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