It Could Happen Here - The 1968 DNC

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Anti-war protests rage, a president drops out of the race in favor of his vice president, a candidate is assassinated, welcome to the 1968 DNC. But how similar really is it to 2024?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and

it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Bill Wong. With me is James Stout. Hi, man. Call zone media. a bunch of episodes from the floor. You're going to be hearing all about all of the sort of excitement. But for sort of day one of our DNC convention, I thought we'd do something a little

bit different. And that is, I want to take a look back at the convention that I think most people have been thinking is the most similar to this one, which is the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which is also a convention that featured large anti-war protests and the vice president of an extremely unpopular president who is waging an unpopular war has seized control of the nomination. I mean, you know, the parallels, I mean, you know, there's occupations at Columbia. I mean, right down to the one that I think I've seen, I haven't seen anyone else talk about is that one of the big uprisings in 1968 is in Pakistan, and particularly in the part of Pakistan that is now Bangladesh. We are about a week-ish, maybe two weeks removed from an enormous uprising in

Bangladesh that just knocked out their political leadership. So, you know, there are lots of sort of 1968 vibes in the air. It's not unsimilar, but it's also not the same, as I'm sure we're about to find out. Yeah, yeah. I think in some sense, and we'll get to this more as the episode progresses, but in some sense, 68, parts of it are sort of an inversion of what's happening now. And parts of it are an interesting case study in having the same pieces, but having them fit into totally different configurations. And because of that, the results are going to be, I think, very, very staggeringly different. Yeah. And I think maybe the primary difference is that really, the 1968 Democratic Convention does not start in the U.S. at all all it starts in vietnam on vietnamese new years and it really starts with the ted

offensive so for people who have forgotten this from their history classes like maybe so maybe some of you were around for this i don't know uh statistically probably not but i don't know maybe there's a few old timers here yeah so the ted offensive is this massive attack by sort of the vietcong which are north vietnamese forces on new years of well technically it's like january 6th because the calendar dates are off but it's this massive attack on american positions it's it's an attempt really to sort of seize control of south vietnam it doesn't really work militarily because and this is a an interesting kind of display of bad judgment the north vietnamese leadership bizarrely makes almost exactly the same mistake that the americans are going to make

from the invasion of iraq which is that they they are under the assumption that you know their attack would trigger a series of urban revolts that would like drive out the corrupt vietnamese south vietnamese like puppet governments and like run the americans out of the country and that doesn't happen there's no uprisings the vietcong take a bunch of grounds but unbelievable numbers of their cadres are just wiped out by the subsequent american counter-attack but it didn't matter at all because what the ted offensive really did was instantly reveal to everyone in the U.S. that LBJ and every previous American administration had been lying to them about the Vietnam War. In the wake of these attacks, it is instantly clear that the U.S. is not winning the war. They are not making steady progress against the communists they are at best locked in a grinding stalemate against an enemy with the capacity to

launch attacks that could again temporarily like run the u.s out of cities right yeah and this this craters lbj's popularity his popularity is in the 30s oh damn yeah when you come but that's yeah it's it's it's really really bad he it's i think it's like 36%. He is staggeringly, staggeringly unpopular. And, you know, the Tet Offensive also, in some sense, validates particularly the sort of radical wing remember the anti-war movement today as this purely this sort of like hyper-militant Students for a Democratic Society, just the draft card burning stuff. And there was that, but those people for the early, especially the early 60s leading up to this point, and even DREAM 68 are a minority, right? Most of the anti-war people are sort of older, like anti-nuclear activists, people who'd come up in the 40s, people who'd been through the Red Scare and are these sort of hyper-vigilant liberals. And these people thought that they could work with LBJ to end the war, right? LBJ comes in not like quite explicitly promising to end the war, but he comes in as the candidate who's not literally threatening to bomb Saigon. And then he turns around and bombs Saigon. And so this moment, the Tet Offensive, is this moment where the radical wing of the anti-war movement is vindicated, right? LBJ has been lying to them the whole time.

All of the sort of negotiations that people have been doing have been a complete failure. And in the sort of wake of this, there's a real sort of drive by a couple of different anti-war factions to stage a protest at the Democratic National Convention for what, you know, to protest what everyone assumes is going to be the coronation of LBJ. There are two different kind of umbrellas of groups, I guess you could call it, who wind up at 68. And this is something that we aren't going to have now because neither of these two kinds of things really exist anymore. The first of these groups are the politically serious hardliners. They are organized into this unbelievably large coalition

of hundreds of groups called National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Nobody says that because it's so long. Everyone then and now just calls it MOAB, or sometimes mobilization, but everyone in the writing just calls them MOAB. And MOAB is one of the groups that's been getting more radical by 68. But again, the students of our democratic society who are kind of the 60s parallel to the DSA, if you're going to sort of do these direct one-to-one lines, right, are a minority. And also, SDS basically leaves MOAB to focus on other kinds of organizing. So SDS is going to be around. They're going to be involved in this protest,

but Moab is kind of not being ran by them. And Moab is also a very complicated endeavor because, again, these are big tent groups, right? These are very, very, very big tent groups. You know, these range from, honestly, sort of right liberal professional groups who oppose the war to, like, one of the major leaders of Moab in this period is a senior member of the SWP, lot of people in bobe who do not want militant confrontation they don't want there to be big confrontations with the police and then also you know these people just don't have the same ends

right yeah the swp people are trying to have a socialist revolution uh there's other people in this group who are trying to not have their tax dollars pay for a war yeah not get their kids drafted into a war yeah yeah but mob is the big anti-war hub right with the exception of the group we're going to talk about next almost all anti-war activity in the country is is running through vogue just to some extent or another because it's a coalition of like all of these groups we don't really have anything like this anymore yeah there are kind of the tattered remains of this stuff but they don't have the kind of pull the kind of especially i don't have the kind of organizational capacity that this stuff had yeah there's not really like there are a wide variety of people opposed to genocide in

palestine but but they're not united under any even this there isn't like a popular front or a big tent yeah that really brings them together even in 2020 so if you didn't really have like a a big tent org did we like we had like blm capital blm that 501c3 but but like that wasn't really a like an org that was that effective on the ground and that's a key component that's very very different about you know about the 68 convention the one that's going to happen you know as as as this comes out it will be day one of that convention yeah the terrain of groups who are opposed to it are staggeringly different this this kind of stuff we just don't have it anymore.

Now, part of what MOAB is struggling to do, and this is something that some of the things they're dealing with are things that we don't deal with now. Some of them are things that we deal with all the time now. One of the big ones is they're trying to develop what eventually is going to be called the diversity of tactics. So they're trying to have protests that you can have 300 000 people and most of those people could be sitting around having a picnic and then there's also a bunch of people who are like fighting the police in the front right yeah we are i think sort of largely familiar with this kind of from 2020 right yeah and the police take us everyone yeah well yeah so this this just comes to another very important part about this, which is that Moab, even in the planning stages, even the radicals are not trying to fight the cops, right?

Nobody wants to do it because everyone is terrified about Chicago's reaction to the Holy Week uprising. We talked about the Holy Week uprising in another episode. Very briefly, it's a massive series of riots and uprisings that follow the assassination of Martin Luther King. riots and uprisings that follow the assassination of Martin Luther King. There's a particularly bad one in Chicago where Mayor Daley is so pissed off that he goes on TV and gives a speech where he tells his cops to shoot and maim people they could accuse of looting. Good stuff. And, you know, this goes over so badly that the next day he's giving statements to the media saying he never said this. you know everyone saw him say it on live tv so you know but people people are terrified because this is a period where the cops

really will shoot into crowds so you know everyone in the planning phases of this you know i i think most people broadly know how this turns out which is there's a bunch of street fighting the police attack people but none of the planners wanted that. They were very, very deliberately trying to make sure there weren't confrontations with the police. Because as it turns out, these people are staggeringly unprepared for a confrontation with the cops. I'm going to read a quote from the very good book, Chicago 68, which is a, politically it's a bit questionable, but it has an excruciatingly in-depth account of these, I mean, we're talking hour-to-hour rundowns of the convention itself, you know, very well-documented accounts of all

of the meetings that produced this. So I'm going to read a quote. This is about Mo, about their preparation for Chicago DNC protests. Quote, some even wanted to warn prospective protesters that they should bring protective clothing like helmets, bulky sweaters, and bandana for tear gas. But it was decided that this might overly alarm would-be protesters. Great. Now, again, this is Moe. They are supposed to be the serious organizers here right the other group that we're going to talk about the yippies like compared to the yippies these guys look like shock troopers and this is how unprepared they are yeah wow like looking at this from our

perspective these people are dangerous amateurs they have no idea what they're doing they don't understand how to deal with police at all one of the other things that happens is this is one of the first early deployment of sort of CS tier gas, right? And they have a guy who'd been drafted into Vietnam, had become a special forces guy who had, you know, like after he got out, had become a leftist. And he's telling you about this gas and he's saying, yeah need to talk to the so the other thing that's going on here is you can tell how early this is into the cycle because they don't have dedicated street medics they have basically a nurse's association a doctor's association that they've gotten to go give you a medical care which is not bad right but no i mean that's great but people need to be aware of what they're getting into and then the medical folks need to be aware of how they can mitigate that and the mo people overruled this guy and saying no we're not going to tell the medical folks need to be aware of how they can mitigate that. And the Moat people overruled this guy and saying, no, we're not going to tell the medical people about the sort of solution thing he's talking about to neutralize this gas, right?

These people are just staggeringly unprepared for an actual police confrontation. And something you have to keep in mind about about 1968 america right is that we have a very different sort of outlook on the police and how you deal with the police than than these people right we come from basically the decade of the street fight since occupied 2011 and really intensifying in ferguson in, there has been a straight decade between conversations with the police. If you were out in the most intense part of 2020, and statistically, if you're listening to this show, you probably at least were out there a little bit. You have seen shit that these kids, like, I call them kids, right? These people are in their 20s and 30s.

But you have seen shit that these people cannot even imagine, right? But you have seen shit that these people cannot even imagine, right? If you're looking back from our perspective, right, you know, with the experience with the police that we have, you can look back at these people and you can instantly tell that they're going to get clobbered. One of the things they're trying to do is they're trying to copy some of the techniques from the Japanese student movement, which is an infamously very, probably the best street fighters in the world. Yeah. And they're trying to copy their techniques and they can't do it. And they're trying to do the snake line thing to break police lines. They're all falling over. And so it's very it's very clear from our perspective that this is going to be a fiasco. But these people think that they understand how to manage the police.

Yeah. I mean, the state's capacity for violence has increased exponentially since then. Like you could kind of stand up to the cops just by by staying in the streets you know to a degree i think it's probably this is the beginning of the state sort of moving towards arming itself to deny people access to public space in that fashion right which we saw like if you grew up at the time i did in in genoa in prague and these g8 summits cancun all the different ones right at octarada like i think that was the beginning maybe of like modern crowd control policing but yeah these yeah this is a different world to the one we are in now yeah and they don't you know and in some sense

this is the beginning of the modern world right but they haven't seen it yet yeah there's only one way to really experience that stuff yeah you have you have to go through it so we're going to take an ad break and when we come back we are going to get to the yippies the other group that's protesting at this convention hooray hey i'm gianna prudente and i'm jimmy jackson gadsden we're the hosts of let's talk offline Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone.

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Where mob are very, very explicit political people, right? Capital T politics, you know, communists, socialists, some like sort of left liberals, progressives, etc., etc. And they're very clearly doing politics conventionally. The yippies are a counterculture group it's this mix of people who are political radicals who get caught up in sort of this counterculture stuff and then a lot of them are just kind of counterculture people who mostly just sort of want sex drugs and rock and roll but see this as the way to sort of resist the the sort of death machine that they see themselves as living in yeah i think this is a time when

people start talking about the marcusian great refusal a lot in 1968 right and then kind of people go in big different directions with that yeah although these people are we'll get into this more in a second these people are not very theoretically sophisticated right they're not reading old herbert they are stoned out of their minds at literally all times you know and so yippy is a term that didn't exist before the 68 convention it was developed specifically as as part of a plan to do a sort of protest thing as as this rallying cry of yippy against the sort of death machine of of the democratic national convention which everyone thought was going to nominate lbj to do more firebombing of vietnam and so their plan is and this is something that you can still see kind

of reflections of in some ish modern movements although we don't do it as much anymore but their plan was to have this sort of festival of life to counterpose against the dnc's festival of death they were going to have a bunch of singers and people were just going to have public sex. And their thesis of how they're trying to do this is to hijack the sort of mass media machine, which they see as the kind of defining element of modern society, right? It's the element of sort of totalitarian social control. And their plan is to hijack it for their own purposes. and their plan is to hijack it for for their own purposes this is superficially similar to something you see from the french 68ers uh who have sort of by the time this is happening have done a revolution that doesn't quite work well we'll cover on this show at some point and the

french 68ers both the students and the workers uh who very very nearly take control of france are heavily influenced by a theorist named guy de board and his sort of ubiquitous book the society of spectacle and superficially these are very similar things but de board's analysis is a technologically and sort of ideologically sophisticated analysis of social relations and again the yippies are contrary to that stoned out of their minds at literally all times yeah yeah they're doing uh like timu.com gita ball yeah well so so i'm gonna read back to back a line an average line from guide to board society a spectacle and then i'm gonna give you a quote from an abby hoffman who's one of the people who invents the term yippie i'm to give a quote from one of his speeches at the 68th convention.

So here is an average guide to board society a spectacle line. Quote, The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch, of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceal the fact that they are relations among men and classes. Second nature, with its fatal law, seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product

of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content. of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content so this is this is this is what the people this is what the 68ers in france are reading here is yippee founder abby hoffman this is this is in a speech why he would call it a rap or something but this is in a rambling that he gives to a crowd at the 68 convention meet the press face the nation the issues and answers all those bullshit shows you know you get a democrat and a republican arguing back and forward this and that this and yeah yeah yeah but at the end of the show nobody changes their fucking mind you see but they're trying to push

brillo you see that's good you want to use brillo see in about every 10 minutes odd will come three minutes of brillo brillo is a revolution brillo was sex brillo was fun brillo was at the end of the show people ain't fucking switching from democrat or republican or commies you know the right wingers ready of that shit they're buying brillo i mean can you imagine if they had the beatles gain zing zing zing all that jump and shout you know and all of a sudden they put an ad where this guy comes on very straight you ought to buy Brillo because it's the rationally correct decision, part of the American process, it's the right way to do things. You know, fuck, they'll buy the Beatles, they won't buy Brillo.

So, this is a semi-incomprehensible rant, right? This is, this just goes on. In the middle of this kind of semi-incoherent, intentionally semi-incoherent nonsense, is this point about how the thing that changes people's minds is advertising, right? And not the sort of business of politics as usual. It's this sort of performance spectacle that is the real thing that actually changes how people think. These are performance artists, right? Alan Ginsberg, sort of famous beat poet, was one of the people who's going to be speaking there. He's writing poetry about it. These people

are doing theater performances. If you've seen like the giant puppets that used to be at big protests, that was kind of a descendant of this stuff. Oh, yeah. And these performance artists are sitting out to hijack the biggest stage in the world and turn it against the war. And that stage is the 1968 Democratic Convention. Unfortunately, however, if there's one group in the U.S. who is even less prepared for a street fight than Moab is, it is the Yippies. At least the more radical members of Moab have pretensions of street fighting. The yippies are not street fighters at all. And this is something that's distinct from most of the 68 uprisings. Most of the 68 uprisings everywhere are characterized by people who are very, very good at this, right?

And these protesters fight very well. I mean, the most famous ones we've talked about a little bit already are the Japanese student movement, who have this sort of iconic white construction hats, these giant wooden poles they use to literally fight riot police at rage but you know students workers and just like random people off the street everywhere from italy to france to pakistan are able to fight the police on fairly even footing they they equip themselves valiantly the yippies on the other hand every single time they come into contact with the police, they get absolutely mauled. And, you know, the pre-DNC Yippie protests are extremely peaceful, right? They're not even disruptive.

They have permits and the police just batter them. And this is kind of the plan, right? The police attacks are generating media coverage and the Yippies are trying to hijack this media coverage to spread their message. And this kind of works to some extent. Part of the problem, though, is that one of the biggest newspapers in Chicago is Chicago Tribune, who are a kind of reactionary that, I mean, I guess we still have them, but this is the kind of magazine that would have been right there with The Economist saying that, like like all of the Irish dying was good. Right. That's the kind of like the British killed him in the famine. Right. Like this is the kind of kind of reactionary that that's Chicago Tribune is. And so some of their protest hijacking stuff doesn't really work in Chicago because you'll have these protests where just the Tribune shows up. up and if your tribune shows up the the coverage of the cops just absolutely beating the crap out of a bunch of people who were just walking on sidewalks is going to be something like police defeat unruly demonstrators or something before before we go any further and by any further

we're going to talk about how these dudes relate to each other and oh boy uh we need to go to the thing the yippies would have been hijacking which is these products and services we're continuing in their noble tradition by using their money to do this episode. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News

and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year,

you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast

Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

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wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. So something that I think is very interesting about these two groups, that is the final thing that you kind of have to understand about why these protests go the way they do. I've talked a bit about how sort of the more radical parts of Moab and the yippies who are very radical are kind of being isolated from the more moderate elements. And this is part of Mayor Daley's deliberate strategy. Daley is the all-powerful mayor of chicago he's one of

the sort of the builders of america's greatest ever political machine which is the chicago machine yeah um by this point he he has single hand almost single-handedly like won elections for the democratic party by handing them illinois on a platter he he is the guy like one of the people who turns illinois from a swing state into a state that votes for democrats by enormous margins every single year and he does this through this incredibly powerful patriotist network and corruption network and daly's deliberate strategy is trying to sort of separate he's trying to knock the moderates out of the protests by threatening that he's going to just like obliterate these people right might not buy and also by continuously denying them permits so that sort of warm water people won't show up.

Yeah. And so the plan is basically to isolate them. And part of the other reason why this works is that this whole plan is opposed by a group you wouldn't really expect to be opposing it, which is the communists. TPUSA wants nothing to do with this. Even the SWP, Socialist Workers Party, who are the Trotskyites, who have very important roles in MOAB, they're part of a faction that doesn't want to do the DNC convention going in. And this is something you see all over 1968. Because, weirdly, the Communist parties in 1968 are a very conservative force. This is something that we've talked about on this show before in places like chile where you have fairly moderate christian democratic workers going into the streets and

meanwhile the chilean communist party is going no no hold on we must slow the pace of reforms yeah yeah this isn't it and you know that's even more mild example than what happens in france where the french communist party blows its one shot of ever taking power by straight up working with the government to stamp out the may 68 uprisings there. Yeah. Yeah. These old left parties are very conservative, both because, you know, on an international level, because some of them are in the sort of common turn orbit. Right. So they're taking orders directly from Moscow and Moscow doesn't want any disruption. Right. And in the U.S., a lot of the older activists don't want a confrontation because they're all still petrified

of the Red Scare. And so they're terrified of anything that could like even sort of alienate a single person. And this means that to some extent, all Moab and the Yippies really have are each other. But the problem is the Moab and the Yippies hate each other. That's a tennis on its time. Yeah, it's amazing. And again again this is something that like all of the mo people agree about which they agree about nothing the only thing they agree about is they don't even they don't even agree about fully demanding an end to the vietnam war right like an immediate they don't agree with anything except they hate the yippies

because they see the yippies as these like deeply unserious bourgeois degenerates who are just having sex and doing drugs and are just literally the same culture that they're trying to resist uh the yippee see mobe as sort of self-righteous assholes who are locked in this death spiral of comically serious politics that are also just a reflection of the thing they're opposing so you know both of these people think the same things about each other but meanwhile both of these groups and really everyone else in the u.s is going to have to ride the wildest wave of vibe shifts in the entirety of american history so all right we we kind of famously had our vibe shift when biden

dropped out and everyone was like whoa hold on better things are possible question mark yeah question there's also a vibe shift in 68 when when lbj drops out it's march 31st but there are key differences here though right biden has already won the nomination right by the by the time that he is forced out and when he is forced out there is great rejoicing everyone's really happy about it even the old biden style words immediately fall in line behind kamal har, right? Yeah, right. The Biden's wins account changes its name to Kamala's wins. Yeah, right. 68 is much, much messier than that.

LPJ doesn't drop out until he almost loses a, he almost loses, I think it's the New Hampshire primary to anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, not to be confused with the other McCarthy. I was really baffled the first time I just saw people talking about mccarthy i was like what wait hold on yeah yeah this is this is anti-war stalwart senator eugene mccarthy and mccarthy almost beating lbj in a very conservative state really sort of lights this fire under lbj and lbj realizes that he could win the nomination but if he does that he's going to lose the general election so he books it and drops out when lbj drops out there's a competitive primary the other reason the primary is competitive is

that rfk takes this as a shining moment and goes i am going to enter the race as the anti-war candidate now we now have our tragedy as farce rfk yeah yeah jesus yeah just to be clear people aren't familiar not the same dude no no different bobby kennedy yeah this is rfk and rfk really is seen as as a guy and both him and mccarthy are seen by young people who have been disillusioned by LBJ as someone who can sort of like take this anti-war platform national, right? And there is a massive vibe shift for a moment. There is hope. And this is a real problem for the anti-war factions because this kind of thing is exactly how the U.S. got into this mess in the first place. LBJ ran this same con in 64.

Yeah, exactly. And then got elected and immediately made the war worse. So, you know, I think there's this tendency to look back on the anti-war protesters as these sort of, like, spoiler people who ruined the Democratic nomination or whatever. But, you know, they were right to a large extent to be incredibly suspicious of anti-war democratic candidates. Yeah. But, you know, this also throws all of the planning for the protests into chaos because the center point of the protests for both Moab and the Yippies was to show an alternative to this sort of stagnant, moribund, death machine politics of LBJ. But then suddenly, like, if there's an anti-war candidate who's a nominee, it becomes so much harder to make this case.

And these people are really unbelievably depressed the vibes everywhere else in the country are great everyone believes in hope again it's hope and change they have and then rfk gets assassinated everything goes to shit almost immediately i mean the vibes are so bad that famously one of the one of the mob guys i think he's on camera just weeping because i mean he and he and bobby kennedy had kind of had sort of known each other through through the sort of anti-war networks and he's not a kennedy supporter but when kennedy gets killed it's basically imagine our vibe shift immediately flipped out his head and went even more rancid than it had been

the feeling that you all had in the week after the the failed trump assassination right yeah and you can see this is interesting right like all of the elements of 1968 are here in 2024 right you have your unpopular president leaving you have a vibe shift you have a kennedy you have an assassination attempt but the pieces fit together differently because what happens is you know the vibe shift collapses with the rfk assassination and suddenly you know anti-war is back on the table but on the other hand mccarthy's still in the race right e? Eugene McCarthy, who is the other anti-war candidate, is still in the race. However, comma, it is becoming increasingly clear that what is going to happen at the convention is that Eugene McCarthy is going to get rat fucked and they are going to put Hubert Humphrey, who is LBJ's vice president, back in the saddle under the same policies. And this, too, is a sort of inversion of 2024. The party elites ousting Biden and installing Kamala Harris

is broadly unbelievably popular with the base. Hubert Humphrey doesn't run in primaries. He just wins by wrangling all the delegates to vote for him in this incredible series of sort of smoke-filled backroom deals and peeling off people who've been kennedy delegates and it becomes clear that that he's going to to win but it's terrifying because what has happened is that the democratic elite against the will of a lot of democratic voters has just straight up stolen this election right they have they have stolen it they have rat fucked eugene mccarthy yeah this is kind of like

the right has unsuccessfully tried to play this narrative again right yeah and again this the thing about harris is that she is seen as something different than biden this is this partially has to do with the differences in biden's weakness versus lbj's right a huge part of biden's weakness that everyone thinks he's completely senile yeah because he is objectively senile yeah yeah because he can't fucking string together a sentence yeah it goes off on right not that trump can no not that trump can either right but it was but biden's was sort of more visible right yeah because of sort of the way the media works because of trump's ability to sort of run away there's a lot of factors right yeah no one on earth thinks that lbj is senile not not even his worst enemies i think that that man is senile right his problem is his policies and the problem with that is that

his policies are being transferred directly to his successor who is his vice president whereas kamala harris does not have the fundamental weakness of joe biden which is that she successfully and she is the first major american political figure who's been able to do this in eight years she can string together three consecutive sentences yeah which yeah it appears like a manna from heaven to the sort of politics appreciator classes right when they have to explain to all of us why we're pure island juvenile of wanting politics outside of politicians while their politicians are like yeah struggling to do a whole paragraph without talking about their corn pop or scranton pennsylvania or something yeah and so so this is you know even as we're heading into into the convention things are things are going to be very different than they're going to play out now but there's one thing that is exactly the same if that is chicago police department

there is no changes the only change is they are slightly less slightly not not significantly they are slightly less willing to say the n-word in public like a little bit yeah and in return for that they got approximately 1010 million of fucking weapons. Yeah, yeah. So really up to you. These people are exactly the same as today. They are overpaid, entitled assholes screaming for violence. They are screaming that they're going to take their vengeance

against what they see as a leftist conspiracy to protect criminals and hand the country to communists. They are precisely the swine who beat us in the streets in 2020 these people in 68 are precisely the men today who run who ran a black site at home and square to torture to disappear and torture suspects in the false confessions and who boldly set out a few years ago to kill a 16 year old with 16 shots on a cover-up this is the exact same chicago police department that it was in 68 and in fact all of the key elements of the modern police department this is the period richard m daly is one of the people who gets the cops to

unionize and again we're gonna see daly is really truly a terrible person daly wants the teamsters to organize the cops and that doesn't work at all his bid completely fails they're organized by the fraternal order of police who are just effectively a giant cartel for police murderers now and they were at the time there are a bunch of unbelievable reactionaries a bunch of their leaderships will do things like quote hitler they just can't fucking stop themselves no yeah so i want to read i'm going to read sort of a modern police statements uh quote the better we do our job of enforcing the law the more we are attacked the state of our so called objective press is sad to behold suddenly too many so-called objective news writers attempt

to excuse the actions of minorities oh wait that's not that's not the modern police that's the 68 police saying a thing that is literally identical to every modern police statement today they have not changed at all because no one made them no this is sort of the trap that the anti-war people are walking into right they are walking into a bunch of ultra radicalized unbelievably pissed off cops who are salivating at the attempt to sort of beat up long-haired hippies and i also there's one thing we should also make clear that's that's very different between this anti-war movement and the modern one which is that mobe and the yippies are terrifyingly white they might be whiter than the cops at this it's it's genuinely possible that's true the hippies love for reasons that are incomprehensible to me other than racism absolutely love dressing up in like indigenous costumes oh god yeah it's awful why yeah and and

part of what's going on is that the sort of black radical groups don't really want to be involved in this yeah what can i can see why you know they're anti-war but they're like this is not our problem uh you you can sort this out yeah and this is also another thing, a very, very key difference between that anti-war sort of coalition and today's. Because today's anti-war coalition, if you go to any of the campus occupations, right, you go to an anti-war protest, it's basically a combination of two groups, right? It's queer white people and just non-white people in general, some of whom are queer and some of whom aren't. And that's the core of sort of protest organization in the US, right? Those are the core of the people who show up. Yeah, and then 17 people with fucking clipboards

trying to get them to sign up for their various... Well, those are the leeches that show up to sort of prey on the news. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are the lamprey on the shark of protest. Yeah, yeah. But this plays out very differently politically because of who has been mobilized into sort of anti-war things now versus who is showing up to this convention and this is going to be true of the people who show up to the convention this time right yeah they are very much not the same kind of sort of middle-class student

people who were showing up to, to like this convention. Although not all those people, but like there was a lot of people who were workers. Right. But like they're distressingly white. And that is, that is simply not true of the modern group. It's one of the reasons why the pieces don't quite fit.

All right. We need to go do some more ads and then we're going to sort of wrap up what actually happened at the convention and how it sort of shook up politically. exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%.

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nor the Yippies really know what they're planning to do. The planning has been terrible. Part of it is because, again, they can't get permits from the city. And it's really hard to plan when you can't know what you're supposed to be doing. There's also internal disagreements in the groups over what to do. There's also a truly staggering federal infiltration and not just the normal feds right we're talking like military intelligence oh wow like the like the army's intelligence office is spying on protesters they they have guys inside of mccarthy's campaign that should not be legal like it doesn't matter if it's legal yeah it doesn't right like it's but it's it's nuts and you know i mean there's an estimate that that's from from 68 chicago that

book that one in six protesters were informants oh fuck me it's like atom waffen ratio they've got going on yeah yeah and like part of this is the the numbers of protesters here aren't very good because people are terrified the cpd is going to start killing everyone so the actual numbers even at its peak is maybe 10 000 which is pretty small considering the pentagon mobilization mobilization that mob had done in 67 was like a hundred thousand people wow right they've been able to put together really massive protests but this one is not that large so the yippies kind of do their concert thing but the moment night hits and they're trying to be in this park the police attack the police are incredibly brutal by about three days in the national guard gets deployed and this is something about 68 that's also different from today if the

national guard is deployed today it's not the same thing no as as as as a national guard deployment 68 because a national guard deployment in 68 very well could mean that the army is going to kill you all right this is a period in which the the national guard their riot control mechanism is a line of guys with bayonets yeah he's about to say these bayonets are less lethal yeah yeah i mean and that's or less lethal because when they're actually going lethal, and they've done this in the past three or four years against a bunch of the sort of blackout uprisings that have been happening,

is they just shoot people. Yeah. Right? They straight up kill them. This happened in Chicago. That was more the cops than the National Guard because during Holy Week, they were sort of told to stand down

so as not to like literally destroy the entire country in a giant war. But, you know, them showing up also really pisses off the organizers and everything happens to the cops start beating the organizers and this it turns out is a bad idea because it turns out if you beat people they get really angry at you and so suddenly you have all of these mob guys who literally their plan going into the convention was we don't want to have a fight because we're gonna lose who are suddenly like well fuck it they're attacking us anyways we're just gonna fight them yeah and and this is where everything sort of the police

completely go off the rails right this is where you see you know all of the sort of famous footage of beatings outside the convention although and i will put this is something robert pointed out is that like anyone who was in portland in 2020 has been through stuff that's way worse than anything anyone saw here. You statistically probably have seen something that was much worse than what happened to these people, which is not to say it wasn't bad, right? These are people getting horribly beaten by guys with billy clubs.

Yeah. It just happens all the time now. We are so far past this being a thing that nobody's ever seen before or whatever, right? Yeah. We had a moment where it could have stopped and a lot of people fucking tried yeah and as a country we are going down the path of the cops beating people and getting away with it like that is yeah where we're at politically yeah and in this period 68 the cops the cops are able to go even more feral

than they are now which is slightly more fail which is to say that they storm mccarthy's campaign office and they have his campaign staffers beaten oh damn yeah that is that is advanced yeah i've never heard of another modern political thing where police straight up stormed a campaign office of a presidential campaign and had his staffers beaten right and this this has a massive impact inside of the convention itself because what's happening in the convention is not what we got with kamala where like the old is gone and here's the new or whatever and you know you can you can look for some kind of break there it is humphrey has been put in humphrey is lbj2 lbj's vietnam policy is inscribed by vote into the

platform of the Democratic Party for what they're going to run in 68. And meanwhile, outside, right, as a sort of rat fuck is happening and as the party leadership is installing Hubert Humphrey, the sort of liberal anti-war wing of the party is recoiling in horror a mccarthy delegate who's a senator famously is about to go on stage and endorse uh endorse hubert humphrey because humphrey's won the nomination they have to come together for unity but he's washing out the window as the police are just like throwing kids around and beating the shit out of them and he instead gives this speech where he says that if mccarthy was president the cops wouldn't be using gestapo tactics and chicago mayor richard m daly gets so angry that he starts screaming from the crowd and i quote and i apologize for saying this but you need to understand who the party elite is

in this period he says quote fuck you you jew son of a bitch you lousy motherfucker go home quote fuck you you jew son of a bitch you lousy motherfucker go home this is the mayor of chicago on the floor live on tv at the democratic national convention jeez you are watching in 68 you can see in real time on tv the entire democratic party completely fall apart yeah fuck the uh yeah the mask has come off there hasn't it yeah everything everything's falling apart you can see you can see the divisions a lot of liberal anti-war candidates refuse to back like humphrey and his people they eventually come back together sort of as the general election approaches but the damage is done and that's not something that we're really at risk of no they seem to be pretty much lockstep right now like both with police violence and with

with what's happening in palestine like there's not much like real within the party the democrat party like much dissent that i can see yeah you know and i i think the other thing about about the 68 election people are trying to compare it to the 2024 election, is that the Democrats only lost by about 1% of the vote, or sub 1% of the vote, even though it was a blowout, they only lost about 1% of the vote in 68. And a big part of what happened also was that George Wallace, the insane segregationist guy, was also running and drew a whole bunch of electoral votes. Yeah, which we don't really have but you know the democrats almost successfully rallied and beat nixon nixon you know and this is something that there's this narrative that nixon wins by sort of unbelievable margins and that he represented the sort of silent majority and that's only sort of true but on the other hand the ground in the u. then has changed, right? The uprisings in the 1960s, and this is from the Holy Week uprisings to the process of

the DNC, all of these protests are hideously unpopular. Everything MLK does, everyone hates it, right? Literally until MLK dies, right? And there's actually a very funny example of this. Bayard Daly had absolutely hated MLK when he was alive, right? He gives speeches calling him saying he's stirring up trouble and like absolutely despise him in the moment he dies he gives a speech saying everyone should follow mlk's example and remain peaceful and not yeah literally days after right

yeah but that's the thing all of these all of these things are unbelievably unpopular. And, you know, the gap between their giant uprising, which was Holy Week, and the election was a few months. Whereas, you know, in 2024, right, the 2024 uprising was marked by over 50% approval for burning a police station down. Yeah. Right. It was actually extremely popular. It was actually extremely popular. And even four years later, you know, with the sort of memory of the tear gas fading, everything about American politics is operating in reverse.

Increasingly, it is not the left that's seen as out-of-touch radicals just having to force their agenda on a compliant population. It's the right. The silent majority today is not composed of evangelical fanatics whose children monitor their porn consumption. It is composed of people who think that shit is weird. And that's the thing that I want to close on, which is that, you know, in 2024, in a lot of ways, is 68 standing on its head. Because everything that comes after the election is seen as the backlash to the sort of excesses

of 68, right? But we are already living in the backlash. The last four years, the last eight years, right? Trumpism is the backlash to the sort of excess of 68 right but we are we are already living in the backlash the last four years the last eight years right trumpism is the backlash to ferguson and then all of the sort of desantis stuff the anti-trans stuff all of the weird groomer panic you know the the anti-critical race theory stuff all of the racism all of that so that's that's all the backlash to 2020 and it sucks everyone hates it it's's awful. And so we are in a period where the backlash that sort of swept in the Republicans to power for a generation that that's going to sort of come out of the Nixon era that's eventually going to lead to Reagan, it's entirely possible that we are about to see basically the opposite of that, where this kind of backlash politics this kind of sort of trumpian

fascism this this very well could be 2024 could be the shore on which that wave breaks we can hope i i'm hope i don't know i i am mildly hopeful i also you know and this is another thing that's important is this this convention is not going to look anything like 68 even even if there is intense suppression of the protests it's not going to play the same way politically as as 68 convention did yeah that history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes right and and i think like there will be similarities here but it is impossible for the the way that the state interacts with protest to be the same yeah and for people to be as shocked by it as they were in 68 right like a good number of democrats like if you know if you go on social media okay that's not a

representative sample you've seen plenty of people barking for cops to crack the heads of kids yeah or people of any age like protesting against a fucking genocide like people don't care anymore i guess if you're clapping for bombing babies you're also going to clap for smashing students in the face of the club like i kind of go together i guess yeah and i mean that's i don't know i think the sort of long range things about anti-war movements is that the actual anti-war movement almost never stops the war right in the short run immediately it almost never works but what happened with vietnam was in the long run the protest in 68 did stop the war right but they stopped the war not by not by moving sort of traditional american politics they stopped the war by being one of the catalysts that

radicalized enough enough of the u.s army that almost by the time the war ends something like half of it is either on strike or openly in revolt yeah and that eventually is the thing that crushes it and i think that's also a thing for this is that like yeah kamala harris probably not gonna end the genocide yeah but comma that there's good reason for this right we're very used to looking for immediate direct impact of her actions and a lot of times the impact of her actions are in things in the distant future in ways that we can't see right now yeah and maybe that gives you hope maybe that doesn't but that's sort of the way that these anti-war things work and i don't know hopefully we'll get a fucking better result this time and we can stop the rest of palestine from being completely exterminated but yeah that would be nice that's the not hopeful part of this

yeah well i think it's not hopeful but it's instructive right like if you're out there now and you're expecting some big change if you're attending in chicago and expecting somebody change you probably won't see it it doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't important and it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep doing it yeah yeah so this has been naked happen here uh the rest of the week will be an account of what actually does happen at this convention so stay tuned enjoy enjoy that and go stop genociding that it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at

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