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

As Democrats embrace authority and Republicans push countercultural revolution, we’re reenacting the 1960s with the roles reversed.

By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

The greatest festival of the year at Hierapolis fell at the beginning of spring, when multitudes thronged to the sanctuary from Syria and the regions round about. While the flutes played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of onlookers, and many a one did that which he little thought to do when he came as a holiday spectator to the festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran through the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life.

— James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1914

In ye olden days when American intellectuals wrote provocative books that people read and sometimes fought over (Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve may have been the last genuine American intellectual scandal of its kind), the dissident feminist Camille Paglia published a fascinating study called Sexual Personae, in which she introduced a new generation of readers to the Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy that had been of so much interest to Friedrich Nietzsche. The Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy understands much of art and life as a struggle between the rational, orderly, formal (Apollonian) elements and the passionate, wild, chaotic (Dionysian) elements. There are virtues on both sides, but virtues that do not often coexist in peace — consider, for example, the Catholic Church’s struggles in harmonizing the order of its liturgy and hierarchy with the ecstasy of the mystics and militants.

Politics and tragedy are not entirely unrelated, and the Apollonian–Dionysian split shows up in the democratic agon, too.

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. Chaos is change - DJI (Tyranny, which is arbitrary government, is understood by conservatives to be a particular species of chaos that typically arises from or descends into ordinary, familiar chaos.) This Apollonian–Dionysian dynamic 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.

It is tempting to read the Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy of the 1960s as a straightforward exercise in power politics: In this view, the partisans of order and tradition were those who already had power and were anxious about losing it, while the partisans of upheaval and chaos were those without power seeking to establish, through personal and political radicalism, a zone of autonomy, with the hippies and the Merry Pranksters and all such acting as shock troops for the more politically serious movements that would advance alongside them, from the civil-rights movement to what used to be called “women’s liberation.” There is some truth to that, of course, but it isn’t quite correct, because 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.

The politics was only one part of a much more comprehensive cultural split that came with its own vestiary signifiers and tonsorial markers: the Goldwater gang with their crewcuts and neckties vs. the hippies with their long hair and outlandish outfits, William F. Buckley Jr.’s wit vs. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Even the rusticated Lyndon Johnson grew his hair long in retirement as an act of protest against the conservativism that was ascendant at the end of his days. As in our own time, politics was best understood as a constituent of — dread word — lifestyle.

The 1960s counterculture was big on performative filth, performative poverty, and, ultimately, performative madness. And it was a performance, even if some of it was genuine, too. Just as the partisans of order imitated paragons of order as they imagined them to be (hence conservatives’ double affectation of aristocratic refinement and John Wayne masculinity), the liberationists set about transforming themselves into lowlifes as they imagined them to be. In this they were led by such pioneers as William S. Burroughs, the Harvard-educated beneficiary of a St. Louis adding-machine fortune who became a Greenwich Village drug-dealer before retreating with his parents to Palm Beach, a fallen angel of the Midwestern patriciate. Burroughs’s banner was taken up and raised higher by such children of the High Bourgeoisie as Bill Ayers, the son of the chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison, and Squeaky Fromme, the 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. These figures were 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: Charles Manson and his addled Bacchae were pure Dionysian ecstasy — supported in part by trust-funders such as Sandra Good, who apparently remains a committed Mansonite to this day.

The 1960s began as “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Five years later, it was “Helter Skelter.” It was not a long and winding road — it was a short one.

There was not much Dionysian action on the right in those years. The Right was interested in order, tradition, and property. (Denouncing materialism was a good way to make money in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was not until the pop-culture triumph of hip-hop that Americans embraced the notion that great wealth could be put into the service of genuinely anti-establishment patterns of life.) The Left despised these things or affected to despise them. The immediate forebears of the people who today lecture passersby about what “the science says,” DJI = right wing anti-vaxx “evidence-based” politics, etc. — and, in some cases, the very same people — 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.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

My 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.

Democrats’ overall approach to politics right now is to associate their party and its members with high-status authority figures and to denounce Republicans as insufficiently reverent of these figures, and insufficiently deferential to them. The response of many Republicans has been to subject those authority figures and their institutions — and, in some ways, the idea of authority itself — to ridicule and scorn. They desire to be both outraged and outrageous, high on rage themselves and a source of rage and anxiety in others. Like those of the hippies and, later, the punks, this right-wing tendency is largely outward-focused rather than the expression of some intimate individual sensibility: If the hippies and the punks had been driven by some kind of anarchic individualism, they wouldn’t have all looked alike and listened to the same music. The point wasn’t originality or authenticity — it was to freak out the squares, to vex and offend the mainstream of society, the ’60s and ’70s version of “owning the libs.”

The leftist radicals of the 1960s were willing to engage in genuinely self-destructive behavior as a sacrifice to the idols they had constructed for themselves. They 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. This is self-harm, but it is also communicative. It is ceremonial outrage directed at the foundations of respectability per se, a reaction to what many on the right — and here I include myself — experience as an ever-narrower corridor of thinkable thoughts and sayable sentences. In some cases, those who are on the outside looking in discover that they are better pleased to be on the outside looking out — but others prefer to smash the windows, or to perform obscenities in front of them to shock and disgust those seated comfortably inside.

Obviously, this kind of histrionic, ecstatic, Dionysian politics is ultimately incompatible with conservatism properly understood, though it goes easily hand-in-hand with a particular kind of right-wing revolutionism. Hence the contemporary Right’s promises of revolution and of a Dionysian frenzy presaging a return to innocence, from Ron Paul’s “Revolution” to the Tea Party to “Make America Great Again,” which, as far as right-wing slogans go, at least has the good taste to be properly reactionary. Hence also the cultishness of Republican politics circa 2021: the fever-dream hysteria, the idolatry, the mad quackery and pseudoscientific enthusiasms, and — lest we forget — the violence. In 2000, the “Brooks Brothers Riot” was a joke — in 2021, the riot was for real, and some on the right are starting to get a taste for it.

Where and how this ends, I do not know. But if there were such a thing as stock in cults, I’d be long on those and short on most of what we understood to be conservatism until the day before yesterday.

ATTACHMENT FIVE – From Politico

WHEN THE LEFT ATTACKED THE CAPITOL

Fifty years ago, extremists bombed the seat of American democracy to end a war and start a revolution. It did neither, but it may have helped bring down a president.

By LAWRENCE ROBERTS, 02/28/2021 07:00 AM EST

· In the winter of 1971, you could still find vestiges of an age of innocence in Washington. The previous decade had been one of the most unstable in the country’s history, rocked by political assassinations, racial violence and explosions at public buildings. But at the U.S. Capitol, it was still easy to stroll through without having to empty your pockets or show a driver’s license. No metal detectors or security cameras. You didn’t need to join a tour. Which is why two young people who melted into the crowd of sightseers were free to scour the building for a safe spot to set their bomb.

They were members of the Weather Underground. Since 1969, the radical left group had already bombed several police targets, banks and courthouses around the country, acts they hoped would instigate an uprising against the government. Now two of these self-described revolutionaries wandered the halls with sticks of dynamite strapped under their clothing. They slipped into an unmarked marble-lined men’s bathroom one floor below the Senate chamber. They hooked up a fuse attached to a stopwatch and stuffed the device behind a 5-foot-high wall.

Shortly before 1 a.m. on March 1, the 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.”

It 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 lost their heads.

Shocked lawmakers condemned the attack. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana), called it an “outrageous and sacrilegious” hit on a “public shrine.” House Speaker Carl Albert (D-Oklahoma) said the bombing was “doubly sad” because it would likely lead to tighter security at the Capitol and less freedom for visitors. The Washington Post’s orial page lamented “the easy contagion of extremism in a time of dark frustrations and deep disillusionment.”

Fifty years later, we find the nation assessing the physical and psychic wreckage left by another Capitol attack, this one at the hands of the radical right. It would be wrong to give these events equal weight on the historical scale, to simply regard them as insurrections from opposite ends of the spectrum. Dangerous and criminal as it was, the bombing amounted to a kind of guerrilla theater, a symbolic destruction of federal property to protest the disastrous military intervention in Vietnam. The Jan. 6 mob that ransacked the Capitol, causing five deaths, embodied a far more perilous delusion: that a national election was fraudulent and should be overturned with threats and violence against lawmakers. “Stop the War” versus “Stop the Steal.”

Still, the attacks do share historical context. Each arose from a cauldron of political polarization and distrust of government. They were carried out by splinter groups that had abandoned faith in American democracy and would have been pleased to see the system collapse. Both led to heightened security in Washington. Thus it may be valuable to examine the events of 1971, and what lessons those days may hold for our new era of extremism.

One big difference is that the 1971 attack was meant to oppose, not support, the sitting president, Richard Nixon. Another is that the case remains cold. While the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in broad daylight, their faces captured by security cameras, their own social media feeds or witnesses with smartphones, the Weather Underground set the bomb in secret. Members were much harder to track down, since they lived together in small cells under false identities.

Since the underground group leaned on above-ground radicals for shelter, money and communications, the FBI and Justice Department decided to squeeze the Vietnam antiwar movement for information. Agents interrogated dozens of people and convened grand juries in several cities. Apparently no one cracked. Even as the feds employed increasingly aggressive and unconstitutional tactics, they had little success. Eventually, nearly all the fugitives surfaced. Yet no one ever was charged with attacking the Capitol. A half-century later, the action that the radical group considered “probably the single most important Weather bombing” remains officially unsolved.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 rampage, at least 200 people have been charged so far. Thousands more scattered around the country remain sympathetic to the rioters’ cause. While the bombing of the Capitol represented an apogee of that era’s left-wing radicalism, the lifespan of right-wing violence, powered not by small cells of self-styled guerrillas but the demagoguery of a former president, might well persist longer.

The Weather militants conceived the Capitol bomb as a curtain-raiser for the most intense season of dissent in Washington’s history. Various groups were coming to town for weeks of peaceful protests they’d named the Spring Offensive. It represented a last-ditch effort to end a war that over six years had already claimed the lives of more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of fighters and civilians in Southeast Asia. Picketing, marching and campaigning hadn’t stopped the killing. True, the antiwar movement had chased President Lyndon Johnson from the White House, and his successor, Nixon, had campaigned on a promise to end the war. But instead, Nixon expanded it into Cambodia and then, weeks before the Capitol bombing, into Laos.

In a communique, the Weather Underground said it had attacked “the very seat of U.S. white arrogance” to protest the Laos invasion. It wanted to prove its “solidarity” with the victims of American wars, hoping to “freak out the warmongers” and “bring a smile and a wink to the kids and people here who hate this government. To spread joy.”

Certainly, some on the left were joyful, but opinion within the antiwar movement was sharply divided about extremism. And of those planning the Spring Offensive, few could have been more distressed about the bomb than Rennie Davis.

At the age of 30, Davis, charismatic, serious and stylish—“elegant in a suede jacket,” as one columnist gushed—was one of the country’s more imaginative activists. His talent for oratory had earned him a leading role in Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, the largest component of what came to be known as the New Left. He helped mount big demonstrations like the one in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention, after which the Nixon administration indicted him and seven others for conspiracy to incite a riot.

In the spring of 1971, Davis was back in Washington, where he’d grown up, to organize the finale of the Spring Offensive. Davis and his colleagues believed the movement needed to escalate tactics. He invented a slogan: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” Under his plan, protesters who called themselves the Mayday Tribe would hit the streets on the morning of the first workday in May, blockading the city through civil disobedience. Participants would face arrest for obstructing traffic, but Davis and his co-organizers, especially veteran peace activist David Dellinger, promised to remain strictly nonviolent. Quakers conducted training to ensure no one would get hurt.

Now Davis worried the bomb undermined this promise of nonviolence and would bring the full force of the feds down on their heads.

His fears were justified. A few days after the explosion, two agents grabbed him as he left the Mayday headquarters at 1029 Vermont Avenue, a well-worn 11-story building a few blocks from the White House, where most peace groups had their D.C. offices. They pushed him up against a car parked in the alley and grilled him about the bombing. Davis told them what he’d been telling reporters: He was “absolutely not involved.”

One thing he didn’t mention: He’d learned about the attack in advance, and tried to stop it, as he acknowledged to me not long ago.

For Davis, the matter was personal. His younger brother, John, was a member of the Weather Underground. And he knew most of the others, because he’d worked with them in SDS, before the student group had disintegrated in 1969 as its factions battled over the proper path to social and revolutionary change.

The most militant cadres veered into guerrilla action. They saw the U.S. as a pretend democracy, structured to oppress the poor and the powerless at home and abroad. Isolated, intoxicated with self-importance, Weather took inspiration from peasant guerrilla movements in Vietnam and Latin America and from martyrs such as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Black Panthers who had been shot by Chicago police in their beds, an incident widely viewed as a cold-blooded execution. They felt kinship with John Brown, who led the 1859 antislavery raid at Harper’s Ferry. They taught themselves to make bombs with dynamite—“that most romantic of 19th century radical tools,” as one wrote later.

Even at the time, few leftists bought Weather’s idea that the U.S. had entered a pre-revolutionary condition that only needed some well-placed explosions and other violent confrontations with state power to spark a final uprising by the poor and working class. In the cold light of history, the group’s political and strategic analysis looks even more misguided and wacky. Yet even at its most unhinged, it promoted nothing as bizarre as the fringe theories we hear now about rigged voting machines, space lasers and international rings of satanic pedophiles.

A year before the Capitol bombing, though, Weather did take its own horrific dive down the ideological rabbit hole. One collective assembled a bomb, packed with roofing nails, intended for soldiers and their dates attending a dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Had they succeeded, they would have erased any question about whether they were terrorists. Instead, on the day of the dance, March 6, 1970, it was the bomb-makers who died. Somehow the device went off in their makeshift factory, in the basement of a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village. Three people blew themselves to bits. At least two escaped, including Cathy Wilkerson, whose father owned the house, and Kathy Boudin, daughter of a prominent liberal defense attorney.

The disaster didn’t dissuade Weather from building more bombs, but from then on, “we were very careful … to be sure we weren’t going to hurt anybody,” one said later. When Davis caught wind of the D.C. plan, he tried to head it off. He cranked up his considerable persuasive power. As a teenager he’d been famous in his Virginia hometown for talking his way out of a speeding ticket, telling a judge he’d just been racing home to finish homework. Rennie contacted his brother and others in the group. This would be no gift to the antiwar movement, he argued. Quite the contrary: A bombing now would undermine the careful preparations for the Spring Offensive.

Weather wouldn’t budge. “That was a nightmare for me,” Davis told me.

The radical group gave the action a code name: Big Top. At first, it looked like a failure.

It’s unusual that we know so much about this particular attack. Even now, ex-Weather members appear to honor an omertà about their activities. Perhaps it was youthful pride that led them to reconstruct the caper in the mid-1970s for the documentary “Underground,” directed by Emile de Antonio. They identified themselves by name, while keeping their faces obscured. Over the years, additional details have emerged from associates, friends and relatives of the bombers, who spilled anonymously to historians and authors including Susan Braudy (Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left), Ron Jacobs (The Way the Wind Blows), Bryan Burrough (Days of Rage) and Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Destructive Generation).

So we know Big Top became a project for two teams. One team posed as tourists and scouted the building. A trash can? A closet? A tunnel? Finally, they found the 5-foot wall. Full of dust, so it probably wasn’t checked regularly. On Saturday, February 27, 1971, the two members of the other team strapped the dynamite and timer to their bodies and assembled the device in the bathroom. As they lifted it into its hiding place, it didn’t sit securely. “There was a ledge where the people who did it thought there had been a shelf,” Weather member Jeff Jones explained in the documentary. “It fell several feet.” After a sickening few seconds, they let out their breath. The bomb appeared intact, still set to go at 1:30 a.m. They left the building.

The group had mailed copies of a letter to the New York Post and The Associated Press, taking responsibility. Sent by special delivery, it carried the group’s logo, a rainbow with a lightning bolt. That night, they placed their warning call. The Capitol police searched, found nothing. Zero hour came and went, and no bomb exploded. The fall must have broken the timer.

“So the organizers had a series of quick calls around the country and came up with a plan,” Jones said, “which was to take a much smaller device and go back in, and put it on top of the one that had been put there the day before. Sort of like a little starter motor.”

The next day, Sunday, the bombers returned, placed the new device, and called the switchboard again. U.S. Capitol Police searched as many rooms as they could in half an hour. According to an FBI report, one man checked the bathroom that held the bomb, saw nothing, and moved on. Only seven minutes later, it blew. Damage was estimated to be at least $100,000, equivalent to $650,000 today. (This week, officials put the cost of the Jan. 6 riot at $30 million.)

Neither Jones nor anyone else in the documentary named the bombers. However, at least three published accounts have identified them as two women then in their late 20s—Kathy Boudin, one of the survivors of the Greenwich Village explosion, and Bernardine Dohrn, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s law school whose looks, brains and take-no-prisoners attitude had made her a romantic icon within the left. Neither Boudin nor Dohrn has publicly admitted or denied placing the Capitol bomb. Neither responded to questions for this article.

According to Destructive Generation, it was Dohrn who called Rennie Davis in 1971. A few years ago, I visited Davis at his Colorado home as I researched my book MAYDAY 1971, about the clash between Nixon and the antiwar movement. His memories of the old days were generally quite sharp, except when it came to the Capitol bomb. He confirmed he’d been alerted about the attack in advance, but said he wasn’t told where or when it would blow. He also said he didn’t remember who called him, and he didn’t recall, if he ever knew, who actually placed the device. Davis died earlier this month from cancer, at the age of 80.

Three days after the bombing, Dohrn, already on the FBI’s most-wanted list for other crimes, nearly had been captured in the Bay Area, when she and others picked up some money wired to a Western Union office. A federal agent recognized them, but they sped away and later switched cars to elude the authorities. One of the drivers was Rennie’s brother John. His were among the fingerprints the FBI later found in a San Francisco apartment where the band had been handling explosives.

But the bureau hadn’t identified Dohrn as one of the possible Capitol bombers. The FBI and Justice Department remained focused on Washington.

As recent events have borne out, the federal government often underreacts to perceived security threats from the right and overreacts to those coming from the left.

The 1971 bomb blew at a crucial moment for Richard Nixon. On that particular morning he was winging his way to Iowa to shore up political support in the heartland. The president was struggling politically, his approval rating dropping. Republicans had lost a slew of congressional seats and governorships in the 1970 midterms, despite Nixon’s hope that moderates would approve the way he was handling the Vietnam War—stepping up the fighting while slowly withdrawing U.S. troops. Next year’s reelection campaign was looking fierce; polls showed him trailing the presumed leader among the Democratic challengers, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.

Nixon had largely built his career on antipathy to liberals and the left, and he didn’t need any additional fuel for his visceral distaste of the antiwar movement. A successful Spring Offensive threatened to not only complicate his Vietnam policies, and thus his second term, but also could distract from his grand plan to reopen diplomatic ties with China and remake the Cold War world.

One of his aides, Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., who would later run the notorious White House “Plumbers” unit that plugged damaging leaks to the media and sought to undermine the president’s opponents, fired off a memo suggesting the Capitol bomb could be a rare opportunity. Handled right, it might counter the trend of “softer” support for the administration’s Vietnam policies from “middle of the road Americans.” The explosion, wrote Krogh, “is a chance for us to point out that we have not been tough for nothing. A bomb detonating in the breast of the Senate is as close as one can get to the heart of super-liberal thought in this government.”

Early in his presidency, Nixon had urged the FBI and Justice Departments to crack down harder on the antiwar movement, even contemplating giving written approval to illegal tactics such as burglarizing the homes and offices of activists. Before the Spring Offensive, Attorney General John Mitchell insisted the protests would turn out to be violent, no matter what organizers said. He secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on the Mayday Tribe and three other groups. Now, the bombing fed the president’s belief that there wasn’t much difference between underground militants and peaceful protesters. Reporting to Nixon on the FBI’s hunt for the bombers, his chief domestic policy adviser listed the suspects: “It’s the Bernadette (sic) Dohrn, Rennie Davis bunch.”

The FBI shifted agents from all parts of the Washington field office to the case. They tailed Mayday activists, including four young people who drove north the day after the bombing, finally stopping them on a Pennsylvania highway. The agents, brandishing shotguns, searched their car but found no reason to detain them.

After all the investigating, only one person was taken into custody in connection with the bombing. She was a tall 19-year-old blonde from California named Leslie Bacon, who had been helping book musicians for the rallies. The FBI found witnesses who said they saw Bacon in the Capitol the day before the blast. When she denied it, she was charged with lying to the grand jury. Weather wrote an open letter to Bacon’s mother, saying she was innocent: “Mrs. Bacon, we cannot turn ourselves in to save Leslie. She is a committed revolutionary and understands this.”

At least a dozen other activists were subpoenaed before grand juries in New York, Detroit and Washington. All refused to answer questions. Some taunted the feds, like Judy Gumbo Albert, the driver of the car stopped in Pennsylvania, who declared of the bombing: “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.” Prosecutors had to decide whether to bring Bacon to trial anyway. But by the time the matter came up, the Supreme Court had issued a decision that effectively would have forced the government to disclose details of its surveillance. The Watergate burglars had just been caught, and the last thing the administration needed was another bugging scandal. Nixon himself ordered the Bacon case dropped. She and the other activists went free. Bacon has continued to say she had nothing to do with the bombing.

The Weather Underground continued to stage nonlethal bombings in the 1970s, notably a blast inside a Pentagon bathroom and at the State Department. (They called ahead on those, too.) When the Vietnam War finally ended, the group lost its center of gravity. By 1980, Weather had effectively disbanded. Dohrn, along with her husband and fellow member, Bill Ayers, came out of hiding. They didn’t go to prison. The government had dropped most charges against them for the same reason they couldn’t prosecute Leslie Bacon, and also because agents on a desperate hunt for clues had been caught conducting illegal break-ins at homes of the fugitives’ friends and relatives. The FBI’s overreach had backfired, but the era of left-wing extremism imploded on its own.

Kathy Boudin was one of the few who remained underground. In 1981, she helped a group called the Black Liberation Army rob an armored Brink’s truck outside New York City. Two police officers and a guard were killed, the militants were captured. Boudin and her romantic partner, David Gilbert, went to prison. She left their 14-month-old son to be raised by her closest friends, Dohrn and Ayers, who became academics in Chicago.

A grand jury subpoenaed Dohrn in the Brink’s case. When she refused to give a handwriting sample, she was jailed for eight months. Her friend Boudin spent 22 years in prison, winning parole in 2003, and now serves as co-director of the Center for Justice at Columbia University.

Neither has disclosed anything specific about Weather’s activities, but Dohrn has spoken in general about those days, with some regret if not quite an apology. “Now, nobody in today’s world can defend bombings,” she said in a November 2008 interview with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now.” “How could you do that after 9/11, after, you know, Oklahoma City? It’s a new context, in a different context … the context of the time has to be understood.”

In the same interview her husband said: “I think that if we’ve learned one thing from those perilous years, it’s that dogma, certainty, self-righteousness, sectarianism of all kinds is dangerous and self-defeating.”

As a slogan of the 1960s went, what goes around comes around. That 14-month-old son who Dohrn and Ayers raised for Boudin? He became a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer and a public defender. In 2019, he was elected district attorney of San Francisco, a job once held by Vice President Kamala Harris. And on Jan. 6, as the pro-Trump mob attacked, Chesa Boudin sent out a tweet: “Hoping everyone who works in the Capitol is safe from this despicable effort to take down our democracy.” (See Attachment Five A, below)

Fifty years on, it seems remarkable how fast the 1971 attack faded from collective memory, even as it exercised a profound effect on the end of an era of political activism that would be unrivaled until the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The bombing supercharged Nixon’s paranoia, leading the president and his aides to ramp up their crackdown on the New Left. They ordered the biggest, and most unconstitutional, mass arrests in U.S. history during the Mayday protests, rounding up more than 12,000 people. And then weeks later, the White House launched illegal measures to discr Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. On Labor Day weekend, Krogh dispatched operatives to break into the office of Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, searching for compromising material. Nixon’s men were field-testing the tactics they’d soon be caught using against their political opponents in the 1972 election. Thus, you can draw a line, if a dotted one, from the bombing to the demise of Richard Nixon in 1974. Donald Trump, meanwhile, still awaits the consequences of the Jan. 6 attack.

Lawrence Roberts, is the author of MAYDAY 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest

ATTACHMENT FIVE (A) – From Guardian UK

CHESA BOUDIN, SON OF JAILED WEATHERMEN RADICALS, IS NEW SAN FRANCISCO DA

· Candidate supported by Bernie Sanders declares victory

· Parents Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert were jailed in 1981

By Guardian Staff and Agencies, Sun 10 Nov 2019 16.28 EST

The son of two anti-war radicals who went to prison for murder has won a tightly contested race for district attorney in San Francisco, after campaigning to overhaul the criminal justice system.

Chesa Boudin’s parents were members of the far-left, anti-Vietnam war Weather Underground, which was active in the 1960s and 70s. His mother, Kathy Boudin, survived an infamous explosion in Greenwich Village, New York City, in March 1970, when members of the group accidentally detonated a bomb intended for an army ball in New Jersey.

She and her husband, David Gilbert, were sent to prison when Chesa was an infant, for their role in an armed heist in New York in 1981 in which three people were killed by members of the Black Liberation Army. Kathy Boudin was released in 2003. Gilbert remains in jail.

Growing up, I had to go through a metal detector and steel gates just to give my parents a hug

Chesa Boudin

Boudin, 39, has said growing up with incarcerated parents motivated him to study law and reform the criminal justice system. In 2002, the Yale grad and Rhodes scholar told the Guardian: “Growing up in a household where people have a political consciousness, where people think and care deeply about political issues has an impact on you.”

He was raised by two other well-known Weathermen, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

“My parents are all people who have taken a stand for what they believe in over and over again,” he said 17 years ago. “That to me is a fine example – even if I disagreed with some of their choices.”

In a campaign video this year, he said: “Growing up, I had to go through a metal detector and steel gates just to give my parents a hug.”

After college, Boudin had a spell working as a translator for Hugo Chávez, the late president of Venezuela.

On Saturday night in San Francisco, he declared victory after four days of ballot-counting determined he was ahead of Suzy Loftus. Results from the San Francisco department of elections gave Boudin victory by 2,825 votes. Loftus, the interim district attorney, said she would work to ensure a smooth transition.

Loftus was appointed by Mayor London Breed last month, after George Gascon announced he was resigning and moving to Los Angeles to explore a run for DA there. Loftus was endorsed by the Democratic establishment, including California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the US senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, for whom she worked when Harris was San Francisco DA.

“San Francisco has always been supportive of a progressive approach to criminal justice,” Harris said on Sunday while campaigning in Iowa for the Democratic presidential nomination. “It’s the nature of that town and I congratulate the winner.”

Boudin received high-profile support from the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and the writer and civil rights activist Shaun King. Congratulating Boudin, Sanders tweeted: “Now is the moment to fundamentally transform our racist and broken criminal justice system by ending mass incarceration, the failed war on drugs and the criminalization of poverty.”

Boudin is the latest candidate across the US to win district attorney elections by pushing for sweeping reform of incarceration policies. In a statement on his win, he said he wanted to tackle racial bias in the criminal justice system, overhaul the bail system, protect immigrants from deportation and pursue accountability in police misconduct cases.

“The people of San Francisco have sent a powerful and clear message,” he said. “It’s time for radical change to how we envision justice. I’m humbled to be a part of this movement that is unwavering in its demand for transformation.”

· This article was amended on 11 November 2019. It originally said Boudin was ahead by 8,465 votes. In fact, his final margin of victory was 2,825. It was further amended on 13 November 2019 to correct a misspelling of Chesa Boudin’s first name.

AND… ATTACHMENT FIVE (B) – From the Daily Beast

GROWING UP WEATHER UNDERGROUND

Updated Apr. 25, 2017 3:18PM ET / Published Apr. 17, 2009 1:03PM ET 

Ah, to have been a fly on the wall during the Weather Underground meetings in the Sixties. Now, we have something even better: a memoir from Bill Ayers’ adopted son (and later, Rhodes Scholar) Chesa Boudin, who recounts his experiences growing up with some of the most notorious people in America for parents. In Gringo: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America, Boudin describes not only his radical upbringing but also the decade he spent traveling around South America. Gringo may sound intriguing, but the book comes up short when it comes to writing. The New York Times writes of Boudin’s style: “It belongs in a yoga magazine, not between hardcovers.” What would Bill Ayers say to that?

ATTACHMENT SIX – From the Daily Hampshire (Mass.) Gazette

Columnist Joe Gannon: Trump supporters have their ’60s moment

· By JOE GANNON, Published: 8/10/2018 10:10:52 PM

·

While recently obeying summer’s most important commandment — Thou shalt spend hours staring off into the hills — I had an epiphany about Donald Trump’s hardcore supporters whose faith cannot be shaken by scandal, incompetence, nor capitulation to the enemy: No matter how bad it seems to the rest of us, they are absolutely gleeful!

Why, when so many worry, such unbridled, even reckless, glee? And then it hit me: They are having their ‘60s moment — their counterculture, stick-it-to-the-man moment.

Consider: Trump supporters are as anti-establishment now as the hippies were back in the ‘60s. 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. Stay with me a little bit.

The ‘60s, at least for white people, mostly began with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Nowadays, we might say those student radicals “weaponized” free speech, the same way the alt-right does now in claiming they are the champions of free (albeit hate) speech, and the establishment the purveyors of suppression.

The ironies are just too rich to ignore: here is the establishment warning Trump’s anti-hippie-hippies that they are in danger of falling prey to Russian manipulation, the same way The Man tried to convince the ‘60s hippies they were playing into the hands of the Soviet Union. Trump’s supporters are as impervious to such a clarion call as was Abbie Hoffman, the premier merry prankster of the ‘60s.

The “anti-hippie-hippie” theory explains his supporters shrugging off Trump’s brown-nosing Vladimir Putin at the Helsinki summit. The counterculture did not turn its back on Jane Fonda when she visited North Vietnam, during the war. Indeed, many hippies had already taken up the chant “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is gonna win!”

Trump’s anti-hippies chant “We’re rootin’ for Putin! We’re rootin’ for Putin!” while the rest of us shake our heads in utter disbelief.

Trump’s overwhelmingly white supporters, you could say, are those who did not get a ’60s moment during the ‘60s. They mostly got a tour in Vietnam, some drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll, then Watergate and then a blue-collar job, hopefully in time to collect a pension before it was shipped overseas. But they didn’t get Freedom Rides, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, nor the chance to re-invent themselves as flower-power children.

So they, and their kids, are now — only instead of flower power, it’s glower power. And they will not be denied.

This best explains their utter gleefulness. The more liberals, even sensible Republicans, warn the end is nigh, the more gleeful they become, which is why consternation is pandemic amongst liberals. That is the anti-hippie hippie’s point. Their glee is doubly magnified because unlike the ‘60s hippies, their undisputed, irreplaceable leader was not assassinated nor jailed, but elected to the highest office. (Imagine Abbie Hoffman as president in 1969, and Black Panther Huey Newton vice president and you get a feel for how good it feels to be them!)

The ‘60s hippies didn’t want to educate the “man in the gray suit” — they wanted to put a “kick me” sign on his back. Neither do the Trumpista anti-hippies want to “rap” with liberals. Like the hippies, they want most to outrage, exhaust and alienate an establishment they believe is corrupt, doting and incapable of reform.

And like the real hippies, Trumpistas are loyal only to themselves and those who believe, even live, as they do. The rest of us are too square, man, to get it. And Trump’s anti-hippies are determined they “won’t get fooled again” by Democrats nor Republican sellouts.

The parallels match, in a reverse image, through-the-looking-glass way. The hippies’ mantra was “trust no one a like Ramparts magazine, which once ran the headline “Enemy bombs Hanoi.” The anti-hippies watch Sean Hannity rave: “Deep State Overthrows Trump.”

The whole messy, unwashed, impolite, seething mass of countercultural ‘60s crazy was seeking to expand the reach of our national credo — E Pluribus Unum — to those who had been excluded from the One for so long.

And what was their legacy? The civil rights and voting rights acts? Ask Black Lives Matter if the work is finished. Women organizing themselves as feminists? Ask the #MeToo movement if that work is finished.

The legacy of the ‘60s, ultimately, was not political, but an evolutionary leap in consciousness. The hippies, for all their dopey theater and often painful displays of middle-class, white privilege, looked at the wall America had built around all people are created equal and kicked it over — if not in daily practice, then in our national consciousness. Their legacy is they picked the lock on Straight White Male America and the door popped open.

Trump’s anti-hippies in this their summer, not of love, but of their discontent, seek to rebuild that wall, to close that door, to rewrite E Pluribus Unum as Omnis Homo Sibi — everyman for himself.

The anti-hippies cannot put the genie of multicultural liberation back into the lily-white bottle — you cannot undo evolutionary change. But it is clear the change begun fifty years ago is still playing out. That a large swath of America that did not heed the call for liberation — either because they did not hear it or did not think it called to them — is now determined to drown it out.

The ‘60s hippies were a generational turnover — rebellious youth as the tip of the spear of change, messy as it was, and is. Trump’s anti-hippies are a counterinsurgency of the Old Farts, as they follow their mad Merry Prankster on his electric Kool-Aid hater trip.

I have field-tested this idea on some of my otherwise impervious Trumpista Facebook friends, and frankly, it freaked them out, man! Give it a try.

ATTACHMENT SEVEN – From the Daily Beast

STEVE BANNON’S SHOUT-OUT TO A LEFT-WING TERROR GROUP

In a rip-roaring speech at a rally in New York, Trump’s top adviser channeled one of the 20th century’s most controversial leftist groups.

Last August I wrote an article for the The Daily Beast [that has now gone viral] about a strange encounter I had with Steve Bannon at a party on Nov. 12, 2013. Bannon, whom I had never met, came up to me and informed me that he was a “Leninist” who wanted to bring down the establishment including the Republican and Democratic Parties. Back then, he was organizing and speaking for the Tea Party, and his sights were set on winning Congressional races. They were the vehicle through which he hoped his ideas would take root and that by winning races the Tea Party activists would set the stage for a future populist transformation.

Bannon has certainly come far. Not only is he a senior adviser to the president at the White House, he is hiring many of his former staff at Breitbart.com to join him. He has been given an unprecedented seat on the Principles Committee of The National Security Council (never before given to a political adviser by any administration, Democrat or Republican). Not content with this, Bannon has created a counter group to the NSC in his office, called the Strategic Initiatives Group. The NSC’s “stature, independence and influence,” as Julie Smith and Derek Chollet write in Foreign Policy, has been even more eroded. As they put it, “Bannon and his team have been increasing their public profiles on foreign policy issues in recent days,” which may be an understatement.

It is no wonder that Bannon is sarcastically being referred to by many commentators as “President Bannon.” This past week, it was Bannon- not the president- who got the cover story in Time which called him “the Second Most Powerful Man in the World.” Because of his importance in the Trump administration, there is great interest in finding out what he believes, and what motivates him.

The answer is to be found in a speech Bannon delivered in New York City to an outdoor rally to the New York Tea Party on April 15, 2010. Here he is angry, and inflames the rowdy crowd with his attacks on the “world financial system.” Bannon attributes the financial collapse to “the financial elites and the American political class.” They took care of themselves, he tells the crowd, and let everyone else suffer, as government took over the financial industry, the auto industry and the health system. He refers to the “ticking time bomb” of mortgage defaults, and he calls the situation an “existential threat” to the nation, a “true crisis” that threatens the nation’s sovereignty. “Our beloved country is an addict,” he says, led by the “pushers on Wall Street.” Then he holds up a copy of The New York Times which he calls the paper “of the liberal elite,” while he describes The New York Post as the paper of the people. The Tea Party, Bannon says, are the people who fight our wars, pay our taxes, work in civic organizations—“the beating heart of the greatest nation on earth.”

It is the end of his speech, however, that is most important. After blasting Anderson Cooper and CNN, he concludes with words that somehow have escaped all the commentators who have been writing on Bannon:

"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, he was saying that he and the Tea Party are revolutionaries who want to bring down the system. 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.

These revolutionary New Leftists’ goal was to use bombing and guerrilla warfare tactics to bring down our democratic capitalist system, to smash the state and create a revolution in the United States. Clearly Bannon is consciously revealing that he sees the Tea Party as the equivalent of a new revolutionary movement, that will play the same role as did the Weather Underground by organizing to destroy the old order.

Recent articles, including one in The Washington Post by Frances Stead Sellers and David A. Fahrenthold, and another one by Steve Reilly and Brad Heath in USA Today, have presented his views from his take on Islam, which he believes we are at war with, to his belief that there is a crisis of national sovereignty which is being threatened by global elites, which necessitates “strong nationalist movements” being developed both here and abroad.

Bannon famously believes that “we’re at war,” not only with jihadists and Islam around the world, but at home with the press—the real opposition party—and the entire American left-wing. But to understand just what Bannon’s actual world view is, one must look at other speeches he gave to different Tea Party groups. The most recent was this past August, in the heat of Trumps’ campaign which Bannon had joined, before it was becoming apparent that Trump would win the White House.

Anyone who thinks Bannon is not smart will think differently after hearing his performance. In much of his speech he sounds like Bernie Sanders. He talks about how working-class and middle-class women who formed the Tea Party know how prices for groceries have gone up, and about the debt their children have incurred for going to college. He talks about the new Generation Zero, as he calls today’s young generation, that knows no history and hence buy into the illusions of Occupy Wall Street.

Here, Bannon’s anger is directed at the cultural, financial, industrial and political elite in America. His concern is for the enraged middle-class, who sees “socialism for the poor and the very wealthy,” while middle-class people are “paying for their own children’s destruction.” He notes how the bankers and the people at Goldman-Sachs, where he once worked, made money on the backs of regular people, who lost their homes and saw their incomes decline. [One wonders what he thinks of Stephen Mnuchin, who made a killing from owning One West Bank, that foreclosed on delinquent homeowners, and then evicted them from their houses and profited from their losses.] “There is no depression,” he says, “in Georgetown” and “in East Hampton.” The people he speaks to, he tells them, “are the last line of defense” for saving America.

Bannon distains Republicans and conservatives who, he thinks, got everything wrong by attacking the Tea Party. He names people he says he has “great respect for,” including conservative pundits Charles Krauthammer and David Frum. He and the Tea Party, Bannon emphasizes are not “homophobic, nativist” and “racist,” but simply people trying to save the country. Referring to America as a center-right nation, Bannon attacks the large national debt and out of control federal spending which keeps expanding it. And of course, he has no patience for the Occupy Wall Street movement who know very little about real life and how it works.

Bannon, of course, put it most succinctly in his much-discussed speech at the Vatican in 2014. It is here that he talked about “the global war against Islamic fascism” that must be waged, about crony capitalism that in the Marxist sense treats people as commodities, and where he praises the “entrepreneurial spirit… that can flow back to working-class and middle-class people.” If you put aside his nationalist solution, this is quite like the arguments made by most leftists and socialists.

What is different is that Bannon clearly favors an alliance with the new right-wing authoritarian and populist parties in Europe, with Le Pen’s National Front in France, Neil Farage’s UKIP in Britain, and Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, as well as other similar ones throughout the continent. He states, attacking crony capitalism, that… "all the upside goes to the hedge funds and the investment banks, and to the crony capitalist with stock increases and bonus increases. And their downside is limited," because the banks will be saved and bailed out by middle-class taxpayers.

Now that he is in the White House, Bannon seeks to use the Trump presidency and administration as the vehicle to fulfill the very revolutionary goals he has sought since 2008. Referring to the movement he is helping build as revolution- “and this is a revolution,” Bannon emphasized in the Vatican speech, his end goal is to create “a new center-right populist movement.” That seems at first glance to be a benign goal, since other conservatives and centrists also favor it. But Bannon’s version is different- when he says “center-right” he means a new nationalist, anti-immigrant movement quite different from that favored by many conservatives and centrists. That alone, he believes will produce the revolutionary outcome he seeks.

Whether or not he will succeed remains to be seen.

ATTACHMENT EIGHT – From Vice

CAPITOL RIOTERS IN JAIL’S ‘PATRIOT WING’ HAVE THEIR OWN RITUALS AND A GROWING FAN BASE

Experts worry that a lack of de-radicalization efforts in jail could mean inmates falling further into the narrative that led to the January 6 violence in the first place.

By Tess Owen October 21, 2021, 12:01pm

At 9 p.m. every night, inmates in the so-called Patriot Wing of the D.C. Correctional Treatment Facility reportedly stand at attention and sing The Star-Spangled Banner. You can even listen, if you want, to an alleged recording of it on the website called The Patriot Freedom Project.

Inmates also started their own handwritten newsletter and passed it from cell to cell, one detainee told NBC 4. 

Part of a letter from one inmate, Guy Reffitt, and signed “The 1/6 -ers,” was published by ProPublica earlier this year and entered into evidence in the court. It reads like a manifesto on behalf of the Capitol rioters.

“We have been labeled the enemy, yet clearly we see tyranny as the enemy,” they wrote. “While our lawyers do our bidding and the judges do their duties, we remain resolute, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the National Anthem all in unison, loud and proud most every day. All because we are us, we are you, we are all Americans and in here, we have no labels.”

The “Patriot Wing” houses the most hardcore perpetrators of the January 6 riot, roughly 40 men in all. 

On the outside, they’ve been recast as “political prisoners” by some sitting GOP politicians, while some fans even paint them as heroes—literally. One pro-Trump fine artist recently published images of a new painting titled “Solitary Confinement,” showing a shackled prisoner wearing a red MAGA hat, wasting away in his cell. That image has been shared widely on right-wing forums, with captions like “Never forget your brothers who fought on Jan. 6.” There’s also a coordinated “patriot mail” letter-writing campaign, plus fundraisers for the inmates, and lawmakers have led protests on their behalf. (The detainees’ complaints of poor treatment are not falling on deaf ears: The DOJ announced Thursday that it was reviewing conditions in the jail amid concerns from a federal judge.) 

But beyond their bizarre celebrity—they do stand accused of invading the world’s most famous symbol of democracy, after all—there are serious ethical and legal considerations on what to do with the “Patriot Wing” in the D.C. jail, officially called the Correctional Treatment Facility. 

Extremism experts say that many in that group are likely already radicalized, or at least vulnerable to being radicalized—and so the notion that they’re solidifying a group identity should be cause for concern, especially as they move further through the criminal justice system.

“I do think the fact that the J6 defendants who are currently being held pre-trial... having them all together where they can seemingly communicate by newsletter, is likely to foster continued feelings of anti-government mentality among those individuals who are being prosecuted,” said Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. (Only about 40 of the 600-odd individuals arrested in connection with the Capitol riot are being detained pretrial.)

Some within the group of detainees are bonafide members of known extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. For example, New York Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola is accused of committing the first breach of the Capitol, which allowed rioters to stream into the building. When investigators searched his home, they discovered a thumb drive containing instructions for how to build bombs, construct homemade guns, and concoct poisons.

Others, like Lonnie Coffman, the Alabama man who was arrested near the Capitol with a truck full of weapons and Molotov cocktails, had dabbled in organized extremist activity, having been flagged by the FBI back in 2014 for armed militia activity. 

Some of those being held pretrial have no known nexus to organized extremist groups, but they’re accused of some of the most violent crimes documented at the Capitol, like beating police officers using an array of weapons, including a flagpole, a crutch, and a baton. 

And while pretrial detention alone may be enough to deter some of the individuals in the Patriot unit from engaging in violence in the future, others may find themselves falling further into the narrative that brought them to the Capitol in the first place. 

“By naming themselves, having a newsletter, establishing this unification thing, they’re viewing themselves as patriots and see what they did as necessary to defend the country,” said Laura Dugan, Ralph D. Mershon Professor of Human Security and Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University. “Some may have to go even deeper into this layer of denial, buying even more into the idea that the election was not legitimate, and they had no other choice but to go and fight for it.”

These concerns about the individuals who are being held pretrial speak to a broader dilemma faced by policy makers and prison officials: how to ensure that people who harbor extremist beliefs don’t leave prison even more radicalized than they were to begin with. 

Counterterrorism officials and experts have repeatedly warned that, without adequate training for prison staff to help them recognize the signs of radicalization among inmates, and without dedicated rehabilitation programs for extremists, recidivism will pose a serious threat to future national security. In 2018, a federal court concluded that the U.S. had “yet to develop a unified strategy to address the problem of prison radicalization” and that there were “few deradicalization programs or initiatives in place that are target to rehabilitate extremists and help them re-enter society as lawful individuals.” That sentiment was reaffirmed in a federal terrorism case earlier this year, in which an expert testified that the U.S. was “miles away” from offering any kind of rehabilitation or deradicalization programs to extremists in custody that were comparable to what countries like Denmark or Germany had implemented. 

Prison systems typically have three approaches when it comes to housing known extremists, which were laid out in a 2018 paper by George Washington University on “radicalization in custody.” The U.K. system and the Netherlands typically opt for “co-location,” which means that inmates who are designated as extremists are held in the same facility or area of facility. The thinking behind clustering extremists together is to prevent them from reaching and radicalizing other inmates who may be vulnerable to being radicalized. 

Others, including Spain, opt for “dispersal”—which means extremists are spread out across several prisons so that they can’t form extremist networks. The third option is isolation, where extremists are kept more or less in individual cells, and their interactions with others are severely restricted. But prolonged isolation, or “solitary confinement” as it's often referred to in the United States, has been widely criticized as being inhumane, and likened to torture by human rights advocates. 

The use of solitary in the case of the Jan. 6 detainees has been a major point of contention. Up until May, D.C. Jail, like many other criminal justice facilities around the country, had imposed harsh lockdown restrictions due to COVID-19 which meant inmates were isolated for up to 22 hours. Since restrictions were relaxed, some of the Jan. 6 detainees have at times reported that they’ve been placed in “the hole”—the nickname for solitary confinement—as a form of punishment. 

In addition to solitary confinement being problematic for its detrimental effects on mental health, deradicalization experts have also warned that prolonged periods of isolation can radicalize extremists further, and make them even more entrenched in their sense of grievance. 

“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.” 

Another key issue raised by the conduct of the detainees in the “Patriot Wing” is what actually constitutes radicalized or extremist behavior. On the face of things, singing the “Star Spangled Banner” in unison each evening and passing around a handwritten newsletter don’t exactly scream “extremist activity.” But those activities gain new significance when put into the context of Jan. 6, and how normalized right-wing conspiracy theories have become. 

FBI Director Chris Wray has labelled the events that transpired at the Capitol as “domestic terrorism.” Yet at the same time, the conspiracy theory that Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election, which galvanized people to storm the Capitol, is shared by much of the American public. Multiple surveys conducted since Jan. 6 have found that between half and two-thirds of Republicans believe the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump—or about a quarter of Americans overall. (There is zero evidence of any wrongdoing leading to President Biden’s victory.) And on Thursday, Trump put out a statement that claimed an “insurrection” took place on Nov. 3, 2020, the date of the presidential election, and that Jan. 6 was nothing more than “a protest.”

“By making these symbolic gestures, it makes it seem as though their “struggle,” everything they’re going through, is worth it. If what they did was for nothing, that would cause a serious break in their identity as “patriots”,” said Kurt Braddock, Assistant Professor of Communication at American University and faculty fellow at the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab. “These justifications are being mainstreamed and normalized by many elements of the right, and that’s the biggest danger right now.” 

Of the 646 people charged so far in connection with the Capitol riot, 109 have pleaded guilty. 

Some federal judges presiding over Jan. 6 cases have brushed off accusations that the defendants are being treated overly harshly under the law. However, claims of mistreatment inside the jail are being taken into account. Last week a federal judge ruled to hold the D.C. jail warden and the D.C. Department of Corrections director in contempt, saying they weren’t complying with paperwork requests and failed to follow through on a doctor's recommendation that Jan 6 defendant and Proud Boy Chris Worrell receive surgery for a broken hand. On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division was reviewing conditions in the D.C. Jail. 

ATTACHMENT NINE – From business insider

LINDSEY GRAHAM URGED POLICE TO USE THEIR GUNS DURING THE CAPITOL RIOT, REPORT SAYS

Sen. Lindsey Graham urged Capitol police officers to shoot at rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The Post's extensive account provides new details of the chaotic attack on the Capitol, including the panic as lawmakers rushed to evacuate.

Many were taken to a secure location, though some senators, Graham among them, remained on the Senate floor at first.

The 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."

The report also said Graham and other Republican senators tried to contact President Donald Trump and urge him to call off his supporters.

It said Graham called Ivanka Trump, the president's eldest daughter and advisor, "repeatedly with suggestions for what the president should say."

He was said to have told her: "This thing is going south. This is not good. You're going to have to tell these people to stand down. Stand down."

Ahead of the riot, Graham was among the senior Republicans promoting Trump's baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him.

The conspiracy theory was what drove Trump supporters to attack the Capitol, where lawmakers had gathered to certify Joe Biden's victory over Trump.

Five people died in the attack, including a Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer.

In October, Trump praised Babbitt, said her killing was not necessary, and demanded justice for her family.

In a statement to The Post, Trump's spokesperson described the people who marched on the Capitol as "agitators not associated with President Trump."

In a speech on the Senate floor after the riot, Graham appeared to abandon Trump and his claims of electoral fraud. "Count me out," Graham said.

Since then, Graham has remained close to Trump, who has stuck to his claims of a stolen election while seeming to prepare for another presidential campaign in 2024.

ATTACHMENT TEN – From Dallas Morning News

QANON SUPPORTERS GATHER IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS EXPECTING JFK JR. TO REAPPEAR

Some believe the reappearance of John F. Kennedy’s son, who died in a plane crash in 1999, will bring about the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president.

By Michael Williams and Catherine Marfin

1:46 PM on Nov 2, 2021 CDT — Updated at 5:34 PM on Nov 2, 2021 CDT

Scores of QAnon believers gathered Tuesday afternoon in downtown Dallas in the hopes that John F. Kennedy Jr. would appear, heralding the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president.

The supporters first gathered Monday night in downtown Dallas, and about 1 p.m. Tuesday there were several hundred people near Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

Kennedy’s son died in a plane crash in 1999 at age 38, but some supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory believe that he has spent the last 22 years in hiding. They think John F. Kennedy Jr. will reappear at the plaza before midnight Tuesday, Newsweek reported.

One post from a widely followed QAnon social media account said that after Trump was reinstated as president, he would step down and JFK Jr. would become president. Then former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn would be appointed as his vice president and Trump would ultimately become the “king of kings,” according to Newsweek.

Experts who have been following QAnon since its inception said that even they were surprised by the number of people who showed up Tuesday in Dallas.

”Frankly, I’m kind of shocked at how many people turned out for this,” said Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who researches domestic extremism. “This wasn’t a widespread belief, even among QAnon followers.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory centers on fealty to Trump, who adherents believe will dismantle a shadowy “Deep State,” which they believe comprises leftist politicians and celebrities who are pedophiles.

Law enforcement groups, including the FBI, have warned of the dangers of real-world violence by followers of the movement. QAnon believers were well-represented during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

In 2019, a supporter of the movement allegedly gunned down a reputed underboss of the Gambino crime family ― an act The New York Times described as “the most high-profile mob killing in decades.” Earlier this year, a California man said the conspiracy theory led him to kill his two children, NPR reported.

QAnon is an umbrella group, in which different segments don’t always agree on ideologies, Holt said. He believes Tuesday’s event grew out of chat channels that are obsessed with numerology.

Posts in those channels indicated JFK Jr. would reveal himself Tuesday, but Holt said he was uncertain why believers decided he would pick Dallas, the site of his father’s death, of all places, to reveal himself.

While it may be hard not to laugh at some of the theory’s more outlandish claims, Holt said the fact that such a large group was able to mobilize in person is concerning.

“If they’re willing to show up to the Grassy Knoll thinking JFK Jr. is coming back, it scares me to think of what happens when they get real power,” he said.

JFK Jr. has been a popular figure among QAnon conspiracy theorists. In 2019, some members believed he would return on July 4 as Trump’s vice president, Forbes reported. Another theory posits that JFK Jr. is “Q,” the group’s anonymous leader, according to Forbes.

After a few hours of standing on the Grassy Knoll, waving at passing cars and reciting the pledge of allegiance, the crowd retreated from heavy rains. Some said they expected a revelation Tuesday night at the Rolling Stones concert in Dallas. Others vowed to return at midnight to the Grassy Knoll, where they believe JFK Jr. will appear.

Micki Larson-Olson, who wore a QAnon-themed Captain America costume Tuesday, said she not only believes JFK Jr. is alive — she also believes that his father was never assassinated and that the 104-year-old former president will appear to help usher in a Trump-JFK Jr. administration.

How will she react when the former president and his dead son do not show up?

“We’ll figure that something happened in the plan that made it not safe to do it,” she said. “If it doesn’t go down how I believe it will, that’s OK. We’ll figure it just wasn’t the right time.”

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN (A), (B) and (C)

(A) – FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

RALLIES AHEAD OF CAPITOL RIOT WERE PLANNED BY ESTABLISHED WASHINGTON INSIDERS

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.

Jan. 17, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EST

The fiery rallies that preceded the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were organized and promoted by an array of established conservative insiders and activists, documents and videos show.

The Republican Attorneys General Association was involved, as were the activist groups Turning Point Action and Tea Party Patriots. At least six current or former members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), an influential group that for decades has served as a hub for conservative and Christian activists, also played roles in promoting the rallies.

The two days of rallies were staged not by white nationalists and other extremists, but by well-funded nonprofit groups and individuals that figure prominently in the machinery of conservative activism in Washington.

The Post obtained hours of video footage, some exclusively, and placed it within a digital 3-D model of the building. (TWP)

In recent days, as federal authorities rounded up those involved in the Capitol riot, promoters and participants of the rallies have denounced the violence and sought to distance their events from the events that followed.

“I support the right of Americans to peacefully protest,” wrote Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), “but the violence and destruction we are seeing at the U.S. Capitol is unacceptable and un-American.”

Organizing warm-up events is not the same thing as plotting to invade the Capitol. But before the rallies, some used extreme rhetoric, including references to the American Revolution, and made false claims about the election to rouse supporters to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Unless Congress responds to the protests, “everyone can guess what me and 500,000 others will do to that building,” tweeted Ali Alexander, a former CNP fellow who organized the “Stop the Steal” movement. “1776 is *always* an option.”

On Jan. 5, at Freedom Plaza in D.C., Alexander led protesters in a chant of “Victory or death.”

Alexander did not respond to a request for comment for this story. He previously told The Washington Post that he had “remained peaceful” during the riot and said his earlier speeches “mentioned peace” and were being misrepresented.

“Conflating our legally, peaceful permitted events with the breach of the US Capitol building is defamatory and false,” he said in an email to The Post. “People are being misled and then those same people are fomenting violence against me and my team.”

In the days and hours before the riots, Alexander and his allies attracted tens of thousands of protesters from around the country — a crowd that included white supremacists, Christian activists and even local police officers.

Events included a “Patriot Caravan” of buses to Washington, a “Save the Republic” rally on Jan. 5 and a “Freedom Rally” on the morning of Jan. 6. A little-known nonprofit called Women for America First, a group run by Trump supporters and former tea party activists, got approval to use space on the Ellipse for what they called a “March for Trump,” according to the “public gathering permit” issued on Jan. 5.

Nearly a dozen political activists — including former White House, congressional and Trump campaign staffers — served as on-site rally coordinators and stage managers, the permit said. A spokesperson for Women for America First did not respond to requests for comment.

The Post’s Devlin Barrett outlines the potential charges President Trump and his legal team may face for inciting a mob to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (The Washington Post)

Scheduled speakers included Roger Stone, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, a start-up group that condemned government shutdowns to contain the coronavirus. Gold was among the protesters who entered the Capitol, according to an FBI flier with her photo.

Gold told The Post she went into the Capitol but thought it was legal to do so.

“I do regret being there,” she said.

A Trump supporter protests at Freedom Plaza on Jan. 5. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)

On Jan. 5, the attorneys general group, which is based in Washington, used an affiliated nonprofit called the Rule of Law Defense Fund to pay for a robocall that urged supporters to march on the Capitol at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 to “call on Congress to stop the steal.” A recording of the robocall was first obtained by Documented, a left-leaning watchdog group.

“We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue the fight,” a recording of the call says.

(B) – from documented.net

REPUBLICAN ATTORNEYS GENERAL DARK MONEY GROUP ORGANIZED PROTEST PRECEDING CAPITOL MOB ATTACK

by Jamie Corey, poSTED 1/7/21

This report has been updated on January 11, 2021 to include a new statement issued to reporters by RAGA and new information about RAGA appearing on MarchtoSaveAmerica.com.

The Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), a 501(c)(4) arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), helped organize the protest preceding the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol that took place on January 6, 2021. 

As a 501(c)(4), RLDF is not required to reveal its donors. RLDF has received at least $175,000 from the Koch-backed Freedom Partners. Other RLDF donors include Judicial Crisis Network, the Rule of Law Project, and the Edison Electric Institute.

RAGA is a 527 political organization that helps elect Republican attorneys general and can accept unlimited contributions from wealthy individuals and corporations. As previously reported by Documented, RAGA received significant funding from numerous corporations in 2020, including Koch Industries ($375k), Comcast Corporation ($200k), Walmart ($140k), Home Depot ($125k), Amazon ($100k), TikTok ($75k), 1-800 Contacts ($51k), Chevron ($50k), The National Rifle Association ($50k), Monsanto ($50k), Facebook ($50k), Fox Corporation ($50k), Uber ($50k), Coca Cola ($50k), Exxon ($50k), and Google ($25k). 

RLDF appeared in a list of groups “Participating in the March to Save America” on the March to Save America website alongside entities including Stop the Steal, Turning Point Action, Tea Party Patriots and others. (MarchtoSaveAmerica.com has been taken down but an archived version of the website can be accessed through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.)

RLDF also sent out a robocall detailing where and when the protest would take place. 

Documented · Rule Of Law Defense Fund Robocall

“I’m calling for the Rule of Law Defense Fund with an important message,” the robocall stated. “The march to save America is tomorrow in Washington D.C. at the Ellipse in President’s Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m. At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com. This call is paid for and authorized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, 202-796-5838.” 

RLDF’s role in organizing the protests, which turned into a violent mob attack inside the Capitol, is ironic given its 2020 election campaign warning of “lawless liberal mobs” burning down buildings and committing violence. The campaign, dubbed “Lawless Liberals”, came in the aftermath of the largely peaceful protests following the murder of George Floyd by police and the shooting of Jacob Blake. 

“The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA)’s five-month Lawless Liberals video campaign repeatedly warned Americans about the dangerous reality of lawless liberals run amok in cities across the country,” RAGA said in a statement. 

Republican attorneys general have been heavily involved in efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election. Shortly after Joe Biden was declared the winner, Republican attorneys general filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court that sought to reject some mailed ballots in the state of Pennsylvania. Republican attorney general Ken Paxton–who has been embroiled in bribery, abuse of office and other criminal allegations–filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court regarding four battleground states and alleging unconstitutional changes to their voting laws before the 2020 election. Prior to the protests, Paxton appeared on Fox News and said he hoped to be at both rallies. 

RAGA and Republican attorneys general issued statements denouncing the violence. “The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) and the Republican attorneys general (AGs) stand together to condemn the violence, destruction, and rampant lawlessness occurring at the U.S. Capitol today. These actions are an affront to the rule of law, our Constitution, and our American political discourse.”

After Documented published the robocall, RAGA issued a statement to reporters: “Republican Attorneys General Association and Rule of Law Defense Fund had no involvement in the planning, sponsoring, or the organization of Wednesday’s event.”

The Democratic Attorneys General Association revealed in a tweet RAGA originally appeared on the March to Save America website under “Coalition Partners”. The website later took out RAGA and put in the Rule of Law Defense Fund under “Participating in the March to Save America”.

On Monday, as criticism of the robocall mounted, RAGA Executive Director Adam Piper resigned. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth Martin also condemned the violence and said in a statement to The Post that her group provided no financial support for the rally. “We are shocked, outraged, and saddened at the turn of events Wednesday afternoon,” Martin’s statement said. “We are heartbroken.”

Martin, also an executive committee member at CNP, was listed in promotional material as a rally speaker, though she did not ultimately speak. The Tea Party Patriots were listed as a “coalition partner” with Alexander’s Stop the Steal, RAGA and other groups.

“The rally was peaceful. You cannot blame what happened inside the Capitol on the promotion,” said Jason Jones, a CNP member and rally participant, who said he was there to speak about oppressed people around the world. He called the violence “sorrowful and tragic” but said it represented “a failure of policing and preparation.”

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CNP Executive Director Bob McEwen said his group, a registered charity, does not get involved in political activity and had no role in the Jan. 6 events. He said CNP members and associates act independently. “What they do on their own time — I won’t say I don’t care — we have no interest or capacity to monitor,” McEwen said.

Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA, an organizer of conservative students, and Turning Point Action, its activist arm, also condemned the violence and called Jan. 6 “a really sad day for America,” according to a spokesman.

Before the rally, Kirk — a featured speaker at CNP meetings over the past two years and at the Republican National Convention in August — offered to pay for buses and hotel rooms for protesters.

“This historic event will likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history,” he wrote in a tweet. “The team at @TrumpStudents & Turning Point Action are honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.”

That tweet has been deleted. A spokesman said that Kirk eventually sent a half-dozen buses and that the student protesters had nothing to do with the violence.

In a video posted in late December, Alexander claimed he worked with three lawmakers — Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) — on an unspecified plan to disrupt election ratification deliberations at the Capitol.

“We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope highlighted by the Project on Government Oversight, an investigative nonprofit.

In a statement, Biggs denied meeting Alexander. Gosar did not respond to requests for comment from The Post. Brooks’s office said in a statement that he “has no recollection of ever communicating in any way with whoever Ali Alexander is.”

Brooks, first elected to Congress a decade ago, has been among the most vocal of lawmakers in condemning the election. In a podcast interview last month with Sebastian Gorka, a former strategist in the Trump White House, Brooks said he was working to delay certification of the electoral college tally as part of “an organic movement.”

“The question is really simple. Are you as an American citizen going to surrender in the face of unparalleled, massive voter fraud and election theft?” he said. “Or are you going to do what your ancestors did and fight for your country, your republic?”

The election results have been certified in all 50 states, and courts across the nation have rejected challenges brought by the president’s campaign and his allies. Shortly after the vote, a senior cybersecurity official in the Trump administration described it as “the most secure election in American history.”

In a statement Tuesday, Brooks said he is the victim of a “smear campaign.”

He said that a White House official asked him to appear at the Jan. 6 rally. “I was not encouraging anyone to engage in violence,” the statement said.

Other establishment conservatives who condoned the protests include Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and listed last year as a CNP Action board member, who praised rallygoers in tweets.

“LOVE MAGA people!!!!” she tweeted early in the morning on Jan. 6. “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING.”

Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the early 1980s, CNP has served as a bridge between Washington’s establishment conservatives and scores of Christian and right-wing groups across the nation. It convenes closed-door meetings for members and wealthy donors at least twice a year. CNP officials and their allies met weekly with White House officials under President Trump, in part to coordinate public messaging about the administration’s agenda, internal videos show. Trump spoke to the group in August.

Vice President Pence praised the group in a letter obtained by The Post, saying last year that “I just wanted to thank you and the Council for National Policy for your support and for consistently amplifying the agenda of President Trump.”

McEwen told The Post his group serves only as a venue for conservative speakers and does not coordinate the activity of members.

In one meeting last summer, a CNP member warned that a “civil war” would result if Trump lost the election to predicted fraud, according to internal videos obtained by The Post.

In websites promoting the rallies, Alexander’s Stop the Steal coalition urged protesters to “take to” the Capitol steps “to make sure that Congress does not certify the botched Electoral College,” according to webpages that have been removed.

Another coalition webpage featured a 36-page election analysis by Trump adviser Peter Navarro, a speaker at CNP in May 2019. It claimed that Trump’s loss was a statistical impossibility and was due to a “whitewash” by journalists and politicians. Navarro warned about “putting into power an illegitimate and illegal president.”

He did not respond to requests for comment.

One of those behind the rallies was Arina Grossu, an antiabortion activist listed as a contract outreach coordinator for a religious freedom office at the Department of Health and Human Services, according to HHS promotional material and an agency directory.

Grossu was co-founder of Jericho March, one of the coalition partners that organized the Jan. 6 rallies. In December, her group described some protesters against the election as a “prayer army” that would take the case before “the Courts of heaven, the Supreme Court, and the court of public opinion seeking truth and justice in this election.”

“The blatant fraud and corruption in this election is overwhelming and it cries out to God for justice. We the People demand answers and accountability,” she said in a posting online that has since been removed. “We serve a mighty God who can restore truth and justice in our land.”

Grossu did not respond to requests for comment. An HHS spokeswoman declined to provide Grossu’s employment status.

(C) – from Southern Poverty Law Center, 5/17/16

By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok

The Council for National Policy, a highly secretive group, is a key venue where mainstream conservatives and extremists mix.

For 35 years, a shadowy and intensely secretive group has operated behind the scenes, providing a venue three times a year for powerful American politicians and others on the right to meet privately to build the conservative movement.

The Council for National Policy (CNP) is, in the words of The New York Times, “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country,” an organization so tight-lipped that it tells its people not to admit membership or even name the group. It is important enough that last fall, according to an account in The National Review, Donald Trump and five other Republican presidential candidates each took 30 minutes to address the group; the conservative journal reported that Trump was by far the favorite candidate.

The names of many members and officers of the group have leaked over the years, and some of its officers are reported on the organization’s tax forms. But the last time long lists of its members was made public was in 1998. For the most part since then, members of the CNP — which can be joined only by invitation, at a cost of thousands of dollars — have managed to keep their identities secret.

That is about to end. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) recently obtained a copy of the CNP’s 2014 Membership Directory, a 191-page compendium that lists 413 members, 118 members who have died, and 14 past presidents. The list is surprising, not so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party enthusiasts — but for the many real extremists who are included.

Paul S. Teller, the hardline chief of staff to Ted Cruz who was once described by The Hill as Cruz’s “agitator in chief,” is a member, or at least he was in 2014. Tony Perkins, the head of the LGBT-bashing Family Research Council, was its vice president that year, one of three executive officers. And Frank Gaffney, whose group provided Trump with bogus statistics about American Muslims’ support for violent jihad and who was a senior adviser to Cruz until May, was a member, too.

The CNP’s 2014 vision statement, reproduced at the front of the directory, succinctly lays out its goal: “A united conservative movement to assure, by 2020, policy leadership and governance that restores religious and economic freedom, a strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution.”

But it has long been known that the group included some key individuals whose goals are less benevolent. One of its five founders, Tim LaHaye, is the co-author of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic Christian novels and a man who has described gay people as “vile,” said the Illuminati are conspiring to establish a “new world order,” attacked Catholicism, and once worked for the wildly conspiracist John Birch Society. An important member whose name was revealed early on was John Rousas Rushdoony, who is listed in the 2014 directory’s “In Memoriam” section and advocated for a society ruled by Old Testament law requiring, among other things, the stoning of adulteresses, idolaters and “incorrigible” children.

The following visualizations were created from the Council for National Policy’s (CNP) membership directory. They illustrate the issues that concern individual members and provide a breakdown of shared concerns. 

The 2014 CNP members are paragons of the conservative establishment. There are business titans, Christian college presidents, owners and editors of right-wing media outlets, GOP mega-donors, government staffers and leading members of conservative think tanks. There are officials of organizations like the National Rifle Association and the Federalist Society. There are politicians and political appointees, anti-abortion activists and also some who are less known publicly as conservatives, like Linda L. Bean, who owns L.L. Bean Inc., an outdoorsy clothing company.

But what is most remarkable about the directory is that it reveals how the CNP has become a key meeting place where ostensibly mainstream conservatives interact with individuals who are, by any reasonable definition, genuinely extremist.

Caustic Combinations

Tony Perkins is a good example. He has falsely claimed that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem,” said that gay people “recruit” children, secretly purchased a mailing list for a candidate he was managing from former Klan leader David Duke, and addressed, in 2001, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (the same group that inspired Dylann Roof’s murder of nine churchgoers last year).

He is hardly alone.

On the CNP’s board of governors, for instance, is Michael Peroutka. Peroutka was for many years on the board of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group that advocates for a newly seceded South ruled by white people. He was also the 2004 presidential candidate for the Constitution Party, a far-right group opposed to abortion in all cases. He has appeared on a white nationalist radio show.

There are several other well-known extremists on the same board of governors. Jerome Corsi is the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry, has written an error-filled book alleging that President Obama was not born in the United States, once described Martin Luther King Jr. as a “shakedown artist,” and is a subscriber to numerous baseless conspiracy theories. In his latest, 2014 book, he claims that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun fled to Argentina after the end of World War II and lived there happily until their deaths.

Another on that board is Joseph Farah, who runs the conspiracist online “news” outlet, "WorldNetDaily" and employs Corsi. When Farah’s site isn’t busy bashing anything vaguely liberal or suggesting that Obama is helping the United Nations create a one-world government, it spends its time doing such vital work as running a six-part series alleging that eating soybeans causes homosexuality.

Also on the board is Mat Staver, leader of the anti-LGBT Liberty Counsel, who has worked for the re-criminalization of gay sex, described the Boy Scouts as a “playground for pedophiles,” and likened LGBT activists to terrorists. And then there’s Alan Sears, founder of the Alliance Defending Freedom and the co-author of The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, which falsely links pedophilia to homosexuality.

These members are listed on the CNP’s board of governors right alongside people who are not particularly known for their political extremism, although they are certainly highly conservative. A leading example is Chad Connelly, the two-term head of the South Carolina Republican Party who left that post in 2013 and is now the Republican National Committee’s national director of faith engagement.

Leaders and Money

The CNP founders, including then-Moral Majority leader Tim LaHaye, were a colorful cast of characters: oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, a one-time member of the John Birch Society’s ruling council and a billionaire before he went bankrupt as a result of his effort to corner the silver market; T. Cullen Davis, a multimillionaire from Texas who was tried and acquitted in two separate murder cases; William Cies, a wealthy John Bircher and major CNP funder; and Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The CNP’s latest available tax forms show that the group has a budget of between $1.5 million and $2 million. Eleven years after it was founded in 1981 as a tax-exempt organization, the IRS yanked that status on the grounds that CNP was not run for the benefit of the public. A long legal battle ensued, with the CNP regaining its tax-exempt status after promising to produce a quarterly journal meant to educate the public, although it did not do so until years later. It also launched a website that distributes two publications, Policy Counsel and Heard Around the Hill.

Secrecy was paramount from the first. “Members are told not to discuss the group, reveal the topics discussed in the closed-door meetings, or even say whether or not they are members of the organization,” The Salt Lake City Tribune reported. The membership list is “strictly confidential” and guests may attend “only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee,” according to The New York Times, which also reported that one of its rules was, “The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting.”

In the 2014 directory, two other executive officers are listed in addition to Perkins, the CNP’s vice president. They are President Stuart W. Epperson, co-founder of the sprawling conservative radio and online Salem Media Group, whose on-air personality Hugh Hewitt co-moderated some recent GOP presidential debates, and Treasurer John H. Scribante, the CEO of Orion Energy Systems Inc.

Those are not the only wealthy people associated with CNP. Its past presidents, in particular, include many extremely well off businessmen. Among them are Nelson Bunker Hunt; Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway whose net worth was estimated at $5 billion in 2012; and Foster Friess, a stock picker who was recognized in 2011 for contributions exceeding $1 million to the right-wing funding apparatus started by brothers Charles and David Koch. Friess is notorious for throwing himself an almost $8 million birthday party and saying on TV that women used to avoid pregnancy by putting a Bayer aspirin “between their knees.”

Other past presidents include Tim LaHaye, one of CNP’s original founders; Edwin Meese, a right-wing California lawyer who rose to become the nation’s attorney general under President Ronald Reagan; and Pat Robertson, the far-right Christian activist who started the Christian Coalition and similar groups and who pushed theories of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy in one of his books.

A Who’s Who of the Right

The CNP directory is a remarkable roster of significant figures on the political and religious right. In addition to listing their names and affiliations with various institutions, it also notes the issues that interest each of them. Although those issues vary, the favorites given include “Homosexual Issues” and “Radical Islam.”

The directory includes officials from 14 different conservative media outlets, including the opinion editor for The Washington Times; the publisher of the Daily Caller website; the editor-in-chief of CNSNews.com; and Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of American Thinker, which published a fawning profile of Jared Taylor, a leading white nationalist intellectual. It also includes major donors to conservative causes, among them Michael Grebe, CEO of the far-right Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and Hugh Maclellan, president of the Maclellan Foundation.

Intellectuals on the list include Edwin J. Feulner of the Heritage Foundation and upper-level officials from 16 mostly conservative universities and colleges. And the large number of business leaders include Nashville’s Lea Beaman, the owner of several car dealerships, James R. Leininger, founder of Kinetic Concepts Inc.; Gary Loveless of Square Mile Energy, and many others from the private sector.

The directory also contains a list of young conservative leaders who comprise the CNP’s William F. Buckley Jr. Council. Among them are Daniel Suhr, chief of staff to Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch; Nicolas L. Wenker, a law clerk for the Senate Judiciary Committee; Garrett Gibson, a Texas Supreme Court clerk; and William J. Rivers, a press assistant to U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). Another one is Josh Duggar, the infamous member of the Duggar family that was the focus of TLC’s reality show, “19 Kids and Counting.” In 2015, Duggar was enmeshed in an enormous scandal when his youthful molesting of five girls, four of them his sisters, and his later membership in the Ashley Madison hookup site became public.

And then there is Michael Centanni, a CNP member and the COO of a direct mail company that raised money for conservative candidates. Centanni pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography — more than 3,000 images and 267 videos — in October 2014. He was sentenced last year to 46 months in federal prison.

But, again, the directory is most noteworthy for its hardliners.

One of them is Austin Ruse, head of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute and a man who has lobbied against reproductive rights, abortion and LGBT people at the UN and abroad for years. He once reportedly said that a Catholic priest “offered me guaranteed absolution if I just took [Hillary Clinton] out — and not on a date.” Ruse was fired from the far-right American Family Association’s radio operation for saying liberal professors should be “taken out and shot.”

Another is Tim Wildmon, leader of the American Family Association, which is also an intensely anti-LGBT group. One of the organization’s officials has notoriously complained that welfare rewards black people who “rut like rabbits” and asserted falsely that “homosexuality gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.” (The group repudiated those comments last year in letters to the SPLC, which at the time was publicly criticizing the group for its role in paying for several dozen members of the Republican National Committee to visit Israel.) Wildmon himself has denounced homosexuality and described Islam as a “religion of war, violence, intolerance and physical persecution.”

Philip Zodhiates is another CNP member. In 2014, Zodhiates was accused in New York of helping a woman named Lisa Miller, a self-described former lesbian who fled the country with her daughter during a custody dispute with her former partner. Charged with conspiracy and international kidnapping, Zodhiates is set to go to trial in September 2016 and could face up to five years in prison. For years, Zodhiates’ direct mail company, Response Unlimited, sold lists of subscribers to America’s leading anti-Semitic tabloid, The Spotlight, and its successor publication, American Free Press, although neither is now listed at the Response website.

The radicalism of many members of the CNP is nothing new. That becomes obvious from a perusal of the 2014 directory’s “In Memoriam” section.

One of the people listed there is Madeleine Cosman, a longtime immigrant-basher who told a 2005 nativist conference that “most” Latino immigrant men “molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns.” Cosman, a medieval cookbook author with no expertise in medicine or immigration, also was the source of the storied, and entirely false, claim by then-CNN anchor Lou Dobbs that immigrants had brought a wave of leprosy to the United States.

Another is Howard Phillips, founder in 1992 of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, whose goal was to implement biblical law. Phillips was known for his opposition to the Voting Rights Act, homosexuality, pornography, immigrants and abortion.

W. Cleon Skousen, who is also on that list, was a longtime speaker for the John Birch Society and defender of the Mormon Church’s then-policy of excluding black people from its priesthood. Skousen was obsessed with alleged communist subversion and wrote a book, The Naked Capitalist, that remains a major source of conspiracy theories for people including television personality Glenn Beck.

Others on the list include Larry McDonald, a congressman and the second president of the John Birch Society; J. Evetts Haley, who wanted to use the Texas Rangers to enforce school segregation after the Supreme Court outlawed it; and Clarence Arch Decker, a one-time Colorado state senator whose Summit Ministries once published a book suggesting that gay people might have to be interned.

The Danger of the CNP

The CNP has every legal right to hold its meetings in private and to try to keep its membership secret. And it does publish many of the speeches its members hear, including most of the talks given by the GOP presidential candidates last fall (the exception was Trump’s talk). The speeches tend to center on expected topics for such conservatives, from opposition to same-sex marriage to cutting taxes.

But it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.

And the people mixing with or giving speeches to these extremists are key leaders in American society. Those speaking in recent years to the CNP have included President George W. Bush; Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney; and Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court. The speakers at CNP’s candidate forum last October included Trump, Ben Carson, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum.

At a time of extreme political polarization in our society, in the middle of an ugly presidential contest which has featured an almost unsurpassed record of ethnic, racial and sexual insults and lies, Americans deserve to know who their ostensible leaders are mixing with as we collectively decide our country’s future.

CNP: The Hardliners

The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a body that mixes large numbers of ostensibly mainstream conservatives with far-right and extremist ideologues, mostly from the far fringes of the religious right. What follows is a list of 18 of the hardest-line CNP members and links to information about them and their groups, when available, published in the past by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Groups designated by the SPLC as hate groups are marked with an asterisk (*).

Tony Perkins
*Family Research Council
Washington, D.C.
CNP Vice President

Kenneth Blackwell
*Family Research Council
Washington, D.C.
CNP Executive Committee

Austin Ruse
*Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute
Washington, D.C., and New York, N.Y.
CNP member

Mathew “Mat” Staver
*Liberty Counsel
Orlando, Fla.
CNP Board of Governors

Tim Wildmon
*American Family Association
Tupelo, Miss.
CNP member

Brad Dacus
*Pacific Justice Institute
Sacramento, Calif.
CNP member

Alan Sears
Alliance Defending Freedom
Scottsdale, Ariz.
CNP Board of Governors

Benjamin Bull
Alliance Defending Freedom
Scottsdale, Ariz.
CNP member

Brian Brown
National Organization for Marriage
Washington, D.C.
CNP Board of Governors, Gold Circle

Phyllis Schlafly
Eagle Forum
Alton, Ill.
CNP Executive Committee, CNP Action Inc.

Jerome Corsi
WorldNetDaily
Washington, D.C.
CNP Board of Governors

Michael Peroutka
Institute of the Constitution
Pasadena, Md.
CNP Board of Governors

Tim Macy
Gun Owners of America
Springfield, Va.
CNP Board of Governors

Bishop Harry Jackson Jr.
Hope Christian Church
Beltsville, Md.
CNP member

Gary Bauer
American Values
Merrifield, Va.
CNP Board of Governors, Gold Circle

Troy Newman
Operation Rescue
Wichita, Kan.
CNP member

David Noebel (retired)
Summit Ministries
Manitou Springs, Colo.
CNP member

Frank Gaffney
*Center for Security Policy
Washington, D.C.
CNP member

CNP Rules and Regulations

In order to allow “open, uninhibited remarks” from its speakers, CNP members must adhere to strict rules regarding their thrice-yearly meetings. A memorandum from former executive director and 2014 Executive Committee member Morton C. Blackwell lists the rules.

· Special guests may attend only with advance unanimous approval of the Executive Committee.

· The solicitation of funds on a one-to-one basis is prohibited at meetings.

· Council meetings are closed to the media and the general public. The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting.

· Speakers' remarks at Council meetings are off the record and not for circulation later, except with special permission.

· Members and guests are requested to keep in their personal possession their registration packets and other materials distributed at the meeting.

· Our membership list is strictly confidential and should not be shared outside the Council.

· Fundraising from the list is also prohibited.

Members are asked to avoid organizing and attending formal meetings of other groups or organizations in the same city before, during or immediately after a Council meeting.

Reprinted with permission from the Political Research Associates website, publiceye.org.

Media & the CNP

What follows is a list of leading officials of right-wing or conservative media organizations who are also members of the Council for National Policy (CNP). The list includes regular members, but also one executive officer of the CNP and members of the group’s Executive Committee, its Board of Governors and its Gold Circle, as listed in parentheses below.

American Conservative
John Basil Utley, Publisher

American Thinker
Thomas Lifson, Editor and Publisher

Bott Radio Network
Richard P. Bott Sr., Founder and Chairman (CNP Board of Governors)
Rich P. Bott, President and CEO (CNP Board of Governors, Executive Committee, Gold Circle)

CNSNews.com/Media Research Center
Terry P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief

The Daily Caller
Neil S. Patel, Co-Founder and Publisher

Forbes
Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief (CNP Board of Governors)

National Religious Broadcasters
Jerry Johnson, President and CEO

NewsMax Media, Inc. @Christopher Ruddy, Founder, CEO and President (CNP Board of Governors)

PatriotPost.us
Mark Alexander, Executive Editor and Publisher

Salem Media Group
Edward G. Atsinger, III, CEO (CNP Board of Governors)
Stewart Epperson, Chairman of the Board (CNP President)

Truth Broadcasting
Stu Epperson, Jr., President

The Washington Times
David Keene, Opinion Editor

The Western Center for Journalism
Floyd G. Brown, President

World Magazine
Warren C. Smith, Associate Publisher

WorldNetDaily
Joseph F. Farah, Founder, CEO and Editor (CNP Board of Governors, Gold Circle)
Jerome R. Corsi, Senior Staff Member (CNP Board of Governors)

Higher Education & the CNP

The following list of 20 college and university officials at 16 schools who are also members of the Council for National Policy (CNP) gives a sense of how far the group has reached into conservative academia, particularly religious institutions. Two of those listed are also members of the CNP’s Board of Governors.

Arizona Christian University
President Len Munsil

Belmont Abbey College
President William Thierfelder

Capitol University Law School
Professor of Law Bradley A. Smith (CNP Board of Governors)

Colorado Christian University
Centennial Institute Director John K. Andrews

Ecclesia College
President Oren Paris

Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn
Vice President for External Affairs Douglas A. Jeffrey

Houston Baptist University
President Robert B. Sloan (CNP Board of Governors)
Vice President for Advancement Charles Bacarisse

Institute of World Politics
Founder and President John Lenczowski

Liberty University
Dean Helms School of Government Shawn D. Akers
Associate Dean for Internal Affairs, School of Law, Joseph M. Wiegand

Louisiana College
President Joe Aguillard

Oklahoma Wesleyan University
President Everett G. Piper
Foundation Executive Director David Preston

Patrick Henry College
Chancellor & Founder Michael P. Farris

Pepperdine University
Vice Chancellor Michael Y. Warder

Southern Evangelical Seminary
President Richard Land

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
President Paige Patterson

Truett-McConnell College
President Emir Caner

ATTACHMENT TWELVE – From http://chicago68.com/index.html

(Part Two – 1970 to 1975… see part one (1967 – 1970) in the October 22nd DJI)

July 13: Six members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Gainesville, Florida are indicted by a Federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy to disrupt the August Republican National Convention with weapons and incendiary devices. [The indictment is based on testimony from an FBI agent. Later indictments increased the total to eight, and the defendants became known as the Gainesville 8; they were all acquitted in August 1973.]

August 23: The 1972 Republican National Convention opens in Miami Beach. About 1,000 anti-war activists are arrested trying to block entrances to the convention hall. A total of 10,000 participate in the RNC demonstrations.

November 7: Nixon is re-elected to a second term as President, defeating McGovern.

November 21: Ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on the convictions of Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, and Rubin for crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Citing a number of judicial errors, the convictions are reversed and a new trial is ordered. The Court adds “that the demeanor of the judge and the prosecutors would require reversal if the other errors did not.” The ruling states that the government may re-try the case only if, in line with the Supreme Court ruling in June, the government releases the electronic surveillance it conducted on the defendants.

1973

January 4: The U.S. Attorney announces that it will not seek a new trial on the individual counts of Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, and Rubin.

January 27: The U.S., North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Vietcong sign a ceasefire agreement in Paris. By April the last American combat soldiers have left Vietnam, leaving only military advisers and security forces.

October 29: Trial on the contempt citations of the Chicago 7 and their attorneys before Judge Edward T. Gignoux, a U.S. District Court judge from Maine. For the trial, the government reduces the number of contempt charges to 52. Rubin, Hoffman, and Kunstler are found guilty of two contempts each. Dellinger is found guilty of seven contempts. However in consideration of “judicial error, judicial or prosecutorial misconduct, and judicial or prosecutorial provocation” no sentence is imposed.

1974

July 27-30: The House Judiciary Committee votes three articles of impeachment against President Nixon in connection with the Watergate burglary and other abuses of presidential power.

August 9: Facing impeachment and eroding public support, Nixon resigns.

1975

April 30: The last American personnel in Vietnam leave via helicopter from the roof of the U.S. Embassy as Saigon and South Vietnam fall. Three million Americans served in the war; nearly 58,000 Americans were killed, 150,000 seriously wounded, and over 1,000 are missing in action. Estimates of all civilian and military deaths in the war, from 1954 to 1975, range from 1,500,000 to 4,000,000.

ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – FROM Variety

‘WAVE THAT FLAG’: MEET THE DEADHEADS WHO STUMP FOR TRUMP

By Noah Eckstein

On the lawn of Jeff Whritenour’s house in Kinnelon, New Jersey, a sign reads, “Presidents are temporary, the Grateful Dead is forever.” A few feet away, a flag bearing the iconography of the Grateful Dead flies above a Trump 2020 banner. Passersby often pause for a double-take, no doubt questioning what many would perceive as conflicting messages. After all, the Dead were liberal, pot-smoking hippies of the San Francisco counterculture; musicians inspired by the LSD experience of the 1960s and the Beat Generation. These attributes aren’t what naturally comes to mind when thinking of Donald Trump’s supporters but Whritenour doesn’t see it that way.

“I’m not a big fan of the president, but at the end of the day, Trump is about individual freedom and so was the Dead,” says the insurance claims consultant. His take, along with that of an unknown number of Trump-supporting Deadheads, is that the Grateful Dead’s philosophy was about individual liberties and not telling people what to do.

“I ain’t buyin’ it,” declares Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead’s longtime publicist and author of “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead.” McNally worked for the band from 1984 to 2004 and feels that the essence of the Grateful Dead’s music — and its core members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann — is to be compassionate and tolerant. “The capacity for people to compartmentalize their lives is infinite, and anyone who is serious about being a Deadhead and then supports Trump is more or less consciously overlooking the values that he espouses which are bigotry and cruelty.”

The Dead’s lyrics are not a polemic, there is a lot of room for interpretation and disparate perceptions. Further, it’s difficult to identify a singular theme or collective Grateful Dead political philosophy. Most of their lyrics were written by Robert Hunter, a poet inspired by folk music whose words elicited no mundane meanings but rather formed an authentic journey into an old, ideal, adventurous storybook America. The Dead saw themselves as meta-political, playing concerts at anti-war protests but never supporting any political candidates. In fact, it’s rare that an original song by the Dead even reference a news event of its time. The Dead have no “Ohio” in their repertoire.

That political agnosticism may in fact be what draws Republicans and libertarians to the band. Deroy Murdock, a political commentator and Fox News contributor, saw the Dead over 70 times and uses the song ‘Liberty’ — specifically Hunter’s lyric “to find my own way home” — as evidence that the Dead’s values are inherently conservative. Murdock attended Dead shows in the ’80s and ’90s with other rightist commentators like Ann Coulter and Marc Caputo. “The emphasis of individuality, self-expression, and patriotism is appealing to Trump supporters,” says Murdock, who prefers to focus on the president’s policy record rather than his public demeanor. Yet, after over four years of nonstop coverage, late-night tweet storms, and questionable leadership, it’s hard not to focus on Trump’s character. Murdock thinks that Garcia, the Dead’s somewhat reluctant leader, and Hunter would have found Trump amusing. “They would have laughed at his antics.”

“Actually, Hunter is spinning in his grave,” says McNally, who worked closely with the late lyricist and Garcia. Steve Silberman, a New York Times best-selling author who co-produced “So Many Roads,” a boxset of Grateful Dead music, says of Garcia: “Could you imagine Jerry supporting a government kidnapping 500 children and losing their parents? I can’t.”

This isn’t to say the band never took a political stance. In the summer of 1989, members of the Dead testified before Congress to raise awareness of deforestation in Malaysia. Garcia lit a cigarette in the non-smoking chamber before Representative Claudine Schneider, a Republican from Rhode Island, stated that her guess would be 90% of Deadheads did not vote. Garcia himself rarely voted, except as Silberman recounts, for Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964. A few years later in 1993, Garcia stood in the oval office wearing sweatpants and sneakers as Vice President Al Gore explained the origins of the Resolute Desk, wearing a three-piece suit. “We would have never gone to the White House if a Republican was in office,” says McNally.

Garcia’s small acts of rebellion were indicative of a Grateful Dead philosophy that put great stock in freedom, autonomy, independence and not preaching to the population. Still his reasoning for being invested in the rainforest issue was: “I am an earthling on this planet,” pointing toward a spirit of caring that is at the core of the Dead’s philosophy.

“Conservative Deadheads have gotten much more stupid and much more programmed,” says Silberman, who fears civil war may be imminent with potential polling place violence on election day and Trump’s continued spread of Covid-19-related misinformation. He, like countless others quarantined in their homes for months, has found himself returning to the comfort music of his youth, turning to the Dead’s melodies and sense of community “for something more meaningful, as a place to be reborn at every show.”

But Silberman also recalls shows in the ’70s and ’80s where he felt afraid to hold his boyfriend’s hand in public, worried about being “gay-bashed” by those in attendance. “Homophobia and sexism ran in the Grateful Dead family,” he says.

Murdock, who is a Black gay man, insists that the scene was inclusive. He also feels strongly that Trump is not a racist. “If he were racist, he would not have ended mass incarceration,” states Murdock, falsely, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The issue at the heart of conservative Deadheads’ point of view is the desire for little to no government interference in their private lives. Offers Whritenour: “We shouldn’t focus on Trump the man, but instead the right to do what I want with my time, money, and life.”

North Carolina newspaper or Brian Clary, who attended Dead shows in the ’80s and ’90s, counters that the peace and love vibe “does not square with Trump… at all.” If anything, he believes Trump-supporting Deadheads are misinterpreting the songs and the culture. “The ‘I got mine, you got yours’ philosophy that [Trump’s] supporters are all about is the antithesis of the Grateful Dead.”

Among the Dead’s guiding mantras is Garcia’s oft-sung line, “Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.” And while Deadheads may not collectively agree on the greatest “Dark Star” jam or who was the band’s best keyboardist, never mind politics, fans from all walks of life would endorse the fact that American has the right — and duty — to make their own decision on election day.

ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – From Newsmax

HOW TUCKER CARLSON, RUSH LIMBAUGH, AND DONALD TRUMP MORPHED FROM 'HIPPIES' TO 'HELLS ANGELS'

By Ralph BenkoMonday, 15 March 2021 12:43 PM

Fox News bad boy Tucker Carlson is stirring things up again, hippie-punching the New York Times’s Taylor Lorenz, accusing her of snowflakery. The New York Times counterpunches with charges of cruelty. Both charges quite possibly are well founded.

That said, there’s a backstory. Tucker has Hippie roots.

He attended more than 50 Grateful Dead concerts in his day. Per Fox News, "…Tucker Carlson – who has attended at least 50 shows – named his latest book 'Ship of Fools,' an homage of the Grateful Dead song of the same name."

Carlson has company in his transformation from gentle Hippie to tough guy Hells Angel: Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump.

Matt Taibbi (paywalled at Substack and worth every penny), reminds us that Rush started off as a mildly Hippified personality, "Jeff Christie." Rush, who was more about pwning progressive pieties than promoting authentic conservatism, pivoted to tough guy and went on to fame and fortune.

His pivot from pussycat to grizzly bear (dancing or not) soon was emulated by one real estate mogul named Donald Trump. Trump began his own political adventures singing Kumbaya. As Fintan O’Toole reminds us in the New York Review of Books:

"At the beginning of this century, Trump was testing the market for a run at the presidency. This was the product he thought Americans would buy: Oprah on his ticket, a guarantee to serve one term only, and an insistence that ‘one of our next president’s most important goals must be to induce a greater tolerance for diversity.' In his manifesto The America We Deserve (2000), Trump claimed that his friendships with the rapper Sean ‘Puff Daddy’ Combs and baseball outfielder Sammy Sosa had left him with 'little appetite for those who hate or preach intolerance.' The horrible murder in Wyoming of a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, had convinced him of the need to ‘work towards an America where these kinds of hate crimes are unthinkable.'"

"Most strikingly, Trump’s analysis in 2000 was that his putative rival for the Reform Party nomination, a right-wing populist, could never be elected because he had spent too long as a professional loud-mouth: 'Simply put, Pat Buchanan has written too many inflammatory, outrageous, and controversial things to ever be elected president.' This kindly, tolerant, politically correct President Trump… never found a market. Trump soon realized that it wouldn’t fly. He dropped it and eventually worked his way toward the presentation of a very different commodity. He realized that overindulgence in the 'inflammatory, outrageous and controversial’ was not an obstacle but a springboard to the presidency.'"

America recently elected the touchy-feely Joe Biden in preference to the swaggering Donald Trump. And yet … even with President Joe in the White House, Limbaugh gone to his Eternal Reward and Trump in quasi-exile many millions continue to yearn for tough guys. Some of us saw this coming.

As I observed way back in 2015 at Forbes.com, Politics, Noir:

"Donald Trump continues to dominate and fascinate. Why? Politics, like comic books, thrillers, detective stories, science fiction, professional wrestling, movies and TV is a pulp medium. … What’s going on now in Campaign 2016 isn’t strictly politics. It is melodrama. …

"Donald Trump, 'Reality' TV star, grasps the conventions of the pulp world better than any of his (far more qualified, far more distinguished, and far more likable) rivals. Trump is getting the best ratings because Trump is presenting a more compelling pulp Story.

"It surely is no coincidence that Trump’s emergence comes in the era where Breaking Bad entered the Guinness Book of World Records as 'the highest rated TV series' of all time. Popular culture now is dominated by stories of antiheroes: Walter White, Don Draper, Barksdale, Frank Underwood, Tony Soprano … the list goes on."

And as I wrote for The Transpartisan Review, in Political Armageddon, in 2019:

"[W]e pivot to demonizing one another. As an aside, one can trace the evolution of the American narrative from Hollywood’s output. In the ‘30s you had frontier Westerns with heroic sheriffs fighting brutal outlaws. The ‘40s gave us heroic soldiers fighting evil Nazis and imperial Japanese troops. The ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s gave way to heroic fights against Communist agents. All gave way to noir anti-heroes, dystopian futures, Imperial Storm Troopers and, eventually, Zombies."

Rush Limbaugh walked, as Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump walk, on the wild side.

Progressives are appalled, having forgotten (as I, another right wing Deadhead, remember) how the greatest poet of our generation, Allen Ginsburg, saw how the Hippies and Hells Angels, who detested each other over their respective opposition to and support of the Vietnam War, both, as outlaws, had undiscovered affinities.

Ginsberg invited them both to a wild party. The Hippies and Hells Angels became, for a time, fast friends.

So… word up, Tucker. Keep on Truckin’!

Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $88T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.