to vote and they probably wonder why People who have no stake in the society are governing it, but they still appeal to these people because in some sense they realize they have no truck unless they at least rhetorically align themselves with the American past.
And in this very speech to someone, he says, Oh, I would have quoted Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine who first made plain our nation's unprovisional commitment to human rights.
Well, OK, but in the next breath, if you actually said, well, what does Thomas Jefferson have to say about the specific problems of this time?
It's not like he'd be part of the new left, which is why very quickly these people went into territory saying that white supremacy is the defining problem of the United States.
Without getting too much into the specific history of the movement, but if we can make it very Broad, but still meaningful.
SDS at the beginning, as you point out, was not particularly radical for all the pop psychology and the Port Huron statement and everything else.
Clearly founded on two things, Vietnam, civil rights.
But it was after the main civil rights legislation was passed.
Civil Rights Act 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, That's when you started seeing the main urban riots.
That's when you started seeing the rise of black power movements where black radicals were no longer willing to be controlled by kind of these Northeastern elites who were using them as sort of a bludgeon against the South.
That's also when SDS itself started getting this internalizing this white self-loathing and seeing White identity as one of the key problems that was upholding what they considered to be a progressive and militaristic social structure.
Because to them, if we describe corporate liberalism as a ruling ideology of the country, what they really mean is the alignment of the military with universities, big business, corporate media.
Essentially, what we would call the establishment.
But again, even this doesn't really present that big an obstacle.
I mean, they were still organizing on these campuses that they claimed were part of this militaristic system.
I mean, Noam Chomsky got cut his teeth during this time, and he was at MIT, and he himself said that the military didn't care about what he was talking about at MIT because MIT was still researching weapons and stuff.
If you're really living under a militaristic system, they're not going to let some professor be organizing anti-war events on quote-unquote your own campus.
And so when you get this radicalism later, particularly into the weather underground, and then there was a, there was sort of a splinter faction, uh, I think it was called the progressive I'll come back to it in a second, but essentially it was like a Maoist group that sort of looked at things purely through the nexus of class.
There are so many splinter groups, even, I mean, there are even too many like terrorist splinter groups to keep track of from all of this.
It's incredible how internally divisive it was.
There was eventually the May 19 Communist Organization, there was the Black Liberation Army, something called Prairie something or other.
A lot of the blacks just straight up left.
Went to the Black Panthers.
The Progressive Labor Party, that was on the tip of my tongue, I couldn't remember it.
Progressive Labor Party was one of these, basically it was a well-organized Maoist Communist faction.
And they took control of what passed for the formal machinery of SDS, like the key positions.
But everybody just left.
Because by that point, we're talking 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969.
People weren't as interested in talking about class.
I mean, even in the Port Huron statement, right from the beginning, you're not seeing that old school Marxist analysis about class, because right off the bat, they say we've all been raised in at least modest comfort.
Instead, it's about race.
It's about this kind of Shady image of self-emancipation.
It's about being liberated from the past.
It's about racial politics.
It's about sexual identity politics.
It's about third world racial identity politics and for a lot of people White students and white activists who were involved in these movements would praise black power as a liberation force and But came to see their own race as a main problem.
I'm quoting from a paper here called playing in the dolls house of revolution, which talks about white students and activists involved with SDS.
Talking about white activists here.
For some, the only way they were well aware of their global history of oppression and persecution at the hands of the dominant white class.
For some, the only way to reconcile that past with their personal integrity, these are the white activists, was to reject their race altogether.
Indeed, as black power encouraged blacks to respect and celebrate their race, many whites took it as an exhortation to reject their race.
What resulted thus was a white involvement in black power that resulted from a psychological rejection of their own racial identity.
a condition that prevented them from fully examining the political merits of black power
or contributing to the cause of racial justice in the best way possible,
preaching its merits in the very middle-class communities they had rejected."
This question of white allyship and the question of where do whites fit in these
racial liberation struggles, this is something that has only intensified in the years since,
arguably culminating now in the years in the... God, it's already...
It seems like it was a million years ago, but it really wasn't Ever since George Floyd died and we had Black Lives Matter really come to the fore as the dominant social movement promoted by the establishment in this country the idea of whites Having to quote do the work and twisting themselves into all sorts of these ideological pretzels to justify their own existence and See race sometimes but not see it at other times and Support blacks, but not be getting in the way or leading them because that would be Stepping in front of them and acting as a white savior.
We can't have that but at the same time they also Want to make sure that they're seen to be doing all these things because this desire for attention and this desire for psychological self-satisfaction All of this is implicit in these movements All of this sounds new, but I would argue that this goes all the way back to SDS, arguably before that, and it's not even just a product of the later SDS, of the more militant years, of the Days of Rage or anything like that.
I would argue it's all there implicit from the beginning, all the way back to 1962.
Okay, so I think Yeah, you and I disagree on the exact point of germination.
I don't think you're quite there yet in 1962.
I do think a lot of this comes later, really what we think of as the 60s get started, the second half of the 60s.
I think that's kind of a minor point of disagreement, but what I'd really like to stress here is that Most of you listening to this podcast are so used to Democrat politicians, including white men themselves, ones at the top of the heap, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, you know, talking about demographic change as it's, you know, like it's a very good thing.
I mean, Bill Clinton was the first president to do that in the 90s.
He talked about how America becoming a white minority country would be, you know, the next big revolution in American society and how this was a good thing.
Joe Biden has also cheered on demographic change as a good thing, and then when you get a few levels down, maybe it becomes much more explicit.
People who work at the DNC and people talking heads on MSNBC really do not mince words about how great demographic change is and how evil whites are and how prevalent white privilege and white supremacy is and everything, but that's That was not the case for the Democrat Party at all in the 1960s.
That wasn't something LBJ or Hubert Humphrey talked about.
This wasn't even something George McGovern really talked about, much less Jimmy Carter.
The concept of gender neutrality or white privilege or any of those things was really, really a fringe notion at that point, and the first people to really pick it up were the Weathermen.
I mean, again, that's why they changed their name from the Weathermen Underground to the Weather Underground.
I mean, nobody was talking about gender-neutral language in the 1970s except these guys.
And same with this radical white ethnomassacism.
It was the Weather Underground and certain factions of the SDS who really did pioneer a lot of this stuff.
You know, and this is something that they, I mean, they self-chastised themselves for this.
Like, I know, I know that they, they would release, the Weather Underground would release these sort of communiques or, you know, sort of micro manifestos.
You could even say, call them press releases.
And they would talk there about how, even though they were being oppressed by this evil system, they still had it better than blacks.
You know, that self-flagellation was there in a way that, No mainstream white Democrat was doing at that time.
And it is an example of the radicals winning.
Of course, they themselves would never admit this.
But, you know, if you're talking about white privilege in the 1970s, you would never believe that this evil, white supremacist, imperialistic, colonialist, capitalist society would ever be talking about white privilege.
You know, the top members of society would be talking about white privilege within, you know, just 30, 40 years.
But that is what happened.
And that's kind of what I mean about The most interesting thing about the SDS, and really the most interesting thing about the Weather Underground, is how the people who chose to do violence, the people who went the terrorist route and the people who didn't, both kind of ended up in the same place.
The big example, I guess, is to compare a few of these people who took initially different routes in the 60s and 70s.
Um, but ended up, you know, sort of rubbing elbows by the 90s or the 2000s.
So one SDSer was a guy named Todd Gitlin, who he became sort of, I guess sort of was considered a softie.
One of his most famous books, he's a public intellectual, he's written a number of different books, but one of his bigger ones was called Letters to a Young Activist, which was published in 2003.
And that was him really urging kind of young radical kids to not push things too far and to play ball with the system and all of this stuff.
And Gitlin as well is one of those liberals who despises Ralph Nader and thinks Ralph Nader is this egomaniac who just narcissistically cheated Al Gore out of the presidency on purpose in 2000.
But Gitlin has been working in academia since the 1970s, first at San Jose State University, and then somewhere in New York, and ultimately for a while at Columbia University, which is quite prestigious, obviously.
And again, Todd Gitlin was an SDSer.
He was not into blowing stuff up.
He was not into killing cops, nothing like that.
But then you compare him to somebody like Kathy Bowden.
She was an SDSer.
She did join the Weather Underground when it was founded.
She and her romantic partner, David Gilbert, in 1981, they worked with the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brinks truck.
The robbery did not go well and two cops and one security guard ended up being killed.
So for the record, Kathy Bowden and her romantic partner, David Gilbert, were not the ones pulling, did not pull the triggers that killed these three men.
But they were part, I mean, they were key organizers in the robbery and she acted as a decoy and he was the getaway driver.
So they were arrested and they were convicted of felony murder, you know, appropriately enough, and they were imprisoned.
And their prison sentence, they got prison sentences for very lengthy periods of time, you know, because they were involved in killing cops.
But lo and behold, Kathy Bowden was released from prison on parole in 2003, and shortly thereafter became an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
I'm going to pause for effect there.
And again, Todd Gitlin, who never did anything violent, and again, in many ways became sort of a softie, he also got to teach at Columbia University.
You know, they didn't end up being this big difference.
It's like, yeah, I guess it's sad for Kathy that she served in federal prison for a few decades.
But hey, not a lot of people who get released early for killing cops get to then teach at Ivy League universities.
But that is literally what happened.
And David Gilbert also, he recently got released, actually.
He's yet to start teaching at a prestigious university.
But Governor Andrew Cuomo actually reduced his sentence, which made him eligible for parole, and he was granted parole in October of 2021, so just a couple of months ago.
I think the fact that Andrew Cuomo was able to release Dave Gilbert from prison is, again, sort of really, really key because Cuomo is hated by progressives and the Bernie wing, they despise him.
Remember that they primary challenged him in 2018 with Cynthia Nixon, former City Star.
And that was a really aggressive challenge from the left.
And I mean, Cuomo ultimately got got me toed and all of this stuff.
And I mean, and the progressives and the Bernie brothers are right.
Look, Cuomo is is a Machiavellian sort of machine Democrat politician.
He is not a radical left-winger.
He does not talk about socializing medicine.
He's not into, you know, legalizing lots of drugs, these sorts of things, you know, really important issues that the Bernie Bros are into.
But even though Cuomo is not a radical, it's still Cuomo who is like, oh yeah, this literal communist terrorist who played a key role in killing Three people, two of whom were cops, like, yeah, let's just let him out of prison.
I mean, it's not a, you know, it's not a big deal.
We can let bygones be bygones.
And you see this, and there's so many more examples of this.
So actually, yeah, we're on the topic.
So David Gilbert and Kathy Bowdoin, this sort of Marxist Bonnie and Clyde, they had a child named Chessa Bowdoin.
I'm assuming that the child took the mother's name as some sort of feminist Kind of thing?
I don't know.
That's my guess.
So Chessa is born, and then he's born in 1980.
So one year later, there's this armed robbery of the Brinks trucks by his parents.
His parents go away, and then he is adopted by two other Weather Underground radicals, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn.
They raise him as their own.
And today he is the district attorney of San Francisco.
He's one of these super progressive district attorneys in major liberal cities that were, you know, got oodles of money from George Soros in the last couple of years.
And, you know, these are, these are the ones who, you know, like decriminalize all low level offenses and now, you know, murder rates are sky high.
And I mean, San Francisco is one of the worst places, you know, one of the places that suffered the most.
They're the ones that are losing all of their Walgreens because No, you can shoplift up to $900 or something with relative impunity.
I believe it's $750.
We must be very cautious about getting these things correctly.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, we're waging war against the capitalist system thanks to our funds from currency speculator George Soros.
We still need to... A PSA to all our listeners looking for five-finger discounts in the Bay Area.
But again, this is my point of like, There was this very meaningful split in 1969 when the SDS falls apart.
And some of them, some of these SDSers just become McGovernites in the Democrat Party.
Some of these people just become generic Democrats because the war in Vietnam is sort of tapering down and the draft ends and they don't really care about stuff anymore.
Others become these radical terrorists.
And many of them, because again, Tom Hayden's into talking about white privilege as well.
Tom Hayden, who, to remind everybody, is one of the peaceful guys who's never involved in bombing anything or killing any cops.
His son married a black woman, and he famously toasted at the wedding that he thought it was great because it's another step in a long-term goal that is the peaceful, non-violent disappearance of the white race.
Just to interject here for a second.
Anyone who accuses...
People like us of being neurotic or overly fixated on race.
I mean just just take take that state like it wouldn't even occur to me at a wedding regardless of the demographic circumstances involved to make like a political speech.
Yeah.
About the racial implications about these two people getting married but like they can't they can't help but do this and this is again this is what I was trying to say last week like I I don't mean to, the boss is probably going to imagine this, but like, I don't mean to paint with a broad brush, but I don't think a truly committed leftist is capable of human relationships for all the talk about creativity and individualism and reason and liberation and blah, blah, blah, because everything has to be seen through this stupid ideological lens.
They can't help but constantly put people into categories.
They can't help.
Look at everything like it's a sociology exercise.
And at the end of the day, as you point out, like these guys, they all end up becoming education professors.
They all end up becoming sociology professors.
They all end up becoming these people who characterize and manage social relations because they don't actually Do anything in terms of producing something that's of value.
I mean again, let's look at Bill Ayers.
This is from NPR now NPR.
This is the closest thing America has to state radio, right?
So here's Here's the government.
Here's the evil American militaristic corporate liberalist government interview with Bill Ayers this is after Obama was elected for the first time and here's like the gleeful NPR host and Bill Ayers was a focal point of the McCain-Palin campaign's attacks against Barack Obama.
Ayers didn't speak to the press during the campaign, but now that it's over, we asked him to tell us about his experiences during the campaign, his relationship with Obama, and to explain his radical past and what motivated his actions.
Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, which broke away from SDS, Students from a Democratic Society, in the early 70s to take more militant action against the war in Vietnam, including setting off a bomb in the Pentagon.
Federal charges against Ayers were dismissed because of government misconduct.
Now Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of several books about education.
In 1997, he won Chicago's Citizen of the Year Award for his work in education reform.
Now, being Citizen of the Year in Chicago is one of those, like, self-discrediting awards, perhaps, but still, it does show that here's the government itself talking about a guy who was involved with all these movements that were, I will very carefully phrase it as direct action against that government, and it's a puff piece.
You know, I'd say it's to protect you against the radical opinions of John, the John McCain campaign.
So upper middle class whites can get know how to be, how to think about the weatherman underground and stuff like that.
And also this is not just that this is an educator.
Now this is, this is the leading educator.
This is the guy who's going to be shaping how education needs to be reformed and how it needs to be redone.
And this is how we need to teach everybody going forward.
And this has all been.
Sublimated in American middle class life upper middle class life I mean, this is the philosophy of America's technocratic elite and that's I think really the the main story of SDS Is they started off by saying?
Oh, we're this radical alternative to corporate lizard liberalism or this American system which reduces everybody to the level of a commodity and now They're the salesman, and it really didn't matter whether you started off peacefully or whether you went into militant direct action.
At the end of the day, you're the same old, boring, rich, urban liberal, and everything that you've ever said and everything that you've ever believed or will ever believe or will ever say is eminently predictable.
And when reading the Port Huron statement and then reading a lot of the stuff that's coming out today, It's just the same stuff.
It's the same phrases.
It's the same arguments They've been they've been saying the same thing for 70 years And one of the things that white advocates need to say is like we've been doing this for Maybe more than 70 years if we want to extend the civil rights movement further back into the 40s and you know the double-v campaign during World War two or the NAACP and You know, I've been doing this for like a century.
And according to polls taken now, race relations are worse than ever.
And nothing, none of the things they said would happen have happened.
And the further we go and the more concessions we make, the more is demanded.
And even if you get The peaceful abolition of the white race, or the violent abolition, I don't think they would care in the end.
50 years after we're all gone, they'd still be making the same complaints.
You'd still have, you know, you'd have the same sort of socio-economic discrepancies, only now it would be between, like, light-skinned and dark-skinned, and there'd be all sorts of, like, stupid- That's what they call colorism, actually.
Right, you know, people would be holding up paper bags to determine whether you get, like, arrested or not.
Being part of the oppressive class or whatever nightmare they would unleash.
None of these problems go away, they just intensify.
It's not just that we need to look at these movements and say, well isn't it crazy how these people who were involved in the most despicable crimes, the most violent activity, essentially get not just let back into society, but are given a ticket to The highest level of society, with no penalties paid, and contrast that to these same reporters who are screaming and wailing and crying about the so-called insurrection because a couple boomers strolled through the Capitol.
Yeah, no, I mean the difference, it is, it's so, it's so crazy.
Myself, I have a hard time Wrapping my mind around it, I mean, like Bernadine Dorn, who is the spouse of Bill Ayers and who raised Chesa Bowden, she was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for years because she was involved in so many bombings.
I mean, she was like the leader of the Weather Underground for a while, and she teaches at the Northwestern University School of Law.
You know, I mean, it's just...
It's just incredible, and you hear the Left always talking about how America is this carceral state, and we put all of these people in prison, and none of them deserve it, and the way that all of these people walked, right?
Some of them basically never spent time in prison, and others, such as David Gilbert, appropriately were imprisoned for decades, and then inappropriately let out.
And you compare that to, I mean, forget even comparing them to January, the January 6th people, you can compare that to you and I, right?
It's like, you and I will, you know, it's inconceivable that we would ever teach at any university, much less a prestigious one on the East Coast or in Chicago.
And we haven't done anything.
I mean, we do, we host a weekly podcast and we write essays about, you know, the importance of race and the reality of race.
And, you know, we, I have a much higher chance of losing access to a bank account or Uber or Airbnb than these people.
Than any anti-capitalist, yeah.
Right, and palmed the Pentagon.
And nobody seems to really notice this discrepancy.
And again, setting aside the January 6th people, it's like a class of people who are more oppressed than these former terrorists.
Are people who work in porn, people who work in porn actually have a hard time getting bank accounts or loans or mortgages.
And they, you know, they get kicked off of Twitter sometimes as well.
And these sorts of things.
I mean, they actually, you know, girls on OnlyFans and porn stars face more oppression than Marxist terrorists in the United States.
It's easier to be a Marxist terrorist over the long haul.
Maybe there will be a rough patch for you, but over the long haul you will face less deplatforming than if you are what is now fashionably called a sex worker.
I deplatform them both, but that's neither here nor there.
I'm not trying to lionize.
My residual traditionalist Catholicism is coming to the fore.
So you and I could never teach at a university.
Right, or it would be difficult for us to even get a job in corporate America as an accountant.
Well, you know, people who formerly worked in porn also have a hard time leaving, you know, because they're, you know, they're easily doxable and pornography is still crowned upon by the mainstream.
And yet, you know, none of these people who are responsible for deaths and bombings, etc.
They not only didn't really get punished, they now teach at these universities, and their radical ideas from the 60s are now talked about by the president, and of course they're still not happy.
They still think America is evil.
I remember watching, there's a great documentary on The Weather Underground called The Weather Underground that interviewed David Gilbert while he was still in prison, and he was very unapologetic about how he should not be in prison, and how Bill Clinton should be in prison instead.
I mean, maybe he's right.
Well, you know, maybe both.
You could say that both belong in prison.
Why not both?
Right.
But no, I mean, this idea that David Gilbert shouldn't be in prison because he was morally righteous in killing those cops and that security guard It's just so... Was he the triggerman, or he was just involved in the operation?
He was the getaway driver, but he was part of the plan.
I mean, he helped put together the plan because he was an active terrorist.
Because he was an important member of a terrorist group.
Yeah, and there's... if you go back, I mean, you can read some of these just unbelievably larpy Declarations of war against the government and y'all were going underground and everything else and if you read the histories of SDS and a lot of the people were involved in the beginning they'll sort of mourn how these groups.
Isolated themselves from a mass base by pretending they were essentially Viet Cong Operating in Manhattan or something and of course There was that one famous case where somebody was trying to make a bomb and they ended up blowing themselves up And so doing doing more positive good for society than the American conservative movement has done in 75 years but the But I mean the the key here is that There's no They didn't actually marginalize themselves.
There was no cost paid.
They still have access to a mass base, and they were let right back in.
And to try to flip these comparisons, I mean, it would be... It's so unthinkable that to even say it almost makes me sound crazy because, like, even going in this direction is bad.
But, like, it would be as if Mitt Romney sought clemency for James Fields or something like that.
I mean, it would it's it's it's and that that's actually like less extreme than like what's happened in a lot of these cases.
And with Ayers, of course, you have the famous example of the relationship with Barack Obama and Barack Obama.
Again, I'm to any progressives who are listening, I'm not Saying, oh, Barack Obama's far left socialist, whatever, like this isn't, you know, the Republican House Caucus or something like I get that Barack Obama is seen as basically.
An exemplar of corporate liberalism, old school corporate liberalism in a way in terms of policy in terms of what I mean, he was no socialist.
Clearly, if anything, you would argue that he his administration.
And then if Michelle Obama runs for office, I mean, it would essentially be to put a glossy.
Fun hip image on.
The tyranny of big tech and the tyranny of big business.
The Obamas are neoliberals.
They're not partisans.
That's my point.
He was not an extremist and yet these connections were of no importance and mainstream journalists just kind of laughed them off as being nothing.
Whereas if you're a staffer on a guy Who worked for another guy who ran for the Republican Senate somewhere.
I mean, that's going to be the number one story throughout the country and the world for like weeks.
And ultimately you have to ask yourself, well, where does the blame lie?
And I mean, I hate to, to come back to a repeating theme, but to me, it always comes back to the American conservative movement where they constantly leave their wounded on the field.
They constantly, the left says, jump.
They say how high.
They constantly play by the left's terms.
We saw this just with MLK Day.
Every year we get this stupid, unbelievably stupid pattern of ignorance where they say Martin Luther King would actually be on our side and the left will come back with chapter and verse of what King actually said and what he actually believed and the Republicans usually just respond with silence.
Either because they've never actually read any of what King actually said or believed or did, or they just don't want to confront it.
And, or they, or they just dismiss it out of hand as like an evil democratic lie or plot or something.
And did you know that the Confederates were Democrats and blah, blah, blah.
It's also why we end up in sort of this dead end.
And I think one of the big differences between, I mean, as somebody who, Student organizer and as somebody who worked with conservative student organizers from various different groups, you know, y'all yeah, whatever you name it.
I think one of the big differences between the American right and the American left is that there were divisions within SDS and there was a lot of bitterness and I don't want to say like well in the end that was all just the same thing.
They may have ended up at the same place, but a lot of these people are still very bitter about About the factions and everything else.
That cannot be overstated.
And let's not, I'm not trying to say all these guys, saying these guys ended up in the same place is not the same thing as saying they all believed in the same things or that they agreed with the same tactics.
I'm not saying SDS was all terrorists.
No, I'm not saying that at all.
That would be wildly, that would just be a complete lie.
But I'm not even saying they're all socialists.
I mean, it was, it was broader than that.
I mean, you had a lot of guys from middle America who were just opposed to the war and it was, it went no farther than that.
Um, and I'm sure some turned out to be Republicans and stuff in later life.
Yeah.
But what I am saying is that you do have this, this consciousness of operating in a revolutionary way where you are opposed to the system, even while the system is, Taking it easy on you, all things considered, and yet you don't sell out your comrades.
You don't attack your extremes.
You keep it within the family, so to speak.
And if there's a debate, you might have a faction.
Split off and God knows the history of leftist movements is full of factions and weird little minuscule parties splitting off from one another.
And if you're interested in reading about SDS, you'll be amazed at how many factions came out of it and how.
I'm not sure if it was, it might've been Hayden, but it was, uh, one of the leaders, one of the initial leaders was talking about at one of the later conferences where everything was splitting apart.
And he said something about during over the course, it might have even been Abbie Hoffman, during the course of the convention, I marveled at how little I understood what was being said, because everything had just fallen so deep into jargon.
And, you know, we have to use these crazy terms that nobody actually uses in describing these social functions and everything else.
So, like, all of that is there.
And I'm not pretending that the left is some monolith because it's clearly not nor am I just saying that they're all crazy radicals.
But what I am saying is that in the end they all did come around to what has become essentially an anti-white position and it should be called an anti-white position.
We have we also have to name the system and we also have to name what its motivation is and In that sense, they all ended up in the same place pushing that core concept.
And when you compare that to American conservatives, it's not sure there's factionalism, but there's factionalism in anything.
But the difference is that for American conservatives, they're constantly expelling each other to try to get concessions from liberal journalists, the existing system of power to essentially become the approved Opposition, the true loyal opposition to what's happening, whereas the left does not operate that way.
Even when they are the system in some ways, they still act as if they're in opposition to it, which in a way is what allows them to get real concessions.
Whereas if you look at American conservatives.
I mean, at the end of the day, people are talking about this coming red wave that's supposed to happen with the midterms.
Well, if they take power, what are they actually going to do?
I mean, the only thing that I can see is we'll probably get more tax cuts for the companies pushing BLM and we'll get a more militant defense of American cultural exports like wokeness and, you know, against Russia or something or Hungary, you know, we'll get more funding for quote unquote independent media and Hungary or something like that.
There's no.
There's no concept of an alternative.
There's no concept of challenging what is.
And really, I think that's because if we accept SDS's definition of corporate liberalism as a meaningful thing, and I think we can, the only difference now is I would say the type of guys who ran SDS are now the ones in command of it and in command of all these institutions.
The American conservative movement has always been the biggest offenders of corporate liberalism.
What they do is protect it from its own excesses and make sure that it continues.
And if we're going to have a productive movement, particularly if you're talking about what's happening on college campuses, you have to come at it from a place of challenge outside the system.
You have to say this existing thing, this existing structure, is the enemy.
It needs to be replaced.
It can't just be tinkered with and it can't just be and certainly can't be protected against the leftists.
I mean, I'm more If it's falling, push it.
Yeah.
Well, actually, that's probably a good place to end.
Yeah, this is a very sprawling topic, and I would encourage readers to get into the history of this group.
Yeah, I mean, I always end with that.
This is a very sprawling topic, and I would encourage readers to get into the history
of this group.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff here, but there's also, and I would just say from a
purely tactical standpoint in terms of organizing and college campuses and the particulars of
organizing in that environment, but if you say, well, I don't have the time for that,
and I just don't want to invest in it, honestly, you can just take a step back.
And what Chris said is true.
I mean, all of these people for all their different factions and all their militancy and even the open violence embraced by Quite a few of the members.
We didn't even get into the Days of Rage, which was the giant riot they organized in Chicago.
Which, of course, you know, no meaningful consequences for anyone.
If you look at everything they did, they all still ended up fundamentally in the same place.
And they all fundamentally ended up talking about white privilege and the blood guilt of white people and why whites need to be replaced.
And the true terror is not that, oh, here's some leftist student movement that had these slogans.
The true terror is that what these guys were saying is also being said to you by the federal government, by your bank, by BlackRock or your real estate agency, your real estate holding companies or whatever else.
I mean, this is the message now that's been brought to you by American capitalism.
And the fact that SDS and American capitalism ultimately ended up in the same place is something that we really should internalize when talking about a systemic challenge to everything that our people face.
So, we'll leave it at that.
Yeah.
Thanks for tuning in, guys.
We'll see you next week.
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