Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Ick It Happened Here. I'm your host Bio
Speaker 2: Wong with me as James Stout by me. Hello, this
Speaker 2: is a podcast about things falling apart putting it back
Speaker 2: together again. For the rest of this week, we are
Speaker 2: going to be going to our live correspondence from a
Speaker 2: Democratic National Convention. We're going to be getting a bunch
Speaker 2: of episodes from from the floor. We're you're gonna you're
Speaker 2: gonna be hearing all about all.
Speaker 3: Of the sort of excitement.
Speaker 2: But for sort of day one of our DNC convention,
Speaker 2: I thought we'd do something a little bit different, and
Speaker 2: that is, I want to take a look back at
Speaker 2: the convention that I think most people have been thinking
Speaker 2: is the most similar to this one, which is the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight Democratic National Convention, which is also a
Speaker 2: convention that featured large anti war protests and the vice
Speaker 2: president of an extremely unpopular president who was waging an
Speaker 2: unpopular war seized control of the nomination. I mean, and
Speaker 2: you know, and the parallels. I mean, you know, there's
Speaker 2: occupations at college. I mean right down to the one
Speaker 2: that I think I've seen it. I haven't seen anyone
Speaker 2: else talk about. Is that one of the big uprisings
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty eight is in Pakistan, and particularly in
Speaker 2: the part of Pakistan that is now Bangladesh. We are
Speaker 2: about a week ish, maybe two weeks removed from an
Speaker 2: enormous uprising of Bangladesh that just knocked out their political leadership.
Speaker 2: So you know, there are lots of sort of nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight vibes in the air.
Speaker 4: It's not unsimilar, but it's also not the same, as
Speaker 4: I'm sure I'm about to find out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think in some sense, and we'll get
Speaker 2: to this board as the episode progresses, but in some sense,
Speaker 2: sixty eight parts of it are sort of an inversion
Speaker 2: of what's happening now, and parts of it are an
Speaker 2: interesting case study in having the same pieces but having
Speaker 2: them fit into totally different configurations, And because of that,
Speaker 2: the results are going to be I think, very, very
Speaker 2: staggerlarly different. Yeah, And I think maybe the primary difference
Speaker 2: is that really the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention does
Speaker 2: not start in the US at all. It starts in
Speaker 2: Vietnam on Vietnamese New Years, and it really starts with
Speaker 2: the tet Offensive. So for people who have forgotten this
Speaker 2: from their history, classes, like, so maybe some of you
Speaker 2: are around for this.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Statistically probably not, but I don't know. Maybe there's a
Speaker 3: few old timers here yea.
Speaker 2: So the Tet Offensive is this massive attack by the
Speaker 2: viet Cong a's roar of North Vietnamese forces on New
Speaker 2: Years of Well technically it's like Gener's sick because the
Speaker 2: calendar dates are off. But it's this massive attack on
Speaker 2: American positions. It's an attempt really to sort of seize
Speaker 2: control of South Vietnam. It doesn't really work militarily because,
Speaker 2: and this is an interesting kind of display of bad judgment.
Speaker 2: The North Vietnamese leadership bizarrely makes almost exactly the same
Speaker 2: mistake that the Americans are going to make from the
Speaker 2: invasion of Iraq, which is that they are under the
Speaker 2: assumption that, you know, their attack would trigger a series
Speaker 2: of urban revolts that would like drive out the corrupt
Speaker 2: Vietnamese South Vietnamese like puppet governments, and like run the Americans.
Speaker 3: Out of the country. And that doesn't happen. There's no uprisings.
Speaker 2: The viet Cong take a bunch of grounds, but unbelievable
Speaker 2: numbers of their calldurators are just wiped out by the
Speaker 2: sums of good American counterattack. But it didn't matter at all,
Speaker 2: because what the head offensive really did was instantly revealed
Speaker 2: to everyone in the US that LBJ and every previous
Speaker 2: American administration had been lying to them about the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2: In the wake of these attacks, it is instantly clear
Speaker 2: that the US is not winning the war. They are
Speaker 2: not making steady progress against the Communists. They are at
Speaker 2: best locked in a grinding stalemate against an enemy with
Speaker 2: a capacity to launch attacks that could again temporarily like
Speaker 2: run the US out of cities, right, Yeah, and this
Speaker 2: craters lbj's popularity. His popularity is in the thirties.
Speaker 5: Oh damn, yeah, when incumbent.
Speaker 2: That's yeah, it's really really bad. It's I mean, he's
Speaker 2: like thirty six percents he is. He is staggeringly, staggeringly unpopular.
Speaker 2: And you know, the tet offensive also in some sense validates,
Speaker 2: particularly the sort of radical wing of the anti war movements.
Speaker 2: You know, I think people remember the anti war movement
Speaker 2: today is this purely this sort of like hyper militant
Speaker 2: students for Democratic Society to the draft card burning stuff,
Speaker 2: and there was that, but those people for the early
Speaker 2: especially the early sixties leading up to this point, and
Speaker 2: even even Dream sixty eight are a minority.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Most of the anti war people are sort of older,
Speaker 2: like anti nuclear activists, people who come up in the forties,
Speaker 2: people who'd you know, been through the Red Scare and
Speaker 2: are these sort of hyper vigilant liberals. And these people
Speaker 2: thought that they could work with LBJ to end the war.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: LBJ comes in not like quite explicitly promising to end
Speaker 2: the but he comes in as the candidate who's not
Speaker 2: you know, who's not literally threatening the bombs I gone.
Speaker 2: And then he turns around a bombs I gone. And
Speaker 2: so this moment the tet offensive is this moment where
Speaker 2: the radical wing of the anti woman is vindicated. Right,
Speaker 2: LBJ has been lying to them the whole time. All
Speaker 2: of the sort of negotiations that people have been doing
Speaker 2: have been a complete failure. And in the sort of
Speaker 2: wake of this, there's a real sort of drive by
Speaker 2: a couple of different anti war factions to stage a
Speaker 2: protests at the Democratic National Convention for what you know,
Speaker 2: to protest what everyone assumes is going to be the
Speaker 2: coronation of LBJ. There are two different kind of umbrellas
Speaker 2: of groups. I guess you could call it who wind
Speaker 2: up at sixty eight? And this is something that we
Speaker 2: aren't gonna have now because neither of these two kinds
Speaker 2: of things really exists anymore. The first of these groups
Speaker 2: are the politically serious hard lighters. They are organized into
Speaker 2: this unbelievably large coalition of hundreds of groups called National.
Speaker 3: Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Nobody says that because it's it's so long, Everyone then
Speaker 2: and now just calls it MOB or sometimes mobilization, but
Speaker 2: everyone in the writing just calls them MOOBE, and MOBE
Speaker 2: is one of the groups that's been getting more radical
Speaker 2: by sixty eight. But again, the Students for a Democratic Society,
Speaker 2: who are kind of the sixties parallel to the DSA,
Speaker 2: if you're going to sort of dose these directly one
Speaker 2: to one lines, right, are a minority. And also STS
Speaker 2: basically leaves MOB to focus on other kinds of organizing.
Speaker 2: So the STS is going to be around, they're going
Speaker 2: to involved in this protest, but MOBE is kind of
Speaker 2: not being ran by them. And MOB is also a
Speaker 2: very complicated endeavor because again, these are big tent groups, right,
Speaker 2: These are very very very big tent groups. You know,
Speaker 2: the range from honestly sort of write liberal professional groups
Speaker 2: who oppose the war to like one of the one
Speaker 2: of the major leaders of MOBE in this period is
Speaker 2: a senior member of the SWP, the Socialist Workers Party,
Speaker 2: who are.
Speaker 3: Like old school Trotsky eight group.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's very very hard to get coalitions like
Speaker 2: this to work, partially because of secretariat infighting over some
Speaker 2: of it's over tactics, because a lot of there's a
Speaker 2: lot of people in MOB who do not want militant confrontation.
Speaker 2: They don't want there to be big confrontations with the police.
Speaker 2: And then also, you know, these people just don't have
Speaker 2: the same ends, right the SWP people are trying to
Speaker 2: have a socialist revolution. There's other people in this group
Speaker 2: who are trying to not have their tax dollars pay
Speaker 2: for a war.
Speaker 5: They'll get their kids drafted into a war.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, but MOB is the big anti war hub, right.
Speaker 2: With the exception of the group we're gonna talk about next,
Speaker 2: almost all Edgibar activity in the country is running through ROBE,
Speaker 2: just to some extent or another, because it's a coalition
Speaker 2: of like all of those gifts we don't really have.
Speaker 3: Anything like this anymore.
Speaker 2: There are kind of the tattered remains of this stuff,
Speaker 2: but they don't have the kind of poll the kind
Speaker 2: of especially, they don't have the kind of organizational capacity
Speaker 2: that this stuff had.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not really like that.
Speaker 4: There are a wide variety of people are posted to
Speaker 4: genocide and Palestine, but they're not united under any even this.
Speaker 4: There isn't like a popular front or a big tent
Speaker 4: Yeah that really brings them together. Even in twenty twenties,
Speaker 4: if you didn't really have like a a big tent org,
Speaker 4: did we Like we had like BLM capital BLM five
Speaker 4: oh one c three, But like that wasn't really like
Speaker 4: an org that was that effective on the ground.
Speaker 2: And that's a key component that's very very different about
Speaker 2: you know about the sixty eight convention that the ones
Speaker 2: gonna happen. You know, as as this comes out, it
Speaker 2: will be day one of that convention. The terrain of
Speaker 2: groups who are opposed to it are staggeringly different.
Speaker 3: This kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: We just don't have it anymore now. Part of what
Speaker 2: MOB is struggling to do, and this is something that
Speaker 2: some of the things they're dealing with, the things that
Speaker 2: we don't deal with now. Some of them are things
Speaker 2: that we deal with all the time.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: One of the big ones is they're trying to develop
Speaker 2: what eventually is going to be called the diversity of tactics.
Speaker 2: So they're trying to have protests that you can have
Speaker 2: three hundred thousand people and most of those people could
Speaker 2: be sitting around having a picnic. And then there's also
Speaker 2: a bunch of people who are like fighting the police
Speaker 2: in the front.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: We are I think sort of largely familiar with this
Speaker 2: kind of from twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, and the police take ASTs everyone.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wellh So this comes to another very important part about this,
Speaker 2: which is that mob, even in the planning stages, even
Speaker 2: the radicals, are not trying to fight the cops.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Nobody wants to do it because everyone is terrified about
Speaker 2: Chicago's reaction to the Holy Week Uprising. Though we talked
Speaker 2: about the Holy Week Uprising in another episode, very briefly,
Speaker 2: it's a massive series of riots and uprisings that follow
Speaker 2: the assassination of mart Luther King. There's a particularly bad
Speaker 2: one in Chicago where Mayor Daily is so pissed off
Speaker 2: that he goes on TV and gives a speech where
Speaker 2: he tells his cops to shoot and maim people they
Speaker 2: could accuse of.
Speaker 5: Looting good stuff.
Speaker 2: And you know, this goes over so badly that the
Speaker 2: next day he's giving statements to the media saying he
Speaker 2: never said this, but you know everyone saw him say it.
Speaker 2: I'm live to me, so yeah, but people, people are
Speaker 2: terrified because this is a period where the cops.
Speaker 3: Really will shoot into crowds.
Speaker 2: So, you know, everyone in the planning phases of this,
Speaker 2: you know, I think most people broadly know how this
Speaker 2: turns out, which is there's a bunch of street fighting
Speaker 2: to police attack people. But none of the planners wanted that.
Speaker 2: They were very, very deliberately trying to make sure there
Speaker 2: weren't confrontations with the police, because, as it turns out,
Speaker 2: these people are staggeringly unprepared for a confrontation with the cops.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna read a quote from the very good book
Speaker 2: Chicago sixty eight, which is a politically it's a bit questionable,
Speaker 2: but it has an excruciatingly in depth account of these
Speaker 2: I mean we're talking hour to hour rundowns of the
Speaker 2: convention itself. You know, very well documented accounts of all
Speaker 2: of the meetings that produce this. So I'm going to
Speaker 2: read a quote this is about MO about their preparation
Speaker 2: for the Chicago D and C protests.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: Some even wanted to warn perspective protesters that they should
Speaker 2: bring protective clothing like helmets, bulky sweaters, and Ben Dan
Speaker 2: Effertier gas, but it was decided that this might overly
Speaker 2: alarm would be protesters. Great Now, again, this is MOBE.
Speaker 2: They are supposed to be the serious organizers here, right.
Speaker 2: The other group that we're going to talk about the Yippies, Like,
Speaker 2: compared to the Yippies, these guys look like shock troopers,
Speaker 2: and this is how unprepared they are.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Wow, Like, looking at this from.
Speaker 2: Our perspective, these people are dangerous amateurs. They have no
Speaker 2: idea what they're doing. They don't understand how to deal
Speaker 2: with police at all. One of the other things that
Speaker 2: happens is this is one of the first and early
Speaker 2: deployment of so CS tear gas, right, And they have
Speaker 2: a guy who'd been drafted into Vietnam was become a
Speaker 2: Special Forces guy, who would you know, after we got out,
Speaker 2: have become a leftist and he's telling them about this
Speaker 2: gas and he's saying, yeah, we need to talk to
Speaker 2: the So they were thinking that's going on here is
Speaker 2: you can tell how early this is into the cycle
Speaker 2: because they don't have dedicated to street medics. They have
Speaker 2: basically a nurses association at doctor's association that they've gotten
Speaker 2: to go get feel a better OG which is not bad, right,
Speaker 2: but no, I mean that's great, but people need to
Speaker 2: be aware of what they're getting into, and then the
Speaker 2: medical places need to be aware of how they can
Speaker 2: mitigate that. And the most people overrule this guy and
Speaker 2: saying no, we're not going to tell the medical people
Speaker 2: about the sort of solution thing he's talking about to
Speaker 2: neutralize this gas. Right, these people are just staggeringly unprepared
Speaker 2: for an actual police confrontation. And something you have to
Speaker 2: keep in mind about about nineteen sixty eight America, right,
Speaker 2: is that we have a very different sort of outlook
Speaker 2: on the police and how you deal with the police
Speaker 2: than these people.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: We come from basically the decade of the street fight
Speaker 2: since Occupy twenty eleven and really intensifying and Ferguson in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen. There has been a straight decade between conversations
Speaker 2: and the police. If you were out in the most
Speaker 2: intense parts of twenty twenty, and statistically, if you're listening
Speaker 2: to this show, you probably at least were out there
Speaker 2: a little bit.
Speaker 3: You have seen shit that these kids, like.
Speaker 2: I call them kids, right, these people are in the
Speaker 2: twenties and thirties, but you have seen shit that these
Speaker 2: people cannot even imagine.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: If you're looking back from our perspective, right, you know,
Speaker 2: with the experience with the police that we have, you
Speaker 2: can look back in the people and you could instantly
Speaker 2: tell that they're going to get claubered. One of the
Speaker 2: things I'm trying to do is they're trying to copy
Speaker 2: some of the techniques from the Japanese student movement, which
Speaker 2: is an infamously very probably the.
Speaker 3: Best street fight in the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're trying to copy their techniques and they
Speaker 2: can't do it. And they're trying to do the snake
Speaker 2: line thing to break police lines. They're all falling over
Speaker 2: and so it's very it's very clear from art perspective
Speaker 2: to this is going to be a fiasco. But these
Speaker 2: people think that they understand how to manage the police.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, the state's capacity for violence has increased
Speaker 4: exponentially since then, Like you could kind of stand up
Speaker 4: to the cops just by by staying in the streets,
Speaker 4: you know, to a degree, I think it's probably this
Speaker 4: is the beginning of the state sort of moving towards
Speaker 4: arming itself to deny people access to public space in
Speaker 4: that fashion, right, which we saw like if you grew
Speaker 4: up at the time I did in Genoa, in Prague
Speaker 4: and these g eight Summits, Kanku, all the different ones
Speaker 4: right at Octorada, Like I think that was the beginning
Speaker 4: maybe of like modern crowd control policing. But yeah, these yeah,
Speaker 4: this is a different world to the one we are
Speaker 4: in now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they don't you know, and there's this this
Speaker 2: is the beginning of the modern world, right, but they
Speaker 2: haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's any one way to a really experience that stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you have to go through it.
Speaker 2: So we're going to take an ad break and when
Speaker 2: we come back, we are going to get to the Yippies,
Speaker 2: the other group that's protesting at this convention, right, and
Speaker 2: we are back from the advertisements that the Yippies would
Speaker 2: have loved hijacking. So the Yippies are another group that
Speaker 2: we don't have anything really like this today Because this
Speaker 2: is the year twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Everyone kind of smokes.
Speaker 2: I mean not everyone, but people just kind of smoke weed,
Speaker 2: right all the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's pretty normal.
Speaker 3: But in c eight this is.
Speaker 2: Really not that we're mob are very very explicit political people, right,
Speaker 2: capital P politics, you know, communists, socialists, some like sort
Speaker 2: of left liberals, progressives, et cetera. There, and they're very
Speaker 2: clearly doing politics conventionally. The Yippies are a counterculture group.
Speaker 2: It's this mix of people who are political radicals to
Speaker 2: get caught up in sort of this counterculture stuff. And
Speaker 2: then a lot of them are just kind of counterculture
Speaker 2: people who mostly just sort of want sex, drugs and
Speaker 2: rock and roll, but see this as the way to
Speaker 2: sort of resist the sort of death machine that they
Speaker 2: see themselves as living in.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think this is the time people start talking
Speaker 4: about the MARCUSI in great refusal a lot in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty eight, right, and then kind of people going big
Speaker 4: different directions with that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, altho, these people are We'll get into this more
Speaker 3: in a second. These people are not very theoretically sophisticated.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, I'm not reading Old Herbert.
Speaker 2: They are stoned out of their minds at literally all times,
Speaker 2: you know. And so yippie is a term that didn't
Speaker 2: exist before the sixty eight Convention. It was developed specifically
Speaker 2: as part of a plan to do a sort of
Speaker 2: protest thing, as this rallying cry of yippee against the
Speaker 2: sort of death machine of of the Democratic National Convention,
Speaker 2: which everyone thought was going to nominate LBJA to do
Speaker 2: more firebombing of Vietnam. And so their plan is, and
Speaker 2: this is something that you can still see kind of
Speaker 2: reflections of in some Ish modern movements, so though we
Speaker 2: don't do it as much anymore, but their plan was
Speaker 2: to have this sort of festival of life to counterpose
Speaker 2: against the DNC's festival of death. They were going to
Speaker 2: have a bunch of singers and people were just going
Speaker 2: to like have public sex. And their thesis of how
Speaker 2: they're trying to do this is to hijack the sort
Speaker 2: of mass medium machine, which they see as the kind
Speaker 2: of defining element of modern society, right is the element
Speaker 2: of sort of totalitarian and social control, and their plan
Speaker 2: is to hijack it for fur their own purposes. This
Speaker 2: is superficially similar to something you see from the French
Speaker 2: sixty eight ters, who have sort of, by the time
Speaker 2: this is happening, have done a revolution that doesn't quite
Speaker 2: work well. We'll cover on the show at some point.
Speaker 2: And the French sixty eight ters, both students and the
Speaker 2: workers who very very nearly take control of France, are
Speaker 2: heavily influenced by a theorist named Guide to Board and
Speaker 2: his sort of ubiquitous book The Society is Spectacle, and
Speaker 2: superficially these are very similar things, but de Board's analysis
Speaker 2: is a technologically sort of ideologically sophisticated analysis of social relations.
Speaker 2: And again, the Yippies are contrary to that stone out
Speaker 2: of their minds at literally all times.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, they're doing like t moo dot com guidable. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, so I'm going to read back to back a line,
Speaker 2: an average line from Guide to Board Society a Spectacle,
Speaker 2: and then I'm going to give you a quote from
Speaker 2: an Abby Hoffman, who's one of the people who invents
Speaker 2: the term Yippium, to give a quote from one of
Speaker 2: his speeches at the sixty eight convention. So here is
Speaker 2: an average Guide to Board Society Aspectacle line.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself.
Speaker 2: It's laudatory monologue. It is the self portrait of power
Speaker 2: in the epoch because it's totalitarian management of conditions of existence.
Speaker 2: The fetishistic, purely objective appearance. The spectacular relations conceal the
Speaker 2: fact that their relations among men in classes. Second nature,
Speaker 2: with its fatal law, seems to dominate our environments.
Speaker 3: But the spectacle is not the.
Speaker 2: Necessary product of technical development, seen as a natural development.
Speaker 2: The society of the spectacle is, on the contrary, the
Speaker 2: form which chooses its own technical content. So this is,
Speaker 2: this is, This is what the people that this is
Speaker 2: what the sixty eight is in France are reading. Here
Speaker 2: is yippie founder Abbie Hoffman. This is This is in
Speaker 2: a speech. While he would call it a rap or something,
Speaker 2: but this is in a rambling that he gives to
Speaker 2: a crowd at a sixty eight convention. Meet the press,
Speaker 2: face the nation, issues and answers all those bullshit shows.
Speaker 2: You know, you get a Democrat and a Republican arguing
Speaker 2: back and forward, this and that, this and yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: But at the end of the show, nobody changes their
Speaker 2: fucking mind, you see. But they're trying to push Brillo.
Speaker 2: You see. That's good. You want to use Brillo. See
Speaker 2: in about every ten minutes on will come three minutes
Speaker 2: of Brillo. Brillow is a revolution, Brillow is sex, Brillo
Speaker 2: is fun, Brillo is At the end of the show,
Speaker 2: people late fucking switching from Democrat or Republican or commis
Speaker 2: you know the right wingers ready of that shit?
Speaker 3: They're buying Brillo. I mean, can you imagine if they
Speaker 3: had the Beatles gain zing zing zing, all that jump
Speaker 3: and shout, you know, and all of a sudden they
Speaker 3: put an ad where this guy comes on very straight.
Speaker 3: You ought to buy Brillo because it's the rationally correct decision.
Speaker 3: Part of the American process is the right way to
Speaker 3: do things. You know. Fuck, they'll buy the Beatles, they
Speaker 3: won't buy Brillow.
Speaker 2: So this is a semi incomprehensible rat right, this is
Speaker 2: this just goes on and in the middle of this
Speaker 2: kind of semi incohre intentionally semi incoherent nonsense, is is
Speaker 2: this point about how the thing that changes people's minds
Speaker 2: is advertising, right, and not not the sort of business
Speaker 2: of politics as usual. It's this sort of performance spectacle
Speaker 2: that is that is the real thing that like shit
Speaker 2: that actually changes how people think. These are performance artists, right,
Speaker 2: Alan Ginsberg, sort of famous beat Poe is was one
Speaker 2: of the people who's going to be speaking there. He's
Speaker 2: writing sort of, he's writing poetry about it. The people
Speaker 2: are doing theater performances. If you've seen like the giant
Speaker 2: puppets that used to be at Big protest that was
Speaker 2: kind of a descendant of this stuff. Oh yeah, And
Speaker 2: these performance artists are sitting out to hijack the biggest
Speaker 2: stage in the world and turn it against the war.
Speaker 2: And that stage is the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Unfortunately, however,
Speaker 2: if there's one group in the US who is even
Speaker 2: less prepared for a street fight than MOB, is it
Speaker 2: is the Yippies. The Yippies, you know, at least the
Speaker 2: more radical members of MOB have pretensions of street fighting.
Speaker 2: The Yippies are not street fighters at all. And this
Speaker 2: is something that's distinct from most of the sixty eight
Speaker 2: upris Most of the sixty eight uprisings everywhere are characterized
Speaker 2: by people who are very very good at this. Right,
Speaker 2: and these protesters fight very well. I mean, the most
Speaker 2: famous ones we've talked about it a little bit are
Speaker 2: right or of the Japanese student movements who have this
Speaker 2: sort of iconic white construction hats, these giant wooden polls.
Speaker 2: They used to literally fight riot police at rage. But
Speaker 2: you know, students, workers, and just like random people off
Speaker 2: the street everywhere from Italy to France to Pakistan are
Speaker 2: able to fight the police on fairly even footing.
Speaker 3: They equit themselves valiantly. The yippie is, on the.
Speaker 2: Other hand, every single time they come into contact with
Speaker 2: the police, they get absolutely bald And you know, the
Speaker 2: pre DNC Yippie protests are extremely peaceful, right, You're not
Speaker 2: even disruptive. They have permits, and the police just batter them.
Speaker 2: And this is kind of the plan, right. The police
Speaker 2: attacks are generating media coverage, and the yippies are trying
Speaker 2: to hijack this media coverage to spread their message, and
Speaker 2: this kind of works to some extent. Part of the problem, though,
Speaker 2: is that one of the biggest newspapers in Chicago is
Speaker 2: Chicago Tribune, who are a kind of reactionary that I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess we still have them, but this is the
Speaker 2: kind of magazine that would have been right there with
Speaker 2: the economists saying that like all of the Irish dying
Speaker 2: was good. Right, That's the kind of like when the
Speaker 2: British kill him with the famine, right, Like this is
Speaker 2: the kind of kind of reactionary that that.
Speaker 3: The Chicago Tribune is.
Speaker 2: And so some of their protest hijacking stuff doesn't really
Speaker 2: work in Chicago because you'll have these protests where just
Speaker 2: the Tribune shows up, and if the Tribune shows up,
Speaker 2: the coverage of the cops just absolutely beating the crap
Speaker 2: out of a bunch of people who were just walking
Speaker 2: on sidewalks is going to be something like did the
Speaker 2: police defeat unruly demonstrators or something? Before before we go
Speaker 2: any further, and by any further, we're gonna talk about
Speaker 2: how these Jews relate to each other, and oh boy,
Speaker 2: we need to go to the thing the Yipians would
Speaker 2: have been hijacking, which is these products and services we're
Speaker 2: continuing in their noble tradition by using their money to
Speaker 2: do this episode.
Speaker 3: We are back.
Speaker 2: So something that I think is very interesting about these
Speaker 2: two groups. That is the final thing that you kind
Speaker 2: of have to understand about why these protests go the
Speaker 2: way they do. I've talked a bit about how sort
Speaker 2: of the more radical parts of mob and the yippies
Speaker 2: who are very radical are are kind of being isolated
Speaker 2: from the more moderate elements right, and this is part
Speaker 2: of Mayor Daily's deliberate strategy. Daily is the all powerful
Speaker 2: mayor of Chicago. He's one of the sort of the
Speaker 2: builders of America's greatest ever political machine, which is the
Speaker 2: Chicago Machine. By this point, he has single hand almost
Speaker 2: single handedly like one elections for the Democratic Party by
Speaker 2: handing them Illinois on a platter. He is the guy,
Speaker 2: one of the people who turns Illinois from a swing
Speaker 2: state into a state that votes for Democrats by Noah's
Speaker 2: margins every single year. And he does this through this
Speaker 2: incredibly powerful patriotish network and corruption network. And Daily's deliberate
Speaker 2: strategy is trying to sort of separate He's trying to
Speaker 2: knock the moderate out of the protests by threatening that
Speaker 2: he's going to just like obliterate these people right by,
Speaker 2: and also by continuously denying them permits so that certain
Speaker 2: more water people won't show up, And so the plan
Speaker 2: is basically isolate them. And part of the other reason
Speaker 2: why this works is that this whole plan is opposed
Speaker 2: by a group you wouldn't really expect to be opposing it,
Speaker 2: which is the Communists CPUSA wants nothing to do with this.
Speaker 2: Even the SWP socials workers parties, who are the Trotzkyites
Speaker 2: who have very important roles in MOB they're part of
Speaker 2: a faction that doesn't want to do the DNC convention
Speaker 2: going in And this is something you see all over
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight because weirdly, the communist parties in sixty
Speaker 2: eight are a very conservative force. This is something that
Speaker 2: we've talked about on the show before. In places like Chile,
Speaker 2: you have fairly moderate Christian Democratic workers going into the
Speaker 2: streets and meanwhile the Chilean Communist Party is going, no,
Speaker 2: no hold on.
Speaker 3: We must slow the pace of reforms.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, this isn't it.
Speaker 2: And you know that's even more mild example than what
Speaker 2: happens in France, where the French Communist Party blows its
Speaker 2: one shot of ever taking power by straight up working
Speaker 2: with the government to stamp out the MA sixty eight
Speaker 2: uprisings there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these old left parties are very conservative, both because
Speaker 2: you know, on an international level, because some of them
Speaker 2: are in the sort of common tern orbit, right, so
Speaker 2: they're taking orders directly from Moscow and Moscow doesn't want
Speaker 2: any disruption, right, And in the US, a lot of
Speaker 2: the older activists don't want confrontation because they're all still
Speaker 2: petrified of the Red Scare, and so they're terrified of
Speaker 2: anything that could like even sort of alienate a single person.
Speaker 2: And this means that to some extent, all Mob and
Speaker 2: the Yippies really have over each other. But the problem
Speaker 2: is the Mob and the Yippies hate each other. That's
Speaker 2: the Tennis Odust time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's amazing.
Speaker 2: And again this is something that like all of the
Speaker 2: mode people agree about which they agree about nothing. The
Speaker 2: only thing they agree about is they don't even they
Speaker 2: don't even agree about fully demanding an end to the
Speaker 2: Vietnam War, right, They don't agree with anything except they
Speaker 2: hate the Yippies because they see the Yippies as these
Speaker 2: like deeply unseerious bourgeois degenerates who are just having sex
Speaker 2: and doing drugs that are just literally the same culture
Speaker 2: that they're trying to resist. The yipc mode has sort
Speaker 2: of self righteous assholes who are locked in this death
Speaker 2: spiral of comically serious politics that are also just a
Speaker 2: reflection of the thing they're opposing. So, you know, both
Speaker 2: of these people take the same things about each other.
Speaker 2: But meanwhile, both of these groups and really everyone else
Speaker 2: in the US is going to have to ride the
Speaker 2: wildest wave of vibe shifts in the entirety of American history. So,
Speaker 2: all right, we kind of famously had our vibe shift
Speaker 2: when Biden dropped out and everyone was like, whoa hold on,
Speaker 2: better things are possible?
Speaker 5: Question mark, Yeah, question.
Speaker 2: There's also a vibe shift in sixty eight when when
Speaker 2: LBJ drops out.
Speaker 3: It's March thirty first.
Speaker 2: But there are key differences here though, Right, Barden has
Speaker 2: already won the nomination right by the time that he
Speaker 2: is forced out, and when he is forced out, there
Speaker 2: is great rejoicing. Everyone's really happy about. Even the old
Speaker 2: Biden stalle warts immediately fall on line behind Kamal Harris.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, right, that Biden's wins account changed his name.
Speaker 3: Yeah right. Sixty eight is much much bessier than that.
Speaker 2: LBJ doesn't drop out until he almost loses a he
Speaker 2: almost think it's the New Hampshire primary to anti war
Speaker 2: candidate Eugene McCarthy, not to be confused with the other McCarthy.
Speaker 2: I was really baffled the first time I just saw
Speaker 2: people talking about McCarthy. I was like, what wait, hold on, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is anti war stal warts Senator Eugene McCarthy, and
Speaker 2: McCarthy almost beating LBJ in a very conservative state really
Speaker 2: sort of lights this fire under LBJ. And LBJ realizes
Speaker 2: that he could win the nomination, but if he does that,
Speaker 2: he's going to lose General Lushion, so he books it
Speaker 2: and drops out. When LBJ drops out, there's a competitive primary.
Speaker 2: The other reason the primary is competitive is that RFK
Speaker 2: takes this as his shining moment and goes, I am
Speaker 2: going to enter the race as the anti war candidate.
Speaker 2: Now we now have our tragedy as farce RFK.
Speaker 4: Gee jesus, Yeah, just to be clear if people aren't familiar,
Speaker 4: not the same dude, No, no different, Bobby Kennedy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is RFK.
Speaker 2: RFK really is seen as as a guy, and but
Speaker 2: both hum and McCarthy are seen by young people who
Speaker 2: have been disillusioned by LBJ as someone who can you
Speaker 2: can sort of like take this anti war platform national right,
Speaker 2: and there is a massive vibe shift for a moment,
Speaker 2: there is hope. And this is a real problem for
Speaker 2: the anti war fashions because this kind of thing is
Speaker 2: exactly how the US got into this mess in the
Speaker 2: first place. LBJ ran this same con in sixty four, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: and then got leck. It immediately made the war worse. So,
Speaker 2: you know, I think there's a tendency to look back
Speaker 2: on the anti war protesters as these sort of like
Speaker 2: spoiler people who ruin the democratic nomination or whatever. But
Speaker 2: you know, they were right to a large extent to
Speaker 2: be incredibly suspicious of anti war democratic candidates. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: you know, this also throws all of the planning for
Speaker 2: the protests and the chaos, because the center point of
Speaker 2: the protest for both mob and the Yippies was to
Speaker 2: show an alternative to this sort of stagnant war upon
Speaker 2: death machine politics LBJ. But suddenly, like if there's a
Speaker 2: if there's an anti war candidate who's a nominee, it
Speaker 2: becomes so much harder to make this case. And these
Speaker 2: people are really unbelievably depressed. The vibes everywhere else in
Speaker 2: the country are great. Everyone believes in hope again, it's
Speaker 2: hope and change. So they have Obama and then RFK
Speaker 2: gets assassinated. Everything goes to shit almost immediately. I mean,
Speaker 2: the vibes are so bad that famously, one of the
Speaker 2: one of the mob guys, I think he's on camera
Speaker 2: just weeping because I mean, and he and Boby Kennedy
Speaker 2: had kind of had sort of known each other through
Speaker 2: the sort of anti war networks, and he's not a
Speaker 2: Kennedy supporter. But when Kennedy gets killed, it's basically imagine
Speaker 2: our vibe shift immediately flipped at his head and went
Speaker 2: even more rancid than it had been the feeling that
Speaker 2: you all had in the week after the failed Trump assassination, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: and you can see this is interesting, right, like all
Speaker 2: of the elements of nineteen sixty eight are here in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four. Right, you have your unpopular president leaving,
Speaker 2: you have a vibe shift, you have a Kennedy, you
Speaker 2: have an assassination attempt. But the pieces fit together differently
Speaker 2: because what happens is, you know, the vibe shift collapses
Speaker 2: with the RFK assassination, and suddenly you know, anti war's
Speaker 2: back on the table. But on the other hand, McCarthy's
Speaker 2: still in the race, right, Ujim McCarthy, who's the other
Speaker 2: anti war candidate, is still in the race. However, it
Speaker 2: is becoming increasingly clear that what is going to happen
Speaker 2: at the convention is that Eugene McCarthy is going to
Speaker 2: get rat fucked, and they are going to put Hubert Humphrey,
Speaker 2: who is lbj's vice president, back in the saddle under
Speaker 2: the same policies. And this too is a sort of
Speaker 2: inversion of twenty twenty four. The party elites ousting Biden
Speaker 2: and installing Kamala. Harris is broadly unbelievably popular with the base. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Hubert Humphrey doesn't like run in primaries. She just wins
Speaker 2: by rankling all the delegates to vote for him in
Speaker 2: these this incredible series and sort of smoke filled backroom
Speaker 2: deals and peeling off people who've been Kennedy delegates, and
Speaker 2: it becomes clear that he's going to win. But it's
Speaker 2: terrifying because what has happened is that the Democratic elite,
Speaker 2: against the will of law of Democratic voters, has just
Speaker 2: straight up stolen this election. Right they have they have
Speaker 2: stolen it. They have rat fucked Eugene McCarthy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is kind of like the Riot has unsuccessfully
Speaker 4: tried to play this narrative again, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again, the thing about Harris is that she
Speaker 2: is seen as something different than Biden. Yeah, this is
Speaker 2: this part actually has to do with the differences in
Speaker 2: Biden's weakness versus lbj's.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: A huge part of Biden's weakness that everyone thinks he's
Speaker 2: completely senile. Yeah, because she is objectively senile.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, because he can't fucking certain together a sentence
Speaker 4: yeah goes off, right, Not that Trump can.
Speaker 2: No, not the Trump can either, right, but it was,
Speaker 2: but Biden was sort of more visible, right, Yeah, because
Speaker 2: of sort of the way the media works, because of
Speaker 2: Trump's ability to sort of run away.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of factors this, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No one on Earth thinks that LBJ is seen now,
Speaker 2: not even his worst enemies.
Speaker 3: I think that that man is senile. Right.
Speaker 2: His problem is his policies, And the problem with that
Speaker 2: is that his policies are being transferred directly to his successor,
Speaker 2: who is his vice president. Whereas Kamala Harris does not
Speaker 2: have the fundamental weakness of Joe Biden, which is that
Speaker 2: she successfully and she is the first major American political
Speaker 2: figure he has been able to do this in eight years.
Speaker 2: She can string together three consecutive sentences yeah.
Speaker 4: Which, yeah, it appears like a manna from heaven to
Speaker 4: the sort of politics appreciate a class is right when
Speaker 4: they have to explain to all of us why we're
Speaker 4: pure rad and juvenile of warning politics outside of politicians,
Speaker 4: while their politicians are like struggling to do a whole
Speaker 4: paragraph without talking about their corn pop or scratched in
Speaker 4: Pennsylvania or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so this is, you know, even as we're
Speaker 2: heading into the convention, things are things are going to
Speaker 2: be very different than they're going to play out now.
Speaker 2: But there's one thing that is exactly the same. If
Speaker 2: that is your cargo police department. No changes.
Speaker 3: The only change is they are slightly slightly, not not significantly.
Speaker 3: They are slightly less willing to say the ND word
Speaker 3: in public, like a little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and in return for that, they got approximately ten
Speaker 4: million dollars of fucking weapons.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, really up to you.
Speaker 2: These people are exactly the same as today. They are
Speaker 2: overpaid and titled asshole screaming for violence.
Speaker 3: They are screaming it.
Speaker 2: They're going to take their vengeance against what they see
Speaker 2: as a leftist conspiracy to protect criminals and hand the
Speaker 2: country to communists. They are precisely the swine who beat
Speaker 2: us in the streets in twenty twenty. These people in
Speaker 2: sixty eight are precisely the men today who ran a
Speaker 2: black site at Homan Square to torture, to disappear, and
Speaker 2: torture suspects and the false confessions, and who boldly set
Speaker 2: out a few years ago to kill a sixteen year
Speaker 2: old with sixteen shots on a cover up. This is
Speaker 2: the exact same Chicago Police department that it wasn't sixty eight,
Speaker 2: and in fact, all of the key elements of the
Speaker 2: modern police department.
Speaker 3: This is the period. Richard M.
Speaker 2: Daily is one of the people who gets the cops
Speaker 2: to unionize, and again we're gonna see Daily is really
Speaker 2: truly a terrible person. Daily wants the Teamsters to organize
Speaker 2: the cops. That doesn't work at all. He's been completely fails.
Speaker 2: They're organized by the Fraternal Order of Police, who are
Speaker 2: just effectively a giant cartel for police murderers. Now and
Speaker 2: they were at the time. There are a bunch of
Speaker 2: unbelievable reaction areas. A bunch of their leaderships will do things.
Speaker 4: Like quote Hitler, they just cal't fucking stump themselves.
Speaker 2: No, Yeah, I want to read. I'm going to read
Speaker 2: sort of the modern police statements. Quote, the better we
Speaker 2: do our job of envoicing the law, the more we
Speaker 2: are attacked. The state of our so called objective press
Speaker 2: is sad to behold subtly too many so called objective
Speaker 2: news writers attempt to excuse the actions of minorities. Oh wait,
Speaker 2: that's not that's not the modern police, that's the sixty
Speaker 2: eight police saying a thing that is literally identical to
Speaker 2: every modern reallest statement today.
Speaker 3: They're not changed at.
Speaker 5: All, because no one made them.
Speaker 2: No, this is sort of the trap that the anti
Speaker 2: war people are walking into, right, They are walking into
Speaker 2: a bunch of ultra radicalized, unbelievably pissed off cops who
Speaker 2: are salivating at the attempt to sort of beat up
Speaker 2: long haired hippies. And also, there's one thing we should
Speaker 2: also make clear, that's that's very different between this anti
Speaker 2: war movement and the modern one, which is that mob
Speaker 2: and the yippies are terrifyingly white. They might be whiter
Speaker 2: than the cops at this It's it's genuinely possible, that's true.
Speaker 2: These love for reasons that are incomprehensible to be other
Speaker 2: than racism. Absolutely love dressing up in like indigenous costumes.
Speaker 5: Oh god, Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's awful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And part of what's going on is that the
Speaker 2: sort of black radical groups don't really want to be
Speaker 2: involved in this. Yeah, well can see why. You know,
Speaker 2: they're anti war, but they're like, this is not our problem.
Speaker 2: You can sort this out.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And this is also another thing, a very very key
Speaker 2: difference between that anti war sort of coalition and today's
Speaker 2: because today's anti war coalition. If you go to any
Speaker 2: of the campus occupations, right, you go to an anti
Speaker 2: war protest, it's it's basically a combination of two of
Speaker 2: two groups. Right, it's queer white people and just non
Speaker 2: white people in general, some of whom are queer, with
Speaker 2: some of whom aren't. And that's that's the core of
Speaker 2: sort of protest organization of the US, Right, those are
Speaker 2: the core of the people who show up, Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then seventeen people with fucking clipboards trying to get
Speaker 4: them to sign up for their various.
Speaker 3: Well, those are the leaches that show up to sort
Speaker 3: of pray on pray on the Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they are the lamprey on the shock of protests.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But this plays out very differently politically because of
Speaker 2: who has been mobilized into sort of anti war things
Speaker 2: now versus who is showing up to this convention, And
Speaker 2: this is going to be true of the people who
Speaker 2: show up to the convention this time, right, Yeah, they
Speaker 2: are very much not the same kind of sort of
Speaker 2: middle class student people who were showing up to like
Speaker 2: disconventional not all those people, but like there are a
Speaker 2: lot of people who did workers, right, but like they're
Speaker 2: distressingly white, and that is that is simply not true
Speaker 2: of the modern movement. It's one of the reasons why
Speaker 2: the pieces don't quite fit. All Right, we need to
Speaker 2: go do some more ads and then we're going to
Speaker 2: sort of wrap up what actually happened at the convention
Speaker 2: and how it sort of shook out politically.
Speaker 3: We are back. So the other thing that guarantees.
Speaker 2: Really that this is going to descend into sort of
Speaker 2: chaos is that, I mean, even days before the events, right,
Speaker 2: neither the mode people nor the Yippies really know what
Speaker 2: they're planning to do.
Speaker 3: The planning has been terrible.
Speaker 2: Part of it is because again they can't get permits
Speaker 2: from the city, and it's really hard to plan when
Speaker 2: you can't know what you're supposed to be doing. There's
Speaker 2: also internal disagreements in the groups of what to do.
Speaker 2: There's also a truly staggering federal infiltration, and not just
Speaker 2: the normal feds, right, we're talking like military intelligence. Oh wow,
Speaker 2: the like the Army's intelligence office is spying on protesters.
Speaker 2: They have guys inside of McCarthy's campaign that.
Speaker 3: Should not be legal.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter if it's legal, it doesn't, right, it's
Speaker 4: but it's it's nuts.
Speaker 2: And you know, I mean, there's an estimate that that's
Speaker 2: from from Citi Chicago that book that one in six
Speaker 2: protesters were informants of Fuck Me. It's like after Waffin
Speaker 2: ratio they've got going up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And like part of this is the numbers of protesters
Speaker 2: here aren't very good because people are or five the
Speaker 2: CPD is going to start killing everyone. So the actual
Speaker 2: number is even as peaks, maybe ten thousand, which is
Speaker 2: pretty small considering that the Pentagon mobilization that mob had
Speaker 2: done in sixty seven was like one hundred thousand people. Well, right,
Speaker 2: they've been able to put together really massive protests, but
Speaker 2: this one is not that large. So the Yippi's kind
Speaker 2: of do their concert thing, but the moment night hits
Speaker 2: and they're trying to be in this park. The police attack,
Speaker 2: the police are incredibly brutal. By about three days in
Speaker 2: the National Guard gets deployed. And this is something about
Speaker 2: sixty eight that's also different from today. If the National
Speaker 2: Guard is deployed today, it's not the same thing, no,
Speaker 2: as as a national Guard deployment sixty eight, because the
Speaker 2: National Guard deployment in sixty eight very well could mean
Speaker 2: that the army is going to kill you, all right.
Speaker 2: This is a period in which the National Guard, their
Speaker 2: riot control mechanism is a line of guys with bayonets.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's to say that these bayonets a leslie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's or less lethal because
Speaker 2: when they're actually going lethal, and they've done this in
Speaker 2: the past three or four years against a bunch of
Speaker 2: the sort of black op risings have been happening, is
Speaker 2: they just shoot people.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, they straight up kill them. This happened in Chicago.
Speaker 2: That was more of the cops the National Guard because
Speaker 2: read Holy Week, they were sort of told to stand down.
Speaker 2: So it's not to like literally destroy the entire country
Speaker 2: in the giant war, but you know, them showing up
Speaker 2: also really pisses off the organizers and the everything that
Speaker 2: happens to the cops start beating the organizers, and this,
Speaker 2: it turns out, is a bad idea, because it turns
Speaker 2: out if you beat people, they get really angry at you.
Speaker 2: And so suddenly you have all of these mode guys
Speaker 2: who literally their plan going into the convention was we
Speaker 2: don't want to have a fight because we're gonna lose,
Speaker 2: who are suddenly like, well fuck it, they're attacking as anyway,
Speaker 2: we're just gonna fight them. Yeah, and this is where
Speaker 2: everything sort of the police completely go off the rails, right,
Speaker 2: this is where you see, you know, all of the
Speaker 2: sort of famous footage of beatings outside the convention. Also,
Speaker 2: and I will put this something Robert pointed out, is
Speaker 2: it like anyone who was in Portland and twenty twenty
Speaker 2: has been through stuff that's way worse than anything anyone
Speaker 2: saw here. Like you statistically probably have seen something that
Speaker 2: was much worse than what happened to the people, Which
Speaker 2: is not to say it wasn't bad, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: these are people getting horribly beaten by guys with billy clubs.
Speaker 5: But yeah, it just happens all the time.
Speaker 2: Now we are so far past this being a thing
Speaker 2: that nobody's ever seen before or whatever.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, we had a moment where I could have stopped,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people have fucking tried. Yeah, And
Speaker 4: as a country, we are going down the path of
Speaker 4: the cops beating people and getting away with it like
Speaker 4: that is yeah, where we're at politically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And in the experience sixty eight, the cops, the
Speaker 2: cops are able to go even more feral than they
Speaker 2: are now, which is slightly more fail which is to
Speaker 2: say that this storm McCarthy's campaign office and they have
Speaker 2: his campaign staffers beaten.
Speaker 5: Oh damn, Yeah, that is that is advanced.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've never heard of another modern political thing where
Speaker 2: police straight up storm the campaign office of a presidential
Speaker 2: campaign and had his staffer's beaten.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And this has a massive impact inside of the convention itself,
Speaker 2: because what's happening in the convention is not what we
Speaker 2: got with Kamala, where like the old is gone and
Speaker 2: here's the new or whatever, and you know, you can
Speaker 2: you can look for some kind of break there. It
Speaker 2: is Humphrey has been put in. Humphrey is LBJ two.
Speaker 2: Lbj's Vietnam policy is inscribed by vote into the platform
Speaker 2: of the Democratic Party for what they're going to run.
Speaker 3: In sixty eight.
Speaker 2: And meanwhile, outside right, as the sort of rat fuck
Speaker 2: is happening, and as the party leadership is installing Hubert Humphrey,
Speaker 2: the sort of liberal anti war wing of the party
Speaker 2: is recoiling in horror. A McCarthy deleg who's a senator
Speaker 2: famously is about to go on stage and endorse, endorse
Speaker 2: super Humphrey because Humphrey's won the nomination, they have to
Speaker 2: come together unity. But he's washing out the window as
Speaker 2: the police are just like throwing kids around and beating
Speaker 2: the shit out of them, and he instead gives this
Speaker 2: speech where he's says that if McCarthy was president, the
Speaker 2: cops wouldn't be using gestopo tactics, and Chicago bay Or
Speaker 2: Richard M. Daly gets so angry that he starts screaming
Speaker 2: from the crowd and I quote and I apologize for
Speaker 2: saying this, but you need to understand who the party
Speaker 2: elite is in this period. He says, quote, fuck you,
Speaker 2: you juice, son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home.
Speaker 2: She is the mayor of Chicago, on the floor live
Speaker 2: on TV at the Democratic National Convention. Jeez, you are
Speaker 2: watching in sixty eight, you can see in real time
Speaker 2: on TV the entire Democratic Party completely fall apart.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Fuck the uh yeah, the mosque has come off,
Speaker 5: that hasn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything's flowing apart. You can see.
Speaker 2: You can see the divisions. A lot of liberal anti
Speaker 2: war candidates refuse to back like Humphrey and his people.
Speaker 2: They eventually come back together sort of as the general
Speaker 2: election approaches, but the damage is done and that's not
Speaker 2: something that we're really at risk of.
Speaker 4: No, they seem to be a pretty much lock step
Speaker 4: right now, like both with police violence and with what
Speaker 4: was happening in Palestine. Like there's not much like real
Speaker 4: within the party, the Democrat Party, like much descent that
Speaker 4: I can see.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: And I think the other thing about the Sittiate election
Speaker 2: people are trying to compare it to the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four election, is that the Democrats only lost by about
Speaker 2: one percent of the vote, or some one percent of
Speaker 2: the vote, even even though it was a blowout, They
Speaker 2: only lost are about one percent of the vote in
Speaker 2: sixty eight. And a big part of what happened also
Speaker 2: was that George Wallace, the insane segregation. This guy was
Speaker 2: also running and drew a whole bunch of electoral votes, yeah,
Speaker 2: which we don't really have, but you know, the Democrats
Speaker 2: almost success rallied and beat Nixon Nixon, you know, And
Speaker 2: this is something that there's this narrative that Nixon wins
Speaker 2: by sort of unbelievable margins and that he represented the
Speaker 2: sort of silent majority. And that's only sort of true.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, the ground in the u
Speaker 2: US since then has changed, right, the uprisings of the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties, and this is from the Holy Week uprisings
Speaker 2: to the process of the d NC. All of these
Speaker 2: protests are hideously unpopular. Everything MLK does, everyone hates it,
Speaker 2: right literally until MLK dies.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And there's actually a very fun example of this. Bayar
Speaker 2: Daily had absolutely hated MLKA when he was alive. Right,
Speaker 2: He gives speeches a college he say he is starting
Speaker 2: up trouble and like Astley, despised him, and the moment
Speaker 2: he dies, he gives a speech saying everyone should follow
Speaker 2: mlk's example and remained peaceful and not the state.
Speaker 3: Literally days after right.
Speaker 2: But that's the thing, all of these all of these
Speaker 2: things are unbelievably unpopular, and you know, the gap between
Speaker 2: their giant uprising which was holy weak and the election
Speaker 2: was a few months whereas you know, in twenty twenty four, right,
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty four uprising was marked by over fifty
Speaker 2: percent approval for burning a police station down right, he
Speaker 2: was actually extremely popular.
Speaker 3: And even even.
Speaker 2: Four years later, you know, with the sort of memory
Speaker 2: of the tear gas fading, everything about American politics is
Speaker 2: operating in reverse. Increasingly, it is not the left that's
Speaker 2: seen as out of touch radicals just attempting to force
Speaker 2: their agenda on a compliant population. It's the right. The
Speaker 2: silent majority today is not composed of evangelical fanatics whose
Speaker 2: children monitor their porn consumption. It is composed of people
Speaker 2: who think that shit is weird. And that's the thing
Speaker 2: that I want to close on, which is that you know,
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty four, in a lot of ways, is
Speaker 2: sixty eight standing on its head, because everything that comes
Speaker 2: after the election is seen as the backlash to the
Speaker 2: sort of excess of sixty eight. Right, but we are
Speaker 2: already living in the backlash the last four years, the
Speaker 2: last eight years. Right Trumpism is the backlash of Ferguson
Speaker 2: and then all of the sort of desan to stuff,
Speaker 2: the anti trans stuff, all of the weird grumor panic,
Speaker 2: you know, all the anti critical race theory stuff, all
Speaker 2: of the racism, all of that. That's all the backlash
Speaker 2: to twenty twenty and it sucks. Everyone hates it. It's awful.
Speaker 2: And so we are in a period where the backlash
Speaker 2: that sort of swept in the Republicans to power for
Speaker 2: a generation, that that's going to sort of come out
Speaker 2: of the nick sonari that's eventually going to lead to Reagan.
Speaker 2: It's entirely possible that we are about to see basically
Speaker 2: the opposite of that, where this kind of backlash politics,
Speaker 2: this kind of sort of trumpe and fascism. This very
Speaker 2: well could be twenty twenty four could be the shore
Speaker 2: on which that wave breaks.
Speaker 5: We can hope.
Speaker 3: I'm hoping.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I am mildly hopeful.
Speaker 2: I also you know, and this is our thing that's sport,
Speaker 2: is this convention is not going to look anything like
Speaker 2: even if there is intense deppression of the protests, it's
Speaker 2: not going to play the same way politically as as
Speaker 2: sixty eight convention did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, right,
Speaker 4: and I think there will be similarities here. It is
Speaker 4: impossible for the way that the state interacts with protest
Speaker 4: to beat this saying yeah, and for people to be
Speaker 4: as shocked by it as they were in sixty eight, right,
Speaker 4: like a good number of Democrats, Like you know, if
Speaker 4: you go on social media, okay, it's my representative example,
Speaker 4: you've seen plenty of people barking for cops to crack
Speaker 4: the heads of kids, yeah, or people of any age,
Speaker 4: like protesting against a fucking genocide, Like people don't care anymore.
Speaker 4: I guess if you're clapping for bombing babies, you're also
Speaker 4: going to clap for smashing students in the face of
Speaker 4: the club, Like I kind of go together, I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean that. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think the sort of long range things about anti
Speaker 2: war movements is that the actual anti war movement almost
Speaker 2: never stops the war right in the short run immediately,
Speaker 2: it almost never works. But what happened with Vietnam was
Speaker 2: in the long run, the protests and in sty eight
Speaker 2: did stop the war, right, But they stopped the war
Speaker 2: not by not by moving sort of traditional America pologists
Speaker 2: to stop the war by being one of the catalysts
Speaker 2: that radicalized enough of enough of the US army that
Speaker 2: almost by by the time the war ends, something like
Speaker 2: half it is either on strike or openly in revolt. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that eventually is the thing that crushes it. And
Speaker 2: I think that's also a thing for this, is that like, yeah,
Speaker 2: Kamala Harris probably not gonna end the genocide. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: comma that there's good reason for this, right. We're very
Speaker 2: used to looking for immediate, direct impacts of reactions, and
Speaker 2: a lot of times the impact of reactions are in
Speaker 2: things in the distant future, in ways that we can't
Speaker 2: see right now. Yeah, And maybe that gives you hope,
Speaker 2: maybe that doesn't, But that's sort of the way that
Speaker 2: these anti word things work.
Speaker 5: And I don't know.
Speaker 2: Hopefully we'll get a fucking better result this time and
Speaker 2: we can stop the rest of Palestine from being completely exterminated.
Speaker 5: But yeah, that would be nice.
Speaker 3: That's the not hopeful part of this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's not hopeful, but it's instructive, right, Like,
Speaker 4: if you're out there now and you're expecting some big change,
Speaker 4: if you're always tending in Chicago and you're expecting some change.
Speaker 4: You probably won't see it. It doesn't mean that what
Speaker 4: you're doing isn't important, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't
Speaker 4: keep doing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, so this has been making it happen here.
Speaker 2: The rest of the week will be an account of
Speaker 2: what actually does happen at this convention.
Speaker 5: So stay tuned.
Speaker 3: Enjoyed that, and go stop geto touching that.
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