It's 1968 All Over Again

The worst year in modern American history was unquestionably 1968, which in its first six months included the Tet Offensive, LBJ's surprise announcement that he would not seek re-election, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the subsequent riots that destroyed the cores of many American cities including, fatally, Detroit; and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles.

Still to come were the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the "Black Power" salutes by American athletes at the Olympics in Mexico City, Richard Nixon's razor-thin victory over Hubert Humphrey in an election that saw a third-party candidate, George Wallace (a former racist Democrat) garner 13.5% of the popular vote as he ran against the "pointy-headed intellectuals" in Washington, and widespread student protests against the military draft.

The pace of recent events, from the outre presidential election, the "exoneration" of career criminal Hillary Clinton by the FBI, and the shooting of multiple police officers in Dallas during a "Black Lives Matter" protest, is reminiscent of '68; the country barely had time to process one enormity when the next once occurred. Yeats' famous stanzas from his poem, "The Second Coming," are as true today as they were then:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

As then, so now. The murders in Dallas should come as a surprise to exactly nobody, since this is the end point those supporting the BLM movement have tacitly -- or openly -- encouraged. The cry of "off the pigs" has been with us since Bill Ayers (some guy in Barack Obama's neighborhood, never heard of him) was a pup. The Democrats, who have finally come out of the closet as the first openly anti-American party in American history, are now planning to disrupt the Republican convention later this month in Cleveland. We haven't had any political assassinations yet, but give the violent Left time: they're just warming up.

What is happening to the country? For those born after the pivotal year of 1968, it's obviously a complete mystery. The clueless and increasingly disgraceful #neverTrumpumpkins continue to insist on a restoration of their inherited and almost entirely unearned "conservative principles," incapable of understanding that not only is Edmund Burke dead, but so are Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Ronald Reagan. What were viable policy choices then, they continue to mistake as "timeless principles," heedless that things like limited government and lower taxes are not only doomed to failure at the ballot box, but are also not universal solvents. In their jejune inflexibility, they are an embarrassment to genuine conservatism, which must be rooted in foundational Western cultural principles.

Political solutions devoted to policy arise from a time and place and are generally specific to that era. In our solipsistic age, we insist on seeing the past through the lens of our ideology, cocksure that we are right and they were wrong. This malevolent stupidity is behind the attacks on "whiteness," on the actions and social attitudes of people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago; it also explains the insistence on "climate change" -- if we can't impose our fantasies and shibboleths upon future generations, what good are we? The world was born with us.

The fact is, 1968 and 2016 are directly linked, in a way that the punditos (those born after 1968) and small children cannot possibly understand: this is a Baby Boomer war and it won't end until all of us Boomers are senile, in Florida nursing homes, or dead.

For the truth is, we hate, despise and loathe each other and always have. From the crowded classrooms of the 1950s through the scrambling competition for colleges in the 1960s to our entry into the job markets in the 1970s, we have jostled, bumped and collided with our coevals at every step. The Vietnam War split us along socio-economic lines, with college students largely exempt from the draft as a matter of national policy.

We took over the universities and the media (my own peronal and professional relationships with many well-known figures in the national media go back more than four decades), and we hired among the next generation those bright young things who most reminded us of ourselves. As pawns in the Cold War (which was being fought by our parents' generation), we largely tolerated the communist penetration of the idealistic Left, especially targeting the black leaders around King (and King himself) and infiltrating the student movements via people like Ayers. As Don Surber noted today:

Make no mistake, this is the street battle that Bill Ayers envisioned in "Prairie Fire," the hateful, anti-American manifesto that he co-authored and used to rationalize terrorism in the 1970s, long after the Vietnam War ended. The book was dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan and others. From Prairie Fire:

Our job is to tap the discontent seething in many sectors of the population, to find allies everywhere people are hungry or angry, to mobilize poor and working people against imperialism. We have an urgent responsibility: to destroy imperialism from within in order to help free the world and ourselves from its grasp. Our final goal is the destruction of imperialism, the seizure of power, and the creation of socialism. Our strategy for this stage of the struggle is to organize the oppressed people of the imperial nation itself to join with the colonies in the attack on imperialism. This process of attacking and weakening imperialism involves the defeat of all kinds of national chauvinism and arrogance; this is a precondition to our fight for socialism. People like Ayers and his partner, Bernarndine Dohrn, however, were not deluded, well-intentioned naifs: they were and remain devoted to the destruction of the country as founded, and determined to cause enough Helter-Skelter chaos to bring about the country they envison. By their lights, they are "patriots," but by ours, they are simply evil. Like Shi'ite Muslims, who seek to call forth the End Times in order to create conditions ripe for the re-appearance of the Mahdi, the Left wishes to Cloward-Piven the nation to death, collapse the system and superimpose its vision of socialism; no wonder the Left and Islam have formed an unholy alliance akin to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. They will stay on the same side until one (Islam) double-crosses the other (the Eloi Left). And then the butchery will really begin.

The difference between today and 1968, however, is that the American government is on the side of the radicals; nothing that is happening now is happening by chance. President Obama, the first anti-American president, has expressly set in motion many of the conflicts besetting us, including exacerbating racial tensions whenever he gets the chance. The astounding, in-your-face corruption of the political process has given us the unholy Hillary Clinton -- the very embodiment of that corruption -- and her antithesis, Donald Trump. Polls show that Americans have completely lost faith in the institutions of government; the police are reeling from the Ferguson Effect, and yesterday events in Dallas are only likely to worsen things.

All of this is meant to push, prod and provoke a reaction from a long-suffering populace that is seeing itself marginalized, condemned and demographically replaced by a gang of sneering thugs -- bastard children of Rousseau -- whose intentions have been plain since 1968, when the first rocks flew in Chicago. The question is: what, if anything, are we going to do about it?

Amazingly, I saved this editorial from 1993 about the very same thing...

No Guardrails
August 1968 and the death of self-restraint.
(Editor’s note: This editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 1993.)

The gunning down of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida last week shows us how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don’t understand the rules, who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control. We are the country that has a TV commercial on all the time that says: “Just do it.” Michael Frederick Griffin just did it.
An anti-abortion protester of intense emotions, he walked around behind the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services Clinic and pumped three bullets into the back of Dr. Gunn. Emptied himself, Michael Griffin then waited for the police to take him away. A remark by his father-in-law caught our eye: “Now we’ve got to take care of two grandchildren.”
As the saying goes, there was a time. And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn’t seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, did so many become undone?

We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won’t like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals—university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators—who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.
With great rhetorical firepower, books, magazines, opinion columns and editorials defended each succeeding act of defiance—against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.
What in the past had been simply illegal became “civil disobedience.” If you could claim, and it was never too hard to claim, that your group was engaged in an act of civil disobedience—taking over a building, preventing a government official from speaking, bursting onto the grounds of a nuclear cooling station, destroying animal research, desecrating Communion hosts—the shapers of opinion would blow right past the broken rules to seek an understanding of the “dissidents” (in the ‘60s and ‘70s) and “activists” (in the ‘80s and now).
Concurrently, the personal virtue known as self-restraint was devalued. In the process, certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.
You can argue, as many did and still do, that all this was necessary because the established order wouldn’t respond or change. But then you still need to account for the nation’s simultaneous dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction. You need to account for what is happening to those people within U.S. society who seem least able to navigate the political and personal torrents that they become part of, like Michael Griffin. Those torrents began with the antiwar movement in the 1960s.

Those endless demonstrations, though, were merely one part of a much deeper shift in American culture—away from community and family rules of conduct and toward more autonomy, more personal independence. As to limits, you set your own.
The people who provided the theoretical underpinnings for this shift—the intellectuals and political leaders who led the movement—did very well, or at least survived. They are born with large reservoirs of intelligence and psychological strength. The fame and celebrity help, too.
But for a lot of other people it hasn’t been such an easy life to sustain. Not exceedingly sophisticated, neither thinkers nor leaders, never interviewed for their views, they’re held together by faith, friends, fun and, at the margins, by fanaticism. The big political crackups make the news—a Michael Griffin or the woman on trial in Connecticut for the attempted bombing of the CEO of a surgical-device company or the ‘70s radicals who accidentally blew themselves up in a New York brownstone. But the personal crackups just float like flotsam through the country’s hospitals and streets. You can also see some of them on daytime TV, America’s medical museum of personal autonomy.

It may be true that most of the people in Hollywood who did cocaine survived it, but many of the weaker members of the community hit the wall. And most of the teenage girls in the Midwest who learn about the nuances of sex from magazines published by thirtysomething women in New York will more or less survive, but some continue to end up as prostitutes on Eighth Avenue. Everyone today seems to know someone who couldn’t handle the turns and went over the side of the mountain.
These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life’s margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules. They’re guardrails. It’s also true that we need to distinguish good rules from bad rules and periodically re-examine old rules. But the broad movement that gained force during the anti-war years consciously and systematically took down the guardrails. Incredibly, even judges pitched in. All of them did so to transform the country’s institutions and its codes of personal behavior (abortion, for instance).
In a sense, it has been a remarkable political and social achievement for them. But let’s get something straight about the consequences. If as a society we want to live under conditions of constant challenge to institutions and limits on personal life, if we are going to march and fight and litigate over every conceivable grievance, then we should stop crying over all the individual casualties, because there are going to be a lot of them.

Michael Griffin and Dr. David Gunn are merely two names on a long list of confrontations and personal catastrophe going back 25 years. That today is the status quo. The alternative is to start rethinking it.

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a larger state. In other words, a butterfly flapping its wings in Texas can cause later a typhoon in the Japanese Sea.

But not for the Vietnam War and the 1968 Tet Offensive, Obama would still be a Community Organizer and hanging out in Chicago bath houses, but the “Butterfly Effect” of the 1968 Tet Offensive made it possible for Barack Hussein Obama, a homosexual Muslim Communist, to be elected to the highest office in the land.

During the Vietnam War, the 1968 Tet Offensive resulted in the annihilation of Viet Cong units throughout South Vietnam and was a disaster for the Communist insurgency; it never recovered from its loses. This Tet Offensive was a coordinated “Do or Die” attack by every Viet Cong unit in South Vietnam on the night of January 30 and the morning of January 31, 1968 that simultaneously struck every South Vietnamese City, village, and military installation in an attempt to win the war in one country wide attack; they failed and they paid the price for their failure; they died.
The war was carried on after Tet 1968 by invading North Vietnamese, and North Vietnam could never move sufficient troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to ever hope to defeat the United States effort in South Vietnam, so they resorted to another Communist tactic; they lied.

1968 was a Presidential Election year in the United States, and the Communist Party USA attempted to use the Tet Offensive to influence the election by claiming it was a Communist victory and the war was lost. This American Communist Party organized an anti-war movement and assembled enough strength through this movement to seize control of the Democrat Party that summer during the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago.

These Communists attempted to nominate a Presidential candidate who would end the war and they failed, but the Communist Party USA still retained control of the Democrat Party, and this Party managed to elect enough Leftists to Congress to cut funding for the Vietnam War and the war was then lost, so in this way the 1968 Tet Offensive was indeed a Communist victory.

After using the Tet Offensive to gain control of the Democrat Party, the Communist Party USA never lost control of the Democrat Party, and when a few decades later they managed to elect an avowed Marxist Communist, Barack Hussein Obama, to the Presidency of the United States, it made the 1968 Tet Offensive the greatest Communist victory of all times.

In 1968 89% of the population was non-Hispanic whites; today it is 63%. By 2019 half of the population 18 and under will be minorities as classified by the USG.

We have created a permanent underclass populated by mostly blacks and Hispanics. The wealth gap is growing along with a sense of frustration in our inner cities where the unemployment rate for blacks without a high school diploma is 95%. Some graphs to show why this is occurring:

The black unemployment rate has consistently been twice as high as the white unemployment rate for 50 years:

The gap in household income between blacks and whites hasn't narrowed in the last 50 years

the wealth disparity between whites and blacks grew even wider during the Great Recession

The black poverty rate is no longer declining:

Our schools are more segregated today than in 1980

The marriage gap has widened over the past 50 years:

Blacks are still far more likely to be uninsured than whites. That's true for both adults and children:

The racial disparity in incarceration rates is bigger than it was in the 1960s:

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