I’m old enough to remember the riots and the media coverage, both in the papers and on the three channels we got… And it went on for days…
Fifty years ago tonight, a great American political party was murdered by its own children and closest friends.
The party in question was the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and JFK, which perished during the riots in Grant Park, Chicago, on the night of Aug. 28, 1968, in the midst of the party’s national convention.
Full article, HERE on the National Review.
This was, if I remember correctly, also the point at which the media really changed their coverage of not only Vietnam, but also the draft dodgers, protesters, and others who were anti-American.
They were lauded, law enforcement was vilified, and Bezerkley really became the forefront of the ‘protest’ generation when Haight Ashbury collapsed in early 1968 due to overcrowding. Remember, this was only a year or so after the hippies started in Haight Ashbury, and the psychedelic rock music was receiving more and more commercial radio airplay.
The Monterey Pop Festival in June further cemented the status of psychedelic music as a part of mainstream culture and elevated local Haight bands such as the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Jefferson Airplane to national stardom. A July 7, 1967, Time magazine cover story on “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture,” and other major media interest in the hippie subculture exposed the Haight-Ashbury district to enormous national attention and popularized the counterculture movement across the country and around the world.
And here we are today… Sigh…
Ah, for a time machine and a five gallon bucket of arsenic…
Almost as if the newsies were being paid by the USSR to destroy the US.
Oh, wait…
Yeah, I remember JFK saying “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
Nowadays, the Dem motto is “Free Sh*t!”
+1 McChuck
Steven Hayward at Powerline adds something to the NR article.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/08/chicago-50-years-on.php
One of the ways in which things have gotten worse is that the media bias in favor of the Left (already on display in 1968) is more accepted now than it was then.
Was there Saturday 8/31. I was stationed at Chanute AFB. I had flown into O’Hara sat night but couldnt catch a train till morning. I wandered around with this army private all night. The cops were really cranky. Neither private snuffy or myself really knew what was going on so we asked a cop, he threatened to arrest us and beat our asses. Private snuffy was drunk enough that he was going to give the cop a go at it but I pointed out the gang of cops coming up behind. We beat feet.I really didn’t understand the significance of it till years later.
The Democrat Party was not great even before then.
The Civil War was essentially a hissy fit because they fucked up, and ran three candidates against one Republican. The Democrats have long been democrats, who have no regard for the rights of political minorities or the institutions of a Republic.
Democratic white supremacist domestic terrorism during the twenties and thirties killed people by the tens and hundreds.
FDR was a jackbooted Wilson fanboy. JFK’s election was fraud and owed a great deal to white supremacist terrorism. The only reasons he has a better reputation on that is a) Jackie wanted someone other than the Soviets to blame for his death b) LBJ was shrewd enough to know that the white supremacists were no longer a viable proposition, and was in a position to stab them in the back. Truman, like Jackson, earned his place on my list of ‘Democrats I am charitable towards’ by killing foreigners.
The difference between the Democrats before and after they went entirely over to the Soviets was the replacement of a nutjob white supremacist ideology with a nutjob socialist ideology. They retain the same tendencies as an organization, and the same sense of acceptable tactics. And the Progressivism of Wilson and FDR had a lot in common with the Nazis and the Communists.
All- Thanks for the comments. I, among others, took Kennedy’s words to heart, and DID volunteer.
Posted from my iPhone.
There were riots in Detroit in 1967. I went in the army Aug of 67, Vietnam in Jan of 68, NAS in Key West, FL and then Germany came home in July of 70. I had no idea why the people turned against veterans. But then I didn’t have access to news like we do today. Thanks for the link, it fills in a lot of gaps.
I was told a fascinating story in History class during High School;
The Yippies were planning the mayhem out in California before the convention, and thought it would be cool to have the black Panthers along for the fun. So they invited the Panther leadership out for a pow wow and explained their plans.
There is no word for word record of what the Panthers said, but it has been summed up as follows:
“You honkies are out of your goddamned minds. The Chicago Police have cops they keep in cages between riots, and they are going to bust your heads wide open. And WE are going to be as far away from Chicago as we can get when it happens.”
Hey Old NFO;
I missed this article you posted, my Bad. I read in the history books when the media and the democrats overtly went to supporting the communist and the protestors and denigrating everyone else that had a different opinion. WHat is happening now is that the young and impressionable students back then are now the professors and heads of academia and media and this gives them a chance to live their “Golden days”. Since then the media was always carrying the water for the soviets, it didn’t matter that they were supporting a foreign hostile government against the Americans. The Media, democrats and academics poisoned another generation of Americans to believing that America was”bad” and the cycle continues, the new generation of antifa and other useful idiots will be tenured professors and poison the next.