the DON JONES INDEX…
		GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED
	11/12/21… 14,550.86 11/5/21… 14,532.73 6/27/13… 15,000.00
(THE DOW JONES INDEX: 11/5/21…36,327.96; 10/29/21…35,760.83; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

LESSON for November 5, 2021 – “THEY MUST BE DEMOCRATS!” (PART TWO)

Again… that disclosure, in “Landslide” by Michael Wolff that, after he abandoned his supporters at the Capitol, ran (or was driven) home to the White House and watched the rest of the riot on television, former President Trump (reportedly) told a sixpack of sidekicks, including family members and aides Justin Miller and Mark Meadows, that his own, much beloved POTheads looked “like a bunch of Democrats.” (From our Lesson of two weeks ago; See Attachment One)

Every picture, so wiseguys and Rod Stewart say, tells a story – so, two pictures (separated in time and space by half a century, and change, and several hundred miles) provide double illumination of the sort one can expect as the best case of same in these darkened times. Thus…

The one-six (or J-6 as some defenders memorialize it) has already gleaned more substantive polish as a meme than most prior chronicled aphorisms like twelve-seven or seven-four; almost as weighty as the still-hallowed nine-eleven, (though its heft is likelier to fade more quickly as the months and years fly by, in the way that certain popular books or songs or pre-pandemical motion picture blockbusters of a type rocket to the top of the gross receipts charts of their respective media, but quickly begin to fade as other, newer contenders claim their place in the sun).

Two months after then-President Trump slip slided away from his own insurrection, returning to the White House to watch it on television, leaving his acolytes to disappear quietly away at dusk and the Senators to reconvene to confirm Joe Biden President, fairly elected or not, the drama is largely over. Oh… there may be drama ahead (the week’s election results have given hope to Trump Republicans… but America’s attention has shifted back to old menaces: radical Islam, of course, and in both Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Russians and Chinese, the supply chainsaw massacre that threatens Christmas, the global warming that world leaders are jibber-jabbering about in Glasgow and a slippery and slithy pandemic that keeps mutating itself out of the sights of the vaccinators. The one-six, meanwhile, has withered away to legal speculation and an increasingly fervent dragnet for increasingly clueless and irrelevant occupiers and new threats and fevers arise. Pepe le Pew! Mister (soon to be gender neutered) Potato Head!

Still, before we move on to the labors of the riot probe investigators or these old or entirely new crises and new fashions, it may be of value to consider certain corresponding quanta between the assault on the Capitol by revolutionary right-wing insurgents and a more drawn-out in duration, if no less noteworthy for its time, occurrence… the rise and fall of left-wing radical activism.

Paramount are that pair of selfies which, in the lingo of the present, have gone “viral”; the most recent of which is the present-day image of Capitol occupationoid Richard Barnett (now the most famous… or notorious… citizen of Gravette, Arkansas) duly ensconced in the domain of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, feet up on her desk, cellphone at hand. Gaze beyond the present-day images and back into the recesses of memory… if you’re of a certain age… or archives, if not, and Lo! there squats a similarly shaggy occupant upon the seat of wealthy and powerful authority. (See Attachment Two) That would be the office of Columbia University prexy Grayson T. Kirk, circa 1968; the occupant, one David Shapiro (born and bred in Newark, 1947, subsequently made his bones in New York City, ending up as a celebrated poet… sample as Attachment Three), butt firmly planted on the President’s chair, (but with feet on the floor) and holding up one of the Presidential cigars.

Think a moment…

As the Geico lizard might conclude… serendipity?

Or did the insurrections resemble Democrats or… in 1968 or 1969… tendencies well to the left of Joe Biden and Hubert H. Humphrey – at least in cultural and visual aspects, if not ideology? (See, again, our Attachment One, reprinted from… speaking of half a century ago… Bobby, the Nixon Slayer, Woodward’s latest opus, “Peril”)

Not exactly serendipity most rational Americans occupying a broad, if soggy, political center greater than current newspeak would tend to assume, but it’s opposite. A concurrence, true, but one of chaotic, even wicked mien, as one might recall from the most extreme manifestation of 60’s protests unreeling towards their inevitable exhaustion ending with “the system’s” token gestures towards diversity and winding down of the war in Southeast Asia… images and slogans from the streets of Chicago to the Weather Underground’s bombings, the Manson family, the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army, kidnappers and temporary converters of Patty Hearst to the young and uninitiated) and the inevitable consequence of all that jazz: the election and subsequent demise of Richard Nixon, whose resignation and pardoning by successor-President Gerald Ford cheated the lefties out of their vengeance and their closure.

Could it happen again – history repeating itself, but with a further twist of the switchblade in the back? Nixon retreated in disgrace, if not repentance; Trump, however (as noted in the week before last’s DJI), is already plotting a comeback. His re-election to a second Grover Clevelandian term remains unlikely, barring a massive memory zap by those Jewish space lasers, or by QAnon’s answering Oblividrones, made in the USA from blueprints lifted by dedicated, patriotic hackers (or if Joe Biden is renominated and cannot prevent some Democratic offshoot from perpetraiting a deed of such belligarant and arrogant wokeness as, say, to blow up Mount Rushmore or replace the racist, slavery-friendly Washington, District of Columbia, America with some woke appellation like Capitol District large city, North, mid-Continental nation), but he is now favored to win the Republican nomination or, if it is stolen from him, break off and form a third party which will so divide the G.O.P. that a Democrat… a really old Old White Joe by 2024 or worse (an even older Bern, or a pink Brigadista like AOC, a Pocahontas, Kamalala, Marianne or Hillary) will steal yet another election.

Little noted at the time (Groundhog Day, four days before the Capitol riot) and less remembered now than even during his heyday, Rennie Davis, the last, least famous and most puzzling living member of those convicted in the trial of the Chicago Eight (or Seven, after Bobby Seale was removed from the courtroom gagged and shackled) died of lymphoma at the home in Colorado he shared with his third wife.

(More on Davis in our Lesson of two weeks ago and below, on the topic of the left’s assault on the Capitol and its analysis.)

The Chicago riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in the Windy City were a benchmark in the struggle of a (mostly young, mostly white) left-wing “counterculture” in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War – objectives whose resolutions remain debatable (See, again, DJI, Part One, above) and tactics remain duplicable. Race remains an issue, especially considering economic (as opposed to legal) progress and police-community relations; the war eventually did wind down, but not before thousands more young Americans and tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Vietnamese died in the struggle.

(Although still a Communist dictatorship, that nation is now favored by many American manufacturing firms as an even lower-wage alternative to low-wage China. Communism’s replacement as enemy-at-the-door with radical Islam has engendered new wars and new recriminations – though the template remains essentially the same.)

Where the words sometimes concur, sometimes belie, the pictures from the Capitol battlefield and related actions occurring at Trump rallies and right-wing militia demonstrations – when posited against the multiple theatres of conflict in which Davis, the rest of the Chicago conspirators, other left-wing organizations… often conflicting with one another but lumped together by the government and detractors as that aforesaid “counterculture”… and perhaps millions of random individuals waged guerrilla warfare with said government from approximately November 1963’s assassination of President Kennedy to about 1975 with the cessation of hostilities in Southeast Asia and the Watergate-inspired resignation of Pig Nixon - often betray striking similarities. What links Mr. Barnett in Washington and Mr. Shapiro at Columbia is their fleeting seating in the lap of victory after winning an archtypical battle of underdog against (outnumbered) overlords; oozing passion occasioned by a sincere (if ultimately doomed) revolt against injustice… perceived or real… which encloses the principles in a circle of heroic nostalgia that might also include icons of gallant defeat like Spartacus, like Robert E. Lee; like any Division Two sacrifice to an Alabama or Clemson homecoming which, after a 63-7 drubbing, celebrates their singular moment of triumph within an hour of abject failure.

(The Capitol occupiers departed, allegedly when the armed and organized faction among them realized that their President, their idol Donald J. Trump, was not going to voice orders to spray the Rotunda with bullets and root out the politicians hiding in cloakrooms and beneath desks. Columbia’s protests concluded in the early morning hours of April 30, 1968, when the NYPD violently quashed the demonstrations - with approximately 132 students, 4 faculty members and 12 police officers injured and over 700 protesters arrested. Violence continued into the following day as students armed with sticks and rocks battling with officers (who had guns that they did not use). Frank Gucciardi, a 34-year-old police officer, was permanently disabled when a student jumped onto him from a second story window, breaking his back.

See this pair of forty year old reminisces: McFadden, Robert D. "Remembering Columbia, 1968", The New York Times, April 25, 2008 and Dominus, Susan "Disabled During ’68 Columbia Melee, a Former Officer Feels Pain, Not Rage", The New York Times, April 25, 2008 – noted in the Wiki summary of the occupation, Attachment Two).

Left or right winged… was the tang of their 1968-9 or 2021 seasons in the sun of the same flavor as storming of the Bastille or the Winter Palace as granted the insurgents victories they could not, to re-interpret Benjamin Franklin, keep; or, on the other and darker hand, the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 – an epic fail which would ultimately foreshadow a similarly greater victory and greater debacle?

And there are other correspondences between the revolutionists half a century distant from one another if one will scan the surface of the images – the long hair and Duck Dynasty beards, the scruffy clothes and improvised weapons with which to do battle against the police, (some of) the slogans, (more of) the camaraderie (even more of) the spontaneity.

“Kill the pigs (i.e. police)!” the leftist radicals shouted back in the day, and while calls to hang Spiro Agnew may or may not have been chanted, the loathing for Nixon’s Vice President (shortly thereafter charged with corruption and resigning in disgrace to avoid impeachment) was plainly evident. Police beat students and students beat police, but killings did not take place at Columbia (deaths were tolled on both sides elsewhere and elsewhen during the long struggle) as they did half a century later (the latest postmortem dispatches now say that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was poisoned by a blast of bear spray to the face – a rather Russian means of dispatching enemies, the conspiracy-minded might aver – and the officer who shot Ashlii Barrett was summarily exonerated).

More of the partisans on both sides in both ages rallied and radicalized themselves with slogans… “Stop the War”, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh”, “No Justice, No Peace” were en vogue in the sixties; “Stop the Steal” (headed for a revival in New Jersey), “Make America Great Again” and the uncannily prescient “Lock Her/Him Up” in 2016 and, again, in 2020.

And, should one believe the Washington Post’s assertion that rallies ahead of capitol riot were planned by established Washington insiders just as folksinger Phil Ochs, Chicago Seven indictee Jerry Rubin and some others purchased a hog, christened it Pigasus and nominated him for the Presidency (See Attachment Eleven, this issue and Ochs testimony, Attachment Nine in DJI.21022), protests against both the War and the Steal would gather support (if not participation) from mainstream persons, institutions and organizations. No left-wing demonstration of the 20^th century was complete without the presence of pacifists, environmentalists and anti-nukers ranging from the antecedents of Greenpeace and PETA to Quakers and No Nukes; the civil rights movement sponsors ranging from the NAACP to Black Panthers and Black Muslims engendering Black Lives Matter and corresponding Latin, Asian, gay and lesbian fellowships.

“As Democrats embrace authority and Republicans push countercultural revolution, we’re reenacting the 1960s with the roles reversed” according to Kevin Williamson, author of “The American Right Hits Its Hippie Phase” in this years July 23^rd National Review. (See Attachment Four)

Positing the Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy that piqued interest of cultural historians from Friedrich Nietzsche to Camille Paglia as a struggle between the rational, orderly, formal (Apollonian) elements and the passionate, wild, chaotic (Dionysian) elements, Williamson asserted that, from the beginnings of organized American political conservatism in the 1950s through the turn of the century, “the Republican Party was overwhelmingly — though not exceptionlessly — the Apollonian party, and what the conservative movement understood itself to be principally opposed to was chaos.”

In other words, chaos was change and change is inherently chaotic.

This Apollonian–Dionysian dynamic, Williamson deduced, “was most dramatically displayed in the 1960s, when the political Left and the anarchic counterculture made more or less consistently common cause for a decade.” The divide was not political, nor economic - rather “the 1960s counterculture was very much the product of young people who were the heirs of the ruling class. It was not a rising of the proletariat, but a rising of well-off college kids… as in our own time, politics (being) best understood as a constituent of — dread word — lifestyle,” an arguable distinction in that the poor and working-class draftees in Vietnam and minority youth in America’s urban ghettos also consumed the cultural nectars of the time (and sometimes to excess).

Citing and comparing such bygone luminaries as beatnik author William S. Burroughs, “a fallen angel of the Midwestern patriciate”, William Ayers, “son of the chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison,” and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, “daughter of a well-off Santa Monica family who sought fame dancing on the Lawrence Welk Show before taking up with Charles Manson and trying to assassinate Gerald Ford” as typical of a generation of “jumped-up champagne radicals whose taste for transgression blasted past sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll all the way to terrorism, political assassinations, and mass murder… pure Dionysian ecstasy!”

The immediate forebears of the people who today lecture passersby about what “the science says,” (i.e. “right wing” anti-vaxx refuseniks, Q-Anon cultists and the cynics who assert that 2020’s elections were stolen by Chinese bamboo paper ballots or Jewish space lasers… something) were, only a few decades ago “howling along with Allen Ginsberg, joining cults in Big Sur, engaged in “yogic flying” with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, seeking their bliss in LSD etc.”

Williamson’sWil

“hunch” is that “a great deal of what is presently going on with the Right — and it won’t do to pretend it is just a tiny fringe — is an echo of that 1960s counterculture. Republicans have evolved out of their Apollonian sensibility and adopted a Dionysian one just as Democrats have, by and large, made the opposite journey. Today among progressives, it’s “experts say” and “science says,” but not long ago it was, “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson,” in the words of Bernardine Dohrn, who went on to marry Ayers and become a professor of law at Northwestern as well as a benefactor of Barack Obama.

The leftist radicals of the 1960s “…held science, reason, the government, the business establishment, organized religion, and much else in disdain, along with such notions as compromise, moderation, and cooperation. The contemporary Right also hates the government, the business establishment, much of organized religion, compromise, etc., but instead of LSD and Transcendental M ation it has hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, absurd mask politics, election trutherism, anti-vaccine activism, 1,001 conspiracy theories, and QAnon. It even has its own version of the Manson murders, the five dead after the January 6 sacking of the Capitol only one unborn child short of the six dead at Roman Polanski’s house — both episodes of violence meant as theater for public consumption.

One might wonder at the comparison of the civil rights and antiwar protests to the Manson Family – but… after all… this is the National Review.

“The U.S. right is having its 'hippie phase’” Williamson and reiterated on a Morning Joe Show with author Kurt Andersen (“Vox”) to discuss Republicans' 'countercultural revolution' the following week.

The master conspirators of the J-6 (indicted and unindicted) may question the comparison of their means and motives to those of the Manson family, but a good look at the riot video footage… the long hair, the old clothes, the exuberant anti-police, anti-politician chanting cannot help but tweak some ancient adolescent (or childhood, or past-life) memories among the suit-weating, hotel and suite-inhabiting promulgators of the Capitol insurrection.

The 60’s radicals even assaulted the Capitol (although not until 1971… See Attachment Five)

Throughout the siege of Chicago and tumultuous few years after (eventually fizzling out with Nixon’s disgrace and resignation and the Afghanish American pullout from Southeast Asia) plots were hatched, toilets bombed, young people marched in the streets and on university campuses, danced, inhaled, copulated and were… on occasion… beaten, gassed and, in a few cases like Kent & Jackson States and on the mean streets and back roads of Amerikkka, occasionally shot. Those “Democrats” who put their faith in George McGovern and his ilk lost the battle of 1972, but (sort of) won the war by ending the war in Vietnam, chasing Richard Nixon out of office and prying open certain restrictive, color- and gender-covenanted enclaves (to the extent that the ubiquitous victims of society now can obsess on writing out past history and suspect tropes).

Peter Coyote, author of “Sleeping Where I Fall” and a principal actor (both senses of the word) in Emmett Grogan’s “Digger” history “Ringolevio”, disagrees in the anthology “Witness to the Revolution”, a compendium of interviews with and statements by 60’s radicals collected by Clara Bingham. “We didn’t end capitalism, we didn’t end imperialism, we didn’t end racism, we didn’t actually end the war in Vietnam.” That analysis, it must be said, depends… like Bill Clinton’s parsing of what “is” is… on your definition of the words “We” and “End”. Capitalism endures, or course, and has metastasized… but just as America is one right step from fascism (probably provoked by some outrageous “woke” gesture or cancellation perpetrated by white, upper-middle to upper class Zs), “we” (in the American sense but particularly among working-class POTheads) are one left step away from scuttling (or, at least, substantially reining in) the billionaires who have, to date, hornswoggled the Trumpish populists into deflecting their Bannonesque resentment of elites into downward rage against the poor, the racial, ethnic, generational and cultural minorities and… to be honest… women; resulting in a resounding rationalization of their own repression and exploitation by the elites (abetted not a little by the corruption within and inevitable downfall of Soviet and Soviet-like socialism).

From Wilhelm Reich… the political psychologist who managed to be persecuted by Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and Capitalist America throughout the 50s, but was, by the late sixties, venerated by radicals who bemoaned his being confused with, often mistaken for “Greening of America” author Charles Reich, whose feckless endorsement of cultural change earned him their unmitigated contempt: “It is the irresponsibleness of masses of people that lies at the basis of fascism of all countries, nations, and races,” Reich declared. (“The Mass Psychology of Fascism… see more here) “That this situation was brought about by a social development which goes back thousands of years does not alter the fact… (i)t is man himself who is responsible and not "historical developments" that caused the downfall of the socialist freedom movements.”

Or retired Congressman and independent Presidential candidate Jack Parnell, on accusations of his being a Communist after the Soviet devolution: “Marxist Communism rotted from its root… the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s a hell of a lot more fun to be a dictator than a proletarian, so it was, and remains, only natural that revolutionaries turned dictators will behave like the rest of the breed: indulging in corruption and taking repressive measures to ensure their own personal privileges.” (“Entropy and Renaissance” – sample chapters here)

Similarly, “we” did not “end racism”, but only the angriest of BLM revolutionaries would assert that the legal status and, on balance, the economic status of minorities has improved – although hearts and minds will never reject racism, and have endorsed it for thousands of years. (Such inclination dates back to the Punic Wars, which outcome solidified white hegemony – although one could argue that racism dates even further back to Biblical accounts of the Jews, Egyptians, Babylonians as well as even older conflicts.)

Imperialism, as a theory, still thrives but… as a practice, colonialism, has died off in most parts of the world, perhaps with the exception of Puerto Rico and the light hand of the British in Canada, Australia... and perhaps tighter control in Northern Ireland. “We” (meaning wealthy or middle-class white student radicals) had far less to do with its demise than did the colonized themselves, whether in Africa or Asia or… dating further back… parts of Europe such as the Irish Republic and Soviet satellites or… even further… the Americas (at least from the direct control of Spain). Then too, while resistance (as well as exhaustion) eventually removed the United States from Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia), the war was actually concluded by the Vietnamese themselves – only to be nearly immediately followed by a conflict with China.

So, Mr. Coyote’s pessimism is only partially justified and compares favorably with the abject acts of contrition like those perpetrated by SDS and Weather Undergrounder Mark Rudd who has now deduced: “…results are where it counts, and (had) we not been so enamoured of our own heroic morality, we might have been able to judge the fact that our theories were not working.”

Like Coyote, Rudd now believes that the road to Utopia lies along the blue brick road of culture… “a new cultural revolution that will repoliticize young people.” So into the trashcan with Wilhelm Reich and back to the podium for Charles… who, nonetheless, told Bingham that the past few years, at least, have brought “the ungreening of America” (President Joe’s advocacy of “greens steel”, whatever that is, to the contrary.

Not all 60’s streetfighters became National Review subscribers, but most knuckled down to authority; cutting their hair and becoming solid citizens employed by Wall Street, Main Street and various media and academic outposts (from which a few still maintain their outrage by targeting enemies of the state as diverse as Pepe le Pew, Andrew Cuomo and Mister Potato Head - feeding their shriveled egos… more or less destroyed by the abject failure of the American left to accomplish anything by way of permanent racial or economic uplift, cultural renaissance or a coherent foreign policy… with j’accuse moments that the elites (yes, some of whom were their former comrades in the trenches, were quite willing to accommodate as harmless gestures of ego that might, as alt-right pedo gadfly Milo Yannopolis averred, create the sort of backlash that enabled POThead politicians to seek and gain public office.

So – in what ways were the insurrectionists of the sixties and POTheads of a calendar round afterwards the same, different, or a mixed bag of contradictory inclinations?

SIMILARITIES

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

The scruffy 60’s radical… long hair, bearded, dressed in old clothes (sometimes surrounded by as many flies as Charlie Brown’s “Pigpen” to denote uncleanliness), maybe with the wild gaze of insanity and/or addiction, and maybe wielding a bomb or a club, too, is a common image denoting the time, the space and the personality.

“Trump supporters are as anti-establishment now as the hippies were back in the ‘60s,” deduced Joe Gannon of the Hampshire Gazette. (See Attachment Six) They don’t trust the establishment, the FBI, the CIA, the mainstream media. They believe, as the hippies did, that America is fundamentally flawed, and for those too square to understand, no explanation is possible. Nor accommodation.

“I do not say they are hippies, but they are the countercultural “anti-hippie-hippies” of the Trump era.

TIRADES and TROPES

Both movements had their chants and slogans… a few of which are noted above… and, also, their means of getting the message across to inform and motivate confederates and lobby the unknowing and undecided.

The use of social media as a MAGAtelegraph is, by now, well known… so well known that a hostile Biden Administration and some of the gatekeepers of Google, FaceBook, Twitter and other supposedly free speech forums are taking measures to crack down on their use by some of the more annoying and occasionally dangerous alt- gatherings (like those of Nazis, Russians and the such).

Back in the day, the peaceniks, Vietniks, Blackniks and promulgators of “chaos and anarchy” (Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers” prior to their degeneration into the “Starship” and commercial acquiescence) had their slo-mo telephones to disseminate information but no electronic forums save short-wave radio (mostly preferred by a small, largely right-wing cadre of conspiracy theorists) and network television (an occasional “Laugh In” or “Smothers Brothers” skit might stoke the righteousness of their words and deeds as well as, after Chicago, a more tolerant outlook by the network news behemoth).

So they resorted to the do-it-yourself interaction afforded by the underground press… most large cities and university towns having at least one alt- paper… an occasional movie like “Easy Rider” or “Joe” churned out by an increasingly liberal Hollywood, and, above all, the music.

The paucity of MAGAmusic will be treated in more detail below, but, back in the sixties, your common streetwise or slumming hippie lefty could be grooving along to nefarious Englishmen, some American copycats as the decade wound down or stronger fare like “Ohio” or “Bad Moon Rising” or “Street Fighting Man”. Blacks had the common “shake yer booty” soulfare, but also anthems like “What’s Goin’ On” or “A Change is Gonna Come”. And everybody listened to and sometimes resuscitated the marching music of the past… from early 60’s liberation songs like “We Shall Overcome” all the way back to often ironic odes of the Depression.

REJECTION of (and Combat against) AUTHORITY

The street legions of Chicago, Columbia and other edifices of higher education like UC Berkeley and Harvard (and also Kent and Jackson State) probably never chanted for, nor even thought of hanging Spiro Agnew (although not a few would have enjoyed seeing him swaying from the gallows) but they met or even exceeded the zeal of the Capitol insurrectionists in their eagerness to fight the police, even when outgunned and outnumbered.

Most sixties rebels wound up as victims of official violence, most of these were cowed into conformity and, as the Vietnam (later Southeast Asian) War ended, and the Days of Rage faded into a mundane reversion to school and then careers – usually white collar and professional, antipathy towards authority also waned. Some old-school streetfighters even went into politics themselves (e.g. Hayden, Chicago’s Bobby Rush and assorted Mayors and legislators generating anti-governent, anti-police legislation from both the red and blue spectra).

Many more leftist radicals migrated towards right-wing radicalism (or at least sympathy) as they grew older, their bodies less primed for cop-fighting, the lure of stuff and money proving irresistible. Even that ol’ Deadhead Steven Bannon apparently retained some grudging sympathy (or at least the respect granted a worthy opponent) with the leftists of the left as late as 2013, according to Ronald Radosh of the Daily Beast, who has known the MAGA-instigator for more than a decade.

His evidence is a speech Bannon delivered in New York City to an outdoor rally to the New York Tea Party on April 15, 2010 inflaming the rowdy crowd with his attacks on the “world financial system.” Bannon attributed the financial collapse to “the financial elites and the American political class.” They took care of themselves, he told the crowd, and let everyone else suffer, as government took over the financial industry, the auto industry and the health system. He referred to the “ticking time bomb” of mortgage defaults, and called the situation an “existential threat” to the nation, a “true crisis” that threatens the nation’s sovereignty. “Our beloved country is an addict,” he said, led by the “pushers on Wall Street.”

Of course his early populism morphed into the faux populism pushed by Daddy, who has passed the art of talking angry while doing the bidding of elites into a sort of art (or at least showmanship). Bannon even concluded his speech by intoning: "It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, and the winds blow off the high plains of this country, through the prairie and lights a fire that will burn all the way to Washington in November."

“Although his audience may not have gotten the reference,” Radosh wrote, Bannon took the phrase from a verse of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, which was used by the self-proclaimed revolutionary young people in the late ’60s and ’70s who created first the Weathermen, and then the Weather Underground terrorist group from the detritus of Students for a Democratic Society. Their publication in which they spread their ideas was named Prairie Fire, and four years before he spoke, the Weather Underground’s leaders—Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones published their writings for a new generation, in the book Sing a Battle Song, a compendium of the group’s revolutionary arguments.

THE CAPITOL

Ayers, Dohrn, Jones and other Weathercreatures performed, as a matter of fact, the first left-wing assault on the Capitol by 60’s-ish insurgents (albeit in 1971). Two still unknown revolutionaries slipped into an unmarked marble-lined men’s bathroom one floor below the Senate chamber with sticks of dynamite strapped under their clothing r, hooked up a fuse attached to a stopwatch and stuffed the device behind a 5-foot-high wall.

Those old-school revolutionaries… boy howdy, they loved blowing up toilets. This endeavor, however, was a little sterner.

Shortly before 1 a.m. on March 1, wrote Lawrence Roberts, author of “MAYDAY 1971” in the Feb. 28 issue of Politico, a phone call came into the Capitol switchboard. The overnight operator remembered it as a man’s voice, low and hard: “This is real. Evacuate the building immediately.”

The bomb exploded at 1:32 a.m. No one was hurt, but damage was extensive. “The blast tore the bathroom wall apart, shattering sinks into shrapnel. Shock waves blew the swinging doors off the entrance to the Senate barbershop. The doors crashed through a window and sailed into a courtyard. Along the corridor, light fixtures, plaster and tile cracked. In the Senate dining room, panes fell from a stained-glass window depicting George Washington greeting two Revolutionary War heroes, the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben.” Both Europeans, Roberts noted, “lost their heads.” (See Attachment Five)

THE MAN and his REPRESSION

Well over six hundred Chicago protesters were arrested during the weekend of the convention, thousands more in actions around the country or just for DWHLH (driving while having long hair, a short-lived corollary to DWB). What happened to most is lost in the mists of history and myth, but the numerous appeals on grounds of botched prosecutions, spurious arrests or whatever tended to lead to dismissals, plea bargains or reversals on appeal for all except a handful of the most violent offenders.

A somewhat similar six hundred have been fingered… mostly after the fact thanks to the new developments in surveillance technology and the desire of lower-tier malcontents to take selfies of their crimes and post them on the Internet. The contention that leftist demonstraters were treated more harshly the right wingers of two generations later is challenged by an expose in Vice two weeks ago… detailing conditions in the so-called Patriot Wing of the DC jail, where about forty men held since the J-6 are reportedly being beaten, tortured and isolated in “the hole.” (See Attachment Eight)

“This is inhumane and people think it's OK because I’m a Trump supporter,” wrote one Jan. 6 detainee in a letter that was published on The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing blog, about his experience in solitary confinement. “Because I like Trump they don’t see me as human. They enjoy watching me suffer. It makes them smile. How sick is that? The pure hate within the Justice Department is obvious in their actions.” 

They have won over some sympathizers – although some of these somebodies are the sort of personages not likely to inspire mass congratulations or juror sympathy. Q-Anon Qneen M. T. Greene has been defending the Capitol rioters for months, saying they’ve been “abused” by the government and attempting to hold a press conference to advocate for them in July (the press conference was disrupted by protesters).

Barnett, above, was held without bail for four months, then bonded out. Charged with “seditious conspiracy” and the ubiquitous “parading”, he has since cut his hair and shaved his beard (or the Feds did it for him). (See details here.)

And, after ten months of incarceration, Federal Judge Amy B. Jackson ordered the release of Thomas Sibick, 35, one of three men held for stealing an official NYPD badge during the brutal assault on D.C. Police Officer Michael Fanone – in part because she found “toxic” conditions in the D.C. Jail were likely to contribute to his further radicalization if he was kept in pretrial detention.

His father, Dr. Eugene Sibick, a former officer with the U.S. Navy had publicly criticized his son’s detention at the “Justice for J6” rally in September and has called him a “political prisoner.”

Sibick was released to his parents’ Buffalo, New York, home under 24-hour incarceration “under the condition that he continue the psychiatric treatment he’s begun in custody and that he stay away from D.C. and all political rallies. She also ordered him to stay off social media and not to watch any political television programming.”

No Tucker Carlson for you!

Of late, some of the clusters of incarcerated “patriots” are being broken up on the counsel of military police and overseers who recall that Islamic extremists, crowded together in Guantanamo, radicalized one another, swapped terror tactics and served as martyrs, inspiring those on the outside to further redouble their insurgency as opposed to being crushed into silence.

Others contend that a Biden DOJ “dragnet” is swooping up Trump supporters whether or not they rioted on January 6^th or committed any other crimes,

NPR investigated the claim of a former police officer turned yoga instructor turned Capitol rioter and mask/vaxx refusenik, arrested for demonstrating against plague lockdowns in California. Enraged by the process, he formed a pro-Trump nonprofit society and, as his rhetoric appeared to become increasingly violent, (especially toward California's governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, whom he called a "tyrant" and "killer.")

After Joe Biden won the November 2020 presidential election, Hostetter's focus turned from COVID-19 to overturning what he viewed, against all evidence, as a stolen election.

"Some people at the highest levels need to be made an example of with an execution or two or three," said Hostetter in one video he posted to YouTube. "Tyrants and traitors need to be executed as an example."

He reportedly spoke at the Trump rally on January 6^th, but NPR added “there's no evidence Hostetter or Taylor breached the Capitol building, nor have prosecutors alleged that they did.”

Nonetheless, Hostetter was arrested by the FBI Five months later,. He has pleaded not guilty to four charges, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and remains free pending trial.

As the Justice Department prosecutes more than 650 people on charges ranging from trespassing to assaulting police, Reuters reports that “it is struggling to share the sheer volume of evidence with defendants and their attorneys.

“Defense lawyers and at least one federal judge have warned the delays may be infringing on defendants' rights to speedy trials…” especially for those who remain behind bars.

The Washington Department of Corrections said in a statement that it has "a several-weeks-long waitlist" for inmates to access evidence.

"They have very limited numbers of laptops that are available for all of the residents in the facility, and it is a four-to-six-week wait, at a minimum, before one can get the discovery," said Michelle Peterson, an attorney for Oath Keepers defendant Jessica Watkins, who faces conspiracy and other charges, during a court hearing.

And, during the insurrection… as he now claims… Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) now says he advised President Trump to order the Capitol Police, National Guard, someone (the Salvation Army?) to do a Kent State/Jackson State and open fire on the mob of his own baser instincts. (See Attachment Nine)

The (Washington) Post described Graham as "irate that senators were forced to flee their own chamber."

"He yelled at the Senate sergeant-at-arms. 'What are you doing? Take back the Senate! You've got guns. Use them,'" the report said, citing a Republican senator with knowledge of the exchange.

The report said Graham repeated himself. "We give you guns for a reason," he said. "Use them."

STRANGE BELIEFS

The hippier of the sixties hippie/radicals had their occult charms and keepsakes – while a minority of politically puritan insurrectionists rejected faith, in any form, except that which grew out of the barrel of a gun, most of the boots on the ground dabbled in astrology, karma, the I Ching and/or darker shades of witchcraft and hoodoo (“levitate the Pentagon”, etc.). Gurus abounded, from the Hari Krishna cultists to Jeanne Dixon, to the boy God Mahara Ji who lured Rennie Davis into his orbit… as well as more sinister types like Charlie Manson and Jim Jones.

Many of the Capitol rioters, by comparison, followed the teachings and prophecies of Q-Anon, which posits a mysterious Master Q (who may or may not be Donald Trump) guiding the true believers to face and surmount the end times against a hostile horde of pizzeria pedophiles, powerful and creepy corporate elitists like Bill Gates or George Soros, working hand-in-glove with corrupt, plague spreading, nanochip vaxxing doctors and junk scientists serving their masters, the reptilian legions of Planet Evil.

Salon has drawn lines from youthful new agers… again, Steve Bannon… to aging conservatives, a trope we hope to explore more when we zero in on the Stevester. And just this week, numerous Q-sters flocked to Dallas where, it was proclaimed (by somebody) that John F. Kennedy Junior would rise from the dead, stand atop the grassy knoll of Senior’s real assassins and proclaim a New World Order. (See attachment ten)

(The premise was rather lame… why the Junior (a harmless playboy and bad pilot)… instead of the original JFK, a figure of respect and veneration to both the red and blue brigades. Were Mister Trump and his family to be taken out by antifa or ISIS or somebody, wouldn’t He be the one to reincarnate, not Don Junior or… heavens help us… Erik? Anyway, it didn’t matter, JFK Junior didn’t show.)

DIFFERENCES

Differences, to be sure, one must also acknowledge, were and remain substantial… beginning with the fact that most of the rioters would self identify as right wingers… some as alt-righters… a few as out and out Nazis.

Most, despite Djonald’s declaration, remain Republicans. They were, for the most part, not rich, but they identify with those who exploit them, believe they deserve their abuse and resent anybody who doesn’t.

Perhaps the most significant is that the Capitol rioters have a hero to lead (or dislead) them on to their Valhalla. No, not Q… it’s the former President. Many would die for Trump and, due to his anti-mask, anti-vaxxing stance (howsoever parsed more recently), many did.

All the heroes to Democrats and the left are dead – many, like the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and more, were martyred, as were the role models for the more violent 60’s radicals like numerous Black Panthers and foreign insurrectionists like Che Guevara. Instead they have clowns (the yippies, the New York and Hollywood media “influencers”, or earnest but tepid reformers in the mold of Clean Gene McCarthy, George McGovern or eventually Jimmy Carter.

THE MIXED-SALAD TRINITY

“I think it’s fair to say we lost all our political struggles in the sixties,” positied Peter Coyote (see above) “…(but) we did win all the cultural battles.” Again, perhaps an exaggeration… as most of the change germinated in the late 50’s and early 60’s (the beatniks spawning the hippies, the Beatles and their ilk… borrowing heavily from earlier American niche R&B and country classics as they polished their act in Hamburg, the psychedelic blundering of the CIA and, of course, The Pill (initially developed by Enovid in 1960). But just as the mass media began to go viral with the democratization of television, directional changes in TV and movie content (“Leave It to Beaver” morphing to “All in the Family”), John Wayne to “Easy Rider”, the baby boomers drove Al Martino and Frankie Avalon off the charts (Frank would hang around, however, and culture became weaponized in the generational wars, as it had not been before, or would be after. (The old stuff hangs around for Gen. Z – albeit prostituted in hundreds of quacking TV commercials.)

MAGA-nation might march to the drumbeat of the “Schutzstaffel” (German for “protective echelon”) but America’s charts are wholly devoid of oompah bands, Steve Bannon’s documentaries’ B.O. dwarfed by the DC/Marvel machine’s irrepressible profusion of troubled men in spandex and fiendish (but fetching) villains and villainesses, depictions of Space Forces that may never come to fruition given the perilous state of Earth ecology. Car crashes, burp guns and from-the-headlines melodrama that always seem to climax with kung-fu fighting… it’s a marvel (sic) that nobody has Sinematized the adventures of Q and the Jewish space laser reptilian attack. (Some of the pedophilia removed or watered down to secure that precious PG rating.)

The Apollonian evangelical straitjacket and Dionysian joy of vandalism and mayhem co-exist uncomfortably within the ranks of the POT-heads, as witness these dispatches from the Trinity…

SEX

Back in the 60’s girls were supposed to say yes to the boys who said no (whether they wanted to or not) – a curious but not unreasonable inversion of the hasty marriages that preceded deadly conflict from World War Two back to the Civil War back to, one presumes, the Crusades.

In general, a wet blanket has been draped over Eros… blame the pandemic, political correctness (anybody but the religious right, which continues to weaken). Some of the outgrowths are strange… the anti-masturbation obsession of the Proud Boys. Some are politically motivated… “coming out” as gay, lesbian, trans, whatever as opposed to “being” what they acclaim. And more then a few, quite possibly, see so little future for the human race that they’ve stopped having children.

Unlike during the swinging sixties and disco 70’s, sex seems to play less of a role in motivating young men to assert their masculinity by fighting cops.

Instead, even the hyper-MAGA proud boys have had their troubles down there.

“It’s easy to understand why masturbation bans are popular among organizations that seek to enhance group loyalty,” contends the gen.medium media. “Masturbation is, on a fundamental level, a radical act of individuality. Engaging in masturbation serves no other purpose beyond giving pleasure to one’s self; it encourages us to consider what we want rather than what we are being told to do. This self-indulgence is often framed as a selfishness that prevents us from connecting with our partners, but it’s also a way of staking out our individual identities, wholly apart from the larger group — a mindset that’s hardly conducive to obeying an authoritarian leader, or, in the case of the Proud Boys, enthusiastically, and sometimes violently, supporting a pro-Trump platform.”

Then again, not a few of the J-6 insurgents were probably losers who had trouble getting dates and, perhaps, thought being a REAL, TOUGH RIOTER would change that.

DRUGS

Right-wingers smoke as much as leftists… probably more… and they are not unfamiliar with the stimulants (meth, cocaine) and depressives (pills, heroin) either. Some, even, make a living at it.

Consider, from pe.com:

On April 24, 2017, Alex Furman's last day as a drug smuggler ended when the nose of his small plane crunched into the dirt, throwing him face-first into the controls. He'd missed the runway by about 50 feet.

Furman, who grew up in St. Louis County, had moved to California in 2015 after earning a pilot's license and a stint as a student at Central Missouri University. But on that Monday in April, when the square-jawed 24-year-old emerged bloodied from the cockpit of his Cessna 210, he soon found himself facing questions about the 6,200 grams of hash oil police found in a suitcase.

There was also the small matter of $700,000 in cash wrapped in vacuum-sealed bags. Police seized two unregistered handguns from his apartment.

Despite all that, today Furman is out of prison and off probation. Less than a year after his hard landing, he pleaded guilty to a single charge of possession with intent to distribute and was released on time served. In 2018, he moved back to St. Louis — and since then, he's picked up some new roles.

He's gainfully employed as a locksmith. He's in the St. Louis County Libertarian Party and running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives against Democrat Cori Bush (although, given the blue district, she's all-but-guaranteed to win her seat come November.)

Or this, from CNN…

Herndon, Virginia, July 2013: Gun rights activist and Oath Keeper Adam Kokesh was arrested in Washington, D.C., on weapon charges after a search warrant on his Virginia home turned up firearms and illegal drugs. DJI – He would later run for President as a Libertarian.

As opposed to the free-wheeling counter-culture of the 1960s, there was the Progressive Labor Party… orthodox Marxists who banned drugs (while promoting beer), trimmed haircuts, supported members getting married (and not living together) and encouraged bowling (a working-class sport). However, the membership of PL was overwhelmingly not working-class and the attempt to work in factories and talk about Marxism with their fellow workers largely failed.  (See “You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance”, ed by John F. Levin and Earl Silbar (San Francisco: 1741 Press, 2018)

If the War on Drugs was as much a failure (though far longer lasting) then the Vietnam and Mideast Wars, the semi-legalization that has bleached much of the outsider fun out of smoking weed or popping pills, it has also induced an inflationary spiral that has gentrified ordinary pleasures and introduced an unpleasant nose-lifting connoisseurhship to the vice. An ounce of pretty good weed that used to go for maybe $15 (primo Colombian or Acapulco Gold for $25) now retails for as much as three, five, even eight hundred bucks an ounce.

(Eight hundred bucks! Almost as much as a ticket to “Burning Man” which the Managing Editor helped kick off back in the day, after which a five or ten dollar gate fee was considered blasphemous!)

ROCK and ROLL

Music is the final point of differentiation between 1969 and 2021. Except for Ted Nugent (who, proseletyzing during a YouTube livestream reported by the New Musical Express, told his arch-er acolytes that the hairy, anti-police chanting rioters were “Antifa and Black Lives Matter wearing Trump shirts and hats. I wanna be on record right now for that. Insurrection my ass!”), Kid Rock, Johnny Rotten (and perhaps, if vaxxing refusnickery is an indication, Eric Clapton) the sounds that POTheads youth are grooving to are sad, mostly borrowed music ditties from their parents’ and grandparents’ day.

Steve Bannon has confessed that he listened to… and may still listen to… Bruce Springsteen. (And why not, given his passion for authority and Brucie’s status as The Boss!)

Bannon’s real love-me hate-me boss, Djonald Dancing, has been prone to spicing up his rallies with tunes by the ultra-gay Village People (who have requested that he refrain from exploiting their catalog). He also famously compared biden/dems to snakes, quoting from (but not singing) a classic but relatively unknown R&B singer Al Wilson, whose version of “The Snake” (composed by leftist Oscar Brown) was a staple of MAGA rallies until… like the Rolling Stones, the Village People and countless others, family lawyers stepped in and stopped it.

Variety Magazine (See Attachment Fourteen) profiled a curious niche of Americana… “Deadheads for Trump”, citing the lawn of Jeff Whritenour’s house in Kinnelon, New Jersey, on which a sign reads, “Presidents are temporary, the Grateful Dead are forever.” The issue at the heart of conservative Deadheads’ point of view is the desire for little to no government interference in their private lives.

“Trump is about individual freedom and so was the Dead,” Whritenour explains, “We shouldn’t focus on Trump the man, but instead the right to do what I want with my time, money, and life.”

After all, the conservative outlet Newsmax was probably pained to report, even Tucker Carlson said he had attended fifty… fifty!... Dead concerts to date. (See Attachment Fifteen)

We’ll take a closer look at Mister Bannon, Mister Carlson, some alien reptile pedophiles and assorted other unindicted co-conspirators of the J-6 putsch (no other term to describe it, giving its prime director’s escape to the White House and the world of television). But not next week – there’s a climate conference to deal with.

	OCTOBER 29 – NOVEMBER 4
Friday, October 29, 2021 Infected: 45,923,988 Dead: 745,380 Dow: 35,291.13	President Joe escapes quarrelling legislators to meet with Pope Frankie, who waves off the angry, cancelling bishops. “You can take communion. Fuggedaboutit!” He tells French President Macron that the nuclear sub deal was “clumsy” but doesn’t apologize. Macron forgives him (who else will have his back?). Mask and vaccine mandates generate partisan anger. Under pressure, 1,000 NYC cops get shot, but the firemen refuse. FDA still arguing over kiddie vaxxes, parents losing confidence – only a quarter of them want their kids vaxxed. Old standbys still standing by… Haitian kidnappers go dark, investigators mulling over Baldwin shooting, Andrew Cuomo says the prosecuting Sheriff was mean to him.
Saturday, October 30, 2021 Infected: 45,953,223 Dead: 747,882	G-20 meets in Rome; Biden apologizing for his psycho predecessor, calling Pope Francis “a warrior for peace.” He shops a global minimum tax for corporations to mild interest and gains their endorsement. The world “celebrates” five million Covid dead. CBS poll finds only 35% of parents supporting the vaxxes for five to eleven year olds. Kaiser’s numbers are slightly better… 37%. Labor crunch persists – lack of truck drivers means a leaner, meaner and later Christmas, lack of 911 dispatchers leads to death. Congresspersons dress up for Mischief Night: Mitt Romney as Ted Lasso, embattled NYC Mayor DiBlasio channels Captain Kirk, but in a Spock uniform. World Series start brings out critics of racist Atlanta Braves, but they’re one-upped by PETA, which demands baseball “bullpens” be renamed “arms barns”. (But won’t that discomfit pacifists?)
Sunday, October 31, 2021 Infected: 45,970,785 Dead: 745,832	It’s Halloween. President Joe puts on his superhero spandex and remotely orders the Pentagon to alleviate supply chainsaw massacre by calling out the Naitonal Stockpile. (Of Chinese toys?) He also promises “green steel”. At home, Press Secretary Jen Psaki gets it… doctors discount chances she’ll give it to Joe, who’ll give it to all of the leaders of the world. Back in the USA, Democrats are squabbling with Democrats (Republicans have promised to destroy the Biden administration by destroying both infrastructure bills). The vote on either or both on Tuesday is downgraded to “Tuesday, at the earliest…” Sunday talksters talk… Chris Christie says Joe Manchin is delaying infrastructure bills due to paranoia that some Communistic change might slip in, old Clinton hand Donna Shalala calls them “the miracle on the Potomac.” Killers act out their seasonal media fantasies… 10 shot (1 killed) at Halloween Party in Texas, creep dressed as the Joker stabs 17 on Tokyo subway. Is LA mom Heidi Planck the new Gabby… she disappears, leaving her dog behind and ex-husband all over the toob. Jay Z and the Foo Fighters inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Also making the grade… Tina Turner, Carole King, Todd Rundgren and the Go Go’s.
Monday, November 1, 2021 Infected: 46,091,954 Dead: 747,033 Dow: 35,258.61	The travelling Joe Show treks on to Glasgow, makes a speech. 200 countries, more or less, attend this COP-26 show – call it the “Last Chance Saloon”. “Paris type” agreements not predicted. Media turns focus to climate catastrophe – fires in Brazil, Madagascar drought and famine (nothing to eat but red cactus and insects), Icelandic ice melt. Tricks outnumber treats in America. New York cops, firefighters and garbagemen call in “sick” as the labor/vaxxing crisis escalates. Joe Manchin trashes Biden’s speech, outraged liberals reiterate promise to kill Infrastructure One in retaliation. SCOTUS takes on Texas abortion law, even conservative justices concerned about the “bounty hunter” provisions. Renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger quits the House with bitter breakup speech. Hillary whisperer and ex-Mrs. Weiner Huma Abaden writes a book, hits the circuit.
Tuesday, November 2, 2021 Infected: 46,146,540 Dead: 748,287 Dow: 35,976.90	It’s Election Day. Only marquee race on the ballot features former Gov. Terry McAuliffe trying to regain his seat v. Trump’s handpicked Glenn Youngkin (suffering distractions such as a Steve Bannon rant and Nazi-ish tiki torchlight parade). But with so many Joneses sick and tired of Biden, it’s a dead heat as is the surprising strength of Republican dark horse Jack Ciaterrelli in New Jersey. President Joe, in a white room in Glasgow, apologizes for his predecessor’s desertion from the climate wars and then declares his own war on methane (cow farts). Back home, a fireman out West says: “What used to be a fire season is now a fire year.” Other leaders from other nations line up to call global warming a bad thing and shower promises on their onlookers… a delegate from India (3^rd worst polluter on the planet behind the U.S. and China) avers that his country is trying to break its “addiction” to coal. The Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year is “vaxx”… usage up 7,200% over 2020. The good news is that 80% of Joneses have been vaxxed… the bad is that medical bills for plague victims are soaring, one hospital even charging a sick woman $700 for “waiting room time” after she gives up in despair after seven hours.
Wednesday, November 3, 2021 Infected: 46, 252,549 Dead: 750,426 Dow: 36,058.68	It’s National Sandwich day. Sandwiched between his party’s failure to produce legislation on the infrastructure, ex-Governor Terry McAuliffe is crushed by POT candidate Glenn Youngkin while Ciaterrelli holds a 65 vote lead over Phil Murphy in New Jersey. Michelle Wu and Eric Adams elected Mayors of Boston and New York… Minneapolis rejects the scheme to abolish the police. In business and labor news, John Deere management tells workers no more deals, so they’ll just go out of business. The three largest book publishers announce plans to merge – drawing outrage from book lovers and attention from the gummint. Braves shut out Houston, win World Series 4 games to 2.
Thursday, November 4, 2021 Infected: 46,334,882 Dead: 751,555 Dow: 36,124.23	Last minute surge carries Murphy to narrow win in Jersey, setting up immediate cries of “Stop the Steal!” Still, gloomy Democrats ponder future of the infrastructure bills, further complicated by holdout Sen. Manchinm who calls them “gimmicks”, asserts that America is now a center-right nation and the days of FDR and JFK are over. A Kyle Rittenhouse juror proves the point by telling racist jokes that get him bumped from the box. Two soldiers from not-center right The Base busted for plotting a white folks revolution that will “decimate” blacks… they accept some helpful help from helpers who turn out to be FBI agents. Game over. Back from Scotland, President Joe imposes a mandate upon corporations to impose more mandates on workers by January 3^rd, 2022. Lawyers explode from the woodwork. New York City prefers the carrot - $100 bribes to kids who volunteer to get shot. With 2021 elections concluded, midterm Congress races on deck and 2024 in the dugout, “Little” Marco Rubio finds the issue he hopes will carry him into the White House… a universal Daylight Savings Time. He is immediately countered by the American Academy of Sleep, whose Doctor Sleeps call for the abolition of DST altogether.
The planet may be drying or even dying, but Don Jones is doing rather well… especially if he’s a wage-earner cashing in on the shortage of workers that is driving the unemployment rate down and stock market up. For employers and retailers waiting on the rusted, busted supply chain – maybe not so well. There’s some momentary interest on what the election means as regards 2022 and 2024, but that just may be because of the bungling and shuffling of President Joe’s two infrastructure bills. Anyway, Don Jones can look forward to an extra hour of sleep next week.

THE DON JONES INDEX

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

See a further explanation of categories here…

ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)

DON JONES’ PERSONAL ECONOMIC INDEX

(45% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS)

CATEGORY	VALUE	BASE	RESULTS			SCORE	SCORE	OUR SOURCES and COMENTS
INCOME	24%	6/17/13	LAST	CHANGE	NEXT	10/29/21	11/5/21	SOURCE
Wages (hourly, per capita)	9%	1350 points	10/8/21	+0.42%	11/12/21	1,481.15	1,487.38	https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages  26.15 nc 26.26
Median Income (yearly)	4%	600	10/29/21	+0.03%	11/12/21	674.83	675.17	http://www.usdebtclock.org/   35,693 701 711
*Unempl. (BLS – in millions	4%	600	10/1/21	-4.35%	11/12/21	418.21	436.39	http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/  4.8% 4.6
*Official (DC – in millions)	2%	300	10/29/21	-0.14%	11/12/21	511.83	512.56	http://www.usdebtclock.org/      8,408 7,630 619
*Unofficl. (DC – in millions)	2%	300	10/29/21	-0.20%	11/12/21	426.00	426.85	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    14,270 3,602 575
Workforce Participtn. Number   Percent	2%	300	10/29/21	+0.017% -0.07%	11/12/21	321.15	320.93	In 153,279 3,792 818 Out 100,054 391 387 Total: 253,333 4183 4205 http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 60.51
WP % (ycharts)*	1%	150	10/8/21	-0.16%	11/12/21	152.23	152.23	https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate  61.60 nc
OUTGO	(15%)
Total Inflation	7%	1050	10/8/21	+0.4%	11/12/21	973.36	973.36	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.4 nc nc
Food	2%	300	10/8/21	+0.9%	11/12/21	272.56	272.56	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.9
Gasoline	2%	300	10/8/21	+1.2%	11/12/21	251.94	251.94	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +1.2
Medical Costs	2%	300	10/8/21	+0.1%	11/12/21	285.05	285.05	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.1
Shelter	2%	300	10/8/21	+0.3%	11/12/21	287.33	287.33	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.3
WEALTH	(6%)
Dow Jones Index	2%	300	10/29/21	+1.84%	11/12/21	388.28	395.43	https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/DJIA 36,327.96
Home (Sales) (Valuation)	1% 1%	150 150	10/1/21	+16.91% -1.09%	11/12/21	199.77 177.56	199.77 177.56	https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics      Sales (M):  6.29 Valuations (K):  352.8 nc
Debt (Personal)	2%	300	10/29/21	+0.06%	11/12/21	269.86	269.70	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    65,282 357 395
	AMERICAN ECONOMIC INDEX (15% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS)
NATIONAL	(10%)
Revenue (trilns.)	2%	300	10/29/21	+0.0008%	11/12/21	346.26	346.263	debtclock.org/       3,891 4,049 049.289
Expenditures (tr.)	2%	300	10/29/21	+0.38%	11/12/21	219.13	219.97	debtclock.org/       6,894 837 811
National Debt tr.)	3%	450	10/29/21	+0.05%	11/12/21	317.96	317.76	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    28,910 929 944
Aggregate Debt (tr.)	3%	450	10/29/21	+0.04%	11/12/21	372.19	372.04	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    84,921 950 984
GLOBAL	(5%)
Foreign Debt (tr.)	2%	300	10/29/21	+0.12%	11/12/21	275.07	274.75	http://www.usdebtclock.org/   7,647 633 642
Exports (in billions)	1%	150	10/8/21	-2.79%	11/12/21	189.80	184.54	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 213.7 207.9
Imports (bl.)	1%	150	10/29/21	+0.52%	11/12/21	113.90	113.20	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 287.0 288.5
Trade Deficit (bl.)	1%	150	10/8/21	+9.39%	11/12/21	94.32	85.46	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html   73.3 80.9
SOCIAL INDICES (40%)
ACTS of MAN	(12%)
World Affairs	3%	450	10/29/21	-0.3%	11/12/21	383.65	382.50	Media focus on global warming worst cases… Maldives Is. (inundation), Madagascar (drought induced starvation that leaves children nothing to eat except red cactus and insects). China quadrupling its nukes… Pentagon advises prepare for war. That’ll help.
Terrorism	2%	300	10/29/21	-0.2%	11/12/21	219.95	219.51	ISIS floats pre-electoral threats in Northern Virginia, but acts in Afghanistan… blowing up a mosque and attacking the Taliban. Mystery drone attacks Pennsylvania power grid.
Politics	3%	450	10/29/21	+0.1%	11/12/21	438.15	438.59	Sen. Manchin (D-WV) holds out on Infrastructure bills – calls them “gimmicks”, then trashes Biden’s Glasgow speech. Sen. Richad Burr (R-NC) accused of insider trading. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Il) retires with a bitter speech against his old party. Tuesday’s vote to abolish the Minneapolice police has criminals dancing in the streets – until it fails. Congressional women play press corps to benefit breast cancer… the newspapergals win 5-1.
Economics	3%	450	10/29/21	nc	11/12/21	403.44	403.44	Packers’ QB Aaron Rodgers opts to take part of his multi-million dollar salary in bitcoin. And then he gets it! TV prices highest since 2012… also up are Ritz and Oreo cookies, paint and televisions. Realtor Zillow failing, cuts 25% of staff. Worker shortage inspires Spanx to offer bennies and bonus cash.
Crime	1%	150	10/29/21	+0.2%	11/12/21	237.54	238.02	Australian cops rejoice after kidnapped 4 year old recovered safe and cute, pedo perp is busted. L.A.s “Jetpack Jack” turns out to be a balloon of Jack Skellyton. Real housewife of Beverly Hills suffers real home invasion. Drug gangs shoot it out in Cancun hotel, 2 killed, no tourists.
ACTS of GOD	(6%)
Environment/Weather	3%	450	10/29/21	-0.3%	11/12/21	399.65	398.45	200 world leaders gather in Glasgow for the COP-26 conference, called the “Last Chance Saloon”. Relentless rain brings power outages, flooding and drowning in North Carolina. Dust bowl predicted for Madagascar due to changing weather patterns, landslides for scorched earth in the American West. “What used to be a fire season is now a fire year,” a tired firefighter exclaims.
Natural/Unnatural Disaster	3%	450	10/29/21	-0.2%	11/12/21	403.57	402.76	Mass cancellation “spree” hits multiple airlines. The airlines reply: “We don’t have any pilots!” For the second year in a row, all of the names for storms are used. Climate change flooding blamed for killing off the oysters on Staten Is., NY.
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX (15%)
Science, Tech, Education	4%	600	10/29/21	+0.2%	11/12/21	400.46	401.26	Mask and vaxx refuseniks square off against school boards as the Big Three of Pfizer, Moderna and J&J crawl ever closer towards rolling out vaxxes for schoolkids.
Equality (econ/social)	4%	600	10/29/21	+0.3%	11/12/21	403.97	405.18	Michelle Wu becomes first Asian woman elected Mayor of Boston. Other minorities do well in state and local races.
Health Plague	4%	600	10/29/21	-0.1% +0.1%	11/12/21	398.46 - 103.43	398.06 - 103.33	Emory (Ga) bills woman $700 for waiting in the waiting room until she realized no doctors would treat her and goes away. Nicer doctors tout HPV vax as cure for cervical cancer. Dole recalls listerial salads. Plague spikes in Russia, generating lockdowns, quarantines. But 80% of Americans vaxxed, 91% in New York. With so much demand for cures, impatient parents turn to vaccine moonshiners and bootleggers for snake oil tonics as kill hundreds. FDA cites rare heart inflammation as cause for postponing Moderna for the kiddies. Nineteen states now mask/vaxx refusenik. CDC says people with mental health issues (like depression and/or schizophrenia) at higher risk of Covid death. Doctors say it’s (nearly) impossible for SecPress Jen Psaki to have infected Joe, who’d then infect the 200 world leaders. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti also gets it, as does Tiger King Joe Exotic.
Freedom and Justice	3%	450	10/29/21	-0.1%	11/12/21	460.42	459.96	Oklahoma resumes executions. Dying convict Robert Durst faces new charges in killing his wife. As investigation rumbles on, actor Alec Baldwin says deceased cinematographer was “his friend” and will deep six the movie “Rust”.
MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX (7%)
Cultural incidents	3%	450	10/29/21	+0.1%	11/12/21	531.97	532.50	Disney’s “Encanto” screens Thanksgiving. RIP ABC anchor Jovita Moore, Jerry Remy, Red Sox player turned announcer. Texas jukebox rations playing of Mariah Carey’s Christmas song to once per hour.
Miscellaneous incidents	4%	450	10/29/21	+0.1%	11/12/21	485.49	485.98	Just for Halloween: the Nightmare on Elm Street house for sale. Is that Freddy in the basement? Gambling site Roblox collapses. Conservative Gen. Z shouting “Let’s go, Brandon” as their code for insulting the President (Biden). “Vaxx” and its derivatives named as “Word of the year. Baby gorilla born in Cleveland zoo.

The Don Jones Index for the week of October 29th through November 4th, 2021 was UP 18.13 points.

The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator. The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.

Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com

ATTACHMENT ONE – From the Daily Mail, UK (reprinted from last week’ DJI)

TRUMP TURNED ON CAPITOL MOB BECAUSE THEY 'LOOKED LIKE IDIOTS' AND THOUGHT THEY WERE DEMOCRATS - WHILE IVANKA DOWNPLAYED RIOT AS AN 'OPTICS ISSUE' WHILE TELLING AIDES ABOUT HER KIDS' PLACES IN PRIVATE SCHOOL, BOOK CLAIMS

'This looks terrible,' said Trump as he watched the Jan. 6 violence unfold, according to new book 

'These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits,' he said, adding that they looked like Democrats

Michael Wolff offers detailed account of how the day unfolded in 'Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency'

It describes how advisers urged him to call on supporters to go home 

The book also claims Ivanka was in the West Wing chatting about getting her children into private school on January 6 

She then downplayed the riot as an 'optics issue', Wolff writes  

By ROB CRILLY, SENIOR U.S. POLITICAL REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 11:50 EDT, 28 June 2021 | UPDATED: 15:05 EDT, 28 June 2021

In the aftermath of violence that rocked the nation's capital, hours after hundreds demonstrators attacked the U.S. Capitol, and as his power slipped away, President Trump turned on his supporters.

'This looks terrible. This is really bad,' he told an aide by telephone after watching television coverage of his fans ransacking the Capitol and as his small team tried to work out a survival strategy.

'These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits.

The smell of marijuana hung over clumps of protesters, many of whom had dressed for the occasion - some in camouflage gear, some in jackets made from flags, one as Abraham Lincoln and, in images that came to define the protests, another in a horned headdress.

A new book details how Trump responded to unfolding events on Jan. 6, when Vice President Mike Pence refused to follow his orders in overturning election results, and a mob of Trump supporters attacked police officers and stormed the Capitol complex.

In 'Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency' author Michael Wolff delivers a blow-by-blow account.

In the aftermath of violence that rocked the nation's capital, hours after hundreds demonstrators attacked the U.S. Capitol , and as his power slipped away, President Trump turned on his supporters. 'This looks terrible. This is really bad,' he told an aide by telephone after watching television coverage of his fans ransacking the Capitol. Ivanka Trump also downplayed the riot as an 'optics issue', a new book claims It also claims Ivanka Trump was going around the West Wing talking about getting her children into private school on January 6.

'Ivanka Trump had been floating around the West Wing, chatting to a variety of people. Her children had gotten into private school in Florida, and she was pleased about this — an excited topic of conversation. 

'She was pulled away from her discussion about schools to join the increasingly tense debate about how to respond to the news,' Wolff writes. 

Then, as MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol, she allegedly downplayed the issue.

Wolff writes:  'No one in the White House was seeing this as the full-on assault on the Capitol and the nail in the coffin of the Trump administration that the world would shortly understand it to be; they were, for perhaps another 90 minutes or so, still treating this as “an optics issue,” as Ivanka was putting it.

'It wasn’t until later in the three o’clock hour that Trump seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election — defending him so he would defend them — to seeing them as “not our people.” Therefore, he bore no responsibility for them.'

As the extent of the violence became clear, advisers urged the president to post a Twitter statement that would encourage people to go home, according to an excerpt published by New York magazine.

'Bad apples, like ANTIFA or other crazed leftists, infiltrated today’s peaceful protest over the fraudulent vote count,' said one, using the voice of Trump.

'Violence is never acceptable! MAGA supporters embrace our police and the rule of law and should leave the Capitol now!'

The other said: 'The fake news media who encouraged this summer’s violent and radical riots are now trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions.

In the event, according to Wolff, he ignored both as he continued to fume that the election had been stolen from him.

In calls to allies he sought assurances that coverage of the protests was overblown.

The book recounts how one of his key advisers was watching the trouble unfold from his home in Arlington, Virginia.

Jason Miller began drafting a statement that would essentially do what Trump had not done so far: Concede that Joe Biden won.

He spoke to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows before speaking to Trump himself.

'How bad is this?' Trump asked, diverging from his usual tactic of seeking assurances that everything was perfect.

'Mr. President, today is literally going to change everything,' said Miller, according to the account.

At that point, Trump turned on his supporters who were all over the TV attacking the Capitol, calling them 'idiots with these outfits.'

The first lady then joined in the call on speakerphone.

'The media is trying to go and say this is who we are,' she said. 'We don’t support this.'

'That’s what we have to make clear,' said Miller, as he read a proposed draft statement.

As they haggled over whether to talk about an 'orderly' or 'peaceful' transition, Trump apparently began to realize that the statement was not just about the protesters. It was about his conduct too.

'The media thinks I’m not going to leave,' he said. 'Do they really think that? That’s crazy.'

Miller responded: 'We’ve never laid that out. I really can’t stress enough how much we have to make it clear that we’re fully onboard with an orderly transition.'

With the president's Twitter account suspended earlier in the day, they had to sent it out via Dan Scavino, Trump's social media guru.

ATTACHMENT TWO – From Wikipedia

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PROTESTS of 1968

In 1968, a series of protests at Columbia University in New York City were one among the various student demonstrations that occurred around the globe in that year. The Columbia protests erupted over the spring of that year after students discovered links between the university and the institutional apparatus supporting the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as their concern over an allegedly segregated gymnasium to be constructed in the nearby Morningside Park. The protests resulted in the student occupation of many university buildings and the eventual violent removal of protesters by the New York City Police Department.^[1]

Contents

· 1Background

o 1.1Discovery of IDA documents

o 1.2Morningside Park gymnasium

· 2Protests

o 2.1Occupation of Hamilton Hall

o 2.2Activist separation

o 2.3Popular responses

o 2.4Suppression of protesters

o 2.5Second round of protests

· 3Aftermath

o 3.1Immediate responses

o 3.2Long term effects

· 4In popular culture

· 5See also

· 6References

· 7Further reading

· 8External links

Background[ ]

Discovery of IDA documents[ ]

In early March 1967, a Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society activist named Bob Feldman discovered documents in the International Law Library detailing Columbia's institutional affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think tank affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense. The nature of the association had not been, to that point, publicly announced by the University.^{[citation needed]}

Prior to March 1967, the IDA had rarely been mentioned in the U.S. media or in the left, underground or campus press. A few magazine articles on the IDA had appeared between 1956 and 1967 and the IDA had been mentioned in a few books for academic specialists published by university presses. The RAND Corporation, not the Institute for Defense Analyses, was the military-oriented think tank that had received most of the publicity prior to March 1967. But after Feldman's name appeared in some leftist publications in reference to the Columbia-IDA revelation, the FBI opened a file on him and started to investigate, according to Feldman's declassified FBI files.

The discovery of the IDA documents touched off a Columbia SDS anti-war campaign between April 1967 and April 1968, which demanded the Columbia University administration resign its institutional membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses. Following a peaceful demonstration inside the Low Library administration building on March 27, 1968, the Columbia Administration placed on probation six anti-war Columbia student activists, who were collectively nicknamed "The IDA Six," for violating its ban on indoor demonstrations.

Morningside Park gymnasium[ ]

Columbia's plan to construct what activists described as a segregated gymnasium in city-owned Morningside Park fueled anger among the nearby Harlem community. Opposition began in 1965 during the mayoral campaign of John Lindsay, who opposed the project. By 1967 community opposition had become more militant.^[2] One of the causes for dispute was the gym's proposed design. Due to the topography of the area, Columbia's campus at Morningside Heights to the west was more than 100 feet (30 m) above the adjacent neighborhood of Harlem to the east. The proposed design would have an upper level to be used as a Columbia gym, and a lower level to be used as a community center.^[3] By 1968, concerned students and community members saw the planned separate east and west entrances as an attempt to circumvent the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then a recent federal law that banned racially segregated facilities.^[4] In addition, others were concerned with the appropriation of land from a public park. Harlem activists opposed the construction because, despite being on public land and a park, Harlem residents would get only limited access to the facility. It was for these reasons that the project was labelled by some as "Gym Crow".

Since 1958 the University had evicted more than seven thousand Harlem residents from Columbia-controlled properties—85 percent of whom were African American or Puerto Rican. Many Harlem residents paid rent to the University.^[2]

Black students at a 40th anniversary event said their bitterness evolved from discrimination, that unlike white students their identifications were constantly checked, and that black women were told not to register for difficult courses. A "stacking system" that put all the former black football players in the same position was described.^[1]

Protests[ ]

Occupation of Hamilton Hall[ ]

The first protest occurred eight days before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In response to the Columbia Administration's attempts to suppress anti-IDA student protest on its campus, and Columbia's plans for the Morningside Park gymnasium, Columbia SDS activists and the student activists who led Columbia's Student Afro Society (SAS) held a second, confrontational demonstration on April 23, 1968. After the protesting Columbia and Barnard students were prevented from protesting inside Low Library by Columbia security guards, most of the student protesters marched down to the Columbia gymnasium construction site in Morningside Park, attempted to stop construction of the gymnasium and began to struggle with the New York City Police officers who were guarding the construction site. The NYPD arrested one protester at the gym site. The SAS and SDS students then left the gym site at Morningside Park and returned to Columbia's campus, where they took over Hamilton Hall, a building housing both classrooms and the offices of the Columbia College Administration.

Activist separation[ ]

An important aspect of the 1968 Columbia University protests was the manner in which activists were separated along racial lines. The morning after the initial takeover of Hamilton Hall, the 60 African-American students involved with the protest asked the predominantly white SDS students to leave. The SAS decision to separate themselves from SDS came as a total surprise to the latter group's members. SAS wanted autonomy in what they were doing at that point in the protest, because their goals and methods diverged in significant ways from SDS.^[5] While both the SAS and the SDS shared the goal of preventing the construction of the new gymnasium, the two groups held different agendas. The overarching goal of the SDS extended beyond the single issue of halting the construction of the gym. SDS wanted to mobilize the student population of Columbia to confront the University's support of the war, while the SAS was primarily interested in stopping the University's encroachment of Harlem, through the construction of the gym. It was of great importance to SAS that there was no destruction of files and personal property in faculty and administrative offices in Hamilton Hall, which would have reinforced negative stereotypes of black protesters destroying property then popular in the media. Having sole occupancy of Hamilton Hall thus allowed SAS to avoid any potential conflict with SDS about destruction of university property, as well as with other issues. Thus, the members of the SAS requested that the white radicals begin their own, separate protest so that the black students could put all of its focus into preventing the university from building the gym.^[6] The African-American students said that the European-American students could not understand the protest of the gymnasium as deeply, as its architectural plans were developed in a segregationist fashion. In addition, the African-American students knew that police would not be as violent against a group of black students, to prevent riots due to the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed three weeks prior.^[7]

What began as a unified effort would soon become a tension-filled standoff between black students and white students as the SAS began to meet separately from other protesters and secluding whites, with each group occupying a separate side of the building. There was minimal communication between the SDS and SAS which led to decreased solidarity between the two forces.^[8] An agreement would soon be made between the SDS and the SAS to separate white and black demonstrators. Soon after, the whites left Hamilton Hall and moved to Low Library, which housed the President's office.^[9] Over the next few days, the University President's office in Low Library (but not the remainder of the building, which housed the school switchboard in the basement, and offices elsewhere, but no actual library) and three other buildings, including the School of Architecture, which contained classrooms were also occupied by the student protesters. This separation of the SDS and SAS, with each using different tactics to accomplish its goals, was consistent with the student movement across the country.^[6] Only a portion of the occupiers were actual members of the University community. Many outside participants flocked to this newest point of revolution to participate, including students from other colleges, and street people.

In separating themselves from the white protesters early in the demonstration, the black protesters forced Columbia to address the issue of race. Falling so soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which had caused riots in the black neighborhoods surrounding the university, the administrators trod lightly in dealing with the demonstrators of the SAS. University administration seemed helpless against the group of African-American students who controlled the college's most important building and had support from off-campus black activists. Any use of force, officials feared, could incite riots in the neighboring Harlem community. Realizing this, those holed up in Hamilton Hall encouraged neighboring African-Americans to come to the campus and "recruited famous black militants to speak at their rallies."^[8] The student-community alliance that forged between students of the SAS and Harlem residents led to widespread growth in white support for the cause.^[8]

A photo of David Shapiro wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigar in Columbia President Grayson L. Kirk's office was published in the media.^[10] Mark Rudd announced that acting dean Henry S. Coleman would be held hostage until the group's demands were met. Though he was not in his office when the takeover was initiated, Coleman made his way into the building past protesters, went into his office and stated that "I have no control over the demands you are making, but I have no intention of meeting any demand under a situation such as this." Along with College administrators William Kahn and Dan Carlinsky, Coleman was detained as a hostage in his office as furniture was placed to keep him from leaving. He had been provided with food while being held and was able to leave 24 hours later, with The New York Times describing his departure from the siege as "showing no sign that he had been unsettled by the experience"^[11]

Popular responses[ ]

According to "Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968":

"By its final days the revolt enjoyed both wide and deep support among the students and junior faculty...The grievances of the rebels were felt equally by a still larger number, probably a majority of the students...Support for the demonstrators rested upon broad discontent and widespread sympathy for their position."

However, this statement is problematic, as both WKCR and Spectator conducted polls (citation needed) during the actual event and immediately afterward, and found that while many students sympathized with many of the goals of the demonstration, a majority were opposed to the manner in which things were carried out. To that end, a group of 300 undergraduates calling themselves the "Majority Coalition" (intended to portray the students involved in the occupation as not representative of the majority of liberal Columbia and Barnard students) organized after several days of the building occupation, in response to what they perceived as administration inaction. This group was made up of student athletes, fraternity members and members of the general undergraduate population, led by Richard Waselewsky and Richard Forzani. These students were not necessarily opposed to the spectrum of goals enunciated by the demonstrators, but were adamant in their opposition to the unilateral occupation of University buildings. They formed a human blockade around the primary building, Low Library. Their stated mission was to allow anyone who wished to leave Low to do so, with no consequence. However, they also prevented anyone or any supplies from entering the building. After three consecutive days of blockade, a group of protesters attempted on the afternoon of April 29 to forcibly penetrate the line but were repulsed in a quick and violent confrontation. In addition to fearing that Harlem residents would riot or invade Columbia's campus, the Columbia Administration also feared student on student violence. So at 5:00 PM that evening the Coalition was persuaded to abandon its blockade at the request of the faculty committee, who advised coalition leaders that the situation would be resolved by the next morning.

Suppression of protesters[ ]

The protests came to a conclusion in the early morning hours of April 30, 1968, when the NYPD violently quashed the demonstrations, with tear gas, and stormed both Hamilton Hall and the Low Library. Hamilton Hall was cleared peacefully as African-American lawyers were outside ready to represent SAS members in court and a tactical squad of African-American police officers with the NYPD led by Detective Sanford Garelick (the same investigator of the Malcolm X homicide) had cleared the African-American students out of Hamilton Hall. The buildings occupied by whites however were cleared violently as approximately 132 students, 4 faculty members and 12 police officers were injured, while over 700 protesters were arrested.^[12] Violence continued into the following day with students armed with sticks battling with officers. Frank Gucciardi, a 34-year-old police officer, was permanently disabled when a student jumped onto him from a second story window, breaking his back.^[13]

Second round of protests[ ]

More protesting Columbia and Barnard students were arrested and/or injured by New York City police during a second round of protests May 17–22, 1968, when community residents occupied a Columbia University-owned partially vacant apartment building at 618 West 114 Street to protest Columbia's expansion policies, and later when students re-occupied Hamilton Hall to protest Columbia's suspension of "The IDA Six." Before the night of May 22, 1968 was over, police had arrested another 177 students and beaten 51 students.^{[citation needed]}

Aftermath[ ]

Immediate responses[ ]

The protests achieved two of their stated goals. Columbia disaffiliated from the IDA and scrapped the plans for the controversial gym, building a subterranean physical fitness center under the north end of campus instead. A popular myth states that the gym's plans were eventually used by Princeton University for the expansion of its athletic facilities, but as Jadwin Gymnasium was already 50% complete by 1966 (when the Columbia gym was announced) this was clearly not correct.^[14]

At least 30 Columbia students were suspended by the administration as a result of the protests.^[15]

At the start of the protests, professor Carl Hovde served on a faculty group that established a joint committee composed of administrators, faculty and students that established recommendations for addressing disciplinary action for the students involved in the protests. Appointed as dean while the protests were continuing, Hovde stated that he felt that the "sit-ins and the demonstrations were not without cause" and opposed criminal charges being filed against the students by the university, though he did agree that the protesters "were acting with insufficient cause".^[16]

A number of the Class of '68 walked out of their graduation and held a counter-commencement on Low Plaza with a picnic following at Morningside Park, the place where it all began.^[9] The student demonstration that happened on Columbia's campus in 1968 proved that universities do not exist in a bubble and are, in fact, susceptible to the social and economic strife that surrounds them.^[6] These 1968 protests left Columbia University a much changed place, with, as historian Todd Gitlin describes, "growing militancy, growing isolation [and] growing hatred among the competing factions with their competing imaginations. The Columbia building occupations and accompanying demonstrations, in which several thousand people participated, paralyzed the operations of the whole university and became "the most powerful and effective student protest in modern American history," although it is very arguable that the protests at UC Berkeley and Kent State had far more sweeping repercussions.^[8] A wide variety of effects, both positive and negative, occurred in the wake of the demonstrations, but unfortunately for Columbia, they primarily affected enrollment and alumni donations. Additionally, the "growing militancy" Gitlin refers to peaked just a few years later, and while certain new loci of power came into being, in general campus life calmed down significantly. This is due in major part to the ending of the Vietnam War, which historians cr as the underlying and immediate cause of the majority of said movements. This excepts the Civil Rights Movement which was well under way prior to Vietnam. The two issues combined synergistically in the mid/late sixties.

Students involved in the protests continued their involvement in protest politics in varied forms affecting the movement at large. Their many activities included forming communes and creating urban social organizations. Several Columbia SDS members combined with the New York Black Panther Party to create Weatherman, a group dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government.^[2]

Columbia became much more liberal in its policies as a result of the student demonstrations and classes were canceled for the rest of the week following the end of the protest. Additionally, a policy was soon established that allowed students to receive passing grades in all classes with no additional work for the remainder of the abridged semester. In the place of traditional class, students held "liberation classes, rallies, [and] concerts outside" which included appearances by Allen Ginsberg and the Grateful Dead.^[2]

Long term effects[ ]

Columbia suffered quite a bit in the aftermath of the student protest. Applications, endowments, and grants for the university declined significantly in the following years. "It took at least 20 years to fully recover." ^[9] The protests left Columbia in a bad spot financially as many potential students chose to attend other universities and some alumni refused to donate any more to the school. Many believe that protest efforts at Columbia were also responsible for pushing higher education further toward the liberal left. These critics, such as Allan Bloom, a University of Chicago professor, believed, "American universities were no longer places of intellectual and academic debate, but rather places of 'political correctness' and liberalism." ^[6]

Racial divisions had also been strengthened as a result of the protests, made worse by the separate deal that the administration, to prevent a riot in Harlem, made with the black students of the SAS who had occupied Hamilton Hall. These black activists were permitted to exit the building through tunnels before the New York Police Department came. Black students maintained their own separate organization with a particular agenda: to foster the relationship between Columbia and the Harlem community and modify the curriculum to include black studies courses.^[8]

A university senate was established as a result of the protests. This council, with representation from the faculty, administration and student population, gave students the opportunity to positively restructure the university. It was a way to produce positive dialogue between students and authority figures.^[6] From here on out, university administration would be attentive to student concerns about university policies.^[17] Another result of the protests was an improved relationship with the Harlem community. The university was forced to approach neighboring Harlem with a certain respect.^[6] Instead of continuing expansion north and east into Harlem, Columbia shifted its focus for expansion west to the Hudson Riverside Park area.

Columbia's relationship with the United States military and federal government was changed, a number of years in advance of similar changes for other schools. There would be no more federal sponsorship of classified weapons research and international studies that had been occurring since World War II, as Columbia severed ties to the Institute for Defense Analyses, which had been created in 1955 to foster the connection between Columbia University and the defense establishment.^[17] In addition, the ROTC left the Morningside Heights campus as CIA and armed forces recruiters.^[9] As a sign of changing times, however, Columbia announced early in 2013 a renewal of its historic ties to NROTC.

According to Stefan Bradley in his book Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s, through the results of the protests, the SAS showed that Black Power, which refers to the ability for African-American students and black working-class community members to work together despite class differences, on an issue affecting African-Americans, could succeed as it had done in the Columbia University protests of 1968.^[6]

In popular culture:

The Strawberry Statement – by James Simon Kunen. This book details the particulars of the protest.

· The Strawberry Statement – film version of the above with less analysis.

· Columbia Revolt – 1968 documentary about the incident made by a collective of independent filmmakers.

· Across the Universe – by Julie Taymor.

· A Time to Stir – by Paul Cronin, a fifteen-hour documentary film^[18] (screened as work-in-progress at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008^[19]).

· 4 3 2 1 – by Paul Auster. This book details the particulars of the protest.

See also[

· A. Bruce Goldman

· Counterculture of the 1960s

· David Truman

· List of incidents of civil unrest in New York City

· Protests of 1968

· Silent Vigil at Duke University

· The Architect's Resistance

· List of incidents of civil unrest in the United States

References

1. ^ Jump up to:^{a b} "Columbia’s Radicals of 1968 Hold a Bittersweet Reunion", NY Times, April 28, 2008

2. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d} Slonecker, Blake. "The Politics of Space: Student Communes, Political Counterculture, and the Columbia University Protest of 1968", UNC University Libraries 2006. Accessed October 29, 2009.

3. ^ "Columbia to Build Sports Center It Will Share With Neighborhood; Site for $6,000,000 Facility to Be Donated by City -- University to Raise Fund". The New York Times. January 14, 1960. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 1, 2019.

4. ^ Millones, Peter (April 26, 1968). "GYM CONTROVERSY BEGAN IN LATE 50s; Many Columbia Opponents Use It as a Symbol". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 1, 2019.

5. ^ comments of Ray Brown in the "What Happened?" session of the retrospective Columbia 1968 Conference, held in 2008

6. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g} Bradley, Stefan (2009). Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. New York: University of Illinois. pp. 5–19, 164–191. ISBN 978-0-252-03452-7.

7. ^ "How Black Students Helped Lead the 1968 Columbia U. Strike Against Militarism & Racism 50 Years Ago". Democracy Now!. Retrieved October 22, 2018.

8. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Naison, Mark (2002). White Boy: A Memoir. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. pp. 90–95. ISBN 978-1-56639-941-8.

9. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d} Da Cruz, Frank. "Columbia University – 1968", Columbia University in the City of New YorkApril 1998. Accessed November 2, 2009.

10. ^ Banks, Eric. "New ghosts for old at Columbia", The Guardian, September 28, 2007. Accessed September 22, 2008. See this link for an image of the photo.

11. ^ Martin, Douglas. "Henry S. Coleman, 79, Dies; Hostage at Columbia in '68", The New York Times, February 4, 2006. Accessed September 12, 2009.

12. ^ McFadden, Robert D. "Remembering Columbia, 1968", The New York Times, April 25, 2008. Accessed March 17, 2013.

13. ^ Dominus, Susan "Disabled During ’68 Columbia Melee, a Former Officer Feels Pain, Not Rage", The New York Times, April 25, 2008. Accessed March 17, 2013.

14. ^ Hevesi, Dennis. "Gym Groundbreaking Will Be Held Next Month", Columbia Spectator, September 29, 1966.

15. ^ Columbia University – 1968

16. ^ Hevesi, Dennis. "Carl F. Hovde, Former Columbia Dean, Dies at 82", The New York Times, September 10, 2009. Accessed September 11, 2009.

17. ^ Jump up to:^{a b} Karaganis, Joseph. "Radicalism and Research", Accessed October 27, 2009.

18. ^ ‘We had the dust of radicalism sprinkled on us that night’ Guardian, 25 September 2020

19. ^ Toronto Rounds Out Film Festival with Four-Plus Hours of Its Best Material in A Time To Stir Village Voice

Further reading]

· Avorn, Jerry L.; Members of the Staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator (1969). Friedman, Robert (ed.). Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis. New York: Atheneum. OCLC 190161.

· Cox, Archibald; et al. (1968). Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968 [a/k/a The Cox Commission Report]. New York: Vintage Books. OCLC 634959303.

· Crisis at Columbia: An Inside Report on the Rebellion at Columbia from the Pages of the Columbia Daily Spectator. 1968.

· Cronin, Paul (ed.) A Time to Stir: Columbia '68 New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

· Grant, Joanne (1969). Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest. New York: New American Library. OCLC 32244.

· Kahn, Roger (1970). The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel. New York: William Morrow and Company. OCLC 84980.

· Kunen, James Simon (1969). The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. New York: Random House. OCLC 5595.

· Rudd, Mark (2009). Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. New Yo: William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-06-147275-6.

· Six Weeks That Shook Morningside (PDF). Columbia College Today (PDF). Spring 1968. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 14, 2011.

· Spring '68: 40 Years Later. Columbia College Today. May–June 2008.

External links

· 1968: Columbia in Crisis – Online exhibit from the Columbia University Archives

· "1968 Columbia Protests Still Stir Passion", NPR, April 23, 2008

· "Columbia '68: A Near Thing" – lecture by Robert A. McCaughey

· Columbia University 1968 by Frank da Cruz

· Interactive History of Columbia '68

· "Mutiny at a Great University", LIFE, May 10, 1968

· Stir It Up, Columbia Magazine, Spring 2008

· A Time to Stir

· How Black Students Helped Lead the 1968 Columbia University Strike Against Militarism and Racism 50 Years Ago, April 23, 2018, Democracy Now!

ATTACHMENT THREE – From David Shapiro, “New and Selected Poems”

From DJI: None of Mr. Shapiro’s poems, at least not in this book, touch upon Columbia, 1968. What was of concern to him, other than the quality of President Kirk’s cigars, was this… one of several first collected in the anthology “Poems from Deal” (some of which having reference to the arts, but none, visibly, to “The Art of”… which, itself, would not be published until nineteen years later).

New World of the Will

A black ear crawls on the window. It is

my own, my very own remarkable ear,

I hear little of the original spirit.

A piece of paper caught up in a tree

bearing the stationary marks of you and me

If you were here in teeth and kisses in New York.

how would you see the animals, the ants,

how they teem and murder and are driven too?

It is time for the pronunciation of the will.

So here among the dull and nightly rocks,

here where we first met, with philogophy

upon a lake where oarsmen rowed them past –

Receiving the strict letters and in the morning

On this same spot again I hinder you.

(Mary Trump might have appreciated this.) Shapiro would pose another paradox of precognition nine years later (a professional, precognitive poet, he!) with a longer work: “Music Written to Order”… perhaps a foreshadowing of the quarantine time under Trump (and, now, Biden).

“Yes the early Christians wore masks

And had listened to Terence

Accounting for the look of no look

Cubicle said to be that of Love and Psyche…”

ATTACHMENT FOUR – From the National Review

THE AMERICAN RIGHT HITS ITS HIPPIE PHASE