All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 29, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
48:43
EPISODE 637: CHRONICLES OF THE REVOLUTION — BLOOD ON THE STREETS

Here’s your Daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiec Save up to 65% on MyPillow products by going to https://www.MyPillow.com/POSO and use code POSOSupport the Show.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I want to take a second to remind you to sign up for the Pozo Daily Brief.
It is completely free.
It'll be one email that's sent to you every day.
You can stop the endless scrolling, trying to find out what's going on in your world.
We will have this delivered directly to you, totally for free.
Go to humanevents.com slash Pozo.
Sign up today.
It's called the Pozo Daily Brief.
Read what I read for show prep.
You will not regret it.
humanevents.com slash Pozo.
Totally free.
the Poso Daily Brief.
This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
This is Human Events with your host Jack Posobiec.
Deliver us from evil!
Jack Posobiec here.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Human Events Special Edition.
We've been running through these Chronicles of the Revolution.
If you're watching them in order, We had one called Blood on the Snow, the Russian Revolution.
This installment, Blood on the Streets, the 60s revolution within the United States.
And the reason we talk about the 60s as a revolution certainly was, if you talk to the left, they refer to it as the new American founding.
They refer to it.
As a revolution.
Yet on the right, for some reason, we don't question this.
We just kind of go along with everything we're taught about this era.
So many fake stories.
They cover up the violence.
They cover up the degeneracy.
They cover up the lies that were told about this era.
And so to help dispel some of those myths about what really is, and there's something that I think the left does have right about the 1960s, is that it did fundamentally change the way the United States Hey Jack, great to be here again.
go through a lot of these fundamental changes in this era.
And so to help me dispel all of these myths and set some of the records straight, we have our co-host from Thoughtcrime and our co-host for Chronicles of Revolution, Blake Neff.
Hey, Jack.
Great to be here again.
So, Blake, how is it, let's just set the frame really quickly.
How is it that people initially learn about the 1960s?
Yeah, I think this is the most important thing to start with, which is most people our age, you know, we were in elementary school in the United States.
And before you take history or civics or government, we all have this class in elementary school we call social studies.
And And the way social studies works, this is how it works for me, and it probably works this way for a lot of people, I assume.
I started attending school in the mid-90s, and What you get is in about first grade, probably earlier these days, but I remember it in first grade, you get your first children's book on, you know, how do we get modern America?
And so what you get is you get a children's book on the African-American civil rights movement.
And what you'll get is you'll get a very, very simple moral fable where for all of America, you know, America a long time ago had slavery.
And then we had this Jim Crow where people are discriminated against only on their skin color.
And then, this is how it was everywhere, and everyone just went along with it, and then, like, one person, Martin Luther King Jr., stands up and is like, no, that's, that's bad, we shouldn't, we shouldn't do that, and he does, he starts these protests, and they're peaceful, because he's a very virtuous man, and he gives these speeches that are so inspiring, it changes everyone's mind, but not everyone's mind, because then some evil racist shoots him dead, and so he's this martyr forever, and you get
This is the narrative you get and it is a very simple moral fable about, you know, right and wrong and the creation of modern America.
And this is like the first moral stuff, like the very first moral tale you get that is embedded in actual American history that you get as a child.
And this is what you then slowly have expanded out over the course of growing up.
And I think it's a big reason.
Which, by the way, to interject real quickly, because we get that so young, it also sort of, you know, it casts a pallor over everything else you learn about America's founding.
Because you were told that, okay, yes, we had this founding and we had the Exactly.
and the War of Independence, et cetera.
But, you know, we were still bad right up until the 1960s.
Until the 60s, everything that happened was bad.
And we obviously see that play out in the iconoclasm that's currently going on in the United States, where they will tear down basically anything of any American leader that came before the 1960s.
Exactly.
It embeds a very simple moral framework for viewing relatively recent American history and it also means if you learn anything more about it, it's being built onto this structure that is fundamentally This is the most straightforward Moral good that has happened in American history and so anything else is attached to it that is also by extension good it takes something that is actually an enormously complex event and in many ways a clearly bad event and
And it dresses it up as something that was extremely moral, extremely necessary, and I think most important of all, extremely irreversible.
And especially these days, conservatives are becoming more aware that if they kind of want to undo wokeness or undo this sort of permanent revolution that exists in American history, you actually have to go back to things that happened in the 1960s and seriously consider
Revising what we did then and you can't do that if you're still locked into viewing it as this sacred moral crusade and We're gonna get into why it's more complex, but I do want to have the caveat that it's not like it's not like segregation was good and it's not like All everything that you hear about it is false, but it always ends up missing a lot of nuance When I grew up in the hood, I rolled with bloods And them boys had a saying
One of the most obvious ways that's the case is Martin Luther King Jr.
gets praised for being a peaceful activist.
And, you know, he did promote peaceful activism.
But what they always end up glossing over is actually in the mid-60s and late-60s Civil rights activism becomes a very violent thing.
There are very severe riots in many of America's major cities.
And on a scale that, the ramifications of it, if we let it, if we saw it happening in another country, we would describe it as ethnic cleansing.
Like, there's a massive riot in Newark, New Jersey, and tens of thousands of people, based on skin color, leave Newark because they don't feel that it's safe to live there anymore.
And, you know, nowadays it happens in Gaza and you have the United Nations pass resolutions about it.
But it's like a totally forgotten thing in American history that this took place.
The murder rate absolutely explodes in the U.S.
Which, by the way, to be clear, we did actually just have Jack Cashel here on the program a couple weeks ago, if people want to pull that episode, where we specifically talked about the Newark riots.
I actually have a quick list here of the riots of the 1960s, the ghetto riots that people talk about.
Watts riots in Los Angeles 1965 Detroit riot 1967 the Newark riots of 1967 the Harlem riots that was 1964 and then the Washington DC riots and this is as you say following the assassination of Martin Luther King so it was extremely violent in the 1960s And you do have, by the way, many governors at the time and mayors coming in and using police.
Ronald Reagan actually was a governor who came in and used police force to put down some of these riots and some of these uprisings.
So yes, it did get quite violent.
And again, you know, we're told it's kind of like the same thing that we went through in 2020 with the mostly peaceful protests, where we're told that violence was only on the side of the police or vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse.
And that's the official narrative.
However, because of social media and because we have independent media now, we can actually look and see the truth. - Exactly.
And you know, another myth is, this is one that's very popular on the right, is we've heavily mythologized the I have a dream speech.
You know, judge my children by not the color of their skin, but the content of their character and so on.
And it's not a bad speech and it's not bad rhetoric to celebrate it.
As far as things that you could celebrate that were being said in that era, that's a good set of rhetoric to hold up.
But what is a myth is the idea that this is what they were fighting for in the 60s, actually, or even that this is actually what Martin Luther King was fighting for, for the most part.
Because what we have a more confrontation of these days is basically immediately as the Civil Rights Revolution is unfolding, It goes almost instantly from we want equal opportunity to what we actually want is equality of outcome.
So almost from the moment that the 1964 Civil Rights Act passes, even though the act says you can't discriminate based on race, the federal government steps in under activist pressure from liberal activist groups and they say, oh yeah, actually, you know, it says you can't discriminate based on race, but what it actually means is you have to discriminate based on race because you have to do affirmative action to offset you know, this other discrimination that is invisible but is happening.
And, you know, we get disparate impact by the early 70s.
Disparate impact is a legal doctrine created by the Supreme Court that if any policy at any company or any institution has an unequal outcome based on race or sex or national origin or all these other categories, if they produce any sort of unequal outcome versus what would be predicted by overall if they produce any sort of unequal outcome versus what would be predicted by overall population, then we can Well, as some geniuses have finally started to point out, everything has a disparate impact.
Because in fact, human beings are different.
But we got this standard wrong right away, and this has been what is looming over America for half a century since.
That we have this magical law that says you can't discriminate except you're required to discriminate sometimes, and only government bureaucrats can decide one way or another.
And this is obviously not what you're learning in first grade.
You're also not learning it in high school, and it's just sort of It's created this sort of double think that is mandatory in American life because you're supposed to affirm that we've made all these advances that take us away from racism, away from discrimination.
And yet you look at the laws that we enact and the policies we enact at universities or at employers, and they just scream at you, actually, you know, the opposite.
You have to have tons of discrimination.
Just today, when the day we're recording this, The mayor of Boston tried to organize a Christmas party where she only invited non-white elected members of the city government.
No white people allowed.
And it just felt like this has to be the apotheosis of the left-wing civil rights revolution.
Just fully invert everything.
Well, and that's what we see here.
So we see this in terms of the, and really, as you say, the racial disparity.
So this is where we get away from, so Jefferson has the line, of course, in the Declaration about created equal, and those phrases created equal.
But I think the problem is, is that for folks who, let's just say, if you're not of a certain IQ point, And you can't understand the difference between created equal, as in you have equal rights, you have equal standing, you have equal legitimacy as a human being.
That doesn't mean that everything is going to be equal.
You know, sports are a great example of this.
It's one of the last places where we do have some semblance of meritocracy and, of course, disparate income or disparate outcomes.
Because that's the point of sports.
And this is also why sports have become such a social experimentation field for the left, with trans, but also with pushing various left-wing causes, because of course they also understand that it flies in the face of their philosophical theories.
And so they don't actually understand the difference of equality before the law and equality of outcomes.
They don't.
They don't.
It very much goes against their innermost values.
And I'm not surprised.
I think it actually hurts a lot of people on the right, too.
We have a very powerful desire to... We want the world to be this saccharine place where if everyone is given equal opportunity, naturally it would produce equal outcomes.
I think if you put a gun to all of our heads, we would all admit this is not true, but it's very easy when you're making public policy to just wish-cast and just want it to be different.
And over time, this has grown stronger and stronger in American life, and it just has caused an enormous amount of self-destructive behavior.
And the 60s is in many ways the first pass at this, that they want to abolish Jim Crow.
I think it's understandable.
You shouldn't have laws that discriminate based on race.
And they sweep it away and then they essentially are angry that it doesn't immediately lead to absolute equality in all things.
And so they very instantly start demanding special treatment of all sorts.
What happens on university campuses is really telling and very much a foreshadowing of what we see later.
In the late 60s, you start getting the first of these campus occupations.
And compared to today, it's actually Remarkably radical, what they get away with.
At my own alma mater at Dartmouth, there is a building, a Cutter Hall, and a group of, I would say, I almost said BLM radicals, but it's like Black Panther type radicals.
I don't know if they were literally the Black Panthers, but some sort of Black radical group.
They occupy Cutter Hall and they rename it the El-Hajj al-Malik al-Shabazz Center.
It's the Islamic name of Malcolm X. And they just occupy it for For months on end, maybe even like a year plus, and the administration just won't kick them out.
They just let them do this, and then their demands are, we want to get a black studies department, which none of these had existed before.
You didn't have black studies or Asian studies or LGBT studies, any of these studies things, these grievance studies departments.
They didn't exist.
And suddenly they start doing all of these occupations of campus buildings that are going on for months on end and are essentially just commandeering huge swaths of public space and making these demands that, oh, you have to make academic departments that reflect what we want.
And at the time, you have academics who say, we shouldn't do this because what we're going to get is fake departments that produce fake scholarship, and these people are going to be taking these classes because they're the only ones they can pass.
They'll get ghettoized into these academic subfields that are the only thing they can succeed at, and they'll mess up the academy.
And everyone was like, no!
That, that won't happen.
We just need to give them a little leg up and let them, let them fit in better.
And now, here we are a half century later, Every school has two or three or ten of these departments, and if you're an affirmative action admit to these schools, you're not going to do well in normal classes.
So instead, you end up taking these classes, and you basically just go do politics full-time when you're at a university.
And then, you know, 50 years later, or 30 years later, you become the president of Harvard University.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, Blake, let's go back to how this all started, because a lot of the driving forces of this are not, you know, as the Improviser 5 points out, they're not the actual, as they would call it, POCs.
It's not people of color that are driving this.
It's white people.
and predominantly the hippies.
And so the rise of the hippie and the influence of the hippie is something that really starts in the 1960s.
This movement, which also leads to a sexual revolution that's going on at the same time as the political revolution, the racial revolution.
How is it that these two coincide, and how do they interplay here?
Yeah, well, it's a tremendously...
It's an era that feels like it has limitless possibilities.
It's everything, you know, we often make the okay boomer joke, and it really is fitting because at every phase of the boomers lives... I want to not make it, I want to get away from it, but we have to.
We can't get away from it.
We have to confront the boomer question, which is, if you're a boomer, every step of their lives they've been the biggest and most important demographic group in America.
And so they've always been the group treated most favorably politically.
So when the boomers are in their 20s, everything in American life is oriented towards boosting young people so they can succeed.
This is when we have a huge expansion of college availability.
The 60s is the first generation where, really, if you want to go to college, You're pretty much able to do it.
You either can afford it because the tuition is cheap.
And so you work, you know, the infamous boomer, you know, I worked one summer job and paid for my year of tuition or, you know, you get your GI bill.
Because you could back then.
You could.
And it, or your parents, you know, were able to help you out somewhat because again, it was cheap.
You didn't need to borrow $300,000 to do it.
So you have this massive expansion of the availability of college education.
You also have, you know, the sexual revolution was probably inevitable because now you have the birth control pill.
It's widely available.
All of these things are hitting, right?
Yeah, all of these things are getting mass media.
The massive expansion of economic opportunity after World War II.
This huge demographic group coming online.
They're coming of age.
Electronic music is taking off.
Mass media.
You get – and then Woodstock, right, becomes Woodstock.
And you have – And you have drugs.
Drugs are – Drugs aren't new.
They've always existed.
Sure.
But everything is there.
And so it's just – it's an environment that feeds on itself of sort of like, well, everything is new.
Everything is in doubt.
Everything is possible.
And this – and also you have universities.
And way more people are going to universities.
And then as now, universities were always these incubation pools for radicalism.
And the expansion of universities really matters.
Anything goes.
You know, anything goes.
I think it becomes sort of a... Anything goes.
I know, so we're fighting against the... Because, as you say, the moral tyranny that's applied to America, right, America's founding, then gets applied to sort of the, just really, Christian moral code, which had been very strong throughout the 1950s, throughout the 1940s, I mean, just all the way through the United States up until this point.
and then everything which which by the way it is because of the of the deification of the 1960s this is also why we see the demonization of the 1950s in popular culture they must demonize it because of course this must be a fascist era ruled by the patriarchy.
And you see so much of left-wing media and really mainstream media putting this out.
But the other thing I was gonna throw out that you see the trajectory of a lot of this.
People say, well, how do we get to OnlyFans?
How do we get to abortion on demand?
How do we get all these things in just such a short time?
And I keep telling people it just really goes back to the 1960s.
And guess what?
You know, you want to tell the truth about Woodstock?
You want to tell the truth about the free love movement?
Guess what?
There's just as much rape at Woodstock 69 as there was in Woodstock 99.
It's just they won't talk about it.
Yeah, another thing that's important to hit on the expansion of colleges is we think of campuses as, you know, very liberal places, and that's always been somewhat true.
You've always had a lot of political radicals on campuses, but it used to be a lot more evenly split, and a phenomenon that matters a lot is you have a huge expansion of overall, of the size of universities, the number of universities, the, you know, the number of faculty at universities, and this is hitting in the 60s, It's also when the Vietnam War is going on and, you know, university studies are a great way to dodge the draft at this time.
And so you get this perfect storm where universities are expanding just as you have an also a growing number of left-leaning individuals who are inclined to go into academia.
And so famously these days, if you get a PhD, the job market is terrible, especially if, you know, you're white and you're just not, you know, you're, you're a lower class of person.
But back then, you know, you could get a PhD and get a job in these universities and you'd have tenure and you'd be able to sit there until you're 80 years old.
They also, at the same time, the Supreme Court came in and, or not yet, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled that mandatory retirement ages for professors were illegal.
They went, later went and did this.
But in the 50s and 60s, you were turning 60 and being turned out of these universities because you were too old.
All these people are able to get jobs in academia, and then they get lifetime tenure, and then the Supreme Court says they can never be forced to retire, and it's like, oh, shocker, now our universities are all uniformly super giga left-wing, and then these days you have smug left-wingers who are like, whoa, they're all liberal because only smart people, smart people are all liberals.
And so that's like the genesis of this universities as a permanent factory of wokeness is, okay, they weren't built in the 60s that way, And these people are never going to change.
And as a result.
And then the draft.
So because you've got, you know, at the same time going on, you've also got the Vietnam War kicks off.
So so you have JFK assassination, 1964.
Now suddenly everything's in play.
The Vietnam War really ramps up over under LBJ after who is concurrently pushing the civil rights legislation.
So the draft, of course, gives them something to rail against while they're on these college campuses, even though if they're in college, They're not actually subject to the draft themselves.
You see, of course, MLK's assassination later, RFK's assassination later.
So when people do talk about the turbulent 60s, I mean, they're not joking.
It was an extremely turbulent era.
And you have this group of people that are, again, as I said before, they're coming of age amidst all of this.
So on one hand, it's like the The moral superstructures, right, the moral superstructures of all of society are being torn down, right, as they're being told they can have anything they want, they can do anything they want, and they are essentially taking over the country.
For sure.
And they always will justify it as, okay, well, we were, you know, these days, though, it'll be common to admit there were excesses to this era.
But the justification is always, well, we were overthrowing this evil system, like, you know, boomers taking credit for the civil rights movement.
And one of the most important myths of this is that the 60s was the civil rights movement.
And it's actually not true.
The civil rights movement is a thing that goes on for decades.
In the 1920s, you know, the big cause is we should have a national lynching ban.
And it's basically symbolic to demand this because murdering people was already illegal.
But this is what they would do.
They would like have back and forth on this.
And it sort of worked in the sense that lynching Over time went away.
You do not have extrajudicial killings of black people in the forties like you do in the tens or twenties.
And then also Jim Crow was going away too, like the famous Brown versus Board of Education decision.
It came after about half the country had already just abolished school segregation on their own.
And in California, California famously, uh, you know, we all know about Jackie Robinson integrating major league baseball.
But what's less well-known is the biggest reason, like, the reason the NFL integrates is they want to put a team in California, and California already has a bunch of laws against segregation, and they say, we won't let a team move here if they're in a segregated league.
And so, NFL desegregates.
And this was happening in all these places over time, gradually, and by the end of the 50s, it had largely been complete outside of, like, hard-line places in the American South.
And...
It gets rewritten in this way as America was the super ultra racist country everywhere until the 60s radicals came up with the idea of not being a crappy person as people on Reddit would say with slightly more swear words.
And they used this to take advantage of changes.
They'll take credit for changes that were happening anyway.
Use this to justify the insane radicalism that they would do that was then destructive.
This was on my one appearance on Joy Reid on MSNBC all the way back in 2016.
This is exactly what I challenged her on because she claimed that the entire legacy of the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act was Democrats and that it was LBJ and I started trying to explain Some of this to her and even pointed out that LBJ when he was a congressman and later a senator was completely against civil rights.
It was only after he took up the mantle becoming president that he was able to do you know that he really just you know kind of glommed on to it and she basically threw me off the show.
Yeah and it's it's really what it is is it's when you can see the drive get sick because the push for Equal treatment under the law is a good thing.
You want people to be treated equally under the law, to not be reduced to their skin color.
And it's the 60s where we get away from this, where we start saying, instead of treating you as an equal person, we're going to categorize you as, you know, a member of this race.
This is when we start getting the Census Bureau erecting these weird racial categories that we still live under today.
Like, Hispanics.
Hispanics are fake.
Like, what is the actual commonality between someone from the Dominican Republic, who is of African ancestry, and then a person from Argentina, who's of Italian ancestry, and a person from Mexico, who is Amerindian in ancestry, and then a person from Spain, who, you know, looks like they just came off some Viking longship.
And to say that this is all... Which, by the way, my joke with that is always, go up to a Puerto Rican and call them Mexican, see what happens.
Yeah, so the only commonality between them is they all, you know, speak Spanish.
And then, but the Census Bureau, entirely because of the civil rights revolution, like the modern civil rights law revolution of the 70s, comes on and says, oh, well, we're going to create a single category for all these people for essentially the purposes of allowing them to agitate for special treatment under the law.
And you start getting weirder and weirder versions of this.
For example, in the past, people of the Indian subcontinent, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, they were classified as Caucasian.
And then they essentially campaigned to get themselves switched to being considered Asian.
And the reason for this is basically just that, well, if we're considered Asian, We can apply for special government grants that are for disadvantaged minorities, and they're still eligible for this, even though Indian Americans have the highest income of any group in the U.S.
You also see this in the fact that we predominantly start seeing now, with black Americans, we now start seeing recent immigrants leapfrogging actual African Americans that are descended from people who have lived through these eras that you're describing, who lived under slavery we see recent immigrants or the children of recent immigrants uh just totally leapfrogging them using these pathways that were set up for p
for for you know these quote-unquote historical injustices that they did not live under and that they were not subject to uh with you know case of point you know you have conflict kamala harris and and barack obama you'll
Like, there will be black activist groups on campuses who will agitate, and then they will say, you know, we want these giveaways from the administration, but the benefits should go to ADOS, as they call them, A-D-O-S, American Descendants of Slave.
American Descendants of Slavery.
Yeah, of slavery, because they point out somewhat reasonable, I think, that... I think it's reasonable to say there is some hangover from slavery that hurts them, and Okay, if this is going to be our justification for things, they should be the ones who benefit from it.
And the funny thing is, is the reason they can't is because as part of all of the legal constructs we built up to justify all of the modern segregation and discrimination we do, the official explanation was that we can't, you can't do affirmative action for like retrospectively fixing harms like slavery.
You can do it because diversity is good.
That's just what the Supreme Court came up with.
And that's why we got the diversity cult.
No one was talking about diversity is our strength in the 60s.
It's just a guy at the Supreme Court says that diversity is why you can do affirmative action.
And as a result, suddenly everyone thinks diversity is great.
It's always what I would say the unifying theme since the 60s is you'll get recurring cases of people have to find some excuse to justify discrimination based on basic traits, sex, race, religion, what have you.
And they come up with an excuse, and suddenly that excuse goes everywhere.
And we keep doing this over and over, rather than accept the harder truth, which is we should treat people as individuals, we should treat people equally, and we should accept that this might create macro outcomes that make us feel uncomfortable.
And Jack, where is Jack?
Where is Jack?
Where is he?
Jack, I want to see you.
Great job, Jack.
Thank you.
What a job you do.
You know, we have an incredible thing.
We're always talking about the fake news and the bad, but we have guys, and these are the guys who should be getting policies.
The stuff that was happening in 2020 with George Floyd greatly resembled stuff that was going on in the 60s, where you have violent turmoil in the cities.
But you even have it in the 80s and 90s.
We're on like our third or fourth pass of this by now.
Right.
And so, right, we keep having these like soft cultural revolutions, all from the 1960s, the 80s, the 90s now.
And what's interesting is that you don't really hear most of the sort of anti-woke, anti-CRT crusaders talk about these things.
They'll try to...
Kind of stand up each piece of DEI or CRT or whatever the specific line is and try to knock that down.
But they sort of try to work, and I found this, and I'm not going to single anybody out here, but I found that they try to do so within the framework still of the 1960s without just coming out and saying, no, this is ridiculous.
We need to get rid of all of it.
Well, it's it's comical.
It's a lot like what we said with the Spanish Civil War the other day where they always have to talk about this conflict because it's the one they lost and so they can pretend it would have worked out great if they'd won.
It's sort of like this here where we're perpetually in the 1960s and they act like they're opposing the same man as always because to do otherwise would have to confront the fact that actually the left has run entire cities and entire states for The entire duration of a human lifetime at this point and has often made no progress or literally gone backwards.
This will come up with education reform all the time.
You'll have to hear, yeah, you know, we need to do this new education reform proposal because we have to overcome systemic racism in the school system.
Bro, you guys have been running the public schools in Los Angeles, in New York City, in Boston.
Take your pick of these cities.
There have been No Republicans doing anything of importance in any major American city in decades and they just invent an entirely new reality.
It's sort of like feminism where they'll do this in silly ways like Do you remember when that Captain Marvel movie came out about five or six years ago?
Yeah, and Disney lied about how many tickets were sold for it, and then the next movie came out was a complete failure.
It's not about that.
It's that it was hyped, like, this movie is important because it's a movie, it's a blockbuster movie that stars a woman, and no one's made a movie that shows girls can be heroes before.
At that point, Wonder Woman had been made two years before.
It's constant year zeroing.
It's constant year zeroing.
Or they did this with Black Panther.
They did this with Black Panther too.
And I remember catching people, another Ridley Scott by the way, but I remember catching people with Black Panther and then saying this was the first Marvel movie to star a black man.
And I said, what about Blade?
There was a whole trilogy of Blade movies.
They were great, by the way.
There was even a TV series, all of which preceded the Black Panther film.
But they wanted to get into their marketing, so they had to twist it around.
What's the first one in the current iteration of the... And they want to continue to run this narrative.
It's the same playbook they keep running.
Historic.
It's all historic.
Everything has to be historic.
If you want a great book that captures the feel of all this, and I didn't bring it with me unfortunately, but there's a great book by Thomas Wolfe, one of the great writers of the 20th century, and it's called The Bonfire of the Vanities, and it's a lot of... I could not recommend this more.
It's a big novel, and it hits a lot of themes.
It's basically about New York in the 80s, but the core thrust of the book is this investment banker accidentally, sort of, hits a, you know, an honor student in the Bronx, They literally joke about this, calling him an honor student.
He thinks he's getting mugged.
It's unclear if he is, actually.
He hits this honor student, sends him into the hospital in a coma, and it starts off this massive Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin-type freakout of the public.
It blows up this guy's life.
It's a huge scandal.
There's all these political opportunists.
There's this Al Sharpton-type figure, who is amazing because Al Sharpton was not a public figure at this time.
Wolf writes Al Sharpton into existence before Al Sharpton exists.
He predicted Al Sharpton.
He predicted Al Sharpton.
A lot of it, by the way, because the enemy is this is this sort of like WASP-y, successful individual.
I've been making the argument that Donald Trump is kind of like living through this in his New York trials, particularly in the fraud trial.
That it's sort of like, no, you've become a target for so many of these people, like Letitia James here, to build up on, that the parallels are very striking.
That is, yeah, it's just so telling that this book is now 35 years old at this point, and yet if you read it, it feels so much like what we were going through in the late 2000s, and then through the George Floyd moment, and it just hits you.
This stuff is It's not that it happens always, but it's very cyclical.
We go through the same processes over and over again.
It rises and falls like the tides or like a wave that you'll get this surge of left-wing stuff where they'll kind of act like no one's ever tried to create equality before.
And then now we have this idea and it's totally going to work.
And then they get all these concessions.
They do their thing.
It doesn't work.
And then they come back and they're like, we have to do this because You know, everything's been under the control of the man the whole time, and we're gonna be the first people who decide racism's bad.
Yeah, exactly.
And then the template for that is set in the 60s, which is why it's so important.
It's totally set.
And then the 60s, it's like counterculture, counterculture, counterculture.
Do whatever you want.
Free love, free drugs, free everything.
Tear down all the moral superstructures.
Set Chesterton's fence on fire.
Just go and do whatever you want.
And then this kind of culminates.
One of the things that I think people have said that this has been culminated through there.
I know there's a lot of conspiracy theories about this.
But, um, the Manson murders and the Manson...
Situation really at the end of the 1960s happens in 1969 these brutal killings where it's Charles Manson attempting to spark a race war That's been led to through this hippie movement through this free association free love free everything Kind of situation and that I think that maybe I'm not gonna say it breaks the spell but I think as you say that really is one of the the shocking moments that just sort of brings a lot of people in the 1960s and
And then ends that iteration of it because it sort of breaks the spell and says, oh, wait, no, this is the real world.
Sharon Tate, you know, was a aspiring actress.
Roman Polanski, by the way, is involved, who comes up later in a number of other situations.
And so you usually get it where it runs to great excess and then it runs directly into a wall.
There's elements of that.
I think it can get overblown because what'll happen is they always want to rewrite history that this was super popular and then thereby they can say, oh, but then this thing happened and brought us to our senses.
But really what it was is just, okay, in 1968, it felt like America was absolutely disintegrating.
Obviously that's the spring.
MLK is assassinated.
RFK, the senior, is assassinated.
It's a violent year.
There's huge riots in a ton of American cities.
Vietnam War opposition is reaching its apex.
It feels like the whole country is ripping itself apart.
And it turns out, like, what does the country want?
And politically, what happens then?
And what happens is, we get Nixon.
Nixon is elected.
Richard Nixon becomes the president.
Right.
So this is always, I've always gone back to try to tie this together.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Nixon gets elected on essentially the plea to, you know, screw the hippies and law and order.
And he's imperfect at this, as you know, we'll get used to with other Republican presidents over the years.
But he does represent that.
And that's another thing that ties into today.
Richard Nixon, I like to say.
Which, by the way, and then an even bigger landslide in 1972.
He does.
He does.
But Richard Nixon, regardless of what happens, he's the first template for the modern Republican president.
If you look at how Eisenhower is treated by the country, it's just not relatable today.
He's a Republican.
He's popular.
Plenty of the press likes him.
It's fine.
Nixon is essentially the first Republican, and every Republican since has been the same way, who is literally Hitler.
They become absolutely unglued about him.
They just hate they being, you know, the establishment left, the university left, the media left.
They hate him to this volcanic degree.
If you ever want to feel kind of a cringe sense, you know, Hunter S. Thompson, famous boomer journalist, drug head.
He, when Nixon died in 1993, Hunter S. Thompson writes an obituary for him.
And it's just utterly nasty, vile garbage.
And I read it a couple of years ago because I was writing an essay on Nixon and it struck me.
Hunter S. Thompson was a Reddit user and he died before Reddit was a thing, but it literally reads like the unhinged screed that a Reddit user would post after someone- Blake, what do you, for the folks in our audience and by the way, disclaimer of yes, no, no, obviously we're not talking about all baby boomers.
Right, we understand.
Steve Bannon, if you're listening, we don't include you in this number.
We don't include the folks that woke out of this.
But we're talking about the people who participated in this counterculture who were predominantly boomers.
By the way, I'm like an elder millennial and, you know, I talk about millennials all the time.
But when you mention this, When you mention this setup of a Reddit user, just real quick, I know we're towards the end of the episode here.
You mentioned before, what do you mean by a Reddit user?
What is the archetype you're talking about?
So Reddit is popular for all older people out there.
It's a very mainstream website.
You can have sub-forums called subreddits.
I call it social media for people who hate social media.
I was on there.
There's news, there's religion, there's the NFL, there's knitting.
There'll be breakaway subcategories for all of these.
There'll be comedy subreddits.
There was famously during the 2016 election, there was the Donald.
It was one of the earliest Donald Trump fan pages.
It was later shut down because- - I was on there.
I was all over there. - And it's, it very much represents the zeitgeist of what you'd maybe call normie millennials.
And it has this very, it's, it encourages a type of personality where like, if you're the type of person who your personality is, you know, quoting famous movie lines and just imitating other people, cause you think it's funny.
And you get this sort of like fake personality of over exaggerated jocularity.
So, you know, rather than, man, I'm trying to think, what would be like the best example of like a Reddit insult?
Well, I guess I'm trying to say like someone, it's you're completely pedantic, you want to engage in arguments all the time, yet you're also at the same time incredibly obtuse, generally lack self-awareness, generally are not someone who goes outside very much.
And if anybody wants to really go in down this, and I don't want to really go to the point too much, Because we are running out of time.
But just go into a Google search or Brave Search DuckDuckGo and type Reddit Meetup and you will see exactly what I mean.
These are like the full-on troglodytes of the internet.
But Blake, we're coming to the end of at least the first four installments of Chronicles of the Revolution, we might have more.
You know, we might be able to do some more of these.
I think people are going to like them.
But some of the themes that I wanted to reflect on that we've seen here is that we find economic, we find that economics drives these things.
It can be economic disparity.
But in one case, at least of the 1960s, it's actually economic abundance, which drives a lot of the social worries, which is definitely something for a lot of people to understand that you get the excesses here because of the abundance of economics.
- It really is.
It really is. - And I guess another one is just the smashing of former cultures, right?
Whatever came before must be destroyed.
I mean, obviously, that is the definition of a revolution.
But people don't understand this has to do with moral codes.
It has to do with institutional codes.
It has to do with law itself.
And then again, in many of these cases, and really one of the themes, and certainly we pick the revolutions here, but it's this theme of equality.
Everybody must become equal.
Everyone must be made equal.
And if you are not being equal, then the government will come in and force you to be equal.
Yeah, I really like that point about economic abundance because it's really what we've been dependent on ever since that we can afford.
America has been so rich for so long that we've been able to afford these huge delusions that the trillions of dollars we're spending on this program that's going to achieve equality through, you know, we're going to reform the schools or we're going to change the welfare system or we're going to, you know, have these entirely fake jobs that we've created at these private companies.
That don't have any strict demands on people, that we've been so wealthy for so long that we can just throw unlimited money at, you know, these new initiatives that will be what will finally cure what ails us.
And in poorer societies, you just have more constrained resources.
And so things get very, like, they get more violent and more vicious more quickly because there actually is not a lot of surplus to go around.
Whereas, you know, Chris Caldwell's book, The Age of Entitlement, the reason he called it that was He says the way America solved the social upheaval of the 60s was we just decided to spend our way out of it.
We'll just give the activists all of what they want, but we also won't raise taxes because we can borrow money basically forever.
And, you know, boomers will get rich.
Gen X will get rich.
And, you know, the complainers will still get their slice of tribute and everyone will be fine because we just have unlimited money.
And I think the way you could see this system, we mentioned it's cyclical, but the way it will finally start to come apart is We might be running out of the money to do this.
Like, we're setting aside too much national wealth to keep what is essentially a sham system going.
Well, and this has been, you know, for the War Room fans out there, we know this is something Steve Bannon harps on regularly, that we simply cannot continue the borrowing.
Of course, this is the very issue that directly leads to Speaker McCarthy's ouster by the, you know, Call it the MAGA wing, the Gates wing of the party, really has to do with these debt ceiling fights and has to do with this idea that we can't just keep spending our way into whatever we want.
And it also is something, by the way, that just it, you know, we talk about the, you know, weak men create create bad times meme.
But it's it's something where, you know, we've allowed ourselves the luxury of having these, you know, luxury ideas, as Charlie calls them on his show.
Yep!
That we can run around and waste time talking about these ridiculous things because we don't have to worry as much about the basic necessities.
But it turns out, Blake, that a lot of the basic necessities, the infrastructure, the systems in this country, the complex systems are suddenly beginning to collapse because we've basically left them in a state of disrepair.
Yep.
You can afford to be delusional for a very long time, especially if you're a global superpower.
but you can't be delusional and fake forever.
And I think that is a lesson that America is learning now.
And I think it's actually a reason you start seeing it crumbling.
Like, you know, affirmative action on these college campuses.
It was one thing to just pass people who were totally unqualified for jobs or degrees when they're 10% of the people that you're doing this for.
But when it's half of everyone, more than half, you actually are just badly warping your society to keep a delusion going.
And, you know, eventually you can actually just blow up your country doing this.
And I think it will be a white pill, as it were, if we manage to pull ourselves back from the abyss before we go hurtling over it.
Well, I think it's exactly right, and so I hope that everybody enjoyed watching this series, Chronicles of the Revolution.
I had fun doing it.
Blake, it feels like you had some fun doing it there, huh?
Oh, it was a blast.
It was a blast.
Yeah, this is great because, you know, as we sit here, it's Christmas time, we're in the holidays, you know, we want to go and teach people about some of the topics that we don't get the normal bandwidth or we don't have the normal bandwidth to get into things, especially
Like this episode right here, the 1960s, blood on the streets, the revolution that did reshape America, and yet we in the conservative movement, we don't talk about it, or we're scared of talking about it, or for whatever reason, we find it easier to just kind of go along with it rather than fight back.
We need to stop We need to understand that a lot of these bad ideas came from that age of excess, that age of entitlement, and that age of blood on the streets.
This has been Jack Posobiec.
My co-host has been Blake Neff.
You can't find him anywhere because the man eschews social media, so you will not be following Blake Neff.
▲
Export Selection